Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“Where’s Pam?”

“In the restroom, the last time I saw her.”

“Believe it or not, Maydeen, sometimes I have my reasons for doing the things I do. We’re not the only people who want to get their hands on Noie Barnum. The less anyone knows about his whereabouts, the safer he is. You got me?”

“Yes, sir, I expect so.”

Hackberry looked down the street to see if R.C.’s cruiser had turned into the intersection yet. He tried to clear his head, to think straight, to keep the lines simple before he gave up his one certifiable chance to nail Jack Collins. “Fill in Pam and get the trusties out of the downstairs area. I want the prisoners in the cells at the end of the upstairs corridor moved to the tank. Barnum goes into total isolation. No contact with anyone. His food is brought to him by a deputy. No trusty gets near him. We’re in total blackout mode regarding his presence. Simply said, he doesn’t exist. You copy that?”

“I guess that means no phone call.”

He gave her a look.

“Got it, got it, got it,” she said.

Hackberry went out the back door and waited for R.C. The alleyway was empty in both directions. Think, he told himself. Don’t blow this one. Why would Barnum be in a convenience store by himself? Collins wouldn’t allow him to go wandering about on his own. They either had a fight or Barnum got sick of Collins’s ego-maniacal rhetoric and decided to take a stroll down the road and find some other company. But why had he stayed with Collins in the first place? To find Krill? To find some Al Qaeda operatives in Latin America and even the score for the death of his half sister? That made more sense than anything else.

R.C.’s cruiser turned in to the alleyway, the flasher off. Hackberry looked at all the rear windows of the building. He saw a face at one of the windows in the upstairs corridor. A deputy or a trusty? R.C. helped his prisoner out of the backseat of the cruiser, and the face went away. The prisoner’s wrists were cuffed behind him, the tendons in his neck corded with either embarrassment or anger. In the sunlight, there were pinpoints of sweat on his forehead.

“I’m Sheriff Holland, Mr. Barnum,” Hackberry said. “You are Noie Barnum?”

“Your deputy called me Noie. But I didn’t tell him that was my name.”

“Have it any way you like, sir. You’re in protective custody, but you’re not under arrest. Do you understand the difference?”

“Yes, you’re saying I don’t have the constitutional right to a phone call or a lawyer.”

“No, I’m saying this is a safe place for you.”

“I think I’d just rather hike down to that café we passed and have a piece of pie and a cup of coffee and be on my way, if you don’t mind.”

“That’s not an option, Mr. Barnum. I also need to advise you that you’re starting to piss me off.”

“I don’t see why.”

“I’ll explain. You’re one skip and a j

ump from being charged as an accessory in several homicides, all of them involving your companion Jack Collins. I dug up nine of his female victims. When we get time, I’ll show you their postmortem photographs. The photos don’t do justice to the realities of an exhumation—the stench of decomposition and the eight-ball stare and that sort of thing—but you’ll have some sense of what a spray of forty-five-caliber bullets can do to human tissue.”

“It’s true?” the prisoner asked.

“What?”

“What you just said. Jack did that?”

Pam Tibbs had just come out the back door. “Who the hell you think did it, son?” she asked.

The prisoner tried to hold his eyes on hers, but his stare broke, and he sucked the moisture out of his cheeks and swallowed.

Pam and Hackberry took the handcuffed man up the steel spiral stairs to the second floor and walked him down the row of cells to the end of the corridor. Pam whanged her baton against a cell door when two men came to the bars. Hackberry unhooked the prisoner, and he and Pam Tibbs stepped inside the room with him.

“You have a lavatory and a toilet and a bed and a chair and a window that lets you see the street,” Hackberry said. “I apologize for all the graffiti and drawings of genitalia on the walls. We repaint every six months, but our clientele are a determined bunch.”

“The other cells have bars. Why am I in this one?”

“The only people you’re going to talk to are us, Mr. Barnum,” Hackberry said. “I have a feeling you and Preacher were holed up down by the border or just on the other side of it. But chances are he’s taken off. Is that right? He’s way down in Coahuila by now?”

“You call him Preacher?”