Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [31]
“Just kidding. I had you going, didn’t I?”
Cody’s head was swimming, a smell like soiled cat litter rising from his armpits. “No, sir,” he said.
“No, sir, what?” Temple Dowling said.
“I’m not working for y’all. I’m not having any part of this.”
“I have two affidavits that say you bought the oven timer that detonated the bomb at the clinic. It blinded and disfigured a nurse. I have pictures of her if you’d like to see them. I have a videotape of you in the crowd across the street. You couldn’t stay away from your own handiwork, could you, sir? That’s what I mean when I say you’re a man who lives on the edge. You’re not a suck-up, kick-down kind of guy. You know how to rip ass, Reverend. That woman won’t be in the baby-killing business anymore, that’s for sure.” He glanced at his men and was no longer able to contain his laughter. All of the men had a merry expression in their eyes and were clearly enjoying themselves. “Reverend Daniels, you’re a special kind of shepherd,” Dowling said.
When his visitors had driven away, Cody could hear kettle drums pounding inside his head. He sat down on a wood bench, his spine bowed, his eyelids fluttering, his muscles as flaccid as if his bones had been surgically removed from his body. The only other time he had felt this level of despair was when two county-prison gunbulls had finished with him and lifted him off a sawhorse and dropped him on a workroom floor like a slab of sweaty beef. He wondered why people thought they had to die in order to go to hell.
CHAPTER FIVE
LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON Pam Tibbs parked the department’s Jeep Cherokee at Hackberry’s front gate and walked up the flagstone steps to his gallery and knocked on the door. He answered in his sock feet, his reading glasses on his nose. “I called twice and you didn’t answer, so I thought I’d drive out,” she said.
“I was in the pasture,” he said.
“Maydeen got a report on an illegal dumping and another one on a break-in at a hunting camp. Both instances involved two guys. The dumping turned out not to be a dumping.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Last night a motorist saw two guys prowling in a creek bed and thought they were dumping trash. It turned out they were rifling the back of a camper. They stole some clothes and shoes and sleeping bags and a propane stove and a first-aid kit. This morning a guy with a long, pointy beard, wearing a tattered suit coat, was seen busting the lock on the back door of a hunting camp. He sounds like the same homeless guy who’s been getting into people’s garbage by Chapala Crossing. Except this time he had someone with him. They cleaned about forty pounds of venison out of the game locker. The witness said the guy in the tattered coat looked like he belted his trousers with a piece of clothesline. Sound familiar?”
“Jack Collins is dead,” Hackberry said.
“You’re convinced of that?”
“He either died of his wounds underground or was eaten by coyotes or cougars. He wasn’t a supernatural entity. He was a psychopath and misogynist who probably couldn’t tie his shoes without a diagram.”
“Then who’s the guy who keeps showing up around here?”
“Another lunatic. We’re not in short supply of them.”
“The guy with the tramp was limping. Like maybe a guy who ran a long distance with no shoes on.”
“The man who escaped from Krill?”
“You know that burned-out shack where the tramp with the beard was probably living?”
“What about it?”
“I checked it out. It was soaked with an accelerant. Who would go to that much trouble to burn a shack?”
“You really think Collins is alive?”
“I’m not sure. But I’m bothered that you won’t accept the possibility. I think you want to believe that evil dies.”
She couldn’t tell if he was thinking about what she had said or if he had lost interest. The sun had gone behind a hill, darkening the inside of his house, and she couldn’t see past him into the shadows. “Did I disturb you?” she said.
“Pardon?”
“You didn’t invite me in. Are you with someone?”
“Do I look like it?”
“You tell me. Did you enjoy your Mexican dinner with China’s answer to Mary Magdalene?