Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [208]
“Can you hear me, little fellow?” Jack called out. “Let’s fix a cup of tea and have a chat. Did you ever read And Quiet Flows the Don? It was written by a guy named Sholokoff. Are y’all related?”
There was no reply from the devastated interior of the house. Jack felt a terrible thirst but did not want to set down the Thompson to pour himself a glass of water. “It’s pretty quiet downstairs, Josef. I have a feeling Frank lost out to Sheriff Holland and his deputy. What do you think?”
In the silence, he walked across the linoleum, bits of glass and china crackling under the soles of his cowboy boots. “I checked the upstairs and the attic, but you weren’t there. That means you’ve got yourself scrunched under the floor or up a chimney. I cain’t think of any other possibility. Unless you’ve already hauled ass. No, I would have seen you. Tell me, do y’all have a volunteer fire department in these parts?”
Jack lifted the Thompson to a vertical position and gazed at the ceiling and then out the window. He went through a mudroom onto the back porch and opened the screen door and looked up at the window in the attic area and at a roof below the window. The roof was peaked, and Jack could not see on the far side of it. However, if anyone ran from the house, he would not find cover except in the barn, the cornfield, or the pecan orchard, where the flatbed truck and Jack’s Ford Explorer were parked.
“Josef, I think you might have outsmarted me,” Jack said to the wind. He walked to the hallway door that opened onto the cellar stairs. “You down there, Mr. Holland?”
“What do you want, Collins?” the sheriff’s voice replied.
“You sound like you might have sprung a leak.”
“We’ve got several dead people down here. You can join them in case you’re having any bright ideas,” the sheriff said.
“You never give me any credit, Sheriff. What have I done to you that’s so bad?”
“Tried to kill me and my chief deputy?” the sheriff said.
“Y’all dealt the play on that one. Regardless, I think I squared the deal when I dug up that young fellow Bevins from his grave out in the desert.”
“You’re talking too much, Collins. That’s the sign of either a guilty or a frightened man.”
“It’s Mr. Collins. What does it take for you to use formal address? In the civilized world, men do not refer to one another by their last names. Is that totally lost on you, Sheriff? If it is, I’ve sorely misjudged you. I’m coming down.”
“We need medical help, Mr. Collins.”
“Every one of the locals is on a pad for Sholokoff. They’d have you and your friends in a wood chipper by sunset.”
Jack stepped into the doorway, silhouetting against the hallway light, then began walking down the stairs, his eyes trying to adjust to the gloom. His left hand was on the stair rail, his right holding the Thompson at an upward angle. Then he saw the Asian woman and the man named Krill and the sheriff and his chief deputy. “Looks like y’all got shot up proper,” he said.
The sheriff had stood up but was bracing himself against a wood post, the heel of his hand pressed into his side. “Where’s Sholokoff?” he asked.
Jack didn’t answer. He crossed the cellar and scraped back the metal door to the outside stairwell and walked up the concrete steps into the rain and gazed at the yard and the barn and the pecan orchard and the cornfield, then at the roof that traversed the area under the attic window. He stepped back into the cellar, rainwater running off the brim of his hat.
“You planning on taking me out, Mr. Holland?” he said.
“Could be.”
“But you won’t.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
“You won’t gun me unless I give you cause.”
“What brought you to that conclusion?” the sheriff said.
“Your father