Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [5]
“No, I didn’t,” Hackberry replied. He started to say something about his own experience in No Name Valley many years ago but thought better of it. “Let’s get this behind us, partner.”
Pam Tibbs drove the three of them down the main street of the town in the department’s Jeep Cherokee, the traffic light over the intersection bouncing on its cable in the wind. The newer buildings on the street were constructed of cinder blocks; some of the older ones were built out of fieldstones that had been cemented together and sheathed with plaster or stucco that had fallen off in chunks, leaving patterns that resembled a contagious skin disease. Pam followed a winding two-lane state highway southward through hills that looked like big brown ant piles or a sepia-tinted photograph taken on the surface of Mars. Then she drove across Danny Boy’s property, past his stucco house and his barn that was plated from the bottom to the eaves with hubcaps, onto the geological fault that bled into Old Mexico and a strip of terrain that always seemed to ring with distant bugles echoing off the hills. For Hackberry Holland, these were not the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux.
Pam shifted down and kept the Jeep on the high ground above the riverbed that Danny had walked the previous night, the hard-packed gravel vibrating through the frame. “There,” Danny said, pointing.
“Under the buzzards?” Hackberry said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are your dinosaur eggs?”
“At the house.”
“You sure those aren’t rocks?” Hackberry said, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
But his attempt to relieve Danny Boy of depression and fear was to no avail. The guilt and sorrow Danny Boy had taken with him from the previous night would probably come aborning in his dreams for many years, and all the beer in all the beer joints in Texas would not make one dent in it, Hackberry thought. “Get upwind from it,” he said to Pam.
She crossed a slough chained with red pools and layered with clusters of black butterflies sucking moisture from the sand, their wings shuddering as though they were ingesting toxin. She parked on the incline, above the collapsed rails of the corral that had been used by a one-eyed man who killed and sold mustangs for dog food. When Hackberry stepped out on the passenger side, his eyes roved over the tangles of tumbleweed and bleached wood and the remains of the man whose death may have been the most merciful moment in his life. “You ever see anything like this?” Pam said, her words clotting in her throat.
“Not exactly. Maybe close, but not exactly,” Hackberry replied.
“What are we dealing with?” she said.
“Call the coroner’s office, then get Felix and R.C. down here. I want photos of this from every angle. String as much tape as you can around the crime scene. Make sure nobody disturbs those tracks going south.”
She went to the Jeep and made the calls, then walked back down the incline, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, her upper arms ridging with muscle. Danny Boy remained in the vehicle, his head lowered. “What did he say the leader’s name was? Krill?” she said to Hackberry.
“I think that was it.”
“I’ve heard that before. It’s Spanish?”
“It’s a shrimplike creature that whales eat.”
“Funny name for a killer with an M16 strapped on his back.” When he didn’t answer, she looked at him. “You okay, boss?”
He nodded at the slope above where the victim had died.
“Jesus Christ,” she said.
“He was scalped, too.”
Then the wind changed, and a sickening gray odor blew into their faces. It was like fish roe that had dried on warm stone and the putrescence of offal and the liquid wastes poured from a bucket into a ditch behind a brothel on a Saturday night, and it made Pam Tibbs hold her wrist to her mouth and walk back up the incline, fighting to hold back the bilious surge in her stomach.
Hackberry stepped back from the site and repositioned himself so he was upwind again. But that did not change the nature of the scene or its significance. Often he wondered, as an anthropologist might, what the historical environment of the human race