House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“I see. So now you can have a second run at it?”

“No, I’ve pretty well shot my wad, and I don’t consider myself a threat to nobody. But if I find out you hurt Miz DeMolay, I’ll probably forget my Christian upbringing.”

Beckman hooked his arm over the back of the chair. “ ‘Before me, every knee shall bend.’”

“You’re Jesus?”

“I was just borrowing some of his rhetoric,” Beckman said.

“Enjoy your punch. Cross my heart, I didn’t put paint thinner and horse urine in it. You can ask the waiter over there, the one I sent outside while I guarded the bowl.”

THE SHERIFF’S NAME was Willard Posey. Some thought him ill suited for the job, with his sunken cheeks and firehouse suspenders and peaked forester’s hat and clothes hanging straight down on his emaciated frame. People would have laughed at him except for a spark in one eye that seemed to say, Do you really want to do that?

Early in the morning, four days after his return from San Antonio, Hackberry heard a knock on his front door. He looked through the small window in the top of the door but could see no one. He unlocked and opened the door. “Mind telling me why you’re squatting down on my porch?”

Willard squinted at him from under his hat brim. “I was trying to see that cave up on the bluff where you go for your meditation or afternoon nap or whatever unusual activity you’re up to.”

“Why are you interested in my

cave?”

“Because your friend and neighbor Cod Bishop says that’s where he saw you throw a couple of rifles into the river.”

“Cod Bishop is a pea brain.”

“You didn’t throw two rifles in the river?”

“It was a rifle and a shotgun.”

“Any particular reason you’d be throwing firearms in the river?”

“A couple of vagabonds threatened me.”

“Know their names?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Willard stood up, straightening his back. He wore a shoulder holster without a coat, his badge on his belt. The shoulder holster was black and contained a nickel-plated revolver with white handles. “How you like my new motorcar?”

“It’s an eye-catcher.”

“I got it for a song.”

“What happened to the top?”

“The previous owner cut it off with a hacksaw. Come on, let’s take a ride.”

“What’s going on, Willard?”

“I hope you already ate.”

TWO MAILBAGS, THE drawstrings pulled tight at the bottom of each sack and tied to a rock, had bobbed down the river, finally swinging into a pebble-bottomed green pool by the bank, oscillating on their tethers. A black child who was the first to see the sacks walked to the pool and smelled an odor that made him gag, then he ran to find his father. One hour later, a deputy used a boat hook to pull the sacks onto a grassy stretch by the water’s edge. He and another deputy loosed the drawstrings and worked the canvas off the two bodies inside, both of which were blue and naked, the wrists bound in back with baling wire. One of the deputies vomited.

Willard parked his car in the shade. When he opened the door, it screeched like a tin roof being prized up with a crowbar. “Coming?”

“I can see from here.”

“Will you get out of the motorcar, please?”