Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“What was what?” Dowling said. He looked around, confused.

“I don’t know,” his friend said. “I thought I saw something. A red bug.”

“Where?”

The friend rubbed at one eye with his wrist. “I probably looked into the sun. I think I need new contacts.”

“It looked like it was fixing to crawl in your collar,” another man said.

Temple Dowling pulled his shirt loose from his slacks and shook it. “Did I get it?”

“Nothing fell out.”

“It wasn’t a centipede, was it?”

“It was a little round bug,” said the man with white hair on his arms.

Temple Dowling straightened his collar. “Screw it. If it bites me, I’ll bite it back,” he said. His friends grinned. He picked up a fork and turned the steaks, squinting in the smoke. “Right on this spot, before this was a country club, my father had a deer stand where he used to take his friends. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I snuck off to it and shot a nine-point buck with my twenty-two. Except I gut-shot him. He took off running, just about where that water trap is now. I had to hit him four more times before he went down. I was so excited I pissed my pants. I showed my father what I’d done, and he dipped his hand in the deer’s blood and smeared it on my face and said, ‘Damn if I don’t think you’ve turned into a man. But we got to get you a thirty-thirty, son, before you shoot up half the county.’”

“Were you and your father pretty close, Temp?”

“Close as ice water can be to a drinking glass, I guess.”

Dowling’s companions nodded vaguely as though they understood when in fact they did not.

“My father had his own way of doing things,” he said. “There was his way, and then there was his way. If that didn’t work out, we did it his way over and over until his way worked. No man could ride a horse into the ground or a woman into an asylum like my old man.”

The others let their eyes slip away to their drinks, the steaks browning and dripping on the fire, the golfers lifting their drives high into the sunset, a skeet shooter powdering a clay pigeon into a pink cloud against the sky. At the club, candor about one’s life was not always considered a virtue.

“On your shirt, Temp,” said the man with white hair on his wrists and arms. “There. Jesus.”

Dowling looked down at his clothes. “Where?”

One man dropped his gimlet glass and stepped away, his eyebrows raised, his hands lifted in front of him, as though disengaging from an invisible entanglement that should not have been part of his life. The two other men were not as subtle. They backed away hurriedly, then ran toward the Ninth Hole, coins and keys jingling in their pockets, their spiked shoes clicking on the walkway, their faces disjointed as they looked back fearfully over their shoulders.

Out on the county road, one hundred yards away, Felix Chavez walked from an abandoned mechanic’s shed to an unmarked car, threw a rifle on the backseat, and drove home to eat dinner with his family.

HACKBERRY WAS DOZING in his chair, his hat tilted down on his face, his feet on his desk, when the 911 call came in. Maydeen and Pam and R.C. had stayed late that afternoon. Maydeen tapped on Hackberry’s doorjamb. “Temple Dowling says somebody put a laser sight on him at the country club,” she said.

“No kidding,” Hackberry said, opening his eyes. “What would Mr. Dowling like us to do about it?”

“Probably bring him some toilet paper. He sounds like he just downloaded in his britches,” she replied.

“Maydeen—”

“Sorry,” she said.

“Is Mr. Dowling still at the club?”

“He’s in his cottage. He says you warned him about Jack Collins.” She looked at a notepad in her hand. “He said, ‘That crazy son of a bitch Collins is out there, and you all had better do something about it. I pay my goddamn taxes.’”

“Is there any coffee left?” Hackberry asked.

“I just made a fresh pot.”

“Let’s all have a cup and a doughnut or two, then R.C. and Pam and I can motor on out,” Hackberry said. He stretched his arms, his feet still on his desk, and tossed his hat on the polished tip of one boot. “I’d better take down the flag before we go, too. It looks like rain.”

“You want me to call Dowling back?”