Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [65]
“Collins is a religious head case. He seems to have obsessions with women in the Bible,” the tall man said. “You might fit the bill. What’s your opinion on that?”
Don’t let him know you’re afraid, a voice inside her said. “I think you’re an idiot.”
The short man standing behind the others peered through the corner of the window shade into the yard. He wore heavy boots that looked like they had elevated soles and heels. She saw his head tilt upward and guessed that he was checking for the first glow of dawn beyond the ridgeline. Then she realized that the tall man was watching the man at the window shade. The tall man was not in charge. He was waiting on the man at the window to tell him what to do.
The man at the window did not speak but made a rotating motion with his index finger, as though saying either “continue” or “wrap it up.”
But which?
The tall man went to the closet and threw a robe on Anton Ling’s bed. “Put it on,” he said.
“What for?” she asked.
“Certain things have to be done. Don’t make them harder than they already are.”
“Who do you work for?”
“The country. The people who want it to remain free. You think protecting a traitor like Noie Barnum is a noble act?”
“I won’t put a robe on. I won’t move. I have no control over what you’re about to do. But I won’t cooperate with it.”
The tall man leaned down and took her wrist in his hand. His fingers went easily all the way around it, as though he were compressing a stick in his palm. “Get up.”
“No.”
“You’re making this personal, Ms. Ling. It’s unwise.”
“Don’t use my name. I don’t know you and have no intention of knowing you. Don’t you dare address me as though you know me.”
“I heard you were arrogant, a Mandarin princess or something.” He jerked her up from the bed and knotted her hair in his fist, twisting it hard, pulling her head back until her mouth fell open. “We used to call this cooling out a gook. Is that what you want? Tell me. Tell me now.” He twisted her hair tighter. “I don’t like to do this. This is all on you. I can make it worse and worse and worse, to the point I start to enjoy it. Don’t make me do that.”
When he released her hair so she could speak, she gathered all the saliva in her mouth and spat it full in his face. Then he hit her so hard with his fist that two picture frames fell to the floor when she crashed against the wall. Two of the other men picked her up and shoved her toward the doorway. She thought she heard the sound of water running in the kitchen sink.
CODY DANIELS KEPT his truck pointed south, slamming over the ruts, water splashing up on the hood and across the windshield. He had his radio tuned full-blast to an English-language station that broadcast from across the border to avoid FCC regulations, its signal reaching all the way to Canada. Twenty-four hours a day, it provided a steady stream of country music, evangelical harangues that left the preacher gasping into the microphone, and promotions for baby chicks, tulip bulbs, bat guano, aphrodisiacs, glow-in-the-dark tablecloths painted with the Last Supper, and miracle photographs of Jesus. Late at night it was the refuge for the insomniac and the ufologist and the sexually driven and those who loved the prospect of the Rapture. But right now, for Cody Daniels, it was a source of maximum electronic noise that he hoped would pound the name of Anton Ling out of his head.
He was pastor of the Cowboy Chapel, not the overseer for Asian females in Southwest Texas. Why didn’t she go back where she came from? She had told him to get lost. All right, that’s what he was doing. Live and let live. Besides, maybe the truck with the extended cab wasn’t going to Anton Ling’s. Maybe it was the Border Patrol rounding up stray wets. The wets traveled by night. Wasn’t it reasonable for Cody to at least conclude the oversize pickup was on a government mission?
Except the Border Patrol usually operated by the numbers and didn’t use pickup trucks to round up wets or drive down hillsides through private