Feast Day of Fools

by James Lee Burke

  “What is he saying?” said the man with the Russian accent.

  “He’s sorry he’s on the planet,” said a man holding one of Cody’s arms.

  “See what else he has to say,” said the man with the Russian accent.

  Cody heard the nail gun again and felt his other foot flatten against the vertical shaft of the cross and try to constrict against the nail that had pinioned it to the wood. This time he thought he screamed, but he couldn’t be sure, because the voice he heard did not seem like his own. The popping of the nail gun continued, the muzzle working its way along the tops of his feet and his palms and finally the small bones in his wrists. He felt himself being lifted up, the top of the cross thudding against the wall behind him, his weight coming down on the nails, the tendons in his chest crushing the air from his lungs. Through a red haze, he could see the faces of his executioners looking up at him, as though they had been frozen in time or lifted out of an ancient event whose significance had eluded them. He heard himself whispering, his words barely audible, his eyes rolling up into his head.

  “What’d he say?” one man asked.

  “‘I’m proud my name is on her book,’” another man said.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” the first man asked.

  “It’s from the song ‘The Great Speckled Bird,’” Dennis Rector said.

  “What is this speckled bird?” asked the man with the Russian accent, standing at the foot of the stage.

  “In the song, it’s supposed to mean the Bible,” Dennis Rector replied.

  The man with the Russian accent gazed through the side window at the rain striking the glass.

  “What do you want us to do, Mr. Sholokoff?” Rector asked. “Is he alive?”

  “I think he is.”

  “You think?” Sholokoff said.

  “Just tell me what you’d like me to do, sir,” Rector said.

  “Do I have to write it down?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t come into this county again.”

  “I come through here to deliver the animals to your game ranches.”

  “You need to take a vacation, Dennis. Maybe go out into the desert for a while. Here, I have some money for you. I’ll call you when it’s time to come back to work.”

  Sholokoff began walking down the aisle toward the front of the church.

  “I did what you wanted,” Rector said. “You shouldn’t treat me like this. I ain’t somebody you can just use and throw away.”

  Sholokoff continued out the front of the church into the night without replying or looking back. Dennis Rector pinched his mouth with his hand and stared at Cody Daniels and the blood running from his feet and hands and wrists and down his forearms. He stuck Sholokoff’s wad of bills into his jeans. “I’m gonna get the gas can out of my car,” he said. “Did you guys hear me? Don’t just stand there. Take care of business.”

  None of the other men spoke or would look directly at him.

  A LOCAL RANCHER flying over the church saw the flames burst through the roof of the Cowboy Chapel and reported the fire before Anton Ling did. By the time she had headed up the road to the church, the volunteer fire department truck and Pam Tibbs and Hackberry Holland and another cruiser driven by R. C. Bevins were right behind her.

  “Jesus Christ, look at it,” Pam said.

  The building was etched with flames that seemed to have gone up all four walls almost simultaneously and had been fed by cold air blowing through all the windows, which probably had been systematically smashed out. The fire had gathered under the ceiling and punched a hole through the roof that was now streaming sparks and curds of black smoke into the wind.

  “Somebody used an accelerant,” Hackberry said.

  “You think it’s the same guys who broke into Anton Ling’s house?”

  “Or Temple Dowling’s people.”

  “You believe in karma? I mean for a guy like Cody Daniels.”

  “You mean is this happening to him because he was mixed up in the bombing of an abortion clinic? No, I don’t believe in karma, at least not that kind.”

  “I thought maybe you did,” Pam said.

  “Who gets the rougher deal in life? Beggars on the streets of Calcutta or international-arms merchants?”

  Pam’s attention was no longer focused on their conversation. “Hack, Anton Ling is getting out of her truck with a fire extinguisher.”

  Hackberry saw Anton Ling run from her truck directly through the front door of the church, a ropy cloud of blue-black smoke funneling from under the top of the doorframe. Pam braked the cruiser behind the pickup, and she and Hackberry and R. C. Bevins and two volunteer firemen ran up the steps behind Anton Ling.

  When Hackberry went inside the church, the intensity of the heat was like someone kicking open the door on a blast furnace. The walls were blackening and starting to buckle where they were not already burning, the sap in the cathedral beams igniting and dripping in flaming beads onto the pews below. Hackberry could hardly breathe in the smoke. Anton Ling went down the main aisle toward the stage, the fire extinguisher raised in front of her. Through the smoke, Hackberry could see a man crucified on a large wooden cross at the rear of the stage, his face and skin and bloodied feet lit by stage curtains that had turned into candles.

  Hackberry caught up with Anton Ling, his arm raised in front of his face to protect his eyes from the heat. “Give it to me,” he said.

  “Take your hand off me,” she said.

  “Your dress is on fire, for God’s sake,” he said.

  He tore the fire extinguisher from her hands and pulled the pin from the release lever and sprayed foam on her clothing. Then he mounted the stairs at the foot of the stage, the heat blistering his skin and cooking his head even though he was wearing his Stetson. He sprayed the area around the man on the cross while the volunteer firemen, all of them wearing ventilators, sprayed the walls with their backpacks and other firemen pulling a hose came through the front door and horse-tailed the ceiling with a pressurized jet of water pumped from the truck.

  “Let’s get the cross down on the stage and carry it through the door,” Hackberry said. “He’s going to die in this smoke.”

  But when Hackberry grabbed the shaft of the cross, he recoiled from the heat in the wood.

  “Sheriff?” R.C. said.

  “What?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “No, the wounds aren’t mortal.”

  “Look above his rib cage. Somebody wanted to make sure he was dead. Somebody shot nails into his heart,” R.C. said.

  The flashlights of the firemen jittered and cut angles through the darkness and smoke, the rain spinning down through the hole in the ceiling. “Nobody from around here could do something like this,” one of the firemen said.

  “Not a chance, huh?” Hackberry said.

  “No, this kind of thing don’t happen here,” the fireman said. “It took somebody doped out of his mind to do this. Like some of those smugglers coming through Miss Ling’s place every night.”

  “Shut up,” Anton Ling said.

  “If they didn’t do it, who did? ’Cause it wasn’t nobody from around here,” the fireman said.

  “Give us a hand on this, bud. We need to get Reverend Daniels off these nails and onto a gurney. You with me on that?” Hackberry said to the fireman.

  Outside, fifteen minutes later, Hackberry watched two paramedics zip a black body bag over Cody Daniels’s face. The coroner, Darl Wingate, was standing two feet away. The rain had almost quit, and Darl was smoking a cigarette in a holder, his face thoughtful, his smoke mixing in the mist blowing up from the valley.

  “How do you read it?” Hackberry said.

  “If it’s any consolation, the victim was probably dead when the nails were fired into his rib cage. Death probably occurred from cardiac arrest. The main reason crucifixion was practiced throughout the ancient world was that it was not only painful and humiliating but the tendons would tighten across the lungs and
slowly asphyxiate the victim. The only way he could prolong his life was to lift himself on the nails that had been driven through his feet or ankles. Of course, this caused him to increase his own torment a hundredfold. It would be hard to invent a more agonizing death.”

  “I’d like to believe this poor devil didn’t go through all that, that he died early,” Hackberry said.

  “Maybe that’s the way it went down, Hack,” Darl said, his eyes averted. “Did you know I got a degree in psychology before I went to med school?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I wanted to be a forensic psychologist. Know why I went into medicine instead?”

  “No, I don’t,” Hackberry said, his attention starting to wander.

  “Because I don’t like to put myself into the minds of people who do things like this. I don’t believe this was done by a group. I think it was ordered by one guy and a bunch of other guys did what they were told,” Darl said.

  “Go on.”

  “The guy behind this feels compelled to smear his shit on a wall.”

  “Are you thinking about Krill?”

  “No. The perp on this one has a hard-on about religion.”

  “How about Temple Dowling?”

  “Stop it. You don’t believe that yourself.”

  “Why not?”

  “Dowling is inside the system. He’s not a criminal.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “No, the problem is the way you think, Hack. You’d rather turn the key on a slumlord than a guy who boosts banks. You’ve also got a grudge against Dowling’s father.”

  “Say that again about religion.”

  “I have to give you an audiovisual presentation? We’re talking about a murder inside a church, on a cross. It was done by a believer.”

  “A believer?”

  “Yeah, and he’s really pissed.”

  “How about Jack Collins?”

  “Collins is a messianic killer, not a sadist.”

  “You should have been a cop, Darl.”

  “That’s what I did in the army. It sucked then and sucks now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because arresting these bastards is a waste of time,” Darl said.

  Hackberry walked toward his cruiser, where Pam and R.C. were waiting. The hair was singed on the backs of his arms, and the side of his face was streaked with soot. The churchyard was filled with emergency vehicles, the red and blue and white flashers pulsing in the mist.

  “Wrap it up here,” he said to Pam.

  “You tried to save him, Hack. When you went inside, you didn’t know if the roof was coming down or not,” she said.

  “Call Ethan Riser.”

  “Riser is no help,” she said.

  “She’s right, Sheriff. Them FBI people wouldn’t take time to spit in our mouths if we were dying of thirst,” R.C. said.

  Hackberry opened his cell phone and found Riser’s number and punched it in, then walked off into the darkness and waited for the call to go to voice mail. Surprisingly, the agent picked up.

  “Ethan?” Hack said.

  “Yeah, who’d you expect?”

  Hackberry told him what had happened. “I need everything you can get me on Josef Sholokoff. I need it by noon tomorrow.”

  “Can’t do it, partner.”

  “Cut this crap out, Ethan. I’m not going to put up with it.”

  “There’re probably fifty agents in half a dozen agencies trying to shut down this guy. If you screw things up for the government, they’re going to drop a brick shithouse on your head.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the Glass Mountains.”

  “Who’s with you?”

  “A friend or two.”

  “I think you’re trying to take on Collins by yourself.”

  “Collins is long overdue for retirement.”

  “You don’t know him. I do. Let me help you.”

  “I wish you’d been with me when we had bin Laden’s family on the tarmac. But this one is all mine,” Riser said.

  “That’s a dumb way to think.”

  “Did you ever hear of this black boxer who went up against an Australian who was called ‘the thinking man’s fighter’? The black guy scrambled his eggs. When a newsman asked how he did it, the black guy said, ‘While he was thinking, I was hitting him.’”

  “Don’t hang up.”

  “See you around, Hack. I’ve been wrong about almost everything in my life. Don’t make my mistakes.”

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, as Jack Collins listened to Noie Barnum talk at the breakfast table in the back of the cabin, he wondered if Noie suffered from a thinking disorder.

  “So repeat that for me, will you? You met the hikers on the trail and you did what?” Jack said.

  “I wanted to try out that walking cane you gave me, and I made it down the hill just fine and along the edge of the creek out to the cottonwoods on the flat. That’s when my breath gave out and I had to sit down on a big rock and I saw the hikers. They were a very nice couple.”

  “I expect they were. But what was that about the Instamatic?”

  “At least I think it was an Instamatic. It was one of those cheap cameras tourists buy. They said they belonged to a bird-watching club and were taking pictures of birds along the hiking trail. They asked me to take a snapshot of them in front of the cottonwoods. It was right at sunset, and the wind was blowing and the leaves were flying in the air, and the sky was red all the way across the horizon. So I snapped a shot, and then they asked if they could take my picture, too.”

  “But you’ve left something out of the repeat, Noie.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The first time around, you mentioned this fellow’s line of work.”

  “He said he was a Parks and Wildlife man. He didn’t look to be over twenty-five, though. He said he and his wife were on their honeymoon. She had this warm glow in her face. They put me in mind of some folks I know back home.”

  “And where do they live?”

  “He said Austin. I think. Yeah, that was it. Austin.”

  “Austin. That’s interesting.”

  Jack got up from the table and lifted a coffeepot off the woodstove with a dishrag and poured into his cup. The coffee was scalding, but he drank it without noticing the heat, his eyes fastened on Noie. “You like those eggs and sausage?”

  “You know how to cook them,” Noie replied. “What my grandmother would call ‘gooder than grits.’”

  “You’re a card, Noie. So this fellow was from a law enforcement agency?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call Parks and Wildlife that.”

  “And he lives in the state capital?”

  “Yep, that’s what he said.”

  “And you let him take your photograph? Does that come right close to it?”

  Noie seemed to reflect upon Jack’s question. “Yeah, I’d say that was pretty much it.”

  In the early-morning shadows, Noie’s nose made Jack think of a banana lying in an empty gravy bowl. His long-sleeve plaid shirt was buttoned at the collar, even though it was too tight for him, and his suspenders were notched into the knobs of his shoulders like a farmer of years ago might have worn them. He was freshly shaved, his sideburns etched, his face happy, but his jug-shaped head and big ears would probably drive the bride of Frankenstein from his bed, Jack thought. Noie preoccupied himself with whittling checker pieces he kept in a shoe box, and he had the conversational talents of a tree stump. Plus, Noie had another problem, one for which there seemed to be no remedy. Even though he bathed every night in an iron tub by the barn, his body constantly gave off an odor similar to sour milk. Jack decided that Noie Barnum was probably the homeliest and most single man he had ever met.

  “Did it strike you as unusual that this couple would want to photograph a man they’d known for only a few minutes?”

  “My grandmother used to say people who are rank strangers one minute can turn out the next minute to be your best
friends.”

  “Except we’re not rank strangers to the law, Noie.”

  “That brings me to another topic,” Noie said. “I know the government wants to get their hands on me, but for the life of me, I can’t figure why you’re running from them.”

  “You’ve got it turned around, pard. I stay to myself and go my own way. If people bear me malice, I let them find me. Then we straighten things out.”

  “I bet you give them a piece of your mind, too.”

  “You could call it that.”

  “You ever take your guitar out and play it?”

  “My guitar?”

  “You keep the case under your bed, but you never take your guitar out and play it.”

  “It sounds like it was tuned to a snare drum. That’s because I tuned it.”

  Noie’s expression had turned melancholy. He set down his fork and studied his plate. “That couple I met on the trail don’t mean us any harm, Jack. Particularly toward a fellow like you. I don’t know why you choose to be a hermit, but you’re the kindest man I’ve ever known, and I’ve known some mighty good ones.”

  “I believe you have, Noie.”

  “I worry about you because I think you’re bothered about something in your past, something you probably shouldn’t be fretting yourself about.”

  Through the back window, Jack could see the rain from last night’s storm still dripping off the barn roof and dew shining on the windmill and steam rising off the horse tank. The blueness of the morning was so perfect, he didn’t want to see the sunlight break over the hill. “We’ve got us a fine spot here,” he said. “Sometimes if you listen, you can hear the earth stop, like it’s waiting for you to catch up with it. Like it’s your friend and it wants you to be at peace with it. That’s why I live alone and go my own way. If you don’t have any truck with the rest of the world, it cain’t mess you up.”

  Noie seemed to study the content of Jack’s words, then he stared at his plate again and put his arms below the table. “I got blood on my hands,” he said.

  “From what?”

  “Those Predator drones.”