Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“You don’t listen to the new music, the narcocorridas. The narcocorridas tell us all about these guys. That’s why our people have to be vicious and show no mercy.”

“Look up there on the hillsides, above the stone house. Those two men are Sholokoff’s guards. Let your actions replace your words, Negrito. Take Lupa and Mimo with you and do your job.”

“Stay here and I’ll bring you back their ears. I don’t need Mimo and Lupa to do it, either.”

Krill waved a finger back and forth. “No, you don’t bring back ears.”

“You took the scalp of the DEA agent.”

“Because he killed my brother. Because I had to bring an offering to my brother’s grave so he could rest. You do not bring back trophies from these men. They are only doing what they are told.”

“Wait and see,” Negrito said.

“Everything with you is an argument.” Krill pulled Negrito’s leather hat off his head and started to hit him with it but instead simply shook his head and handed the hat back. He waited several seconds before he spoke, the heat dying in his chest. “The moon is going behind the mountain. As soon as the shadow falls on the house, kill Sholokoff’s guards and come back to me. You are very good at what you do, Negrito. Do not fail me.”

“I will never fail you. When the rooster crows and the sun rises, you will see me at your side and know I have been your loyal servant and follower.”

The moon slipped behind the crest of the mountain, dropping the valley into black shadow. Negrito and the two other men filed down a game trail and climbed silently over a table rock and disappeared into a thicket that was rife with thorns, never hanging their clothes on one of them, never rustling a branch. Krill unslung his assault rifle and knelt in the grass and waited, his gaze roaming over the lighted stone house and the swimming pool steaming behind it and a children’s swing set whose chains made a tinkling sound in the wind.

His M16 had been stolen from an armory in Mexico, along with crates of ammunition and United States Army .45 automatics and bayonets and grenades and flak vests and other forms of military ordnance that Krill considered of no value. But the M16 was indeed a wondrous product of American manufacturing genius. It was lightweight, simple in design, easy to disassemble, rapid-firing, and soft on the shoulder. In semiauto mode, it could snap off shots individually with lethal accuracy or, on auto mode, hose down an entire room in seconds. The newer ones seldom jammed, and in the dark, the shooter could easily drop an empty magazine and replace it with a fresh one. Krill had jungle-clipped a twenty-round and thirty-round magazine together, so when his bolt locked open on an empty chamber, he could invert the two magazines and jam the full one into the loading slot without ever missing a beat.

Argentinean and American advisers had taught him how to shoot and care for the M16 and how to aim in the dark and not silhouette on a hill and how to crawl through wire on his stomach and sink mines in the trails used by the Sandinistas. They had also taught him the use of the M60 machine gun, a weapon whose murderous effectiveness had never ceased to amaze him. What his advisers had not taught him was how to live with the virus the guns had given him, because that was what it was, he told himself, a virus, one that produced an insatiable bloodlust that was like walking around in a warm pink mist and always wanting more of it.

He looked at the luminescent numbers on his wristwatch. Seventeen minutes had passed. He wondered what was keeping Negrito and the others. Lupa and Mimo were not killers by nature, bu

t they would do as they were told and would not question the morality of the orders, as was almost always the case with poor men who became soldiers. Lupa had earned his nickname, “the magnifying glass,” because of the cheap spectacles he wore in order to read and his attention to details that were of no importance. Like Lupa, Mimo had been a farmer in Oaxaca before the prices for corn had gone to virtually nothing, but he was also a drunkard who drank huge amounts of liquor, made from sugarcane, that could be bought for a few cents a bottle. Neither man was dangerous or violent in himself, and both men together did not form another personality that was necessarily dangerous. But under the direction of Negrito, they would commit any number of heinous acts as long as they believed they were committing them in the interest of their families. Mexico was not a country, Krill thought. It was a revolution that had never stopped. The only things in it that stayed the same were the killings and the river of narcotics flowing to the north. The poor suffered and worked in sweatshops and lived in hovels and abandoned their children to live on the streets of Mexico City. Why did they not all rise up and kill their masters? Krill had no answer. Could it be that they were holy in their passivity? As with Negrito, these were ideas he could not fathom, at least not adequately. Maybe that was why Negrito had become his companion and lieutenant. This last conclusion was a disturbing one, and he did not want to dwell further on it.

He saw Mimo and Lupa coming through the trees and tall grass, bent down, their unshaved faces as severe as those of men staring into an ice storm.

“¿Qué pasa?” Krill asked.

Their eyes avoided his. Lupa looked over his shoulder.

“¡Dígame!” Krill said.

“Muerto,” Lupa said.

“¿Quiene?” Krill asked.

“Ellos,” Mimo replied.

“Do you think I am stupid? What did you do out there?” Krill said in English.

Neither man replied. They squatted and kneaded their thighs as though they had run a long distance. They wiped their noses on their hands and felt in their pockets for tobacco or chewing gum, then looked with relief over their shoulders when they heard Negrito coming through the brush, bent low, a button-down shirt wadded in his hand.

“What happened out there?” Krill said.

“We took care of them guys. Like you told me. The second guy fought,” Negrito replied.

“What is in your hand?”

“Nothing anybody’s gonna miss. At least them guys ain’t.”

“Do not play games with me, Negrito.”

“Krill, we are doing these things out of loyalty to you. We ain’t getting paid. Why are you on my case, man?”

“Put the shirt on the ground and open it.”