Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [85]
“You want to check in with the locals?” Pam asked.
“Waste of time,” Hackberry replied.
“It’s like prayer. What’s to lose?”
“It’s not like prayer. The cops run the cathouses.”
She was chewing gum, looking up and down the street, her hands propped on her hips. “This is what hell must look like.”
“It is hell,” he replied.
She glanced at him, then concentrated her attention on the police station across the street. He could hear her gum snapping in her jaw.
“I was a frequent visitor,” he said. “Not to this place in particular but seven or eight like it. I was educated and had money and power and a Cadillac to drive. The prostitutes were hardly more than girls. Some of them were the sole support for their families.”
“How many people were in a North Korean POW camp? How many of them spent months under a sewer grate in a dirt hole in winter?” When he didn’t answer, she glanced at him again, still chewing her gum, shifting it from one side of her jaw to the other. “Let’s stomp some ass, Hack. R.C. said the guy with the hole in his face worked for somebody who was visiting a cathouse?”
“Yeah, one that features teenage girls,” Hackberry replied.
KRILL WAS FURIOUS. He paced back and forth in the last silver glimmering of sunlight inside the clouds, staring at the open trunk of the gas-guzzler Negrito had parked behind the ruined adobe house where they were staying. In his right hand, he clenched a braided wallet, the shape as curved as his palm and pocket-worn the color of browned butter. “You smoked some bad weed?” he said to Negrito. “Something with angel dust or herbicide sprinkled on it? ¡Estúpido! Ignorant man!”
“Why you say that, Krill? It hurts my feelings,” Negrito said.
“You kidnapped a Texas deputy sheriff!”
“I thought he was valuable, jefe.”
“I’m not your jefe. Don’t you call me that. I am not the jefe of estúpidos.”
“It’s clear that he’s a narc. Or maybe worse. Maybe he came down here because of us and the DEA informer we killed. We can sell the Tejano to La Familia Michoacána. They’ll cut his tongue out. He ain’t gonna talk to nobody if he ain’t got a tongue.”
Krill ripped Negrito’s leather hat off his head and slapped him with it, raking it down hard on his face. Negrito stared at Krill blankly, the orange bristles around his mouth and along his jaw and on his throat as stiff as wire, his lips parted, his emotions buried in a stonelike expression that seemed impervious to pain. Krill whipped the hat down on his head again and again, his teeth clenched. “Are you listening to me, estúpido?” he said. “Who gave you permission to act on your own? When did you become this brilliant man with a master plan for the rest of us?”
“You keep saying you’re not my jefe. You keep saying we follow or we don’t follow, that you don’t care about these small matters. But when I use my perceptions to make a decision, you become enraged. I am a loyal soldier, Krill.”
“You are a Judas waiting for your moment to act.” Krill hit Negrito once more, and this time the leather chin cord with the tiny wooden acorn on it struck Negrito in the eye, causing it to tear.
“Why you treat me like this? You think I’m an animal and this is your barnyard and you can do whatever you want with me because I’m one of your animals?” Negrito said.
“No, an animal has brains. It has survival instincts. It doesn’t always think with its penis. Who saw you leave the house of puta with the deputy sheriff?”
“It wasn’t a house of puta. I don’t got to go to houses of puta. It was a cantina. Bernicio the bartender drugged his coffee. We took the boy out the back. Bernicio is a member of La Familia and ain’t gonna tell nobody about it. You worry about all the wrong things. Now you’re taking out your anger on your only friend, someone who has been with you from the beginning.”
The dirt yard where they stood was blown with tumbleweeds and chicken feathers and lint from a grove of cottonwood