Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [74]
“Probably not,” Hackberry said. “But I mean something right close to it.”
“You’re not one given to mercy, Sheriff. I don’t think it’s right to talk to people like that, even the likes of me,” Cody Daniels said. He went outside and sat by himself on the front steps, his face wan, his gaze fixed on the apron of bare earth at his feet.
Hackberry helped the paramedics place Anton Ling on the gurney and take her out to the ambulance. Before they put her inside, she touched his wrist. “I could hear you in the kitchen,” she said. “Don’t be too hard on Reverend Daniels.”
“He has no explanation for being at your house.”
“It was his pride. I shamed and demeaned him in the parking lot at the grocery store. I treated him like human refuse.”
“To my mind, that’s not an unfair description of a clinic bomber.”
“You’re wrong about him,” she said.
“We’ll straighten up your house and lock the doors. I’ll be up to see you at the hospital. In the meantime, I don’t want you to worry about anything. We’ll get the guys who did this.”
“Maybe,” she replied.
“What were they after, Miss Anton?”
“Noie Barnum.”
“No, in the house. What were they looking for?”
“My guess is they’re looking for technical material about the Predator drone.”
“Is it there?”
She shook her head.
“Did Barnum have it on him?”
“To my knowledge, all he brought to this house were his wounds. He stayed in the cottage. I forgot to tell you something. I hurt one of the men who was holding me at the sink. I stabbed him just below the eye with a screwdriver. He’ll have to go to a hospital or see a doctor.”
“You’re a tough lady, Miss Anton.”
“You won’t catch them.”
“Pardon?”
“The men who did this to me have been with us a long time. They’re in our midst every day. We just don’t acknowledge their presence,” she said.
A paramedic closed the back door of the ambulance. Hackberry watched the ambulance drive away, then walked back to the windmill and watched Pam Tibbs and R.C. stringing crime-scene tape from the barn to the front of the house. R.C. was over six feet and had a skeletal frame that looked tacked together from the staves in an apple box, his stomach and buttocks flat, his waist twenty-eight inches, his face perpetually young, his mouth small like a girl’s, his eyes always bright with surprise. He was chewing gum, snapping it in his jaw, his coned-up white straw deputy’s hat slanted down over his brow. “Found a bloody screwdriver that somebody kicked under the counter in the kitchen, Sheriff,” he said.
“Did you bag it?” Hackberry said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. That must be the one Ms. Ling put in a guy’s face.”
“You want to make casts of those tire tracks?”
“That’s a good idea.”
“See the tracks on top of the truck tires? Those are Michelins.”
“How do you know?”
“I can tell by the width and the tread. They’re brand-new, too. Want to start checking the dealerships?”
“You can identify a Michelin tire just by looking at the tread marks?”
“I only mounted about five hunnerd of them.”
Hackberry glanced at Pam. She brushed at her nose with her wrist, her eyes smiling.
“What are y’all laughing at?” R.C. asked.
“Nothing,” Hackberry said.
“I say something wrong?” R.C. asked.
“No, not at all,” Hackberry said.
“I was just making an observation,” R.C. said, his cheeks reddening.
“We were laughing because you were two jumps ahead of us, R.C.,” Hackberry said. “Don’t tell the voters I said that, or they might take my star away.”
“No, sir, they’re not going to do that,” R.C. said. “They think you’re one of them bleeding-heart liberals, but they trust you to do the right thing more than they trust themselves. How’s that for smarts?”
“On the subject of smarts, what’s with shit-for-brains over there on the steps?” Pam asked, glancing in Cody Daniels’s direction. The sun had broken through the clouds, and her bare arms looked brown and big in the sunlight as she unrolled and tightened the crime-scene tape, her dark mahogany hair that was either sunburned or white