Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [172]
“Ask Jack when you catch him.”
“We don’t abuse prisoners here,” Pam said, stepping closer to Barnum, one finger barely touching his sternum.
“Ma’am?” he said.
“I just wanted you to take note of that fact,” she said. “It’s why I’m not pounding you into marmalade. But you open your mouth like that one more time, and I promise you, all bets are off.”
DOWNSTAIRS, FIVE MINUTES later, Pam came into Hackberry’s office and closed the door behind her. “I’m backing your play, Hack, whatever it is. But I think you’re taking an awful risk here,” she said.
“We don’t owe the feds diddly-squat,” he replied. “We apprehended Barnum. They didn’t. As far as I’m concerned, they’re on a need-to-know basis. Right now I don’t figure they need to know anything.”
“This is a national security issue. They’re going to eat you alive. If they don’t, your enemies around here will.”
“That’s the breaks.”
“God, you’re stubborn.”
“I got a call from Temple Dowling. He says Josef Sholokoff believes Dowling put a hit on him.”
“Why’s he think that?”
“Because somebody killed a couple of Sholokoff’s men at his game farm.”
“Why didn’t we hear anything about it?”
“Sholokoff didn’t report it.”
“What did you tell Dowling?”
“To get out of town. That he was on his own,” Hackberry said.
“What’s the problem?”
“I was pretty hard-nosed with him. Maybe I took satisfaction in his discomfort.”
“Dowling is a pedophile and deserves anything that happens to him.”
“He said Sholokoff takes people apart.”
“In what way?”
“Physically, piece by piece,” Hackberry said.
He realized her attention was focused outside the window. A man in rumpled slacks, wearing canvas boat shoes without socks and his shirttail hanging out, was crossing the street hurriedly, a brown paper bag folded under his arm. “What’s wrong?” Hackberry asked.
“That guy out there. He was just released.”
“What about him?”
“He’s a check writer. Loving and Jeff Davis counties have bench warrants on him, but they didn’t want to pay the costs for getting him back.”
“I’m still not following you.”
“He was waiting to be taken downstairs when R.C. brought Barnum in. I remember he was watching us move everybody down to the tank. He was at the window, too, looking down in the alley.”
“He probably wouldn’t know who Barnum is.”
“No, I saw his jacket. He was in Huntsville. He got clemency on a five-bit for sending his cell partner to the injection table. He’s a professional snitch.”
Hackberry thought about it. “Leave him alone. If he has any suspicions, we don’t want to confirm them.”
“Sorry, I had my hands full up there.”
“Forget it,” he said.
She looked at him for a long time before she spoke. “You want them to come after Barnum, don’t you?”
“I haven’t thought about it. I’m not that smart,” he said. “You think I made a target out of Temple Dowling?”
“You’re in the wrong business, kemo sabe, but I love you just the same,” she replied.
WHAT A DIFFERENCE a day and a change of topography could make, Temple Dowling told himself as he gazed through the lounge window of the Santa Fe hotel he and three of his men had checked in to. The evening sky was turquoise and ribbed with pink clouds, a rainbow arching across a canyon in the west, the sun an orange ball behind the mountains. The bartender brought him another vodka Collins packed with shaved ice and cherries and lemon and lime slices, and when Temple lifted it to his lips, the coldness slid down his throat like balm to his soul. Somehow his feelings of failure and humiliation at the hands of that clown Holland had evaporated during the flight to New Mexico. In fact, Temple was confident enough to smile at his foibles, as though someone else had temporarily occupied his skin and admitted his fear of Josef Sholokoff. It was nothing more than a silly lapse, Temple told himself. He had been tired, worn out by worry, beset on all sides by an army of incompetent employees and government bureaucrats and hayseed cops, Holland in particular. Why had Temple’s father ever thought that idiot