Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [180]
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Where are you going?”
“To take a nap,” he said.
He went up the spiral stairs and pulled a mattress from a supply locker into an alcove off the corridor and lay down on his side with his head cushioned on his arm and fell asleep with far more ease than he would have guessed, knowing that his dreams would take him to a place that was as much a part of his future as it was his past. He remembered the words of the writer Paul Fussell, who had said he joined the army to fight the war for its duration and had discovered that he would have to fight it every day and every night for the rest of his life. In his dream, Hackberry returned once again to Camp Five in No Name Valley and the brick factory called Pak’s Palace outside Pyongyang. The dream was not about deprivation or the harshness of the weather or the mistreatment visited upon him by his captors. It was about isolation and abandonment and the belief that one was totally alone and lost and without hope. It was the worst feeling that anyone could ever experience.
In the dream, the landscape changed, and he saw himself standing on a precipice in Southwest Texas, staring out at a valley that looked like an enormous seabed gone dry. The valley floor was covered with great round white rocks that resembled the serrated, coral-encrusted backs of sea tortoises, stranded and alone, dying under an unmerciful sun. In the dream, he was not a navy corpsman but a little boy whose father had said that one day the mermaids would return to Texas and wink at him from somewhere up in the rocks. All he saw in the dream was his own silent witness to the suffering of the sea creatures.
“Jesus Christ, wake up, Hack,” he heard Pam Tibbs say, shaking his arm.
“What? What is it?” he said, his eyes filmed with sleep.
“You must have been having a terrible dream.”
“What’d I say?”
“Just the stuff people yell out in dreams. Forget it.”
“Pam, tell me what I said.”
“‘He takes people apart.’ That’s what you said.”
The telephone call came in one hour later.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
FROM HIS OFFICE window, he could see flecks of rain blowing in the glow of the streetlights, the traffic signal at the intersection bouncing on its support cables, the electrical flashes in the clouds that ringed the town. “Don’t try tracing this,” the voice said.
“You’re too slick for us?” Hackberry replied.
“You know what we want. Deliver him up and there won’t be any problem.”
“By now you’ve probably figured out I’m a bit slow on the uptake. What is it you think I have?”
“‘It’ is a Quaker with a hush-puppy accent who by all rights is our property.”
“Somebody snitched us off, huh?”
“Spying on you hasn’t been a big challenge, Sheriff. You seem to leave your shit prints everywhere you go.”
“Should we decide to deliver up our Quaker friend, what are y’all going to do for us?”
“Give you your Chinese girlfriend back, for one. For two, you’ll get her back looking just the way she did the last time you saw her. Are you getting the picture?”
“I don’t know if it’s the electrical storm or that peckerwood speech defect, but you’re a little hard to understand.”
“We have another guest here, a guy whose father you did scut work for. We’re gonna let him be a kind of audiovisual aid for you. Hang on just a second. You’re gonna like this.”
The caller seemed to remove the phone from his ear and hold it away from him. In the background, Hackberry could hear voices and echoes inside a large room, probably one with stone or brick walls. “Turn up the volume for Sheriff Holland,” the caller said.
Then Hackberry heard a sound that he never wanted to hear again, a cry that burst from the throat and reverberated off every surface in the room and died with a series of sobs and a whimper that the listener could associate only with hopelessness and despair.
“That’s Mr. Dowling, Sheriff,” the caller said. “As you’ve probably gathered, he’s not having a good morning.”
“You abducted Temple Dowling?”
“It’s more like he abducted himself. All we had