Feast Day of Fools (Hackberry Holland 3)

Hackberry looked up at her in the silence. Pam’s eyes were brown, with a reddish tint, and they became charged with light when she was either angry or hurt. She hooked her thumbs in her gun belt and fixed her attention outside the window, her cheeks spotted with color.

“I’m proud of the way you handled it,” he said. “You did all the right things. Let’s see if our man likes his accommodations.”

Hackberry and Pam Tibbs climbed the steel spiral steps in the rear of the building and walked down a corridor of barred cells, past the old drunk tank, to a barred holding unit that contained nothing but a wood bench and a commode with no seat. The man who had identified himself as Reverend Cody Daniels was standing at the window, silhouetted against a sky that had turned yellow with dust.

“I understand you were potting jackrabbits from your pickup truck,” Hackberry said.

“I did no such thing,” Cody Daniels replied. “It’s not against the law, anyway, is it?”

“So you were cruising down the road surveilling the countryside through your binoculars for no particular reason?” Hackberry said.

“What I was looking for is the illegal immigrants and drug transporters who come through here every night.”

“You’re not trying to steal my job, are you?”

“I go where I’ve a mind to. When I got up this morning, this was still a free country.”

“You bet. But you gave my chief deputy a hard time because she made a simple procedural request of you.”

“Check the video camera in your squad car. Truth will out, Sheriff.”

“It’s broken.”

“Pretty much like everything in this town. Mighty convenient, if you ask me.”

“What are you doing in my county?”

“Your county?”

“You’d better believe it.”

“I’m doing the Lord’s work.”

“I heard about your activities on the East Coast. We don’t have any abortion clinics here, Reverend, but that doesn’t mean we’ll put up with your ilk.”

Cody Daniels approached the bars and rested one hand on the cast-iron plate that formed an apron on the bottom of the food slot. The veins in his wrists were green and as thick as night crawlers, his knuckles pronounced, the back of each finger scarred where a tattoo had been removed. He held Hackberry’s gaze. “I have the ability to see into people’s thoughts,” he said. “Right now you got more problems than your department can handle. That’s why you select the likes of me as the target of your wrath. People like me are easy. We pay our taxes and obey the law and try to do what’s right. How many drug dealers do you have locked up here?”

“There’s a kernel of truth in what you say, Reverend, but I’d like to get this issue out of the way so you can go back to your job and we can go back to ours.”

“I think the real problem is you got a romantic relationship going with this woman here.”

“Deputy Tibbs, would you get the reverend’s possessions envelope out of the locker, please?”

Pam gave Hackberry a look but didn’t move.

“I think Reverend Daniels is a reasonable man and is willing to put this behind him,” Hackberry said. “I think he’ll be more mindful of his driving habits and the next time out not object to the requests of a well-meaning deputy sheriff. Is that a fair statement, Reverend?”

“I’m not given to making promises, particularly when I’m not the source of the problem,” Cody Daniels said.

Hackberry drummed his fingers on the apron of the food slot. “Deputy Tibbs, would you get the paperwork started on Reverend Daniels’s release?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

Cody Daniels’s eyes followed her down the corridor, his gaze slipping down her back to her wide-ass jeans and the thickness of her thighs. “I guess it’s each to his own,” he said.

“Pardon?” Hackberry said.

“No offense meant, but I think I’d rather belly up to a spool of barbed wire. That’s kind of coarse, but you get the picture.”