Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [58]
“Can’t lock up a man who hasn’t committed a crime,” Hackberry said.
“I’ll drink if I’m back on the street,” Danny Boy said.
“Incarceration is not the best way to find sobriety,” Hackberry said.
“I’m not like you. There’s still liquor at my house. I’ll drink it if I can get back to it. In a few days, I can go without it.”
“Was Preacher Jack Collins at your house?”
“If that’s his name.”
“Who’d he say he was?”
“He didn’t. I said ‘You’re him.’” “What did he say to that?”
“Nothing. Like it wasn’t important. Or it wasn’t important that a guy like me knew. When I told him the girls he’d killed were out there in the desert pointing at him, he told me to watch my mouth.”
“What else did he say?”
“He’s after the guy named Krill. He thought I might know where he was at.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“That I hid when that fellow was murdered.”
“You listen to me,” Hackberry said. “You think I should feel guilty because I hid from the Chinese soldiers who were trying to kill me? You remember the name of General Patton?”
“No, who is he?”
“He was a famous military leader. He said you don’t win wars by giving your life for your country. You win them by making the other son of a bitch give his life.” Hackberry tried to smile and lift Danny Boy’s spirits, but it did no good. “What else did your visitor say?” he asked.
“He’d be looking you up.”
“What else?”
“Nothing. He threw a glass of rum in my face.”
Pam Tibbs tapped her ring on the steel door in order to direct Danny Boy’s attention to her. “Jack Collins has a way of showing up in people’s lives when they’re unarmed and vulnerable,” she said. “He wants to rob people of their self-respect because he has none for himself. Don’t be his victim.”
“Listen to her,” Hackberry said. “You’re a fine man. You have an illness in you that’s not your fault. One day you’ll wake up and decide you don’t want any more of the old life. That’s when you’ll start getting rid of all the problems that kept you drunk. In the meantime, you’re going to take a shower and put on some fresh jeans and a sport shirt I have in my closet, and then you and I are going to have a steak-and-egg breakfast down at the café.”
“I saw the Oriental girls standing in the desert. There was nine of them. They’re waiting for him,” Danny Boy said.
“You saw them when you were drinking?”
“It don’t matter what I was doing. They were there. Collins knew about my visions. He knew what was in them. No, that’s not exactly right. He knows things don’t happen in order, like past, present, and future. He knows things happen all at the same time, all around us, people we cain’t see are still living out their lives right next to us. Not many people know that.”
“Collins is a fraud. Don’t pay attention to what he says,” Hackberry said.
“If he’s a fraud, who’s he pretending to be? You ever know anybody like him?”
Pam Tibbs looked at Hackberry and raised her eyebrows. She took the ring of keys from his hand, unlocked the cell, and swung the door back heavily on its hinges, the bottom scraping the concrete. “Time to hit the shower and get something to eat, Danny,” she said.
BY ELEVEN A.M. the sun was bright and hot outside Hackberry’s office window, the blocklike sandstone courthouse on the square stark against a blue sky, the courthouse lawn green and cool-looking under the shade trees. A church group had opened a secondhand sale on the sidewalk in front of the Luna Theater, and people were going in and out of the courthouse and the old bank on the corner much as they had in an era when the town was supported by a viable agrarian economy. It was a good