Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [12]
Hackberry loved the place he lived, and he loved waking inside its soft radiance in the morning, and he loved following his grandfather’s admonition to feed his animals before he fed himself. He loved the smell of his roses inside the coolness of the dawn and the smell of well water bursting into the horse tank when he released the chain on the windmill. He loved the warm odor of grass on the breath of his horses and the vinegary smell of their coats, and the powdery green cloud of hay particles that rose around him when he pulled a bale apart and scattered it on the concrete pad in the barn.
All of these things were part of the Texas in which he had grown up, and they were unsoiled by political charlatans and avaricious corporations and neocolonial wars being waged under the banner of God. He did not tell others about the bugles blowing in the hills, less out of fear that they would suspect him of experiencing auditory delusions than out of his own conviction that the bugles were real and that from the time of Cortés to the present, a martial and savage spirit had ruled these hills and it was no coincidence that a sunset in this fine place looked like the electrified blood of Christ.
Early on the morning after he and Pam Tibbs had interviewed the Asian woman known by the Mexicans as La Magdalena, Hackberry looked out his bathroom window and saw Ethan Riser park his government motor-pool car by the front gate and walk up the flagstones to the front entrance, holding two Styrofoam containers on top of each other, pausing briefly to admire the flowers in the bed. Hackberry rinsed the shaving cream off his face and stepped out on the veranda. “This can’t wait till eight o’clock?” he said.
“It could. Or maybe I could come back another day, when you’re not tied up with something important, like shaving,” Riser said.
“I have to feed my animals.”
“I’ll help you.”
Ethan Riser’s hair was as white as cotton and had all the symmetry of meringue. His nose and cheeks were threaded with tiny blue and red capillaries, and his stomach and hips protruded over the narrow hand-tooled western belt he wore with a conventional business suit and tie. He had been with the FBI almost forty years.
“Fix some coffee while I’m down at the barn,” Hackberry said.
Twenty minutes later, he returned to the house through the back door and washed his hands in the kitchen sink.
“You got a reason for always making it hard?” Riser said.
“None I can think of.”
“Why didn’t you call me about the homicide south of that Indian’s property?”
“It’s not a federal case. It’s not y’all’s damn business, either.”
“You’re wrong about that, my friend. The victim was a DEA informant.”
“It’s still our case. Stay out of it.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“I’ve been on a need-to-know basis with y’all before. I always had the feeling I was a hangnail.”
“The informant’s name was Hector Lopez. He was a dirty cop from Mexico City who worked both sides of the fence. Our people weren’t entirely comfortable with him. Lopez and a physician once tortured a DEA agent to death.”
“I remember that case. The physician went down for it. Why not the dirty cop?”
“That’s the way it is. I’m sharing this with you because we can help each other.”
The microwave made a dinging sound. Ethan Riser took out the two Styrofoam containers and opened them on the breakfast table. They contained scrambled eggs and hash browns and sausage patties smothered with milk gravy. He took the coffeepot off the stove and set cups and silverware on the table. Hackberry watched him. “Does everything meet the standard here? My house tidy enough, that sort of thing?” he said.
“We talked to Danny Boy Lorca already,” Riser said. “He gave us the name