House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“Vexatious?”

“Yes, there are times when I’d like to shoot you.”

“I feel the same way. Toward my own self, I mean.”

“Get in the motorcar. I’ll drive you home.”

“No, sir,” Hackberry said.

He began walking on the deer trail that paralleled the river, his shadow moving upstream against the current, the gaseous autumnal smell of the woods enticing him into its embrace, the coldness of the shade not so much a prelude to winter as a respite from the evil that men did unto one another.

HIS PROBLEMS WITH the sheriff weren’t over. After he arrived back home, the rain strong enough to sting his face, he saw the bucket he had lowered into the well with a hatbox and bricks inside. It was lying on the grass, its contents spilled out. Just then Willard drove up and parked by the rose bed in the side yard. His car door screeched like a shard of glass shoved into Hackberry’s eardrum.

“I thought we were done,” Hackberry said.

“Not hardly. A Mexican woman on the river found a pair of bloody britches buried in her cornfield. In the pocket was a drawing of what looks like your property and the cave up on the bluff. There was also a drawing of your house with a question mark over it. Somebody wrote down the word ‘gold’ with another question mark. Want to explain all that?”

“Maybe the fellow read too many books.”

“What’s in the cave?”

“Bones and bat shit.”

“What are the bucket and bricks and cardboard box about?”

“I’ve been picking up trash and such.”

“With a bucket tied to the winch on your well?”

“I was fixing to untie it.”

“You figured if Beckman’s people came on your property, they’d look in the well first. Even if they didn’t try to get in the house, you’d know they were here.”

“Anything on this property is mine. They got no right to it. That’s the issue, at least as I see it.”

“The issue is a double homicide.”

“Their kind always end the same way. If not here, somewhere else. They dealt the hand.”

“No, they didn’t. You engineered this.”

Hackberry took off his hat and blotted his face on his sleeve. “That’s a goddamn lie.”

“You’re not going to talk to me like that, Hack.”

“Well, you’ll just have to live with it.”

“You’re going to end up in my jail, partner.”

Hackberry put his hat back on. “It won’t be the first time.”

“That’s the first truthful thing you’ve said today.”

Hackberry watched Willard drive away. He remained in the yard and stared at the sky and the way the lightning bloomed silently in the clouds. How could so much force and power exist in the natural world wit

hout leaving a trace of its presence? It began as a flicker and then spread through thousands of miles of firmament in seconds and died inside an ocean of purple smoke. The magnificence of the moment could have been borrowed from Genesis. But what, if anything, did it portend? Was he simply another fool who wanted to believe he saw meaning in the skies when others did not? Was a terrible or grand event in the offing? The Great War had cost more than twenty million lives. Maybe peace would finally come to the world and the lion would lie down with the lamb. Maybe that was what the magnificence in the heavens indicated, like Yahweh hanging the archer’s bow above a flooded world.

In a pig’s eye.