Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

“I had a Chinese bitch of my own once,” Frank said. “Play your cards right and I might keep you around.”

Her first shot hit him an inch above the groin; the second one entered his mouth and exited an inch above the neatly etched hairline on the back of his neck.

His friend dropped his semiautomatic to the floor and lifted his hands in the air just before Anton Ling shot him in the heart.

Upstairs, the Thompson began firing again without letup, the rounds thudding into walls all over the house, the casings dancing on the floors, as though Jack Collins had declared war on all things that were level or squ

are or plumb or that possessed any degree of geometric integrity.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

NOBODY COULD SAY Preacher Jack Collins wasn’t a fan of Woody Guthrie. “Adiós to you Juan, adiós Rosalito, adiós mi amigo Jesus and Maria,” he sang above the roar of the Thompson as he burned the entire ammo drum, hosing down the house from one end to the other, the barrel so hot that it scalded his hands when he reloaded.

He hunted down Sholokoff’s men in closets, crawl spaces, and behind and under the furniture and kitchen counters, blowing them apart as they cowered or tried to break and run.

These were the dreaded transplants from Russia and Brighton Beach or their surrogates in Phoenix? What a laugh.

Jack was having a fine time. He even enjoyed the rain blowing through the broken windows. It filled the house with a soft mist and the wet smell of grass and cornstalks and freshly plowed fields. The smell reminded him of rural Oklahoma during a summer rain, when the rivers and buttes were red and the plains green. His mother took him once to an Easter-egg roll behind a church where she had decided to get reborn. For whatever reason, Jack thought, it sure didn’t take. In fact, he’d always had the feeling that his mother had seduced the preacher.

No matter. When Jack’s Thompson was deconstructing the environment and people around him, he was no longer troubled by thoughts of his mother’s cruelty and the strange form of catatonic trance that seemed to take control of her metabolism and cause her to slip from one personality into another. Well, she got hers when she took a fall off the rocks on the property that eventually became his. It was an accident, of course. More or less. Yes, “accident” was a good word for it, he thought. Even though he had been in his late thirties when it happened, the details had never quite come together for him. How had the chain of events started? She had tried to grab his hand, right? Yes, he was sure about that, although he was a little hazy on what caused her to trip and start slipping backward off the ledge. But he definitely remembered her reaching out, her fingers clutching at his shirt, then at his wrist, then at the ends of his fingers. So he was not really a player in any of it, just a witness. Maybe that was her way of airbrushing herself out of his life. One second she was there; a second later, she was receding into the ground, growing smaller and smaller as she fell, looking back at him as if she had just spread herself out on a mattress for a brief nap.

When anybody got up the nerve to ask Jack how his mother had died, he always gave the same reply: “As she had lived. On her back. All the way down.”

Jack loved crime novels and film noir but could never understand the film critics’ laudatory attitude toward James Cagney’s portrayal of Cody Jarrett in White Heat. Would a mainline con like Jarrett crawl into his mother’s lap? Yuck, Jack thought. The image made his phallus shrivel up and want to hide. And how about that last scene, when Jarrett stands on the huge propane tank outside a refinery, shouting at the sky? Here’s a guy about to be burned to a crisp, and what does he say? “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”

What a douchebag. Didn’t Cagney know better? The real Jarrett would have had his mother stuffed and used as a hat rack or doorstop.

Jack stood in the middle of the kitchen and gazed at the house’s interior and the level of destruction he had visited upon it. No one could accuse him of leaving the wounded on the field. Everyone he had shot was not only dead but dead several times over. He turned in a circle, the Thompson cradled across his chest, a tongue of smoke curling out of the barrel. The rain and wind were cool blowing on his skin through the shattered windows. On the lawn, he could see the slop bucket the maid had dropped when she was highballing for the cornfield. Where oh where was little Josef?

“Can you hear me, little fellow?” Jack called out. “Let’s fix a cup of tea and have a chat. Did you ever read And Quiet Flows the Don? It was written by a guy named Sholokoff. Are y’all related?”

There was no reply from the devastated interior of the house. Jack felt a terrible thirst but did not want to set down the Thompson to pour himself a glass of water. “It’s pretty quiet downstairs, Josef. I have a feeling Frank lost out to Sheriff Holland and his deputy. What do you think?”

In the silence, he walked across the linoleum, bits of glass and china crackling under the soles of his cowboy boots. “I checked the upstairs and the attic, but you weren’t there. That means you’ve got yourself scrunched under the floor or up a chimney. I cain’t think of any other possibility. Unless you’ve already hauled ass. No, I would have seen you. Tell me, do y’all have a volunteer fire department in these parts?”

Jack lifted the Thompson to a vertical position and gazed at the ceiling and then out the window. He went through a mudroom onto the back porch and opened the screen door and looked up at the window in the attic area and at a roof below the window. The roof was peaked, and Jack could not see on the far side of it. However, if anyone ran from the house, he would not find cover except in the barn, the cornfield, or the pecan orchard, where the flatbed truck and Jack’s Ford Explorer were parked.

“Josef, I think you might have outsmarted me,” Jack said to the wind. He walked to the hallway door that opened onto the cellar stairs. “You down there, Mr. Holland?”

“What do you want, Collins?” the sheriff’s voice replied.

“You sound like you might have sprung a leak.”

“We’ve got several dead people down here. You can join them in case you’re having any bright ideas,” the sheriff said.

“You never give me any credit, Sheriff. What have I done to you that’s so bad?”

“Tried to kill me and my chief deputy?” the sheriff said.

“Y’all dealt the play on that one. Regardless, I think I squared the deal when I dug up that young fellow Bevins from his grave out in the desert.”

“You’re talking too much, Collins. That’s the sign of either a guilty or a frightened man.”

“It’s Mr. Collins. What does it take for you to use formal address? In the civilized world, men do not refer to one another by their last names. Is that totally lost on you, Sheriff? If it is, I’ve sorely misjudged you. I’m coming down.”

“We need medical help, Mr. Collins.”

“Every one of the locals is on a pad for Sholokoff. They’d have you and your friends in a wood chipper by sunset.”