Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [148]
The passenger had walked through the headlights and was standing four feet from Danny Boy, his eyes roving over Danny Boy’s face, waiting for him to speak.
“I was in Sugar Land with guys like you. You’re a killer. You ain’t like me, and we ain’t brothers,” Danny Boy said.
“Have it as you wish. But you’re putting us in a bad position, my friend. Your fear is taking away all our alternatives.”
“Fear? Not of you. Not no more.” Danny Boy pushed the release lever on the top of the shotgun’s stock and broke the breech and exposed the empty chamber. “See, I ain’t got a shell in it. I ain’t afraid of you. I ain’t afraid of them guys in the car, either.”
“Está loco, Krill,” one of the men inside the car said.
The passenger folded his arms and stared into the darkness as though considering his options. “You got some real cojones, man,” he said. “But I don’t know what we’re going to do with you. Are you going to turn us in?”
“When I can get to a phone.”
“Where’s your cell phone?”
“I ain’t got one.”
“You got a regular phone in your house?”
“No, I ain’t got no phone.”
“You don’t have a telephone? Not of any kind?”
“You see a pole line going to my house?”
Krill stared at the house and at the barn and at the truck parked next to the barn. “The man you saw me kill out there in the desert? He was a corrupt Mexican cop who tortured my brother to death.”
“Then you ain’t no different from the Mexican cop.”
“You are fortunate to have this fine place to live on. I had a farm once, and children and a wife. Now I have nothing. Don’t judge me, hombre.”
Krill pulled a long game-dressing knife from a scabbard on his side and walked to Danny Boy’s truck and sliced the air stems off all four tires. “Buenas noches,” he said as he got back in the automobile. “Maybe one day you will understand men like us. Maybe one day the Indians who live in the canyon will tell you who your real brothers are.”
“They ain’t you!” Danny Boy shouted at the car’s taillights.
IN THE GLOAMING of the day, Preacher Jack Collins and Noie Barnum pulled into the drive-in restaurant on the state four-lane and parked under the shed and ordered hamburgers and fries and onion rings and frosted mugs of root beer. The evening was warm, the wind blowing steadily across the rolling countryside, the storm clouds in the south bursting with brilliant patterns of white electricity that made Jack think of barbed wire. He had not spoken since they had left the cottage on the hillside above the junkyard.
“You’re not letting me in on where we’re going?” Noie said.
Jack chewed on his food, his expression thoughtful. “You give much thought to the papists?”
“The Catholics?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“Not particularly.”
“That Chinese woman, the one who dressed your wounds, is a puzzle to me.”
“She’s just a woman with a big heart.”
“Maybe she’s spread her big heart around a little more than she should have.”
“If you read Saint Paul, there’s no such thing as being too charitable.”
“She may have been acting as a friend to the FBI. If that’s true, she’s no friend to us.”
“You saying she’s a turncoat?”
“I’d like to talk to her about it. Here’s a question for you.” From the side, Jack’s eyes looked like glass marbles pushed into dough that had turned moldy and then hardened. The amber reflection in them was as sharp as broken beer glass but without complexity or meaning. In fact, the light in his eyes was neutral, if not benign. “You put a lot of work into whittling out that checker set. Each one of those little buttons was a hand-carved masterpiece. But two pieces were missing from your poke, and you didn’t seem to give that fact any thought.”
“I guess I dropped them somewhere.”
“When you counted the checkers out, you didn’t notice that two were gone?”
“Guess not.”
“Too bad to lose your pieces. You’re an artisan. For a fellow