Feast Day of Fools hh-10 Page 42

  “I see your point,” the man with the gun said. “We’re all just making a buck. We shouldn’t let it get personal. I totally understand where you’re coming from.”

  No one in the room moved. In the silence, Krill could hear the little girl whimpering. The man who had been holding a semiautomatic on Negrito put it away and looked at the. 357 he had taken from Krill. It was nickel-plated and had black checkered grips, and each chamber in the cylinder was loaded with a hollow-point round. “Your name is Negrito?” he said.

  “That’s my nickname. It’s ’cause I’m mestizo.”

  “Do you mind riding in a helicopter?” the man asked.

  Negrito shrugged and gazed out the window, his eyes dulling over, his mouth downturned at the corners.

  “Because we don’t want you to be uncomfortable. Can you handle heights? You don’t get airsick or anything like that?”

  Negrito looked at Krill. “We had some fun, didn’t we, amigo? They’re gonna remember us for a long time. Don’t let this guy get to you. We’re better than any of them. We’re stronger and smarter and tougher. Guys like us come back from the dead and piss in their mouths and shit in their mothers’ wombs.”

  Krill stood frozen, the sound of the helicopter blades growing louder and louder in his head, the dust swirling in the downdraft, the rain clouds forming into blue horsetails, the windmill shuddering against the sky, all of these things happening simultaneously as the man with the. 357 lifted the barrel and fired a solitary round through one side of Negrito’s head and out the other.

  Hackberry Holland was reading a biography of T. E. Lawrence under a lamp by his front window when he heard thunder rolling in the clouds far to the south, reverberating in the hills, where occasionally a flash of dry lightning would flicker and then die like a wet match. The book was written by Michael Korda and dealt with the dissolution of empires and a new type of warfare, what came to be known as “wars of insurgency,” all of which had their model among the sand dunes and date palms of Arabia. As Hackberry read the lines describing the white glare of the Arabian desert, he thought of the snow that had blanketed the hills south of the Yalu the first morning he had seen Chinese troops in their quilted uniforms, tens of thousands of them, many of them wearing tennis shoes, marching out of the white brilliance of the snowfield, heedless of the automatic-weapons fire that danced across the fields and the artillery rounds that blew geysers of snow and ice and dirt and rock in their midst.

  He closed the book and placed it on his knee and stared out the window. Not far down the road, he could see a tree limb that had fallen across the telephone line that led to his house. Just as he got up to check the phone, he saw a cruiser turn off the road into his drive, its emergency bar rippling, its siren off. Hackberry stepped out on the front porch and watched R. C. Bevins get out of the cruiser and walk toward him on the flagstones, his face somber. “You tried to call?” Hackberry said.

  “Yes, sir, your phone’s out. Your cell must be off, too.”

  “It’s in my truck. What is it, R.C.?”

  “We’ve got a homicide at the Ling place. The victim appears to be Hispanic. From the exit wound in his head, I’d say somebody used a hollow-point. A ten-year-old girl had been left in Ms. Ling’s care and saw it all. When her mother came for her, she found the girl locked in a pantry. Ms. Ling is gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “From what the little girl said, there were six guys in masks. They took Ms. Ling and a friend of the dead man on a helicopter.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “Did you print the victim?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get a priority with AFIS.”

  “Pam is already on it. Who do you reckon are the guys with the chopper?”

  “Josef Sholokoff’s people.”

  “The little girl said the dead man and his friend spoke Spanish. She also said the friend had a pistol on one hip and a long knife on the other.”

  “What else did she say about him?”

  “She said he was tall and that he had funny shoulders. She said they were too wide, like he had a stick pushed sideways inside his shirt.”

  “That’s Krill.”

  “What would he be doing at Ms. Ling’s place?”

  “I don’t have any idea, none at all.”

  “You okay, Sheriff?”

  “How long have you been trying to get me?”

  “About fifteen minutes. There wasn’t no way you could know the line was down.”

  “Was Ms. Ling hurt?”

  “The little girl said a guy shoved her down. The same guy held a knife at the little girl’s throat. She said they all had gloves on, and the shooter called the dead man a greaseball. You think these are the same guys who crucified Cody Daniels?”

  “What’s your opinion?”

  R.C. scratched at his eyebrow. “I think we got a special breed on our hands,” he said. “I think all this is related to that Barnum boy we got locked in our jail. I’m not sure if we done the right thing on that.”

  Pam Tibbs was waiting for Hackberry when he arrived at the jail. She was not wearing makeup, and there were circles under her eyes. “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  “About what?” he said.

  “Everything.”

  “Did you talk to the FBI yet?”

  “I reported the homicide and the kidnapping. I didn’t mention our boy in isolation,” she said.

  “You’re uncomfortable with that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, Hack. I don’t know what the plan is.”

  “They’re going to call.”

  “The abductors are?”

  “You bet.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ve got what they want. As long as Barnum stays in our hands, Anton Ling will be kept alive.”

  “Hack, they wouldn’t have grabbed her if we hadn’t locked up Barnum.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To take a nap,” he said.

  He went up the spiral stairs and pulled a mattress from a supply locker into an alcove off the corridor and lay down on his side with his head cushioned on his arm and fell asleep with far more ease than he would have guessed, knowing that his dreams would take him to a place that was as much a part of his future as it was his past. He remembered the words of the writer Paul Fussell, who had said he joined the army to fight the war for its duration and had discovered that he would have to fight it every day and every night for the rest of his life. In his dream, Hackberry returned once again to Camp Five in No Name Valley and the brick factory called Pak’s Palace outside Pyongyang. The dream was not about deprivation or the harshness of the weather or the mistreatment visited upon him by his captors. It was about isolation and abandonment and the belief that one was totally alone and lost and without hope. It was the worst feeling that anyone could ever experience.

  In the dream, the landscape changed, and he saw himself standing on a precipice in Southwest Texas, staring out at a valley that looked like an enormous seabed gone dry. The valley floor was covered with great round white rocks that resembled the serrated, coral-encrusted backs of sea tortoises, stranded and alone, dying under an unmerciful sun. In the dream, he was not a navy corpsman but a little boy whose father had said that one day the mermaids would return to Texas and wink at him from somewhere up in the rocks. All he saw in the dream was his own silent witness to the suffering of the sea creatures.

  “Jesus Christ, wake up, Hack,” he heard Pam Tibbs say, shaking his arm.

  “What? What is it?” he said, his eyes filmed with sleep.

  “You must have been having a terrible dream.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “Just the stuff people yell out in dreams. Forget it.”

  “Pam, tell me what I said.”

  “‘He takes people apart.’ That’s what you said.”

&nb
sp; The telephone call came in one hour later.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  From his office window, he could see flecks of rain blowing in the glow of the streetlights, the traffic signal at the intersection bouncing on its support cables, the electrical flashes in the clouds that ringed the town. “Don’t try tracing this,” the voice said.

  “You’re too slick for us?” Hackberry replied.

  “You know what we want. Deliver him up and there won’t be any problem.”

  “By now you’ve probably figured out I’m a bit slow on the uptake. What is it you think I have?”

  “‘It’ is a Quaker with a hush-puppy accent who by all rights is our property.”

  “Somebody snitched us off, huh?”

  “Spying on you hasn’t been a big challenge, Sheriff. You seem to leave your shit prints everywhere you go.”

  “Should we decide to deliver up our Quaker friend, what are y’all going to do for us?”

  “Give you your Chinese girlfriend back, for one. For two, you’ll get her back looking just the way she did the last time you saw her. Are you getting the picture?”

  “I don’t know if it’s the electrical storm or that peckerwood speech defect, but you’re a little hard to understand.”

  “We have another guest here, a guy whose father you did scut work for. We’re gonna let him be a kind of audiovisual aid for you. Hang on just a second. You’re gonna like this.”

  The caller seemed to remove the phone from his ear and hold it away from him. In the background, Hackberry could hear voices and echoes inside a large room, probably one with stone or brick walls. “Turn up the volume for Sheriff Holland,” the caller said.

  Then Hackberry heard a sound that he never wanted to hear again, a cry that burst from the throat and reverberated off every surface in the room and died with a series of sobs and a whimper that the listener could associate only with hopelessness and despair.

  “That’s Mr. Dowling, Sheriff,” the caller said. “As you’ve probably gathered, he’s not having a good morning.”

  “You abducted Temple Dowling?”

  “It’s more like he abducted himself. All we had to do was get a little girl to perch her twat on a bar stool, and Mr. Dowling was in the net. Want to talk to Ms. Ling?”

  Hackberry could hear his own breath against the surface of the receiver. “Yes, I would,” he said.

  “You’d like that?”

  “If you want to negotiate, I need to know she’s there.”

  “She was with Civil Air Transport, wasn’t she? What they called the Flying Tiger Airline?”

  “If that’s what she told you.”

  “She didn’t tell me anything. She didn’t have to. She has a tattoo of the Flying Tiger emblem on her ass. Have you ever had an opportunity to see it-I mean her ass?”

  Hackberry’s mouth was dry, his heart hammering, his breath coming hard in his throat. “No matter how this plays out, I’ll be seeing you down the track. You know that, don’t you?”

  “You still think I sound like a peckerwood? I’d like to hear you say that one more time.”

  Hackberry swallowed, a taste like diesel oil sliding down his throat.

  “No?” the voice said. “We’ll give you a little time to think over your options. Noie Barnum belongs to us, Sheriff. Want to throw away Ms. Ling’s life for an empty-headed government pissant? Do the smart thing.”

  “Why does he belong to you?”

  “Mr. Dowling cost my employer a great deal of money. Barnum is the payback. Tell you what. I’m gonna send you a package. Check it out and we’ll talk again. In the meantime, I’m gonna take personal care of Ms. Ling. Don’t worry, I won’t touch a hair on her head. Promise.”

  The line went dead.

  Anton Ling’s captors had placed her in a subterranean room that was cool and damp and smelled of lichen and the river stones out of which it was made. Three ground-level barred windows that resembled slits in a machine-gun bunker gave onto a scene that seemed out of place and time: a sunrise that had the bluish-red color of a bruise, a meandering milky-brown river from which the fields had been irrigated an emerald green, livestock that could have been water buffalo grazing in riparian grasses. But the people tending animals or working in the fields were not Indo-Chinese peasants; they were Mexicans who had probably eaten breakfast in the dark and gone to work with the singleness of purpose that characterized all workers whose aspirations consisted of little more than getting through the day and returning home in the evening without involving themselves in the political considerations of those who owned the land.

  The floor was concrete, once covered with a carpet that had molded into a mat of black thread. Against one wall was a wooden bed with a tick mattress on it, and a toilet in the corner with a partition that partially shielded it from view. The bars in the door were sheathed in flaking orange rust, and the stones in the wall had turned black and oily with the seepage of groundwater. Someone had scratched a Christian cross on one stone; on another was a woman’s name; on another were the words Ayudame, Dios.

  The screaming that had come from another part of the subterranean area had stopped about two hours ago. Briefly, Anton had seen a tall, mustached man in a suit and a soiled white shirt carrying a medical bag. He had studiously avoided looking at her, his shoulders rounded, the back of his head turned to her, his uncut hair hanging over his collar like a tangle of twigs. To someone else, he had said, “I have left you the hypodermics. That is all I will do. I have seen nothing here. I am going back to my bed.”

  She heard an upstairs door open and feet descending the steps. So far, her captors had not spoken to her without their masks. The man who was approaching her did not wear a mask; he wore elevated shoes, a white sport coat, a monogrammed lavender shirt unbuttoned below the collar, and black slacks. His nose was hooked, the nostrils thick with hair, his cheeks slathered with whiskers, the exposed top of his chest gnarled with tiny bones. He unlocked the cell door with an iron key and pulled it open and came inside the room, wiping the rust off his fingers with a handkerchief. His breath smelled of decay and seemed to reach out and touch her face like wet cobweb. “Frank doesn’t like you,” he said. “He says you spat on him. He says that’s the second time you’ve done it.”

  “He tried to take my clothes off.”

  “He shouldn’t have done that. I’ll talk to him about it. Sit down.” When she didn’t respond, he beamed and said, “Please. Don’t make everything unpleasant. You remember me?”

  “No,” she said, sitting down.

  “I helped provide the AK-47s you and your friends shipped to Nicaragua.”

  “I dealt with many undesirables. I suspect you were among them.”

  “I’ve always wanted to talk with you on a personal level. You are quite famous. Do you want something to eat?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew we could be friends.”

  “You’re Josef Sholokoff. You were at my house when your men almost drowned me.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You killed Cody Daniels in the cruelest way a man can die.”

  “The cowboy minister? He was of no importance. Why are you worried about him? You should be thinking about yourself. We’re going to put you on the phone with Sheriff Holland.” He was still grinning, his eyes so bright and intense and merry that they were impossible to read. “One way or another, you’ll get on the phone. Or you will be heard on the phone. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  “No,” she replied, looking straight ahead.

  “You heard the man screaming earlier this morning. He was talking on the phone to Sheriff Holland. He just didn’t know it.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “He might be, if his heart didn’t give out. I’ll check and see. Do you want to meet him?”

  “Where is Krill?”

  “These are insignificant people. Why do you keep dwelling on them?”

  “I think you’re evil. You’re not just a man who
does evil. You love evil for its own sake. I’ve known a few like you. Not many, but some.”

  “With the Khmer Rouge?”

  “No, the Khmer Rouge were uneducated peasants who were bombed by B-52s. You’re different. I suspect your cruelty is your means to hide your cowardice.”

  “And you? You didn’t rain fire on people who lived in grass huts?”

  “I did.”

  “But I’m evil?”

  “You don’t plan for me to leave here, not alive, at least. Take your lies and your deceit from the room. You’re odious in the sight of God and man, Mr. Sholokoff. I suspect your role as a pornographer allows you to feel powerful about women. But in any woman’s eyes, you would be looked upon with pity. Your fetid breath and your physical repulsiveness are simply an extension of the blackness in your heart. Any woman who is not of diminished capacity would immediately be aware of that and want to flee your presence, no matter what she might tell you. Ask the people around you and see what their response is.”

  He was clearly fighting to retain the merry light in his eyes and to keep his grin in place, but his mouth twitched slightly, and his nostrils were dilating. “Do you like my farm?”

  “Why should I care one way or another about your farm?” she asked.

  “Because it’s yours. Your permanent home. You will be among the people, part of the soil, fertilizer for their vegetables,” he replied. “What finer fate for a martyr of your stature?”

  Preacher Jack Collins didn’t like to be pushed. Nor did he like losing control of things or, worse, having control taken from him. Not only had Noie Barnum, ingrate extraordinaire, strolled off from their safe house, he had managed to get himself arrested in a convenience store and put in a county bag that usually housed drunks and check writers and wife beaters. When Noie did not return from his stroll down the highway, Jack had gotten on his cell phone and begun making calls to an informational network that he had created and maintained for two decades, a network that no one would ordinarily associate with a man who dressed in beggar’s rags and wandered the desert like a Bedouin. It included hookers from El Paso to Austin, button men from both sides of the border, Murphy artists, street dips and stalls, shylocks, coyotes, second-story creeps, drug mules, corrupt Mexican cops, safecrackers, car boosters, money washers, fences of every stripe, and a morphine-addicted retired librarian in Houston who could probably find Jimmy Hoffa’s body if the FBI would take time to retain her.