Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“What does?”

“She used her father’s last name when she moved to New York. Hang on,” Pam said. She got up from the chair and went to the door. “Maydeen’s off the phone.”

When Maydeen walked into Hackberry’s office, her expression was blank, as though she were looking at an image behind her eyes that she did not want to assimilate.

“What is it?” Hackberry said.

“The Alabama state attorney did some hands-on work for us,” she replied. “He found a guy in a state rehab center who was the half sister’s boyfriend. She died in the Twin Towers. She was called in to work on her day off because somebody else was sick. She was in the restaurant on the top floor. She was one of the people who held hands with a friend and jumped.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

AT THE BOTTOM of Danny Boy Lorca’s land was a ravine that few people knew about or chose to travel. It led from Mexico into the United States, but the entrance was overgrown with thornbushes that could scrape the skin off a man or the paint from an automobile. The sides of the ravine went straight up into the sky and had been marked in four places by the lances of mounted Spaniards who littered the bottom of the ravine with the bones of Indians whose most sophisticated weapons had been the sharpened sticks they used to plant corn. The few illegals who used the ravine and even the coyotes who guided them swore they had seen Indians standing on ledges in the darkness, their faces as dry and bloodless and withered as deer hide stretched on lodge poles. The specters on the ledges did not speak or show any recognition of the nocturnal wayfarers passing between the walls. Their eyes were empty circles that contained only darkness, their clothes sewn from the burlap given them by their conquerors. No one who saw the specters ever wanted to return to the area, except Danny Boy Lorca.

He woke to the grinding noise of a car in low gear laboring up a grade and a brittle screeching that was like someone scratching a stylus slowly down a blackboard. When he went to his back door, he saw a gas-guzzler bounce loose from the ravine, its lights burning in the fog, strings of smoke rising from the rust in its hood. He saw the silhouettes of perhaps four men inside the vehicle.

He pulled on his boots and lifted his twenty-gauge from the antler rack on the wall and limped out onto the back porch. The fog smelled of dust and herbicide and a pond strung with green feces and someone burning raw garbage. The gas-guzzler was traversing his property, its engine rods knocking, its low beams swimming wi

th dust particles and candle moths.

He walked toward it, a pain flaring in his thigh each time his foot came down on the ground, the shotgun cradled across the crook of his left arm. His twenty-gauge was called a dogleg, a one-barrel one-shot breechloader he had used to hunt quail and doves and rabbits when he was a boy. It was a fine gun that had served him well. There was a problem, though: He had not bought shells for it in years. He was carrying an unloaded weapon.

He limped through the chicken yard and past the three-sided shed where his firewood was stacked and through one end of his barn and out the other until he stood squarely in the headlights of the gasguzzler. The driver touched his brakes and stuck his head out the window. “We got a little lost, amigo. Know where the highway is at?”

Danny Boy moved out of the headlights’ glare so he could see the driver more clearly. “You got dope in that car?” he said.

“We’re workers, hombre,” the driver said. “We don’t got no dope. We are lost. That canyon was a pile of shit. You got a cast on your leg.”

“Yeah, and you got a bullet hole in your window,” Danny Boy said.

“These are dangerous times,” the driver said. “You have an accident?”

“No, a guy put a shank in me. Did you see the Indians in the ravine?”

“A shank? That ain’t good. You said Indians? What is with you, man?” the driver said. He turned to the others. “The guy is talking about Indians. Anybody here see Indians?”

The other men shook their heads.

“See, ain’t nobody seen no fucking Indians,” the driver said. “We’re going to Alpine. Come on, man, you need to stand aside with that gun and let us pass.”

Danny Boy’s gaze had been fixed on the driver’s orange hair and whiskers and the gorilla-like bone structure of his face, so he had not paid attention to the man sitting in the passenger seat. At first the passenger’s sharp profile and unnaturally wide shoulders and slit of a mouth were like parts of a bad dream returning in daylight. When Danny Boy realized who the passenger was, he felt his breath catch in his throat. He stepped back from the car window, gripping the shotgun tightly. “I seen you before,” he said.

“You talking to me?” the passenger said.

It ain’t too late. Don’t say no more, a voice inside Danny Boy said. They will disappear and it will be like they were never here. “I remember your trousers.”

“What about them?”

“Dark blue, with a red stripe down each leg. Like trousers a soldier might wear, or a marine.”

“These are exercise pants. But why should you care about my clothes? Why are they of such consequence?”

Danny Boy had to wet his lips before he spoke. “I watched you from the arroyo. I heard that man screaming while you did those things to him.”

“You’re mixed up, man,” the driver said. “We ain’t from around here. You ain’t never seen us.”

“Let him talk,” said the passenger.

“You tied the man’s scalp on your belt,” Danny Boy said. “You heard a sound up in the rocks and looked up at where I was hiding. I acted like a coward and hid instead of he’ping that guy you killed.”