Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [107]
“I’ve heard all that stuff before.”
“Is it true?”
“Maybe on some level it is. But it’s yesterday’s box score. Sholokoff is our worry, Sheriff. You worry about Collins and this guy Krill. It’s clear they’re both operating in your jurisdiction. Sholokoff is a separate issue.”
Hackberry could feel his hand clenching and unclenching on the phone receiver. Through his window, he could see his horses running in the pasture and yellow dust rising off the hills, plum-colored rain clouds bunching across the sun. He has cancer. He’s at the end of his row. Don’t insult him, he heard a voice say.
“I’m against the wall,” he said. “My deputy was drugged and buried alive. Federal agencies and their minions, people like Temple Dowling, are wiping their ass on my county, and I can’t do anything about it. I’m throwing away the rule book on this one, Ethan.”
“That’s always the temptation. But when it’s over, the result is always the same. You end up with shit on your nose.”
“You coming down here or not?”
There was a long silence. “I’m tied up. I can’t do it. Listen to me, Hack. Stay out of events that happened years ago. Stay away from this Anton Ling woman, too. She’s an idealist who’s full of guilt, and like all idealists, she’d incinerate one half of the earth to save the other half. She had a chance to return Noie Barnum to his own people—that’s us, the good guys, we’re not Al Qaeda. Instead, she chose to hide and feed him and dress his wounds and let him end up in the hands of Jack Collins. Are you going to put your bet on somebody like that? Use your head for a change.”
THAT EVENING DANNY BOY Lorca entered a saloon off a two-lane highway that wound through hills that resembled industrial waste more than compacted earth. The saloon was built of shaved and lacquered pine logs and had a peaked green roof that, along with the Christmas-tree lights stapled around the window frames, gave it a cheerful appearance in a landscape that seemed suitable only for lizards and scorpions and carrion birds. The saloon’s name was spelled out in a big orange neon sign set on the roof’s apex, the cursive words LA ROSA BLANCA glowing vaporously against the sky. The owner went by the name Joe Tex, although he had no relationship to the musician by the same name. When patrons asked Joe Tex where he had gotten the name for his saloon, he would tell them of his ex-wife, a big-breasted stripper from Dallas who had a heart of gold and a voice that could break windows and a thirst for chilled vodka that the Gulf of Mexico couldn’t quench. The truth was, Joe Tex had never been married and had been a mercenary in Cambodia, operating out of Phnom Penh, where he had been close friends with the owners of a brothel that specialized in oral sex. The name of the brothel had been the White Rose.
Danny Boy had parked his deuce-and-a-half army-surplus flatbed and walked unsteadily across the gravel to the entrance, the drawstring of a duffel bag corded around his forearm, the weight in the bottom of the bag bumping against his hip as he scraped against the doorframe and headed for the bar.
Next door was a 1950s-style motel bordered with red and yellow neon tubing whose circular porte cochere and angular facade and signs gave it the appearance of a parked spaceship. The customers in the saloon were long-haul truckers staying in the motel; women who carried spangled purses and wore eyeliner and lip gloss and had mousse in their hair and whose voices seemed slightly deranged; locals who had been in Huntsville and were probably dangerous and not welcome at other clubs; and college boys looking to get laid or get in trouble, whichever came first.
Joe Tex dressed like a Latino, his cowboy boots plated on the toes and heels, his black cowboy shirt stitched with red roses. He smiled constantly, regardless of the situation, his teeth as solid as tombstones, the black hair on his forearms a signal to others of the power and virility wrapped inside