Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [47]
“You don’t need to do that,” Anton Ling said.
“I know I don’t,” Pam said.
“I’m quite all right,” Anton Ling said.
“Yeah, you are, ma’am. That’s exactly what you are,” Pam replied. “You’re damn straight you’re all right.”
Anton Ling looked at her quizzically.
Hackberry walked down the slope to the Jeep. He scratched idly at his cheek with three fingers and wondered why men tried to puzzle through the mysteries of heaven when they couldn’t even resolve the ones that lived in the human heart. He picked up the handheld radio from the seat of the cruiser and called R.C. and Felix and asked for their ETA. When a tree of lightning burst on the horizon, he thought he saw a solitary figure standing as starkly as an exclamation point on the deck of a house high up on a plateau. But the raindrops were striking his hat as hard as marbles, and he had to concentrate on his call to Felix and R.C., and he paid no more attention to the solitary figure or the house that resembled the forecastle of a ship, a huge American flag painted on the sandstone bluff behind it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE REVEREND CODY Daniels did not like sleep. During the waking day, he could deal with the past by constantly rebuilding his mental fortifications, alternately suppressing uncomfortable shards of memory or re-creating them so they didn’t detract from his image of himself as the pastor of the Cowboy Chapel. Sleep was another matter. Sleep was a stone jail cell without windows or light, where any number of malformed creatures could reach out of the darkness and touch him at will, their fingers as gelatinous and clinging as giant worms. Sometimes the creatures in the dream pressed their faces to his and ran their tongues along his skin, their breathing labored in his ear, the invasion of his person so complete that he felt his entrails would burst, his pelvis would split apart.
When he woke, he would have tears in his eyes and would sit on the side of the bed in the dark and beat his fists on his thighs.
Almost twenty-four hours had passed since he had looked through his telescope and had witnessed the machine-gunning of two men by a man wearing a rumpled suit and a panama hat. At first he had not believed what he was watching. The efficiency of the killer, the way he methodically hosed down his victims, blowing them all over the rocks and sand, had made Cody numb with fear and horror but at the same time had left him in awe of the shooter, a man with cheeks like emery paper and whose clothes and hat looked as though they had been stripped from a scarecrow.
Then Cody had watched the arrival of the sheriff, and the female deputy with the wide ass and big shoulders, and the Asian woman who had held his hands in hers and looked into his eyes and read his most private thoughts. But they were not witnesses. He, Cody Daniels, was. He had seen it all and could describe how the victims had raised their arms in front of their faces, their mouths pleading, their eyes squeezing shut, their coffee spilling to the ground. It was Cody Daniels who had experienced an almost omniscient oversight of events that others would have to guess at and reconstruct and debate and analyze in a laboratory. All he had to do was make one phone call, and the sheriff who had threatened to kick a nail-studded two-by-four up his hole would be treating him as a friend of the court, hanging on his words, the female deputy reduced to nothing but an insignificant functionary in the background.
Except Cody didn’t make the call.
Why?
He knew all too well the answer. It was fear, the succubus that had fed at his heart all his life.
Temple Dowling had given him a business card and had told him to report whatever happened on the Asian woman’s property. Krill and the degenerate named Negrito had weighted him with the same obligation, telling him to build a signal fire and pour motor oil on it, like he