Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [94]
“¿Quépasa, gringo?” asked the policeman with the shined boots.
Hackberry opened his badge holder and held it up for both policemen to see. “My deputy was kidnapped from this cantina. We were having a discussion with Bernicio as to my friend’s whereabouts. Thank you for your assistance.”
“Chinga tu madre. Tus credenciales valen mierda, hombre,” the policeman in shined boots said.
“My badge is worth shit? I should fuck my mother?” Hackberry said. “I’m not sure how I should interpret that.”
“Venga,” the policeman said, crooking two fingers.
“With respect, we’re not going anywhere with y’all except maybe to find my friend,” Hackberry said. He repeated himself in Spanish and then said in English and Spanish, “Right now we’re wasting time that we don’t have. My friend’s life is in jeopardy. The man on the floor is a criminal. You know that and so do I. We are all officers of the law, separated only by a few miles of geography. I ask your cooperation, and I say all these things to you out of respect for your office and the importance of your legal position in the community.”
“We are not interested in your evaluations of our community. You’re coming with me, gringo,” the policeman replied, this time in English, once again crooking two fingers. “You have no authority here, and you have assaulted an innocent man.”
“How’s this for authority, dickhead?” Pam Tibbs said, pulling her .357 Magnum from her holster and aiming it with both hands at the policeman’s face.
“You are very unwise,” the policeman said.
“That’s right,” Pam replied. She cocked the hammer on her revolver with her thumb. “I have little judgment. That’s why I’m two seconds from flushing your grits.”
“Flushing? What do you mean, ‘flushing’?”
“Don’t test her, partner,” Hackberry said, surprised at the level of caution in his voice.
“No entiendo,” the policeman said.
Hackberry could feel a band of tension spreading along one side of his head. It was of a kind that he had experienced only a few times in his life. It stretched the blood veins along the scalp into knotted twine. You felt it seconds after hearing the spatter of small-arms fire, a sound that was as thin and sporadic and innocuous as the popping of Chinese firecrackers. Or you felt it when someone shouted out the word “Incoming!” Or when it wrapped itself around your head like piano wire as a monstrosity of a human being in a quilted coat slathered with mud on the front and mucus on the sleeves pulled back the bolt on a Soviet-manufactured burp gun and lifted the muzzle into your face.
Hackberry could smell the stagnant water and expectorated tobacco juice under the drain covers in the concrete floor, and the stale cigarette smoke in the air and the residual odor of dried sweat that seemed layered on every surface of the cantina. From the cribs in back, he could smell a stench that was like fish roe in the sun and human waste leaching from an open ditch. He could hear a drunk singing in one of the cribs in the alleyway. He could hear his own heartbeat starting to crescendo in his ears.
“She’ll kill you, buddy. Don’t lose your life over a man who wears the tattoo of a self-important fool on top of his head,” Hackberry said.
What followed was a phenomenon that Hackberry had seen perhaps no more than a dozen times in war and during his career as a lawman. Perhaps it could be called a vision of mortality. Or a moment when a person simply calculated his risk and evaluated what was to be lost or gained and then made his bet with full knowledge that his foot rested on the edge of the great precipice. Sometimes the heart-stopping pause that took place before the die was cast, when the filmstrip seemed to freeze inside the projector, dissolved into what Hackberry