Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“What for?”

“To tell him y’all are on your way.”

“He knows our hearts are in the right place,” Hackberry replied.

Forty minutes later, it was misting and the clouds were hanging like frozen steam on the hills when Hackberry and Pam arrived at the club in one cruiser and R.C. in another. Temple Dowling met them at the door of his cottage, a drink in his hand, his face splotched, his eyes looking past them at the fairways and trees and the shadows that the trees and buildings and electric lights made on the grass. The wind toppled a table on the flagstones by the swimming pool, and Temple Dowling’s face jumped. “What kept y’all?” he said. “Who’s this woman Maydeen?”

“What about her?”

“She told me to fuck myself, is what’s about her.”

Hackberry stared at him without replying.

“Come inside. Don’t just stand there,” Dowling said.

“This is fine.”

“It’s raining. I don’t want to get wet,” Dowling said, his gaze focusing on a man stacking chairs behind the Ninth Hole.

“R.C., go up to the clubhouse and see what you can find out. We’ll be here with Mr. Dowling. Let’s wrap this up as soon as we can.”

“Wrap this up?” Dowling said. “Somebody is trying to kill me, and you say ‘wrap this up’?”

Pam and Hackberry stepped inside the cottage and closed the door behind them. “You say somebody locked down on you with a sniper’s rifle?”

“Yeah. Why do you think I called?”

“And Maydeen told you to fuck yourself? That doesn’t sound like her.”

Dowling’s eyes were jumping in their sockets. “Are you listening? I know a laser sight when I see one. Who cares about Maydeen?”

“Did your security guys see it?”

“If they had, Collins would be turning on a rotisserie.”

“The last time a couple of your guys ran into Jack, they didn’t do too well,” Hackberry said. “The coroner had to blot them up with flypaper and a sponge. Did you call the feds?”

“You listen,” Dowling said, his voice trembling with either anger or fear or both. He set down his drink on a bare mahogany table, trying to regain control of his emotions. The velvet drapes were pulled on the windows, the dark carpets and wood furniture and black leather chairs contributing somehow to the coldness pumping out of the air-conditioning ducts. “Collins has killed at least two federal agents. Nobody can do anything about him. Even Josef Sholokoff is afraid of him. But you have a personal relationship with him. If you didn’t, you’d be dead. I think you’re leaving him out there purposely.”

“Jack Collins tried to kill Chief Deputy Tibbs. He knows what I’ll do to him if I get the chance, Mr. Dowling. In the meantime, I’m not sure anything happened here. If Jack had wanted to pop y

ou, your brains would be on your shirt.”

Even in the air-conditioning, the armpits of Dowling’s golf shirt were damp, his face lit with a greasy shine. He picked up his drink, then set it down again, clearing a clot out of his voice box. “I want to talk to you alone,” he said.

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

“Pam, would you wait up at the club?”

“I love your decor, Mr. Dowling,” she said. “We busted some metalheads and satanists who were growing mushrooms inside a place that looked just like it.”

Dowling went into the bedroom and returned with a cardboard file folder secured by a thin bungee cord. He removed the cord and laid the folder flat side down on a dining room table, his chest rising and falling, as though wondering if he were about to take a wrong turn into the bad side of town. “I was going to give you this anyway,” he said. “So I’m not giving it to you as a bribe or a form of extortion or anything like that.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hackberry said.

Dowling lifted his glass and drank and set the glass down again, his words steadying in his throat. “Years ago, when you were going across the border, my father had you surveilled and photographed. And buddy, did he get you photographed. Through windows and doorways, in every position and compromising moment a man and woman can put themselves in. You used three cathouses and three cathouses only. Am I right?”