Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [48]
Why had all this befallen him? He had bought the oven timer; he didn’t set it. The others had said the bomb would go off in the middle of the night, that no one would be hurt, that the object was to scare the shit out of people who were killing the unborn. It was a noble cause, wasn’t it?
But why had he gone to the scene immediately afterward, hiding in the crowd, fascinated, his head reeling with both exhilaration and guilt? Unfortunately, Cody got to see more than he had planned. He had watched dry-mouthed while the firemen and the paramedics pried the nurse from the rubble. Then he saw the glass and brick that had embedded in her face and eyes, and the blood that had fried in a black veil on one side of her head. He had tried to push his way back through the crowd, away from the paramedics loading the nurse into an ambulance only a few feet away. A fat white woman had blocked his way, virtually shoving him, her face blazing with anger. “Watch it, buster,” she said. “I’ll punch you in the mouth. I’ve seen you around here before.”
She had terrified him. That night he had bought a bus ticket to San Antonio and since then had never picked up the phone when the caller ID indicated the call had originated in the East. But this particular dawn, Cody was strangely at peace. The air was cool, the sun still below the earth’s rim, his bedroom filled with a softness that he associated with the promise of rain and the bloom of desert flowers. He had not done the bidding of either Temple Dowling or the blue-eyed half-breed Krill, and now almost twenty-four hours had passed without incident since he had witnessed the killings in the foothills below his house. Maybe these guys were all bluster, he told himself. Cody had dealt with meth-head bikers and gangbangers and perverts of every stripe on a county prison farm, including the two Hispanic hacks who had walked him out to the work shed where a solitary sawhorse waited for him under a naked lightbulb. What could Krill or Dowling do to him that hadn’t been done to him before? Cody was a survivor. Screw these guys, he thought.
He rolled over in bed and let the soft blue coolness of the dawn seep inside his eyelids and lull him back to sleep. That was when he heard a sound that made no sense. Someone was brushing his teeth in Cody’s bathroom. He sat up in bed and stared in disbelief at a man who was bent over the lavatory, jerking Cody’s toothbrush like a ragged stick in his mouth, toothpaste and saliva running down his fingers and wrist.
The figure looked like a half-formed ape wearing a vest and striped trousers without a shirt or belt, his skin streaked with tufts of orange hair. A knife in a scabbard was tied flatly along his upper right arm with leather thongs. He stopped brushing and cupped water into his mouth and spat into the lavatory. “How you doin’, man?” he asked.
“You’re using my toothbrush.”
“Yeah, it’s a good one, man.”
“How’d you get in?”
“You were supposed to make a signal fire. How come you didn’t do that? Krill is pissed at you.”
“Signal fire for what?”
“About that crazy man who killed those two guys down below. He had a machine gun. You can hear it a long way, man. You didn’t hear nothing?”
“I was gone. I didn’t hear or see anything. All I know is what was on the news. Get out of here.”
“A friend of ours says your truck was parked here all day yesterday. You calling our friend a liar?”
“Where’s Krill?”
“Outside, looking through your telescope at la china. He’s got a fascination with her. Know why that is?”
“No. I mean I don’t care. I just want you guys out of my life.”
“Krill’s children were killed by a U.S. Army helicopter. They wasn’t baptized. He thinks la china can do it for him. At least