Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“Ms. Ling says she beat the shit out of Collins with a broom handle. You want me to check the hospitals?”

“Waste of time,” Hackberry said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“What do you think his next move is, Hack?”

“He’s going to call either the department or my house.”

“What for?”

“He made a public fool of himself at Anton Ling’s,” Hackberry replied.

“I don’t get it.”

“We’re the only family he has.”

“Yuck,” she said.

The next morning Hackberry went to his office early and dug out the three-inch-thick file on Jack Collins and began thumbing through only a small indicator of the paperwork that one man had been able to string across an entire continent. The paperwork on Collins, who had never spent one day in jail, included faxes from Interpol and Mexico City, NCIC printouts, FBI transmissions, analytical speculations made by a forensic psychologist at Quantico, crime-scene photos that no competent defense attorney would allow a jury to see, autopsy summations written by coroners who were barely able to deal with the magnitude of the job Collins had dropped on them, witness interviews, crime-lab ballistic matches from Matamoros to San Antonio, and the most fitting inclusion in the file, a handwritten memo by a retired Texas Ranger in Presidio County who wrote, “This man seems about as complex as a derelict begging food at your back door and I suspect he smells about the same. I think the trick is to make him hold still long enough to put a bullet in him. But we’ve yet to figure out a way to do it.”

What did it all mean? For Hackberry, the answer was simple. The system couldn’t handle Jack Collins because he didn’t follow the rules or conform to patterns that are associated with criminal behavior. He wasn’t addicted to drugs or alcohol, didn’t frequent prostitutes, and showed little or no interest in money. There was no way to estimate the number of people he had murdered, since many of his homicides were committed across the border, but he was not a serial killer. Nor could he be shoved easily into that great catchall category known as psychopaths, since he obviously had attachments, even though the figures to whom he was attached lived in his imagination.

Preacher Jack was every psychiatrist’s nightmare. His level of intelligence and his wide reading experience allowed him to create a construct in which he shared dominion with the Olympians. His narcissism was so deeply rooted in his soul that he did not fear death because he thought the universe could not continue without his presence. He was messianic and believed he could see through a hole in the dimension and watch events play out in the lives of people who were not yet born.

With gifts like these, why should Preacher Jack fear a law enforcement agency? Like the cockroach and the common cold, he was in the fight for the long haul.

The irony was that in spite of his success in eluding the law for almost two decades, Collins shared a common denominator with his fellow miscreants: He needed law enforcement to validate who he was. Intuitively, he knew his own kind were by and large worthless and would sell him out for a pack of cigarettes if they thought they could get away with it. All career criminals wanted the respect of the cops, jailers, social workers, correctional officers, and prison psychologists whose attention gave them the dimensions they possessed in no other environment.

There was another consideration in regard to what went on in the mind of a man like Preacher Jack. His visit last night at Anton Ling’s home reminded Hackberry of a similar event that had taken place in Jack’s life the previous year, in San Antonio. Jack had become obsessed with a Jewish woman by the name of Esther Dolan and had invaded her home and indicated to her that he had chosen her as his queen. When she had recovered from the shock of his presumption, she called him a dog turd off the sidewalk and picked up a stainless-steel oatmeal pot and almost beat him to death with it.

Pam Tibbs leaned inside his door. “Guess who’s on the phone,” she said.

“Texas’s answer to B.O. Plenty.”

“Who?” she said.

“Collins?”

“I’ve already started the trace,” she said.

“Have the feds called back this morning?”

“Nope.”

Hackberry gazed at the blinking light on his telephone, then picked up the receiver. “What’s the haps, Jack?” he said.

“I thought I’d check in.”

“We figured we’d be hearing from you.”

“You omniscient, Mr. Holland?”

“It’s Sheriff Holland to you.”

“I like to keep abreast of your activities, since you seem intent on doing me harm and forgetting I saved the life of your young deputy, what’s-his-name, Bevins.”

“No, I think you’re calling because you became a human piñata out at Anton Ling’s place, in front of dozens of poor Mexicans who are now convinced there’s a serious problem in the Anglo gene pool. Just before you called, I was thinking about a pattern that seems to follow you around, Jack. Remember Esther Dolan in San Antone? She’s the lady who drove you from her house with knots all over your head. Then there was that good-looking gal, the country singer, Vikki Gaddis. She sprayed wasp killer in your eyes and took your pistol away from you and shot you through the foot. Why is it you keep getting into it with women who kick your ass? Do they remind you of your mother?”

“Good try, Sheriff. But I’m afraid you don’t know much about my upbringing.”