Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [160]
“Turn east at the highway. We’re not going back to our place. I’ll show you a road through a ranch into Coahuila. Only a few wets know about it.”
“But we leave everybody else here alone? Right? We find Krill but that’s it?”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Jack said. “All I’ve ever wanted was to be left alone. I never stole, and I never went looking for trouble. How many people can say that?”
Noie looked back at him. “I know you’ve done some dark deeds, but I can’t believe you mowed down a bunch of innocent women. I just can’t believe that.”
“Believe whomever you want. I’m tired of talking. I’ve tired of everything out there.”
“Out where?”
“There, in the dark, the voices in the wind, the people hunting and killing each other while they scowl at the likes of me. If I study on it, I have moments when I want to write my name on the sky in ways nobody will ever forget. That’s the burden you carry when you’re born different. You told me once your sister grew up bisexual or whatever in that small southern town y’all come from. Did she have a good time of it there? I think you’ve got more of me inside you than you’re willing to admit, Noie.”
“You’re wrong.”
Jack gazed silently through the front window, his forehead crosshatched with lesions, his thoughts, if any, known only to himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ANTON LING CALLED in the report on Noie Barnum and Jack Collins’s visit to her property five minutes after the two men had left. Maydeen Stoltz immediately called Hackberry at his home.
“Which way did they head?” he said.
“South, toward the four-lane.”
“Get out traffic stops ten miles on either side of where they would enter the four-lane. Then call the FBI and the Border Patrol. Did Noie Barnum seem coerced?”
“Not according to Ms. Ling. She says Barnum heard her accuse Collins of murdering Ethan Riser and the Thai women, and Barnum left with him voluntarily. You think this is Stockholm syndrome or whatever they call it?”
“I doubt it.”
“No matter how you cut it, Barnum isn’t a victim?” Maydeen said.
“Not to us, he isn’t,” Hackberry replied.
“Ms. Ling says she beat the shit out of Collins with a broom handle. You want me to check the hospitals?”
“Waste of time,” Hackberry said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“What do you think his next move is, Hack?”
“He’s going to call either the department or my house.”
“What for?”
“He made a public fool of himself at Anton Ling’s,” Hackberry replied.
“I don’t get it.”
“We’re the only family he has.”
“Yuck,” she said.
The next morning Hackberry went to his office early and dug out the three-inch-thick file on Jack Collins and began thumbing through only a small indicator of the paperwork that one man had been able to string across an entire continent. The paperwork on Collins, who had never spent one day in jail, included faxes from Interpol and Mexico City, NCIC printouts, FBI transmissions, analytical speculations made by a forensic psychologist at Quantico, crime-scene photos that no competent defense attorney would allow a jury to see, autopsy summations written by coroners who were barely able to deal with the magnitude of the job Collins had dropped on them, witness interviews, crime-lab ballistic matches from Matamoros to San Antonio, and the most fitting inclusion in the file, a handwritten memo by a retired Texas Ranger in Presidio County who wrote, “This man seems about as complex as a derelict begging food at your back door and I suspect he smells about the same. I think the trick is to make him hold still long enough to put a bullet in him. But we’ve yet to figure out a way to do it.”
What did it all mean? For Hackberry, the answer was simple. The system couldn’t handle Jack Collins because he didn’t follow the rules or conform to patterns that are associated with criminal behavior. He wasn’t addicted to drugs or alcohol, didn’t frequent prostitutes, and showed little or no interest in money. There was no way to estimate the number of people he had murdered, since many of his homicides were committed