Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [184]
Jack picked up his coffee. It was still so hot, the steam rose into his hat brim and scorched his forehead. But his gaze, which was fastened on the jail, never wavered, nor did his mouth twitch when he drank the cup to the bottom.
The electric light was burning in the sheriff’s office. When the front door opened, Jack saw the sheriff walk to the silver pole by the sidewalk and clip the American flag to the chain and raise it flapping in the wind. At the same moment, Jack’s cell phone vibrated on the seat. The call was from the morphine-addicted reference librarian in Houston.
“I may have found your Russian,” she said. “He owns a place down in Mexico, one with a helipad on it. It’s a horse breeding farm. A French magazine did an article on it about five years back.”
“Can you find out if he’s there?”
“I’ll work on it. I found three game farms he owns in Texas and a place in Phoenix. You want me to check them out, too?”
“No, concentrate on Mexico.”
“I found something else. Sholokoff’s name came up a couple of times with a guy by the name of Temple Dowling. You know him?”
“Dowling was running whores with Sholokoff.”
“I did a search on Dowling and found the name of a security service he uses. I hacked into it and discovered Dowling just went missing in Santa Fe. You think there’s a connection?”
Jack stared at the front of the jail and at the flag ballooning and popping against the charcoal-blue darkness of the sky. “You there, Preacher?” she asked.
“Yeah, Sholokoff’s people probably grabbed him. No one else would have motivation.”
“You doing all this to get the Chinese woman back?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Because there’s this story I don’t believe. About these Thai prostitutes who were murdered. They had heroin balloons in their stomachs. Sholokoff was using them as hookers and mules at the same time. Some people say you did the hit. At some place called Chapala Crossing. But I never believed that.”
Jack could hear the wind blowing in the street, the traffic light at the intersection swinging on its support cables, the tin roof on a mechanic’s shed swelling against the joists.
“You’re serious about your work, but you’d never hurt a woman,” she said. “That’s what I told them. That’s right, isn’t it, Preacher?”
He closed the cell phone in his palm, his hand shaking, his throat as dry and thick as rust.
KRILL HAD NEVER given much thought to the mercenaries he had known. To him, they existed in a separate world, one in which men did not serve a cause or even fight out of necessity. They were simply uniformed employees without depth or ideology, with no desire to know either the enemies they were paid to kill or the civilians they were paid to defend or the countrymen like Krill they were paid to fight alongside.
When Krill thought about them at all, it was in terms of their physicality and their access to North American goods and to fine weapons of international manufacture. Mercenaries were almost always barbered and clean. When they sweated, they smelled of deodorant rather than the glands. They were inoculated against all the diseases of the third world. Their bodies were hard, their stomachs flat, their shoulders and arms of the kind that could carry ninety pounds of supplies and weapons and take the shock of a parachute opening, sometimes crashing through a jungle canopy in the dark, jolting inside their harnesses with enough force to break the back of a cow.
He mostly thought of them in terms of what they were not. They were not haunted by the specters that trailed behind Krill everywhere he went. They did not fear their sleep or need to drink themselves into a stupor when the light went out of the sky and the wind was filled with the sounds of people crying in a village while their huts burned and belts of cached ammunition began popping in the heat. The mercenaries opened their tinned food with a tiny can opener they called a P-38, their eyes fixed on the task with the quiet intensity of a watchmaker at his craft. The deeds they had just