Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“You’re a good man, Danny Boy. I meant you no offense,” Hackberry said.

Danny Boy went inside and sat down by the small gas stove and waited, his work-seamed hands folded between his knees, his ruined face without expression, while Hackberry called Animal Control and fixed coffee and attached the flag to the chain on the metal pole out front and ran it up the pole, the flag suddenly filling with wind and popping against the sky.

“The guy named Krill said I don’t know who my real brothers are,” Danny Boy said.

“He did, huh?”

“His eyes are blue. But his hair and his skin are like mine.”

“I see,” Hackberry said, not understanding.

“He ain’t got no family or home or country. Somebody took all that away from him. That’s why he kills. It ain’t for money. He thinks it is, but it ain’t. He’d pay to do it.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“He believes the dead are more real than the living. That’s the most dangerous kind of man there is,” Danny Boy said.

An hour later, Hackberry called R.C. and Pam Tibbs into his office. “Here’s the lay of the land,” he said. “I’ve made six calls so far this morning and have been stonewalled by every fed I’ve talked to. My best guess is that Noie Barnum deliberately got himself kidnapped by Krill so he could infiltrate Al Qaeda’s connections in Latin America. I’m not sure the FBI was in on it. Maybe Barnum is working for an intelligence group inside the NSA or the Pentagon or the CIA. Or maybe he’s working on his own. Frankly, I don’t care. We’ve been lied to over and over while serious crimes were being committed in our county. If any fed obstructs or jerks us around again, we throw his bureaucratic ass in jail.”

“You sure you want to do that, Hack?” Pam said.

“Watch me.”

“I don’t get your reasoning, Sheriff. If Barnum wanted Krill to sell him to these Al Qaeda guys, how come he escaped?” R.C. said.

“Maybe Krill was going to piece off the action and sell him to a narco gang and wash his hands of the matter. So Barnum decided it was time to boogie.”

“He wants to do all this to get even for what happened to his sister in the Towers?” R.C. said.

“Wouldn’t you?” Hackberry asked.

“I’d do a whole sight more,” R.C. replied.

“Right now we don’t have eyes or ears out there. We need to find a weak link in the chain,” Hackberry said.

“These guys are pros, Sheriff. They don’t have weak links,” R.C. said.

“We’ll create one.”

“Who?” R.C. asked.

“I saw Temple Dowling busting skeet by the Ninth Hole last night,” Pam said.

IT WASN’T HARD to find him. In the county there was only one country club and private golf course and gated community that offered rental cottages. All of it was located on a palm-dotted watered green stretch of rolling landscape that had all the attributes of an Arizona resort, the rentals constructed of adobe and cedar, the walks bordered with flower beds, the lawns flooded daily by soak hoses at sunset, the evening breeze tinged with smoke from meat fires and the astringent smell of charcoal lighter. The swimming pool glowed with a blue radiance under the stars, and sometimes on summer nights, a 1950s-type orchestra performed on the outdoor dance floor; the buffet-style fried-chicken-and-potato-salad dinners were legendary.

The club not only offered upscale insularity, it also allowed its members to feel comfortable with who they were and gave them sanction to say things they would not say anywhere else. Political correctness ended at the arched entranceway. On the links or in the lounge known as the Ninth Hole, no racial joke was too coarse, no humorous remark about liberals and environmentalists unappreciated. In the evening, against a backdrop of palm trees and golf balls flying under the lights on the driving range, in the dull popping of shotguns and clay pigeons bursting into puffs of colored smoke ag

ainst a pastel sky, one had the sense that the club was a place where no one died, where all the rewards promised by a benevolent capitalistic deity were handed out in this world rather than the next.

The irony was that most of the members came from the Dallas–Fort Worth area or Houston. The other irony was the fact that the environs on which the club was built were part of the old Outlaw Trail, which had run from the Hole in the Wall Country in Wyoming all the way to the Mexican border. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Kid Curry and Black Jack Ketchum and Sam Bass and the Dalton Gang had probably all ridden it. Thirty years before, wagon tracks that had been cut into the mire of clay and mud and livestock feces during the days of the Chisholm and Goodnight-Loving trails were still visible in the hardpan. When the topography was reconfigured by the builders of the club, the hardpan was ground up by earth-graders and layered with trucked-in sod and turned into fairways and putting greens and sand traps and ponds, for the pleasure of people who had never heard of Charles Goodnight or Oliver Loving or Jesse Chisholm and couldn’t have cared less about who they were.

Deputy Sheriff Felix Chavez was twenty-seven years old and had four children and a wife he had married when she was sixteen and he was twenty. He was devoted to his family and loved playing golf and remodeling and improving his three-bedroom house. He was also a master car mechanic and a collector of historical artifacts and military ordnance. Because he often swung his cruiser off the main road and patrolled the country-club parking lot without being asked to do so, the management allowed him to use the driving range free whenever he wished, although the gesture did not extend to the links or access to the Ninth Hole. The consequence was that no one paid particular attention to him on the cloudy afternoon when he parked his cruiser by the clubhouse and got out and watched the golfers teeing off or practicing on the putting green. Nor did they think it unusual that Felix strolled through the lot, either checking on a security matter or enjoying a breezy, cool break in the weather. The drama at the club came later in the day, and Felix Chavez seemed to have no connection to it.

Temple Dowling was on the driving range with three friends, whocking balls in a high arc, his form perfect, the power in his shoulders and thick arms and strong hands a surprise to those who noted only the creamy pinkness of his complexion and the baby fat under his chin and his lips that were too large for his mouth. The coordination of his swing and the whip of his wrists and the twist of his hips and buttocks seemed almost an erotic exercise, one that was not lost on others. “Temp, you’re the only golf player I ever saw whose swing could make the right girl cream her jeans,” one of his companions said.

They all roared, then sipped from their old-fashioneds and gin gimlets and turned their attention to the two-inch-thick bloodred steaks Temple had just forked onto the barbecue grill.

“What was that?” said one of the friends, a man with hair like an albino ape’s on the backs of his wrists and arms.