Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [203]
“Señor Collins, I do not know what is happening here,” Jaime said. “Why are you killing my cousin? Why are you turning your gun on your own people? We came here to fight your enemies.”
“You’re not my people, son,” Jack said. “Turn around and walk into the hallway.”
“No, I cannot do that.”
“Why is that, Jaime? You don’t trust your compadres in there?”
“These are not my friends. You are a deranged man. You’ve killed Eladio. You speak craziness all the time, and now your craziness has killed my cousin.”
“Pick up the cell phone and hit redial again. I want you to give somebody a message.”
“What message? That you’re killing your own people?”
“I want to tell Josef Sholokoff I’m just getting started. Can you do that for me, Jaime?”
“No, I will not do this. I didn’t have nozzing to do with Eladio’s transactions. I don’t know nobody in there. I am not responsible for what Eladio may have done.”
“‘Nozzing’ again,” Jack said. “I changed my mind about taking you to a speech therapist, Jaime. There’s no cure for certain kinds of stupidity. It’s kind of like laminitis in a horse. Instead of the hoof curling up, your kind of stupidity shrinks the brain into a walnut. We put horses down, don’t we?”
Jaime was breathing through his mouth, staring at the muzzle of the Thompson, his nose crinkling, as though he had no place to put the fear and tension coursing through his body.
“You still have your Uzi,” Jack said.
“I want to go back home.”
“That’s what everybody wants, Jaime. Even if home is just a place they made up in their minds. You know what home is? It’s a black hole in the ground where somebody shovels dirt in your face.”
Jaime swallowed. “Like Eladio, I took money from the gringo to betray you. My family lives in Monterrey. Get word to them that I am buried someplace and that my spirit will not wander, even if this is not true.”
Jack sighed and gazed out the window at the rain sweeping across the fields and the wind troweling green and gold swaths through the corn. “Damn if you guys don’t always make it hard. Leave the piece,” he said.
“You will let me go? You will not harm me when my back is turned?” Jaime said.
“Did I ever lie to you?”
“I will never tell anybody what has happened here. I will always praise your name when I hear it mentioned.”
“Time to haul freight, Jaime. I got my hands full. If I see you on the street somewhere, keep on going.”
“I do not know what that means.”
“It means some people are hopeless. Come on, there’s the door, pilgrim,” Jack said, and made a snicking sound in his cheek.
Jaime went out the French doors into the rain and crossed the patio and began running through the backyard, his head bent low. He ran past the slop bucket the maid had dropped on the lawn, past the barn and the cornfield, his clothes darkening in the rain, and was almost to the pecan orchard before he looked back at the house. His face was white and round and small inside the grayness of the afternoon. Jack watched all this from the window, simultaneously looking at the empty hallway, listening to the creaking of the house and the drumming of the rain, waiting to hear the whisper of voices or the sound of footsteps moving across the hardwood floors or perhaps a door slamming or an order being shouted. All he heard were the sounds of the wind and rain.
Jaime, maybe you’re a whole lot luckier than I thought, he said to himself.
That was when someone from a back window zeroed in on Jaime with what sounded like a fifty-caliber sniper’s rifle and squeezed off a single round and sent him crashing headlong into a tree trunk, dead before his knees struck the earth.
HACKBERRY HAD LED the way from the barn and across the yard, the rain wilting his hat, driving as hard as ice crystals into his face. He could no longer see the patio and could barely make out the stairs that led down to the cellar door. When he reached the lee of the house, his clothes were wrapped around his body like wet Kleenex. Then he heard the first burst of machine-gun