Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [87]
“If you hear dead people talking to you, it’s ‘cause you’re dead, too,” Negrito said, his mouth gaping broadly at his own humor.
Krill gathered up the contents of the Texan’s wallet and began sticking them back in the compartments and plastic windows. He closed the wallet in his palm and walked to the trunk of the car and tossed it inside. While he did these things, he could feel the eyes of Negrito boring into his neck. He stared into the sweating face of the Texan. He could see the indentation in the tape where it covered the Texan’s mouth. He thought he heard the Texan try to cry out when he slammed the trunk shut.
“This is what you need to do, Negrito,” Krill said. “First, you—”
“You don’t got to tell me. I’ll get the shovel and take care of it. But it’s a big waste of opportunity, man. And going out in the desert is a double waste of time and gas and effort. The others ain’t gonna like this. We ain’t been making no money, Krill. Everything we do is about your dead kids and getting even with the Americans ’cause their helicopter killed them. But how about us, man? We have needs and families, too.”
Krill waited for Negrito to finish before he spoke, his face neutral, his white cotton shirt filling with air in the wind. “See, what you don’t understand, my brother in arms, is that the Texan hasn’t done anything to us. You fill the big wood canteen with water and put it in the car, and you put a sack of food with it. Then you drive the Tejano at least fifty kilometers into the desert and turn him loose. Later, you meet us in La Babia. With luck, all this will pass. If you hurt or sell the Texan, we will have no peace. Do you understand that now, my brother?”
“If that’s what you say,” Negrito replied.
“Good.”
“And after La Babia?”
“Who knows? The Quaker belongs to us. We have to get him back. If you want to get paid, that’s how we will all get paid. Then you can entertain all the chicas in Durango and Piedras Negras and Chihuahua. You will be famous among them for your generosity.”
“You’ll sell the Quaker to the Arabs but not the Texan to our own people?”
“The man Barnum has made machines that kill from the air, no matter what kind of conversion he claims to have gone through. All the gringos are makers of war and the killers of our people. Let them lie together in their own waste and eat it, too.”
“I ain’t never gonna understand you.”
Krill watched Negrito enter the back of the farmhouse, the rowels on his spurs tinkling, the pad of orange hair on his arms and shoulders glowing against the light that fell from the kitchen. Unconsciously, Krill rested his palm against the car trunk and felt the exhaust heat in the metal soak into his skin and leave his hand feeling scorched and dirty.
THE BROTHEL WHERE two SUVs with Texas plates were parked did not look like a brothel. Or at least it did not resemble the adobe houses or clusters of cribs on the far end of town where the street bled into the darkness of the desert and drunks sometimes wandered away from their copulations to bust beer bottles with their firearms out on the hardpan. The brothel frequented by the Texans was located at the end of a gravel lane and was actually an enclave of buildings that had once made up a ranch. The main house was built of stone quarried out of the mountains and had a wide terrazzo porch with large glazed ceramic urns that were planted with Spanish daggers and flowers that opened only at night. The colonnade over the porch was supported by cedar posts and covered with Spanish tile and tilted downward to direct rainwater during the monsoon season away from the house.
There was no lighting outside the building, which helped preserve the anonymity of the patrons. The