Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [204]
He wiped the water off the dial of his watch. “That idiot went in early,” he said.
“I told you he has his own agenda,” she said.
He couldn’t argue with her. Trying to put himself inside the thoughts of a man like Jack Collins had been insane. Collins had a Mixmaster in his head instead of a brain.
The door on the cellar was made of metal and had no windows. Hackberry placed his hand on the knob and twisted slowly. The knob rotated less than a quarter of an inch and then locked solid. “So much for Collins’s intel,” he said.
“Was that the Thompson firing?”
“Yeah, there’s no mistaking it.” He pressed his ear against the metal door but could hear nothing inside. He propped the cut-down Remington pump against the side of the stairwell and took out his Swiss Army knife and opened the long blade and worked it into the doorjamb, hoping to get it over the tongue of the lock. He heard a second burst from the Thompson.
“Sholokoff’s people aren’t firing back,” Pam said.
“They’ve pulled back into the house. They’re going to make Collins come after them,” Hackberry said.
“I think something else is going on. I think he might be shooting his own people.”
“Because I told him I saw Eladio making a phone call?”
“That or maybe he found the GPS locator we hid under the cookies and fruitcake and blamed them. It doesn’t take much to set him off. He stubs a toe, and somebody has to die for it.”
Hackberry pushed on the handle of the knife and felt the blade break off in the jamb. “Darn it,” he said under his breath. Just then he heard a solitary shot from what sounded like a high-powered rifle. He picked up his shotgun and went to the top of the steps and looked out into the rain. He could see the cornstalks thrashing in the wind and the gray barn against the pecan orchard and lightning striking in the hills, but he could see nothing of Jack Collins or Eladio and Jaime. Why would the shooter of the high-powered rifle fire only one round? The submachine-gun fire had sounded like it was coming from within the house. Why would someone be using a sniper rifle at close quarters against men armed with automatic weapons?
Unless one of the men with an automatic weapon had bailed and started running and someone had tried to pot him from a door or window?
It was foolish to waste more time trying to figure out the madness of Jack Collins. “Pam, any element of surprise is gone,” he said. “So this is the way we’re going to do it. I’m going in first. Anybody who’s not a friendly dies on the spot. Temple Dowling is probably already dead. The only two friendlies we know about are the hostages, Anton Ling and Krill. The servants are probably gone. That means everybody else is fair game. If I go down, don’t worry about me. You blow up their shit, and we’ll worry about me later. You got all that?”
“Stop playing the hero. You kick open the door and I go in first,” she said. “You’re bigger than I am, and you can shoot over and around me. I can’t do that with you. I can’t even see around you.”
“You always argue, no matter what the issue is, no matter what I say, you always argue,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re unrelenting. It’s like having a conversation with the side of an aircraft carrier.”
She wasn’t listening. She had tied a blue kerchief around her forehead to keep her hair and the rain out of her eyes. Her white cowboy shirt was drenched and split in back, her jeans and boots splattered with mud, and her eyes were charged with light, the way they became when she was either angry or hurt. He knew that in this instance, neither of those emotions was the cause of the intensity in her eyes. She moistened her lips.
“If we don’t get out of this one, it’s been a great ride,” she said.
“It wasn’t just a great ride, kiddo. You’re a gift, Pam, the kind a fortunate man receives only once or twice in a life span. But you’ve got to make it out of here, you understand? I’ve been on borrowed time since the Chosin Reservoir, and at this point in my life, I don’t want