Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

Hackberry rubbed his forehead and started to hang up, then placed the receiver against his ear again. “If you think you’re in danger, get out of town.”

“I’m already out of town. It doesn’t matter. Sholokoff has a network all over the country.”

“I think you’re imagining things.”

“You don’t understand Josef. He doesn’t just do evil. He loves it. That’s the difference between him and the rest of us. Jack Collins is probably a lunatic. Josef isn’t. He creates object lessons nobody ever forgets. He has people taken apart.”

“He does what?”

PERHAPS DUE TO his fundamentalist upbringing, R. C. Bevins was not a believer in either luck or coincidence but saw every event in his life as one that required attention. The consequence was that he never dismissed any form of human behavior as implausible and never thought of bizarre events in terms of their improbability. The sheriff had once told R.C. that if a UFO landed on the prairie, two things were guaranteed to happen: Everyone who witnessed the landing would grab his cell phone to dial 911, and R.C. would knock on the spaceship door and introduce himself.

R.C. had pulled into a convenience store and gas station on a county road just south of the east-west four-lane that paralleled the Mexican border, and had gone inside and bought a chili dog and a load of nachos and jalapeño peppers and a Dr Pepper and had just started eating lunch at a table by the front window when he saw a pickup stop and let out a passenger. The passenger limped slightly, as though he had a stitch in his side. He wore shades and an unlacquered wide-brim straw hat, like one a gardener might wear. His nose was a giant teardrop, his jeans hiked up too high on his hips, his suspenders notched into his shoulders, the way a much older man might wear them. The man went into the back of the store and took a bottle of orange juice and a ham-and-cheese sandwich from the cooler and a package of Ding Dongs from the counter. He paid, sat down, and began eating at a table not far from R.C.’s, never removing his shades. R.C. nodded at him, but the man did not look up from his food.

“Bet you could fry an egg out there,” R.C. said.

“That about says it,” the man replied, chewing slowly, his mouth closed, his gaze seemingly fixed on nothing.

“My uncle says that during the drought of 1953, it got so dry here he saw a catfish walking down a dirt road carrying its own canteen.”

“That’s dry.”

“You looking for a ride? ’Cause the bread-delivery man is fixing to head back to town.”

“No, I’m visiting down the road there. South a piece.” The man drank from his orange juice and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and began eating his sandwich again.

“Did you see any salt and pepper up there at the counter?” R.C. asked.

“I think I did. Where the ketchup and such are. In that little tray.”

“You want some?”

“No, sir, I’m fine.”

R.C. went to the counter by the coffee and cold-drink dispensers and began sorting through the condiments. “Do y’all have any hot sauce?” he said to the cashier.

> “It’s there somewhere,” the cashier replied.

“I sure cain’t find it.”

The cashier walked over and picked up the hot sauce and handed it to R.C. He was a short man with a sloping girth who always showed up at work in a dress shirt and an outrageous tie and with polished shoes. He had a tiny black mustache that expanded like grease pencil when he grinned. “Glad it wasn’t a snake.”

“Keep looking straight at me,” R.C. said.

The cashier’s face clouded, but he kept his eyes locked on R.C.’s.

“You know that old boy over yonder?” R.C. said.

“I think he was in yesterday. He bought some Ding Dongs and a newspaper.”

“He was by himself?”

“He came here with another man. The other fellow stayed in the car.”

“What’d the other guy look like?”

“I didn’t pay him much mind.”

“What kind of car?”