Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“The White Rose was a whorehouse in Phnom Penh, right?” Hackberry said.

“Could be. Cherry Alley wasn’t an open-air fruit market in Tokyo. But that doesn’t mean I went there to find out. I got to get back to work.”

“What you need to do is take the shit out of your mouth,” Pam said. “I pulled Cody Daniels’s feet and hands off the nails someone used to hang him on a cross inside a burning building. He was alive when his killers started the fire. With good luck, he died of smoke inhalation.”

“I saw it on the news. You think something like that is lost on me? Years ago I knew some intelligence people. But I don’t remember anything about some guy who hauled exotic animals around. Unless y’all got a warrant, get out of my establishment.”

“You got a meth problem, Joe?” Hackberry said.

Joe Texas leaned across the bar. His skin was so dark that in the shadows, it looked like it had been removed from a tannery and kneaded and softened and fitted on his bones; his eyes stared out of the sockets like those of a man living inside a costume. “You don’t have a clue about what you’re dealing with,” he said. “You want to end up a bump out there in the desert? Just keep fucking with the wrong people. You’ll wish you were still drunk and humping underage Mexican whores, Sheriff. Y’all aren’t the only people with access to security files. Get a warrant. In the meantime, I’m D-D-D. That stands for ‘deaf, dumb, and don’t know.’”

THAT NIGHT HACKBERRY went out to his barn and clicked on the interior lights. The row

of bulbs on the ceiling glowed with a chemical-like iridescence inside the humidity. Bales of green hay bound with red twine were scattered on the concrete pad that extended between the stalls located on either side of the building, and a speed bag and an Everlast rebound board were mounted on the back wall of the rear stall. Hackberry’s barn was not a bad refuge from the cares of the world. He began hitting the bag with a rotating motion, landing each blow on the heel of his fist, thudding the bag up into the circular rebound board before it could swing full-out on its cable, increasing his velocity until the bag became a blur, the rhythm as steady and loud as a drumroll.

But he could not clean Joe Tex’s words out of his head. Hackberry had made no secret of his life as a drunk and an adulterer and a frequenter of brothels in northern Mexico. The age of the prostitutes had seemed insignificant at the time, as callous as that sounded. In daylight he would not have recognized most of them. Sometimes he went into a blackout, and when he woke sick and hungover in the morning, the only knowledge he had of the previous night came from his empty wallet and the mileage on his odometer. He suspected that the women or teenage girls who touched his body had done so with indifference if not with revulsion. The odium was his, not theirs. The man with a sprawling ranch and a Navy Cross and a Purple Heart hidden away in a seabag, the man who drove a Cadillac with fins and who had a law degree from Baylor, was the sybaritic visitor to a row of shanties built along an open sewage canal. Shame and dishonor were his flags, and self-loathing was his constant companion. His presence or his absence in the life of these girls or women was as significant as a hangnail they might clip off and drop outside into a waste bucket.

Even knowing these things, he had repeated the same behavior over and over and hadn’t bothered to question himself about a form of immorality that went far beyond his unfaithfulness to Verisa, who’d had at least two affairs that he knew of, one with a banker in Victoria and one with an airline pilot who’d flown an F-86 in Korea. In Hackberry’s mind, his greater sin was his sexual exploitation of girls and women who had no choice in the world. There was no way to excuse or rationalize his callousness toward the deprivation and sadness that constituted their lives. The fact that his behavior was documented in a security file was of no concern to him. The fact that a man like Joe Tex could have access to it and taunt him with it was.

He hit the bag one last time with the back of his fist and walked to the front of the barn and flicked on the outside flood lamp. His two foxtrotters were watching him from the far side of their water tank. “What are you guys up to?” he said.

Love That Santa Fe blew air through his lips, and Missy’s Playboy whipped his tail back and forth across his hind legs.

Hackberry had nailed an apple basket against the side of the barn, roughly approximating the heart of the strike zone for a six-foot batter. He took a fielder’s glove and a canvas bag of baseballs out of the tack room and carried them to the improvised mound he had constructed sixty feet from the apple basket. “Watch this,” he said to the horses. “The batter is crowding the plate and staking out territory he hasn’t earned. We’re going to serve up a forkball to help him in his search for humility.”

Hackberry spread two fingers on the ball, notching the stitches, hiding the pitch in his glove, then let fly at the basket, whipping the pitch overhand, throwing his shoulder and butt into it. The ball smacked into the wood, just wide of the apple basket, and the two horses whirled and plunged out of the light and into the darkness, making a wide circle and returning, their tails flagging.

“Okay, you got that out of your system?” Hackberry said to the horses. “Now watch. This next one is a changeup, to be followed by a slider and then my favorite.”

For the changeup, he held the ball in the back of his palm and floated it into the basket and then buzzed the slider wide and knocked a slat out of the basket.

“All right, forget the slider,” he said. “The ball is getting thrown around the infield. The last guy to touch it before it comes back to me is the shortstop. This guy has no ethics at all. He’s cut a hole in the pocket of his glove, and between his palm and the pocket is a wet sponge. When the ball comes back to me, it feels like it’s been through a car wash.”

Hackberry put two fingers in his mouth, then fired an in-shoot into the basket that sounded like silk ripping.

“What do you think of that, fellows?” he said.

He realized he had lost the attention of his foxtrotters and that they were looking at something out in the darkness, something just on the edge of the floodlight’s glare.

“I didn’t mean to give you a start,” a voice said.

“Who are you?” Hackberry asked.

“Dennis Rector is my name. You’re Sheriff Holland, right?”

“I was when I woke up this morning. What are you doing on my property?”

“I got a couple of hypotheticals to ask you.”

“Where’s your vehicle?”

“Out yonder, on the road, just about out of gas.”

Dennis Rector walked farther into the floodlight. He was a small man whose head was shaved and whose skin was white and whose body looked molded from plastic. His jeans were too large for him and were rolled in big cuffs above his work boots. His shirt was torn and the side of his face scraped.

“You carrying a weapon, Mr. Rector?”

“No, sir. I’m not a violent man. But I know men who are. Men you’re looking for.”