Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [92]
For a second, R.C. thought Negrito was going to pull the tape from his mouth so he could answer. Instead, Negrito’s head jerked around and he stared again into the darkness, his nostrils flaring as though he had caught a scent on the wind, the thumb of his right hand hooking over the butt of his holstered .45. He walked up to the flat place and stood among the row of depressions, looking from one side of the hill to the other. “¿Quién está ahí? Somebody out there want to talk to me?” he said to the wind.
He waited in the silence, then returned to the rear of the car, glancing once behind him. He squatted down and ripped the tape from R.C.’s mouth. “I’m gonna ask you this question once, no second chances,” he said. “Be honest with me, I’m gonna be honest with you. You had somebody with you tonight? Or maybe you had somebody following you? ’Cause that’s the feeling I been having all night.”
R.C. tried to think. What was the right answer? “No,” he said.
“That’s the problem you gringos got. You’re always trying to figure out what kind of lie is gonna work, like right now you’re wondering how stupid is this Mexican man you got to deal with. I’m gonna be honest with you even if you ain’t been honest with me. You’re gonna have a bad night, man. You can cry, you can beg, you can pray, but only one thing is gonna happen to you, and there ain’t no way to change that. Don’t try to fight it. Tonight is gonna be a son of a bitch. Tomorrow, who knows? Maybe you’re gonna catch a break.”
“I’m not a narc,” R.C. said.
“Maybe, maybe not. But the people I sell you to are gonna find out.” Negrito stood up and opened one of the back doors of the car and returned with a shovel and a gas mask that had an extra-long breathing hose. “See this?” he said. “It’s your chance to live. You just got to have a lot of self-control and not let your thoughts take over your body.”
“Don’t do this to me.”
“It’s out of my hands, Tejano boy. I was just having a drink in the cantina. You came into the wrong place and put your nose in the wrong people’s business. Now you got to pay the price.”
“The other guy said to turn me loose.”
“You talking about Krill? He ain’t never gonna know what happened to you. Krill thinks he’s smart, but most of the time, his thoughts are in the next world, where he thinks his dead kids are.” Negrito brushed a piece of dirt off R.C.’s cheek with his thumb and smiled. “You’re a gringo cop who has a flat tire and ends up drinking in a whorehouse that has a bartender who works for La Familia? I hope in the morning you get a chance to tell these other guys that story. It’s a very good one, man. You got to tell them the joke about the golf course, too. They’re gonna really laugh.”
AFTER HACKBERRY AND Pam Tibbs left the bordello and got in the Cherokee, Pam remained silent for a long time. Then she started the engine and looked at him. “Where to?” she asked.
“Back to the cantina. That bartender was lying,” he said.
“I was a little worried in there.”
“About what?”
“When you cracked that guy in the mouth.”
“He’ll get over it.”
“I’ve never seen you like that.”
“I don’t like child molesters.”
“You told those two guys in the living room you’d blow their heads off. I could hear you breathing when you said it.”
“That’s because I meant it.”
“That’s what bothers me.”
“Let’s get on it, Pam,” he said.
On the way back to the cantina, Hackberry lowered the brim of his Stetson and shut his eyes, wanting to sleep for an eternity and forget the violence and cruelty and sordid behavior and human exploitation that seemed to become more and more visible in the world as he aged. According to the makers of myth and those who trafficked in cheap lies about human wisdom, the elderly saw goodness in the world that they had not been allowed to see in their youth. But Hackberry had found that the world was the world and it did not change because one