Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“You’re looking right into a flood lamp, Mr. Rector. But the pupils of your eyes are as big as inkwells. Can you tell me why that is?”

“I’m a truck driver, sir. I’ve pulled Monarch and Wolf Creek Pass when it was ten below, and I’ve gone sliding sideways on ice at forty miles an hour through Pagosa Springs. I’ve driven from Manhattan to Los Angeles in one haul, and I mean not ever shutting it down, either. I used to do whites on the half-shell, then I got into black beauties and have never quite got rid of their appeal. Those babies will flat cook your mush, I’m here to testify. Know a man name of Josef Sholokoff?”

“What about him?” Hackberry said.

“What about him, he asks,” Dennis Rector said, as though a third party were there. “What this is about is I ain’t no Judas Iscariot. I don’t like getting treated as one, either. I don’t like getting run through brambles and chased across the countryside like a fugitive from a chain gang is what I’m talking about. I shaved my head to disguise myself. I do not like this way of life.”

“That’s interesting. I think you might like our detox unit, Mr. Rector. You can get some medication and therapy and maybe enter a program. Let’s take a walk up to the house, and I’ll arrange some transportation, and in the meantime you can tell me about Josef Sholokoff.”

“You can keep your detox and three hots and a cot, Sheriff, ’cause that ain’t why we’re having this meeting of the minds. I did what I was asked and got involved in something that just ain’t my way. I know how things work. A bunch decides to do something really awful, and I mean awful, as bad as it gets, something that’s worse than any nightmare, and one man gets blamed for it and becomes the stink on horse pucky.”

“You have a point,” Hackberry said. “There’s a chair by the tack room. Take a load off, and I’ll be right back with a couple of sodas. How’s that sound?”

“I could use it, yes, sir.”

Hackberry walked up to the house and called for a cruiser. Then he took two cans of ginger ale from the icebox and dropped two pieces of fried chicken in a paper bag and walked back down to the barn. He saw no sign of Dennis Rector. The moon was brilliant over the hills, the wind sweeping in the trees, his horses blowing in the pasture. The lights were still on inside the barn, and he heard a sound like the speed bag thumping irregularly against the rebound board in the rear stall, as though it were being struck by someone who did not know how to use it.

Then he noticed that the chair he kept on the concrete pad was gone and that the tack room door was ajar. He dropped the two cans of soda and the bag of fried chicken into the dirt and ran inside the barn and threw open the tack room door. The chair lay on its side. Above it, Dennis was still swinging from the impact of the drop, his throat wrapped tightly with horse reins, his arms twitching, his neck broken.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

PREACHER JACK COLLINS was not in a good mood. Since the long drive from the cabin on the creek, he had said little to Noie Barnum. Also, he had offered no explanation for his and Noie’s sudden departure, scowling whenever Noie asked a question, brooding and moving his lips without sound as though sorting out his thoughts with a hay fork. The decrepit stucco house they had moved into had been a home for bats and field mice and smelled of the damp earth under the floors. The toilet and sink and bathtub were streaked with orange rust and filled with the shells of dead roaches. In the back of the house was a butte that resembled a row of giant clay columns eroding side by side, creating an effect that was both phallic and effete. The front windows gave onto a long sloping plain and a junkyard that was surrounded by a twelve-foot fence with spools of razor wire on top. In the late-afternoon sun, the compacted and polished metal in the junkyard and the razor wire protecting it took on the sharpened brilliance of hundreds of heliographs.

Jack had flung his suitcase on a bunk bed, then brought his guitar case inside and set it on the kitchen table and unsnapped the top.

“What’s that?” Noie asked.

“They were called trench sweepers in the Great War,” Jack replied, setting the Thompson and two ammunition pans and box upon box of cartridges on an oily cloth. “They were manufactured too late to be used in the trenches, though. That’s how guys like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson ended up with them.”

“What are you doing with one, Jack?”

“Home protection.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“Anything we’re doing.”

“There’re people out there who want to hurt me. It’s not a difficult concept.”

“Hurt you why?”

“I’m hiding you, boy.” Noie’s adenoidal accent was starting to wear on him. Jack threaded a cleaning patch through the tip of a metal pod and dripped three drops of oil on the patch and pushed it down the muzzle of the Thompson. He worked the rod up and down, then inserted a piece of white pap

er in the chamber and looked down the inside of the barrel at the whorls of reflected light spinning through the rifling. “Did you ever take classes in speech or diction?”

“I was an engineering major.”

“It shows.”

“Pardon?”

Jack’s eyes wrinkled at the corners. “Don’t let my tone bother you. I got to stop fretting myself about our enemies. Some people aren’t made for the world. That’s the likes of us. That’s why we’re hunted.”

“A man deals his own play. The world doesn’t have much to do with it,” Noie replied. “That’s the way I look at it.”

With his fingertips, Jack began loading one of the ammunition pans, lifting each .45 cartridge from its individual hole in a Styrofoam block and lowering it into a pod inside the circular magazine, as though he took more pleasure in the ritual than its purpose. “All I ever wanted from people was to be let alone. Learn it soon or learn it late, a man doesn’t have peace unless he’s willing to make war.”