Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [88]
“We wear our badges and carry our weapons in full view,” Hackberry replied.
“I’ve seen that purple SUV before.”
“Where?”
“When I broke both of its taillights in front of the café.”
“That’s Temple Dowling’s vehicle?” he said.
“It was when I broke his taillights. You’re surprised Dowling would be here?”
“Nothing about Dowling surprises me. But I thought the man with the hole in his face might have been working for the Russian, this guy Sholokoff.”
“Let’s find out.”
“You feel comfortable going in there?” he asked.
She rested her hands on top of the steering wheel. Even in the starlight, he could see the shine on her upper arms and the sunburned tips of her hair. He could also see the pity in her eyes. “It’s not me who’s uncomfortable,” she said. “When are you going to accept your own goodness and the fact that you’ve paid for what you might have done wrong when you were young?”
“When the mermaids come back to Texas,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“It was a private joke between my father and me. Ready to make life interesting for the shitbags?”
“Always,” she replied.
They got out on either side of the Cherokee and went inside the brothel. The living room was furnished with a red velvet settee and deep leather chairs and a cloth sofa and a coffee table set with wineglasses and dark bottles of burgundy and a bottle of Scotch and a bucket of ice. There was also a bowl of guacamole and a bowl of tortilla chips on the table. The only light came from two floor lamps with shades that were hung with pink tassels. Two mustached men Hackberry had seen before sat on the sofa, dipping chips into the guacamole and drinking Scotch on the rocks. A Mexican girl not over fifteen, in a spangled blue dress, was sitting on the settee. She wore white moccasins on her feet and purple glass beads around her neck. Her skin was dusky, her nose beaked, her Indian eyes as elongated as an Asian’s. Her lipstick and rouge could not disguise the melancholy in her face.
“How are you gentlemen tonight?” Hackberry said.
“Pretty good, Sheriff. I didn’t think you’d remember us,” one of them said.
“You came to my office with Mr. Dowling,” Hackberry said.
“Yes, sir, that’s us. What might you be doing here?” the man said.
“Not a lot. Just driving around the countryside trying to find a deputy of mine who got himself kidnapped. Do you boys know anything about a kidnapped deputy sheriff by the name of R. C. Bevins?”
The two men looked at each other, then back at Hackberry. “No, sir,” the first man said.
Hackberry could hear the clatter of pool balls in a side room. “Is that more of your crowd in there?”
“Yes, sir, they’re with us. We’d help you if we could, Sheriff, but I think you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“This is the wrong place, all right, but for reasons you evidently haven’t thought about,” Hackberry said.
“Sir?”
“How old do you reckon that girl is?”
“We don’t make the rules down here. Nobody does,” the second man said.
Both men were wearing skintight jeans and snap-button shirts and belts with big silver-and-gold-plated buckles, and they both had the styled haircuts and carefully maintained unshaved look of male models in a liquor ad or on a calendar aimed at homosexuals rather than at women. The second man had a deeper and more regional voice than the first, and a formless blue tattoo, like a smear, inside the whiskers that grew on his throat.
“Were any of y’all in a cantina earlier?” Hackberry said.
“Not us,” the second man said.
“We’re looking for a guy with a hole in his face. You know anybody like that?”
“No, sir,” the first man said.
“I see,” Hackberry said. “Is Mr. Dowling in back?”
Neither of the men spoke. The second man glanced at Pam Tibbs, then filled a taco chip with guacamole and stuck it in his mouth and chewed it while he took her inventory.
“What’s in back?” Hackberry said.
“The whole menu,” the