Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“Did you talk to the FBI yet?”

“I reported the homicide and the kidnapping. I didn’t mention our boy in isolation,” she said.

“You’re uncomfortable with that?”

“I don’t know what you’re doing, Hack. I don’t know what the plan is.”

“They’re going to call.”

“The abductors are?”

“You bet.”

“Then what?”

“We’ve got what they want. As long as Barnum stays in our hands, Anton Ling will be kept alive.”

“Hack, they wouldn’t have grabbed her if we hadn’t locked up Barnum.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“Where are you going?”

“To take a nap,” he said.

He went up the spiral stairs and pulled a mattress from a supply locker into an alcove off the corridor and lay down on his side with his head cushioned on his arm and fell asleep with far more ease than he would have guessed, knowing that his dreams would take him to a place that was as much a part of his future as it was his past. He remembered the words of the writer Paul Fussell, who had said he joined the army to fight the war for its duration and had discovered that he would have to fight it every day and every night for the rest of his life. In his dream, Hackberry returned once again to Camp Five in No Name Valley and the brick factory called Pak’s Palace outside Pyongyang. The dream was not about deprivation or the harshness of the weather or the mistreatment visited upon him by his captors. It was about isolation and abandonment and the belief that one was totally alone and lost and without hope. It was the worst feeling that anyone could ever experience.

In the dream, the landscape changed, and he saw himself standing on a precipice in Southwest Texas, staring out at a valley that looked like an enormous seabed gone dry. The valley floor was covered with great round white rocks that resembled the serrated, coral-encrusted backs of sea tortoises, stranded and alone, dying under an unmerciful sun. In the dream, he was not a navy corpsman but a little boy whose father had said that one day the mermaids would return to Texas and wink at him from somewhere up in the rocks. All he saw in the dream was his own silent witness to the suffering of the sea creatures.

“Jesus Christ, wake up, Hack,” he heard Pam Tibbs say, shaking his arm.

“What? What is it?” he said, his eyes filmed with sleep.

“You must have been having a terrible dream.”

“What’d I say?”

“Just the stuff people yell out in dreams. Forget it.”

“Pam, tell me what I said.”

“‘He takes people apart.’ That’s what you said.”

The telephone call came in one hour later.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

FROM HIS OFFICE window, he could see flecks of rain blowing in the glow of the streetlights, the traffic signal at the intersection bouncing on its support cables, the electrical flashes in the clouds that ringed the town. “Don’t try tracing this,” the voice said.

“You’re too slick for us?” Hackberry replied.

“You know what we want. Deliver him up and there won’t be any problem.”

“By now you’ve probably figured out I’m a bit slow on the uptake. What is it you think I have?”

“‘It’ is a Quaker with a hush-puppy accent who by all rights is our property.”

“Somebody snitched us off, huh?”