When he woke, he would have tears in his eyes and would sit on the side of the bed in the dark and beat his fists on his thighs.
Almost twenty-four hours had passed since he had looked through his telescope and had witnessed the machine-gunning of two men by a man wearing a rumpled suit and a panama hat. At first he had not believed what he was watching. The efficiency of the killer, the way he methodically hosed down his victims, blowing them all over the rocks and sand, had made Cody numb with fear and horror but at the same time had left him in awe of the shooter, a man with cheeks like emery paper and whose clothes and hat looked as though they had been stripped from a scarecrow.
Then Cody had watched the arrival of the sheriff, and the female deputy with the wide ass and big shoulders, and the Asian woman who had held his hands in hers and looked into his eyes and read his most private thoughts. But they were not witnesses. He, Cody Daniels, was. He had seen it all and could describe how the victims had raised their arms in front of their faces, their mouths pleading, their eyes squeezing shut, their coffee spilling to the ground. It was Cody Daniels who had experienced an almost omniscient oversight of events that others would have to guess at and reconstruct and debate and analyze in a laboratory. All he had to do was make one phone call, and the sheriff who had threatened to kick a nail-studded two-by-four up his hole would be treating him as a friend of the court, hanging on his words, the female deputy reduced to nothing but an insignificant functionary in the background.
Except Cody didn’t make the call.
Why?
He knew all too well the answer. It was fear, the succubus that had fed at his heart all his life.
Temple Dowling had given him a business card and had told him to report whatever happened on the Asian woman’s property. Krill and the degenerate named Negrito had weighted him with the same obligation, telling him to build a signal fire and pour motor oil on it, like he was an Indian in a loincloth in a John Wayne movie. Dowling claimed to have evidence that could send Cody to prison for the clinic bombing. Krill and Negrito’s potential was even worse. No matter which course of action Cody chose, he had become a human piñata for people he despised, the rich and powerful on one side and a pair of pepper-belly sadists on the other.
Why had all this befallen him? He had bought the oven timer; he didn’t set it. The others had said the bomb would go off in the middle of the night, that no one would be hurt, that the object was to scare the shit out of people who were killing the unborn. It was a noble cause, wasn’t it?
But why had he gone to the scene immediately afterward, hiding in the crowd, fascinated, his head reeling with both exhilaration and guilt? Unfortunately, Cody got to see more than he had planned. He had watched dry-mouthed while the firemen and the paramedics pried the nurse from the rubble. Then he saw the glass and brick that had embedded in her face and eyes, and the blood that had fried in a black veil on one side of her head. He had tried to push his way back through the crowd, away from the paramedics loading the nurse into an ambulance only a few feet away. A fat white woman had blocked his way, virtually shoving him, her face blazing with anger. “Watch it, buster,” she said. “I’ll punch you in the mouth. I’ve seen you around here before.”
She had terrified him. That night he had bought a bus ticket to San Antonio and since then had never picked up the phone when the caller ID indicated the call had originated in the East. But this particular dawn, Cody was strangely at peace. The air was cool, the sun still below the earth’s rim, his bedroom filled with a softness that he associated with the promise of rain and the bloom of desert flowers. He had not done the bidding of either Temple Dowling or the blue-eyed half-breed Krill, and now almost twenty-four hours had passed without incident since he had witnessed the killings in the foothills below his house. Maybe these guys were all bluster, he told himself. Cody had dealt with meth-head bikers and gangbangers and perverts of every stripe on a county prison farm, including the two Hispanic hacks who had walked him out to the work shed where a solitary sawhorse waited for him under a naked lightbulb. What could Krill or Dowling do to him that hadn’t been done to him before? Cody was a survivor. Screw these guys, he thought.
He rolled over in bed and let the soft blue coolness of the dawn seep inside his eyelids and lull him back to sleep. That was when he heard a sound that made no sense. Someone was brushing his teeth in Cody’s bathroom. He sat up in bed and stared in disbelief at a man who was bent over the lavatory, jerking Cody’s toothbrush like a ragged stick in his mouth, toothpaste and saliva running down his fingers and wrist.
The figure looked like a half-formed ape wearing a vest and striped trousers without a shirt or belt, his skin streaked with tufts of orange hair. A knife in a scabbard was tied flatly along his upper right arm with leather thongs. He stopped brushing and cupped water into his mouth and spat into the lavatory. “How you doin’, man?” he asked.
“You’re using my toothbrush.”
“Yeah, it’s a good one, man.”
“How’d you get in?”
“You were supposed to make a signal fire. How come you didn’t do that? Krill is pissed at you.”
“Signal fire for what?”
“About that crazy man who killed those two guys down below. He had a machine gun. You can hear it a long way, man. You didn’t hear nothing?”
“I was gone. I didn’t hear or see anything. All I know is what was on the news. Get out of here.”
“A friend of ours says your truck was parked here all day yesterday. You calling our friend a liar?”
“Where’s Krill?”
“Outside, looking through your telescope at la china. He’s got a fascination with her. Know why that is?”
“No. I mean I don’t care. I just want you guys out of my life.”
“Krill’s children were killed by a U.S. Army helicopter. They wasn’t baptized. He thinks la china can do it for him. At least he’s been thinking that up till now. Guess why Krill likes you?”
“Likes me?”
“Yeah, man, you’re lucky. He likes you a lot, even when he’s pissed at you. He needs you to do him a favor. You got a lot of luck.”
“What kind of favor?”
“He wants you to baptize his kids.”
“You said they’re dead.”
“Yeah, man, they’re dead. They’re gonna be that way a long time.”
“I cain’t baptize dead people. Nobody can.”
“Why not? They’re the ones that need it most. I was baptized when I was born. It didn’t do me no good. Maybe it’s better to get baptized after you die. Then you can’t fuck things up anymore.”
“How long have his kids been dead?”
“A lot of years, man.”
“Then they’re buried, right? In Nicaragua or El Salvador or Guatemala or one of those other shitholes, right?”
“Not exactly.”
Cody waited for Negrito to go on, his heart dilating with fear for reasons he didn’t understand. Negrito was grinning at him, his eyes lit with a lunatic shine. “They’re in a box,” Negrito said. “He carried it around a long time, then buried it in the desert.”
“They’re what?”
“He’s got them in a wood box. Their bones look like sticks inside skin that’s all shriveled up. Like little mummies. When you shake the box, you can hear them rattle.”
“That’s sick.”
“Say that to Krill and see what happens. He talks to them, man. Krill’s brain is a couple of quarts down sometimes. That’s why he’s out here in a place that’s like a big skillet. That’s why all of you are here. It’s a place for losers, man. You ain’t figured that out?”
“Figured out what?”
“Why you live here. You, la china, the crazy man they call Preacher Jack. Krill understands. But you can’t figure it out? You’re saying you’re not as smart as Krill?”
“Smart about what?”
“About who you are, man. About where you live. Krill says you’re in the bel
ly of God. That’s what Krill thinks the desert is. You thought I was scary, huh? What you think now, man? Look at Krill. He takes scalps ’cause he’s more Indian than white. You gonna tell him you ain’t gonna baptize his kids ’cause they already turned into mummies? You got that kind of guts? I sure ain’t.”
“That’s what it will take to get shut of y’all?”
“No, man. That’s just a small part of it.”
Negrito removed the knife from the scabbard tied down on his upper arm and began cleaning his nails as though he had forgotten the point of the conversation. His hand slipped, and the tip of the knife sliced open the ball of his index finger. He watched a thick drop of blood well from the proud tissue, then inserted his finger in his mouth and sucked the wound clean.
“Go on with what you were saying. What does Krill want?” Cody said.
“Your soul, man. What’d you think?” Negrito replied. “He collects souls that he wants to take with him into the next world. Why are you so stupid, my little gringo friend?”
THAT SAME MORNING, Maydeen Stoltz walked into Hackberry’s office without knocking, her mouth glossy with lipstick. She waited as though gathering her thoughts, her love handles protruding over her belt. “A guy who refuses to give his name has called twice on the business line and demands I put you on the phone,” she said.
“Demands?”
“I think he said, ‘Get to it, woman.’”
“What’s on his mind?”
“He wouldn’t say. He claims you two go back.” She looked at him blankly.
“What are you not telling me?”
“His voice isn’t one you forget. I think I talked to him once last year.”
“Collins?”
“How many sexist pricks call in on the business line?”
“If he calls again, put him through.”
“I put him on hold. I also told him if I get my hands on him, his brains are gonna be running out his nose.”
“You said that to Jack Collins?”
“If that’s who he is.”
“I’m going to pick up now. See if you can get a trace.”
“Watch yourself, Hack.”
He winked at her and lifted the receiver to his ear. Oddly, it gave off a sound like a high wind blowing through the holes in the earpiece. “This is Sheriff Holland. Can I help you?” he said.
“I thought I ought to check in. We haven’t talked in a while.”
The accent was what a linguist would call southern midlands, a dialect common on the plains west of Fort Worth and up through Oklahoma, the pronunciations attenuated, as though the speaker doesn’t have enough oxygen in his blood. This speaker sounded like he had put a teaspoon of metal filings in his morning coffee.
“It’s good to hear from you, Mr. Collins. I had you figured for dead,” Hackberry said.
“In a way, I was.”
“Can you clarify that? I’m not that fast.”
“I did penance for one year. I ate from people’s garbage and slept in caves and wore rags and washed myself with wet ash. I think you know why.”
“I dug those girls up. I wish you could have shared the experience with me. I think you’d find your role as penitent a little absurd.”
“Judge me as you will.”
“Oh, I will.”
“How about those two federal agents? Do you think they were innocent victims?”
“The two guys you capped? I’ve got news for you. They were PIs out of Houston, not feds. They didn’t have squat to do with burning up your shack and your Bible.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Tell that to their families.”
“No, I mean I’m sorry I wasted all that ammunition. There’s been a right smart jump in the price of bullets since the election of our new president.”
“You made a mistake coming back here, bub.”
“I address you by your title, Sheriff Holland. I’d appreciate your showing me the same level of respect.”
“In your way, you’re an intelligent man. But you’re also a narcissist. Like most narcissists, you’re probably a self-loathing failure whose mother wished she had thrown her son away and raised the afterbirth. All of your power is dependent on the Thompson you use to overwhelm your victims, some of whom were Thai girls hardly older than children. How’s that feel, Mr. Collins? You think authors such as Garland Roark or B. Traven would break bread with you?”
“I don’t make claims for myself or impose myself on others.”
“How about Noie Barnum? Does he know you’re a mass killer?”
“Who says I know such a person?”
“You were seen with him while robbing food and camping gear from other people. I hate to disillusion you about your criminal abilities, but you have a tendency to leave fecal prints on whatever you touch.”
“Noie is a decent man untainted by the enterprises you serve, Sheriff.”
“That could be, but you’re not a decent man, Mr. Collins. You bring misery and death into the lives of others and quote Scripture while you do it. I’m not a theologian, but if the Prince of Darkness has acolytes, I think you’ve made the cut.”
“You’re a damn liar.”
“No, sir, you’re the dissembler, but the only person you deceive is yourself. This time out, I’m going to burn your kite and expose you for the cheap titty-sucking fraud that you are.”
“You won’t talk to me that way.”
“I just did. Don’t call here again. You’re an embarrassment to talk with.” Hackberry eased the receiver back into the phone cradle. Maydeen appeared at the doorway and studied his face. “Get it?” he asked.
“Nope. He’s using some kind of relay system.”
“I was afraid of that. No matter. We’ll see him directly, one way or another.”
“I have a feeling you made sure of that,” she said.
He leaned back in his swivel chair and put his boots on the cusp of the wastebasket and stretched his arms. “You got to do something for kicks,” he said. “Can I buy you and Pam lunch?”
ANTON LING HAD just pushed her grocery cart around a pyramid of pork and beans when another shopper wheeled his cart straight out of the aisle and crashed into her basket so hard that her hands flew in the air as though they had received an electric shock. A bag of tomatoes she had just sacked spilled over the top of the basket and rolled across the floor.
“Sorry, I didn’t see you there,” Cody Daniels said.
“You did that on purpose,” she replied.
“No, ma’am, I certainly did not. I was looking for the Vi-ennas and soda crackers, and there you were.”
“The what?”
“Vi-enna sausages. They don’t have those in China?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“I have a diabetic condition. It causes my breath to smell like chemicals.” He grinned at her stupidly, his face dilated and shiny. “It’s colder than a well digger’s ass in here.”
“Why are you acting like this?”
“Here, I’ll pick up your ‘maters. Want to get a snack over at the Dog ‘n’ Shake? It’s on me.”
“Sir, you can hardly stand.”
“Drunk on the love of the Lord, is what I call it.”
“Don’t touch my tomatoes. Don’t touch anything in my basket. Just get away from me,” she said.
She picked up her tomatoes from the floor and replaced them in her cart and got in line at the cash register. But when she went into the parking lot, Cody Daniels was waiting by her pickup truck. “We’re both clergy, Miss Anton. We’ve got us a mutual problem, and we need to put our heads together and work out a solution.”
“I’m not a cleric, Reverend Daniels. I think you’re very confused and should go home.”
“Easy for you to say ‘should go home.’ Krill was at my house. Krill wants me to baptize some dead children he’s got buried out in the desert. He gave me the feeling you won’t do it, and so it’s getting put on me.”
“Of cou
rse I won’t do it.”
“So why should it fall on me?”
“I don’t know. Talk to Sheriff Holland.”
Cody Daniels swayed slightly, obviously trying to concentrate. “Sheriff Holland threatened me. I’m not one of his big fans.”
“Look at me.”
“Ma’am?”
“I said look at me.”
“What the hell you think I’m doing?”
“Why are you so angry at yourself and others?”
The sky was gray, and the wind was blowing in the parking lot, and pieces of newspaper were flapping and twisting through the air. Cody Daniels’s eyes seemed to search the sky as though he saw meaning in the wind and the clouds and the flying scraps of paper imprinted with tracks of car tires. “I’m not angry at anybody. I just want to go about my ministry. I want to be let alone.”
“No, you carry a terrible guilt with you, something you won’t tell anybody about. It’s what gives other people power over you, Reverend Daniels. It’s why you’re drunk. It’s why you’re blaming everybody else for your problems.”
“I was saved a long time ago. I don’t have to listen to anything you say.”
She dropped the tailgate on the back of her truck and loaded her groceries in the bed, hoping he would be gone when she turned around again. She closed the tailgate and latched it with the chain, her gaze focused on a blue-collar family getting in their automobile, the children trying to pull inside the stringed balloons they had gotten at a street carnival. Cody Daniels had not budged. “Let me get by, please,” she said.
“I could have dropped the dime on you any time I wanted and had you arrested,” he said.
“For what?”
“Smuggling wets, aiding and abetting dope mules, maybe hiding out a fellow name of Noie Barnum, a guy who might end up in the hands of Al Qaeda.”
She tried to walk around him, but he stepped in front of her. His breath made her wince. “I saw the man with the machine gun kill those two men down below your place,” he said. “It was Preacher Jack Collins.”
Feast Day of Fools Page 12
