Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [76]
Pam brushed at her nose again, pushing the slapjack back into her pocket. “What do you think we ought to do with you?”
“You got me,” he replied, shaking his head, his eyes lowered.
“Look at me and answer my question.”
“Shoot me?”
“It’s a possibility,” she said.
“She’s not serious, is she?” Cody Daniels said to Hackberry.
“You’d better believe it, bud,” Hackberry said.
Pam and Hackberry went inside the house and, with two other deputies, began picking up the furniture and sweeping up the glass in the kitchen and the chapel. “Are we doing this because you’re a Catholic?” Pam asked.
Hackberry reset the altar at the front of the chapel and picked up the broken pieces of the statue of the Virgin Mary and laid them on top of the altar. “We’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
“Just thought I’d ask,” she said.
“We protect and serve. We treat everybody the same. If others don’t like the way we do things, they can run us off. End of discussion.”
“Who spat in your Cheerios this morning?”
“Stop and consider the image that conjures up. Why don’t you and Maydeen develop a small degree of sensitivity about the language you use? Just once, try a little professionalism.” He propped his broom against the wall, knocking it into the wood.
“My uncle said I put him in mind of a cow with the red scours downloading into a window fan,” she said.
Hackberry gave up. Through the window, he saw Cody Daniels rise from the steps and begin walking down the road toward the highway. Pam saw him, too, and seemed to lose her concentration. She stopped sweeping and blew out her breath. “Is there a shortcut to his place?” she asked.
“No, on foot it’s four miles, most of it uphill,” Hackberry replied.
“The sheriff in Jim Hogg told you Daniels was dirty on a clinic bombing back east?”
“He said Daniels was at least a cheerleader in the group. Maybe worse, who knows? He acts like he’s dirty, though. If I had to bet, I’d say he was a player.”
She propped her broom against the scrolled-iron candle rack and bit a piece of skin on her thumb. “Like you say, we treat everyone the same, right?”
“That’s the rule.”
“The guy stood up. It’s not right to pretend he didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t say he stood up completely, but he made an effort.”
“You mind? I’ll make him sit behind the grille.”
“No, I don’t mind at all,” Hackberry replied.
He watched Pam go out the front door and get in her cruiser and drive down the dirt road. She braked to a stop by Cody Daniels, rolling down her window and speaking to him over the sound of the engine. Daniels got in the backseat, ducking his head, like a man coming out of a storm into an unexpected safe harbor.
Go figure, Hackberry thought.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HACKBERRY HAD NEVER considered himself prescient, but he had little doubt about who would be calling him that evening. As the sun set behind his house, he sat down in a spacious cushioned sway-backed straw chair on his back porch, his Stetson tilted down over his brow, his cordless phone and a glass of iced tea and his holstered .45 on the table beside him. He propped his feet up on another chair and sipped from his tea and crunched ice and mint leaves between his teeth and then dozed while waiting for the call that he knew he would receive, in the same way you know that a dishonorable man to whom you were unwisely courteous will eventually appear uninvited at your front door.
He could hear animals walking through the thickness of the scrub brush on the hillside and, in his half-waking state, see a palm tree on the crest framed against a thin red wafer of sun imprinted on the blue sky. For just a moment he felt himself slip into a dream about his father, the University of Texas history professor who had been a congressman and a friend of Franklin Roosevelt. In the dream there was nothing about President Roosevelt or his father’s political or teaching career or his father’s death, only the time when Hackberry