Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [97]
“You know Preacher Collins?” R.C. said.
“The crazy man up there ain’t gonna help you. So give that up,” Negrito replied, backing down the slope, his gaze still concentrated on the hillside. “He’s the hunter, the left hand of God. He don’t have interest in a boy like you.”
“But he’s interested in you?” R.C. said.
“Of course. He knows we’re brothers. Under our skin, we’re no different.”
“Brothers?”
“That’s right, Tejano boy. Preacher and I are both dead. Our souls died many years ago. What do you see in my eyes?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s right. Nothing. And that’s why you’re gonna start to dig. Or maybe I’m gonna start shooting you in various places that will hurt more than you can believe.”
“I done told you, I ain’t gonna do it. So you’d better kill me, ’cause somewhere down the road, I’m gonna catch up with you. You damn betcha I will.”
Negrito’s eyes were rheumy, his face dull with fatigue, his mouth caked. He made a snuffing sound and rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist. “Release the shovel and get in the trunk of the car.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I got to dig your hole. That makes me very mad. You are lucky I am a merciful man.”
R.C. let the shovel fall to the ground and started toward the gasguzzler, glancing warily over his shoulder, then tripping and stumbling. He heard Negrito pick up the shovel.
“Look up there,” Negrito said.
“At what?”
“The preacher up there in the rocks. See, against the moon. He wants to be your friend. The sacerdote who eats his own mierda has come to your rescue. Or maybe it’s the sheriff you work for. Maybe this is your lucky day.”
R.C. stared at the clumps of brush in the arroyos and at the layers of rock exposed by erosion in the hillside and at the tailings of a mine that spilled like rust down to the wash. He saw a shadow move across the moon. “That’s a coyote,” he said.
He turned around just as Negrito whipped the shovel with both hands through the air and almost flattened the concave steel blade on the back of R.C.’s head.
“I think you was right. It was just a coyote,” Negrito said, staring up the hill.
JACK COLLINS LAY below the crest of the hill, his belly and loins and legs stretched out on a flat rock that had ripples in it like water, his hat beside him, his eyes raised just above a pile of crumbling stone. Behind him, the two Mexican informers, cousins who did murders for hire, were talking quietly to each other, sometimes glancing up in his direction. They were restless men and did not like either indecision or complexity and often found themselves caught between their own self-protective instincts and their hesitancy to challenge the strange ways of the gringo loco whose lethality was a legend in Coahuila and Chihuahua. Finally, the one named Eladio approached the unshaved and unwashed American who dressed in rags and wore a heavy revolver on his hip, squatting down so as not to silhouette against the sky. “Señor Jack?” he said.
“Be patient,” Jack said, peering down the opposite slope.
“Why don’t we just go down there in the streambed and kill Negrito? I’ll do it without no charge.”
Jack looked back over his shoulder and grinned. “You boys were supposed to give me the man named Krill. We didn’t come out here to hunt an orange ape.”
“I thought Krill would be at the farmhouse. He’s a very hard man to catch, boss. This is the place Negrito sometimes uses to bury his victims. It is fortunate that I knew that.”
“So we’re saved from your incompetence by the intervention of the fates, and that should make me feel good?”
“You talk too fast for me to understand sometimes, boss.”
Jack worked his way backward on the rock until he was well under the level of the hillcrest, then got to his feet. He dusted off his knees and the elbows of his suit coat and fitted on his hat, glancing at the strips of black cloud across the moon. He