Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [183]
It didn’t take long to discover what had happened. Noie had gotten pinched in the convenience store by the same deputy Preacher Jack had dug up from a premature burial. How about that for ingratitude? Then a snitch just getting out of the bag had spotted Noie in custody and dropped the dime on him with Josef Sholokoff’s people. Now several Mexicans were saying that a bunch of guys in camouflage masks had landed a helicopter at the Chinese woman’s place, murdered a man in front of a child, and abducted the Chinese woman and a half-breed.
Jack had no doubt who was behind the abduction. Josef Sholokoff wanted Noie Barnum in his possession. The quickest way to him was through the sheriff, and the quickest way to the sheriff was through Anton Ling.
At four A.M. the morning after the abduction, a man who was part albino and part black and who had pink eyes and hairless skin that resembled different shades of white rubber that had been stitched together delivered a new Toyota to Preacher Jack at a café just north of Ojinaga. “There’s another registration and another set of plates under the seat. I got you two driver’s licenses, too,” he said. He put the keys in Jack’s hand, his eyes holding steady on Jack’s.
“Anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare into somebody’s face?” Jack said.
“You’re hot.”
“You know a time when I wasn’t?”
“Not like this. I had a hard time on the driver’s licenses. Word is you popped an FBI agent.”
“He popped himself.”
“A photo guy I use says you’re the stink on shit and for me not to come back again.”
“You wouldn’t try to put the slide on me, would you, Billy?”
“Just telling you like it is.”
“You want more money?”
“I was thinking about visiting Baja. Maybe lie on the beach and cool out for a while.”
“What do you use for suntan lotion—ninety-weight motor oil?”
“I was speaking metaphorically.”
Jack took three hundred dollars from his wallet and folded the bills between his fingers and stuffed them in the man’s shirt pocket. “A metaphor means comparing one thing in terms of another without using the words ‘like’ or ‘as.’ ‘To lie on a beach’ is not a metaphor. If I said to you, ‘Tell your parents to buy a better quality of condoms,’ I would be making an implication, but I would not be speaking metaphorically. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Grammar was never my strong suit.”
“Literary terms have nothing to do with grammar,” Jack said. “If you’re going to speak your native language, why don’t you invest some time in the public library? It’s free. In the meantime, don’t go around using terms you don’t know the meaning of.” Jack stuffed the keys to his Trans Am into the man’s pocket, on top of the bills. “Drive it to San Antone and park it at the airport. Wear gloves, but don’t wipe it down. Leave the keys on the dashboard and the parking stub in the ashtray.”
“Somebody will boost it.”
“Nobody slips one past you.”
“The guy who boosts it will get pinched, and the cops won’t know if he’s lying to them or not—about where he got it, I mean. You’re doing a mind-fuck on them?”
“Don’t use that kind of language in my presence,” Jack said.
“I’ll never figure you out, Preacher.”
“Get out of my sight.”
An hour later, he drove his new car to within one block of Sheriff Holland’s jail and, wearing a hat and round steel-rimmed sunglasses that were as black as welder’s goggles, went into a café and ordered a to-go box of scrambled eggs, ham, grits, and toast and a cup of scalding black coffee. He returned to his car and spread his food on the dashboard and ate with a plastic fork and spoon without seasoning of any kind or even seeming to taste it, as though consuming chaff swept up from a granary floor. His windows were down, and the air was cool and smelled of rain, and the storm clouds above the hills were so thick and swollen that he could not tell when the sun broke the horizon. In moments like these, Jack felt a strange sense of peace, as though the travels of the sun and moon had been set into abeyance, as though time had stopped and the denouement of his life, one that