Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“You’re hot.”

“You know a time when I wasn’t?”

“Not like this. I had a hard time on the driver’s licenses. Word is you popped an FBI agent.”

“He popped himself.”

“A photo guy I use says you’re the stink on shit and for me not to come back again.”

“You wouldn’t try to put the slide on me, would you, Billy?”

“Just telling you like it is.”

“You want more money?”

“I was thinking about visiting Baja. Maybe lie on the beach and cool out for a while.”

“What do you use for suntan lotion—ninety-weight motor oil?”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

Jack took three hundred dollars from his wallet and folded the bills between his fingers and stuffed them in the man’s shirt pocket. “A metaphor means comparing one thing in terms of another without using the words ‘like’ or ‘as.’ ‘To lie on a beach’ is not a metaphor. If I said to you, ‘Tell your parents to buy a better quality of condoms,’ I would be making an implication, but I would not be speaking metaphorically. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Grammar was never my strong suit.”

“Literary terms have nothing to do with grammar,” Jack said. “If you’re going to speak your native language, why don’t you invest some time in th

e public library? It’s free. In the meantime, don’t go around using terms you don’t know the meaning of.” Jack stuffed the keys to his Trans Am into the man’s pocket, on top of the bills. “Drive it to San Antone and park it at the airport. Wear gloves, but don’t wipe it down. Leave the keys on the dashboard and the parking stub in the ashtray.”

“Somebody will boost it.”

“Nobody slips one past you.”

“The guy who boosts it will get pinched, and the cops won’t know if he’s lying to them or not—about where he got it, I mean. You’re doing a mind-fuck on them?”

“Don’t use that kind of language in my presence,” Jack said.

“I’ll never figure you out, Preacher.”

“Get out of my sight.”

An hour later, he drove his new car to within one block of Sheriff Holland’s jail and, wearing a hat and round steel-rimmed sunglasses that were as black as welder’s goggles, went into a café and ordered a to-go box of scrambled eggs, ham, grits, and toast and a cup of scalding black coffee. He returned to his car and spread his food on the dashboard and ate with a plastic fork and spoon without seasoning of any kind or even seeming to taste it, as though consuming chaff swept up from a granary floor. His windows were down, and the air was cool and smelled of rain, and the storm clouds above the hills were so thick and swollen that he could not tell when the sun broke the horizon. In moments like these, Jack felt a strange sense of peace, as though the travels of the sun and moon had been set into abeyance, as though time had stopped and the denouement of his life, one that he secretly feared, had been postponed indefinitely.

Jack picked up his coffee. It was still so hot, the steam rose into his hat brim and scorched his forehead. But his gaze, which was fastened on the jail, never wavered, nor did his mouth twitch when he drank the cup to the bottom.

The electric light was burning in the sheriff’s office. When the front door opened, Jack saw the sheriff walk to the silver pole by the sidewalk and clip the American flag to the chain and raise it flapping in the wind. At the same moment, Jack’s cell phone vibrated on the seat. The call was from the morphine-addicted reference librarian in Houston.

“I may have found your Russian,” she said. “He owns a place down in Mexico, one with a helipad on it. It’s a horse breeding farm. A French magazine did an article on it about five years back.”

“Can you find out if he’s there?”

“I’ll work on it. I found three game farms he owns in Texas and a place in Phoenix. You want me to check them out, too?”

“No, concentrate on Mexico.”

“I found something else. Sholokoff’s name came up a couple of times with a guy by the name of Temple Dowling. You know him?”

“Dowling was running whores with Sholokoff.”