Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [57]
Danny Boy nodded, his gaze turned inward.
“Tell the sheriff I was here,” the visitor said. “Tell him I keep my word. Tell him he’ll know when it’s my ring. Can you keep all that in your head?”
“Yes, sir, I can,” Danny Boy said.
“That’s good. You’re a good listener.” Then the visitor poured the jelly glass half full of rum and picked it up from the table and threw it into Danny Boy’s face.
THAT SAME MORNING, Hackberry went to the office early, his mind clear after a good night’s sleep, the wind cool out of the north, the broken sidewalks dark with night damp, the hills outside town a soft green against an ink-wash sky. He could smell food cooking at the Eat Café down the street. Pam Tibbs met him at the back entrance of the department. “Danny Boy Lorca just came in half drunk and asked me to lock him up,” she said.
“You mean he wants to sleep it off?”
“No, he wants to be locked up. He says he had a visitor this morning.”
Hackberry walked through the hallway and hung his hat on a wood peg in his office. “I hate to ask,” he said.
“The guy didn’t give his name. Danny Boy said he was carrying a pistol. He was wearing a suit and a hat and beat-up needle-nose boots. He said he’d be looking you up and you’d know when it was his ring.”
“Why is Collins pestering Danny Boy?”
“That’s not all that happened this morning. I was down at the café, and two SUVs loaded with some cowboy cutie-pies came in. Stonewashed jeans, mustaches, two or three days of beard, stylized haircuts. They looked like porn actors.”
“Like the two guys Collins popped?”
“The guy in charge knew the waitress. He had on a blue suit and a silver western shirt without a tie, like he was one of the boys. After they left, I asked her who he was. She said that was Temple Dowling.”
“Forget about Dowling.”
She closed the office door and approached his desk. “It didn’t quite end there. I heard him talking in the booth. I heard him use your name.”
“We need to get to the point, Pam.”
“He called you a drunk.”
“That’s what I used to be.”
“That’s not all of it. I heard him whispering, then all of them laughed.”
“Blow it off. These guys aren’t worth talking about.”
“Then one guy said, ‘He brought clap home to his wife?’ Dowling said something I couldn’t hear, and they all laughed again, loud enough that everybody in the café turned around and looked at them.”
“What that man said isn’t true. But I don’t care whether he says it or not. If he does it in my presence, I’ll do something about it. In the meantime, let’s forget it and talk to Danny Boy.” Hackberry took the ring of cell keys off a peg next to his hat.
“I followed them into the parking lot,” Pam said.
“Did you hit somebody?”
“No.”
“All right, then let it go.”
“I took the motormouth aside, the one who said something about clap. He was the driver of one of the SUVs. I told him I wasn’t going to cite him for his broken taillights, but if I ever heard him slander your name again, I was going to beat the living shit out of him.”
“He had two broken taillights?”
“He did after I broke them.”
“Pam?”
“What?”
“What can I say?”
“I don’t know.”
He stepped closer to her, towering over her, and cupped his hand around the back of her neck. Her skin felt hot against his palm. He could smell the shampoo in her hair and the heat in her body and feel the hardness of the muscles in her neck. “You have to stop protecting me,” he said.
“You’re my boss, and I won’t allow white trash to tell lies about you.”
“You really know how to jump-start a man’s day,” he said.
She lifted her eyes to his. Her mouth looked like a flower that had crumpled in on itself in the shade. “Think so?” she said.
He removed his hand from the back of her neck and tried not to swallow. There was a thickness in his throat, a tightness in his chest, and a weakness in his loins that he did not want to recognize. “Why would Collins bother Danny Boy?” he said hoarsely.
“He wants to hurt you.”
“It’s that simple?”
“You bet your ass,” she replied.
They climbed up the spiral steel stairs in the back of the building and walked