Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“You know what I mean,” Anton said.

“No, I don’t,” Pam said. “We know you’re sheltering illegals. We also know you were part of an Underground Railroad that hid them in Kansas back in the eighties. But we look the other way. Maybe you should decide who your real friends are.”

Hackberry felt a pain spreading through his head as though someone were tightening a vise on his temples. “This isn’t solving our problem,” he said.

“The man I recognized outside my hospital room was a handler of animals,” Anton said. “Exotic animals of some kind. I didn’t like him. But I was part of the gun-smuggling operation, Sheriff Holland. I’m responsible for the deaths of innocent people.”

“Did this guy supply exotic animals to game farms?” Hackberry asked.

“Maybe. He talked about it. I remember his complaining about driving a truckload of them into West Texas,” Anton said.

“Where in West Texas?” Hackberry asked.

“This was twenty-five years ago.”

“Where?” he said.

She shook her head. “I don’t remember. He probably didn’t say. Wait a minute. He made a nasty joke once about a brothel in Phnom Penh. It specialized in . . . I don’t care to talk about what it specialized in.”

“Oral sex?” Hackberry said. “Yes,” she replied. “He said he had a friend in Texas who used to hang out in this particular brothel. The friend owned a nightclub in Texas.”

“La Rosa Blanca? The White Rose?” Hackberry said.

“Pardon?” she said.

“Bingo,” Pam said.

THE ORANGE NEON sign on the roof of Joe Tex’s saloon glowed against a turquoise sky that was bottom-rimmed in the west by strips of red and black clouds. The evening could not have been more beautiful. The wind was balmy and out of the south and smelled of distant rain. An obsolete windmill was clattering by an abandoned loading pen on the hardpan, like a beneficent reminder of a grand tradition as well as the potential the land held for all those who lived humbly upon it. Even the tractor-trailers wending their way down the two-lane through compacted hills that resembled ant mounds seemed like a testimony to the industrial success of a new nation rather than harbingers of pollution and the loss of Jefferson’s agrarian vision.

There were few patrons in the saloon when Hackberry and Pam entered through the front door. Joe Tex was stocking his beer cooler behind the bar; Rosanne Cash was singing on the jukebox; the lacquered pine logs in the walls seemed to exude a golden light like warm honey. Joe Tex was smiling when he lifted his head from his work, his hair as shiny and black as a raven’s feathers, his rolled shirtsleeves exposing his vascular arms. “My favorite sheriff and lady deputy,” he said. “What are y’all having?” He propped his arms on the bar, waiting. The top of his white cowboy shirt was unsnapped, and his chest hair was fanned out on his skin like the points of a star. His eyes were so lidless in their intensity that he seemed incapable of blinking.

“Your name has come up in an investigation, Joe,” Hackberry said, setting his hat crown-down on the bar. “Not that you did anything wrong. We just thought you could help us figure out a thing or two.”

“Who was the shooter on the grassy knoll?” Joe Tex said.

“No, it has to do with the name of your saloon,” Hackberry said.

“I remember now. Lime and soda and ice, right?” Joe Tex said. “How about you, Miss Pam?”

“Who was the White Rose?” she asked.

“My wife. She was a stripper in Big D. She actually worked in Jack Ruby’s old joint.”

“We did some checking on that, Joe,” Hackberry said. “Nobody can find any record of your being married.”

“I guess that’s their problem. My wife and I got hitched at a drive-by window in Matamoros.”

“I heard you might have done some quasi-governmental work in Cambodia,” Hackberry said.

“I’m not big on revisiting the past, Sheriff. I was a GI on the Mekong River. It took me to lots of places, most of them better forgotten.”

“You fly in and out of the Golden Triangle at all?” Hackberry asked.

“I don’t remember. I have a bunch of big blank holes in my memory when it comes to Indochina. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I’m not ashamed of anything I did over there.”

“I’m not questioning your service to your country,” Hackberry said. “I’m interested in a man by the name of Josef Sholokoff. A man who works for him helped torture a local woman and maybe crucify Cody Daniels. That man was in the company of a guy who knows you, Joe. He used the name of your saloon. He used to deliver exotic animals to game farms. Does that ring any bells?”

“I guess I’m tone-deaf on that one.”