Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“You don’t have to. You just got eighty-sixed from my jail. It’s a first. Burn a candle the next time you’re in church.”

“Maybe I don’t want to leave.”

“Son, you’d better get a lot of gone between you and this jailhouse,” Pam said.

“Well, you’re gonna see me again,” Barnum said.

Pam raised her eyebrows threateningly.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m gone,” he said.

Downstairs, ten minutes later, Pam said, “Hack, what in the hell are you doing?”

“Fixing to call the FBI,” he replied.

But it wasn’t for the reasons she thought.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

PAM WAS STILL staring at him when he got off the phone. “You told the feds about Dowling’s mutilation but not about Barnum?”

“That’s right,” he replied.

“Why does Barnum get a pass?”

“Because if the feds get him into custody, they’ll probably lose interest in Anton Ling. Second, Barnum isn’t a bad kid and, in my opinion, deserves another chance.”

“You have a funny way of looking at the world, Hack.”

“My father used to say, ‘The name of the game is five-card draw. You never have to play the hand you’re dealt.’ He believed everything we see around us now was once part of the Atlantic Ocean, with mermaids sitting up on the rocks, and that one day I would see the mermaids return.”

“We’d better get some breakfast, kemo sabe.”

“I told you that’s what Rie called me, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, I forgot,” she said.

“Don’t say you’re sorry. You didn’t know Rie. She’d like for you to call me that. She’d like you.”

She looked at him in a strange way, her mouth slightly parted, her face suddenly vulnerable, but he did not see it. Maydeen had just come out of the dispatcher’s cage, her anger palpable. “He’s on the line, Hack,” she said.

“Who is he?”

“He just told me, ‘Put the sheriff on the line, woman.’”

“Collins?”

“I say we hang up on him. Don’t let him jerk you around like this, Hack.”

“No, I think this is the call we’ve been waiting on,” Hackberry said.

JACK COLLINS WAS sitting at a small table under a canvas tarp propped on poles next to an airplane hangar, a corked green bottle of seltzer and a glass and a saucer of salted lime slices by his hand. A clutch of banana plants grew tightly against the hangar wall, beads of moisture the size of BBs sliding down the leaves. The wind was hot, the canvas riffling above his head, the desert lidded from horizon to horizon with a layer of solid blue-black clouds that seemed to force the heat and humidity radiating from the desert floor back into the earth. The clouds crackled with electricity but offered

no real promise of rain or even a moment of relief from the grit and alkali in the wind and the smell of salt and decomposition that whirled with the dust devils out of the streambeds. Jack decided there was nothing wrong with Mexico that a half-dozen hydrogen bombs and a lot of topsoil couldn’t cure.

Jack’s pilot and two hired killers, the cousins Eladio and Jaime, were waiting for him by the two-engine Beechcraft on the airstrip. The pilot was on retainer, at Jack’s beck and call on a twenty-four-hour basis. Eladio and Jaime were available for any activity that put money in their pockets, night or day; if there were any lines they would not cross, any deeds they would not perform, including a drive-by for La Familia Michoacána on a teenage birthday party in Juárez, Jack had not seen it. Their greatest problem, in his view, was the impaired thought processes that seemed to live behind the indolence in their faces. The inside of Jaime’s head could only be described as a tangled web of cruelty that was linked somehow to his stupidity and sullen nature. The more intelligent of the two, Eladio, thought that his transparent childlike deceit and attempts at manipulation were signs of sophistication. During a rare loss of restraint with the two cousins, Jack had asked Eladio if his mother had been impregnated by a bowling pin. Eladio had responded, “You are a man of knowledge, Señor Jack. But you must not misjudge simple men. We think and feel deeply about our mothers. They are the center of our lives.”

“Then why do you say chinga tu madre to each other at every opportunity?” Jack had said.