Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [101]
If there was a way, Sheriff Holland would find him, he told himself. He had given the sheriff his location. It was only a matter of time before the sheriff found the bar and forced the bartender to tell him where R.C. had been taken. All R.C. had to do was hold on, to breathe in and out, to not let go of the fairgrounds and the best day of his life. The soul could go where it wanted, he told himself. It existed, didn’t it? If it could fly from you at death, why couldn’t it leave you while you were alive? He didn’t have to abide the condition he had found himself in. Or at least he didn’t have to cooperate with it.
When he swallowed, his saliva was bilious, and his eyes watered at the fate that had been imposed on him. In his impotence and rage and fear, he cursed himself for his self-pity.
He heard a shovel sink deep into the dirt and felt it graze his side, not unlike the tip of a Roman spear teasing the rib cage of an impaled man.
A moment later, the hands of two men began scraping the dirt away from his face and shoulders and arms and sides, lifting his head free, slipping the mask from his face, allowing him to breathe air that was as clean and pure as bottled oxygen. He could see the silhouette of a third man against the moon, a holstered thumb-buster revolver on his hip, his fingernails like the claws on an animal. He wore a sun-bleached panama hat that was grimed with finger smears on the front brim.
“Who are you?” R.C. said, unsure if he should have even asked the question, his face cold with sweat.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HACKBERRY LOOKED THROUGH the front windshield at the long, flat, sunbaked rawness of the land and at the purple haze that seemed to rise from the creosote brush and the greasewood and the patches of alkali along streambeds that were hardly more than sand. In the distance, he could see hills in the moonlight and stovepipe cactus in the yard of an adobe house whose roof had collapsed. He looked through his binoculars at the hills and at the house and thought he could see a dirt road behind it that switchbacked up the side of the hill, but he couldn’t be sure.
The bartender with the swastika tattooed on his scalp had given him and Pam Tibbs directions to the place where he believed Negrito was taking the young Texas lawman. When Hackberry had asked whether he was sure, the bartender had replied, staring at the broken pool cue Hackberry had almost stuffed down his throat, “It’s where Negrito always disposes of people he has no more use for. It’s the underground prison he likes to stand on top of. Maybe he comes back for them. Maybe that’s where you will end up seriously jodido, that’s what I hope.”
Hackberry’s cell phone vibrated on the Jeep’s dashboard. He picked it up and put it to his ear. “Sheriff Holland,” he said.
“It’s Maydeen. Did you find R.C.?”
“Not yet.”
“Let me try to get you some backup.”
“There’s nobody down here I trust.”
“Hack, I called because I’m at the hospital. Anton Ling says she saw the guy she put a screwdriver in. He and another guy were in the hallway right outside her room.”
“How did she know it was the guy she hurt? He was wearing a mask when she put the screwdriver in his face.”
“She said she recognized the guy with him. She said she was mixed up in an intelligence operation of some kind years ago, and this guy was part of it. Felix and I are in her room now. She wants to talk with you.”
“Put her on.”
Hackberry heard Maydeen speaking to Anton Ling, then Maydeen got back on the cell. “She wants us to leave the room. When y’all get finished, I’ll come back in. Felix will stay here the rest of the night.”
“Tell Anton Ling that anything she wants to tell me, she can say in front of you.”
“Don’t worry about it,