Feast Day of Fools

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Through the bars in his cell, Krill could see the rain blowing on the fields and the side of the house, and the hills that looked like giant white caterpillars disappearing inside it. Mike stood in the middle of the room next to the Asian woman, who was still suspended from a rafter. Mike was opening and closing his hands, his wide-set eyes turned upward at the sound of feet overhead.

“I am sorry I caused you this trouble, hombre, ” Krill said. “I have been a soldier in the service of others, just as you are. We take orders from little men who never have to kill or die in battle themselves.”

“You talk too much,” Mike said.

“Give the woman some water. She’s done nothing to deserve what has been done to her.”

Mike’s attention was fixed on the sound of boots moving back and forth on the floor upstairs, and he could not be distracted. His blond hair was long and oiled and hung in strings over the tops of his ears. His eyes were so widely spaced, they looked as though they had been removed from his face and stitched back in the wrong place. He was a man to whom the fates had not been kind, Krill thought.

“Give the woman some water, and I’ll give you back the spoon,” Krill said. “Then Frank will not be able to use you as his scapegoat any longer.”

“Where is it?” Mike asked.

“In the chemical toilet. Where else?”

“Get it out.”

“You have to give the woman some water.”

Mike walked toward the bars. “You’re going to pay a big price if I have to come inside that cell.”

“I am not putting my hand in a toilet for you. I am sorry, senor .”

“Where are your shoes?”

“They hurt my feet. I took them off.”

“Get back against the wall.”

“What for, senor? I am not a threat to you.”

Mike stepped closer to the bars. “Get back against the wall, turn around, and lean on it. I’m coming in.” With a flick of his right hand, he whipped a telescopic steel baton to its full length.

“ Senor, you’re not going to use that on me, are you?” Krill said.

“Get back against the wall!”

The woman, still hanging by her arms, lifted her head from her chest and parted her lips. “Give me some water,” she said.

Mike looked over his shoulder at her. “Be quiet,” he said.

“I need some water,” she said.

“You did this to yourself, lady. I tried to be nice to y’all, and this is what I got. Now close your mouth.” Mike turned back to Krill. “You move your ass to the back of the cell. Spread your legs and lean on your hands. Don’t tell me you don’t know the drill.”

“Please give me water,” the woman said.

Mike turned around again, his hand gripped tightly on the foam-wrapped handle of the expandable baton. “I’ve had it with you, lady. You open your mouth one more-”

From the back of his waistband, Krill pulled loose the shoestrings that he had removed from his running shoes and braided into a garrote. He flipped the garrote over Mike’s head and jerked it tight around his throat and squeezed Mike’s head between the bars, pulling backward with all his weight, the garrote sinking deep into the neck, closing the windpipe and carotid artery and shutting off the flow of blood to the brain. Mike tried to work his nails under the garrote while veins bloomed all over his neck, not unlike cracks in pottery. Krill pulled tighter as Mike slipped down the bars to the floor. Krill grabbed Mike by the back of his shirt so he would not roll away from the cell once he was on the floor.

Krill got down on his knees and reached through the bars and slipped his fingers into the dead man’s shirt pockets but found nothing. With two hands, he turned him over so that the dead man faced the cell, his eyes half-lidded as though he had been shaken from a deep sleep. Krill got his hand into the man’s left pocket and found a folding single-bladed knife and a wad of Mexican currency and a penlight and a betting receipt from a racetrack. In the other pocket was a three-inch iron key.

Krill was trembling as he rose to his feet and extended his arm through the bars and inverted the key and inserted it into the lock. The key was an old one, and he twisted it slowly so as not to break it off inside the mechanism. He felt the tumblers turn and click into place and the tongue of the lock recede into the door and scrape free of the jamb. He shoved the door open, pushing aside Mike’s body.

“Hold on, Magdalena,” Krill said. “You are a great woman, a master of distraction, the greatest woman I have ever known. I will get you down right now. I never could have done this without you. You were magnificent.”

“Don’t talk,” she said, her lips caked, her voice hoarse. “His right ankle. You must hurry.”

“What about his ankle?”

The color was gone from her face. “He has a gun,” she said. “They’re moving around upstairs. Hurry.”

“No, we get you down first,” Krill said. He fitted his left arm around her waist and lifted her weight against him, then sawed through the pieces of clothesline that held her wrists to the rafter. When she fell against him, her cheek and hair touched his face, and he thought he smelled an odor like seawater on her skin.

“The holster is Velcro-strapped to his right ankle,” she said. “Take the pistol from the holster and give it to me.”

“You are a woman of peace, Magdalena,” he said. “You have no business with guns.”

“Don’t talk in an unctuous and foolish manner,” she replied. “A shadow just went past the window. Please do not waste time talking. The men upstairs will show us no mercy.”

Krill pulled up the right pant leg of the dead man and removed an Airweight. 38 from the black holster strapped to his ankle. The woman took it from Krill’s hand just as he heard an upstairs door crash open and glass breaking and a burst of machine-gun fire ripping through walls and doors.

“You have to live for your children, Antonio,” the woman said. “You have to tell others what happened to them. From this point, you live among the children of light. You become one with them. Do you understand me?”

“I think I do,” Krill said.

“No, say it.”

“I understand, Magdalena. And I will keep my word and do as you have said,” he replied.

Jack Collins pushed Eladio and Jaime ahead of him, through the patio door and into the dining room, both of them resisting and looking back at him anxiously. “Get to it, the pair of you,” Jack said. “You look back at me again, you’ll discover another side to my nature. You kill everything that moves on this floor.”

“We are campesinos, Senor Jack,” Eladio said. “We do not know tactics. We do not even know what we are doing here. What is the profit in rescuing a Chinese woman who teaches superstition to our people?”

Jack stiff-armed him between the shoulder blades, pushing him forward through the dining room, knocking over a heavy antique chair, breaking the crystal ware on a serving table. The first of Sholokoff’s men to come out of the hallway was bare-chested, his shoulders and lats stippled with body hair, an automatic in his left hand. He raised the automatic straight out in front of him, his face averted, as though staring into a cold wind and a magic wand could protect him from its influence. At the same time, Eladio shouted out, “Not me, hombre! Do not shoot. I am not one of them! This is a great mistake.”

Jack fired on Sholokoff’s man, a burst of no more than seven or eight rounds that blew away the man’s fingers from his grip on the automatic and stitched his chest and destroyed his jaw.

Eladio stared in horror at the man crashed against the wall and fell to the floor. Then he stared at Jack, his eyes seeming to search in space for the right words to use. “I froze. You saved my life, Senor Jack. We must prepare to attack the others,” he said. “They’re hiding back in the hallway. I can hear them.”

“Your fear got the best of you, Eladio,” Jack said. “This isn’t like gunning down a bunch of teenagers at a birthday party, is it?”

“Yes, I was very afraid. I was speaking insane words.”

“I wouldn’t say that. You always knew how to cover your bets.”

“Let us now go forward, Senor Jack. Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Just rest easy a second,” Jack said. With one hand holding the Thompson and the other holding Eladio’s cell phone, Jack pressed the redial number with his thumb. In the back of the house, a cell phone rang.

“You would think your bud would have enough sense to silence his phone,” Jack said. “That’s the trouble with treacherous people. Most of them cain’t think their way out of a paper sack. Your man in there sold out Sholokoff, just like you sold out me.”

“I don’t understand,” Eladio said.

“Your bud in there didn’t tell Sholokoff we were coming. Otherwise, Sholokoff would have set up an ambush. Oh, here’s your phone back.”

Jack tossed the cell phone to Eladio. When Eladio raised his free hand to catch it, Jack lowered the barrel of the Thompson and fired directly into Eladio’s chest, the shell casings bouncing off the furniture and rolling across the hardwood floor.

“Senor Collins, I do not know what is happening here,” Jaime said. “Why are you killing my cousin? Why are you turning your gun on your own people? We came here to fight your enemies.”

“You’re not my people, son,” Jack said. “Turn around and walk into the hallway.”

“No, I cannot do that.”

“Why is that, Jaime? You don’t trust your compadres in there?”

“These are not my friends. You are a deranged man. You’ve killed Eladio. You speak craziness all the time, and now your craziness has killed my cousin.”

“Pick up the cell phone and hit redial again. I want you to give somebody a message.”

“What message? That you’re killing your own people?”

“I want to tell Josef Sholokoff I’m just getting started. Can you do that for me, Jaime?”

“No, I will not do this. I didn’t have nozzing to do with Eladio’s transactions. I don’t know nobody in there. I am not responsible for what Eladio may have done.”

“‘Nozzing’ again,” Jack said. “I changed my mind about taking you to a speech therapist, Jaime. There’s no cure for certain kinds of stupidity. It’s kind of like laminitis in a horse. Instead of the hoof curling up, your kind of stupidity shrinks the brain into a walnut. We put horses down, don’t we?”

Jaime was breathing through his mouth, staring at the muzzle of the Thompson, his nose crinkling, as though he had no place to put the fear and tension coursing through his body.

“You still have your Uzi,” Jack said.

“I want to go back home.”

“That’s what everybody wants, Jaime. Even if home is just a place they made up in their minds. You know what home is? It’s a black hole in the ground where somebody shovels dirt in your face.”

Jaime swallowed. “Like Eladio, I took money from the gringo to betray you. My family lives in Monterrey. Get word to them that I am buried someplace and that my spirit will not wander, even if this is not true.”

Jack sighed and gazed out the window at the rain sweeping across the fields and the wind troweling green and gold swaths through the corn. “Damn if you guys don’t always make it hard. Leave the piece,” he said.

“You will let me go? You will not harm me when my back is turned?” Jaime said.

“Did I ever lie to you?”

“I will never tell anybody what has happened here. I will always praise your name when I hear it mentioned.”

“Time to haul freight, Jaime. I got my hands full. If I see you on the street somewhere, keep on going.”

“I do not know what that means.”

“It means some people are hopeless. Come on, there’s the door, pilgrim,” Jack said, and made a snicking sound in his cheek.

Jaime went out the French doors into the rain and crossed the patio and began running through the backyard, his head bent low. He ran past the slop bucket the maid had dropped on the lawn, past the barn and the cornfield, his clothes darkening in the rain, and was almost to the pecan orchard before he looked back at the house. His face was white and round and small inside the grayness of the afternoon. Jack watched all this from the window, simultaneously looking at the empty hallway, listening to the creaking of the house and the drumming of the rain, waiting to hear the whisper of voices or the sound of footsteps moving across the hardwood floors or perhaps a door slamming or an order being shouted. All he heard were the sounds of the wind and rain.

Jaime, maybe you’re a whole lot luckier than I thought, he said to himself.

That was when someone from a back window zeroed in on Jaime with what sounded like a fifty-caliber sniper’s rifle and squeezed off a single round and sent him crashing headlong into a tree trunk, dead before his knees struck the earth.

Hackberry had led the way from the barn and across the yard, the rain wilting his hat, driving as hard as ice crystals into his face. He could no longer see the patio and could barely make out the stairs that led down to the cellar door. When he reached the lee of the house, his clothes were wrapped around his body like wet Kleenex. Then he heard the first burst of machine-gun fire. He dropped down inside the stairwell and pulled Pam Tibbs after him.

He wiped the water off the dial of his watch. “That idiot went in early,” he said.

“I told you he has his own agenda,” she said.

He couldn’t argue with her. Trying to put himself inside the thoughts of a man like Jack Collins had been insane. Collins had a Mixmaster in his head instead of a brain.

The door on the cellar was made of metal and had no windows. Hackberry placed his hand on the knob and twisted slowly. The knob rotated less than a quarter of an inch and then locked solid. “So much for Collins’s intel,” he said.

“Was that the Thompson firing?”

“Yeah, there’s no mistaking it.” He pressed his ear against the metal door but could hear nothing inside. He propped the cut-down Remington pump against the side of the stairwell and took out his Swiss Army knife and opened the long blade and worked it into the doorjamb, hoping to get it over the tongue of the lock. He heard a second burst from the Thompson.

“Sholokoff’s people aren’t firing back,” Pam said.

“They’ve pulled back into the house. They’re going to make Collins come after them,” Hackberry said.

“I think something else is going on. I think he might be shooting his own people.”

“Because I told him I saw Eladio making a phone call?”

“That or maybe he found the GPS locator we hid under the cookies and fruitcake and blamed them. It doesn’t take much to set him off. He stubs a toe, and somebody has to die for it.”

Hackberry pushed on the handle of the knife and felt the blade break off in the jamb. “Darn it,” he said under his breath. Just then he heard a solitary shot from what sounded like a high-powered rifle. He picked up his shotgun and went to the top of the steps and looked out into the rain. He could see the cornstalks thrashing in the wind and the gray barn against the pecan orchard and lightning striking in the hills, but he could see nothing of Jack Collins or Eladio and Jaime. Why would the shooter of the high-powered rifle fire only one round? The submachine-gun fire had sounded like it was coming from within the house. Why would someone be using a sniper rifle at close quarters against men armed with automatic weapons?

Unless one of the men with an automatic weapon had bailed and started running and someone had tried to pot him from a door or window?

It was foolish to waste more time trying to figure out the madness of Jack Collins. “Pam, any element of surprise is gone,” he said. “So this is the way we’re going to do it. I’m going in first. Anybody who’s not a friendly dies on the spot. Temple Dowling is probably already dead. The only two friendlies we know about are the hostages, Anton Ling and Krill. The servants are probably gone. That means everybody else is fair game. If I go down, don’t worry about me. You blow up their shit, and we’ll worry about me later. You got all that?”

“Stop playing the hero. You kick open the door and I go in first,” she said. “You’re bigger than I am, and you can shoot over and around me. I can’t do that with you. I can’t even see around you.”

“You always argue, no matter what the issue is, no matter what I say, you always argue,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You’re unrelenting. It’s like having a conversation with the side of an aircraft carrier.”

She wasn’t listening. She had tied a blue kerchief around her forehead to keep her hair and the rain out of her eyes. Her white cowboy shirt was drenched and split in back, her jeans and boots splattered with mud, and her eyes were charged with light, the way they became when she was either angry or hurt. He knew that in this instance, neither of those emotions was the cause of the intensity in her eyes. She moistened her lips.

“If we don’t get out of this one, it’s been a great ride,” she said.

“It wasn’t just a great ride, kiddo. You’re a gift, Pam, the kind a fortunate man receives only once or twice in a life span. But you’ve got to make it out of here, you understand? I’ve been on borrowed time since the Chosin Reservoir, and at this point in my life, I don’t want somebody else paying my tab. I’m going in first, and you’re going to cover my back. If I go down, you stand on my dead body and waste every one of these guys, then pop Collins, no matter what he says or does. But you get back home to tell the story. You got it?”

“What am I supposed to say? You’re pigheaded,” she replied. “If we weren’t in this spot, I’d shoot you myself.”

“You and Rie will always remain the best people I ever knew,” he replied. “And both of you became a permanent part of my life. How many guys can have that kind of luck?”

He held his shotgun with one hand and the railing attached to the brick side wall of the stairwell with the other. Then he raised his right leg and drove the bottom of his boot into the metal door. The reverberation shook the lock and the jamb and the knob, but the door held fast. He raised his foot and smashed his boot into the door again, then again and again, each time bending the lock’s tongue inside the jamb, until the door flew back on its hinges.

He heard the Thompson begin firing again and empty casings bouncing on the hardwood floors and feet running down a hallway. Then he was inside the cellar, inside the damp-smelling coolness that was not unlike a tomb’s, inside the reek of sweat that had dried on the bodies of people who had been tortured, inside the dirty glow of a yellow lightbulb that shone on the faces of Anton Ling and Krill, which seemed as wizened as prunes, as though they had already entered a realm from which no one returned.

The first man to come down the stairs from the hallway may or may not have been armed. Hackberry could remember no details about him other than he was not wearing a shirt, that his head was shaved and his mouth was ringed with whiskers, that there was blood splatter on his chest and arms, that his boots sounded like they had lugs on them as they struck the wood stairs, that his cargo pants were buttoned under his navel, that his mouth dropped open and his face seemed to turn into a bowl of pudding when Hackberry pulled the trigger on the twelve-gauge and watched him buckle over as though he had swallowed a piece of angle iron.

The man who had been first down the cellar stairs had not suffered in vain. As he clutched himself and stumbled and fell down the stairs, three more men followed, shooting over their comrade’s head, filling the cellar with a deafening roar of gunfire that echoed off the walls, the ejected casings shuddering in the electric light, the ricochets sparking off the stone walls and the bars and iron plating of the cells.

Hackberry worked the pump on his twelve-gauge and got another shell into the chamber and fired a second time at the top of the stairs. He saw the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling explode and buckshot cut a pattern across the wooden door that opened onto the hallway, but his adversaries were already into the cellar, firing blindly, breaking the glass in the far window, hitting the body of a man who lay on the floor by one of the cells, driving him and Pam Tibbs back toward the outside stairwell.

“Hack! The guy behind the post!” Pam shouted. Then she began firing the semiauto AR15 into a dark corner of the cellar, pulling the trigger as fast as she could, ignoring a bullet crease on her cheek and a blood-flecked rip in her shirt at the top of her shoulder.

Hackberry felt a blow strike him just above the hip, hard, a pain that punched through tissue and spread deep into the bone the way a dull headache might. He pressed his palm against the wound and saw blood well through his fingers, then something vital inside him seemed to fold in upon itself and melt into gelatin and cause him to lose balance and topple sideways toward a pile of cardboard boxes. All the while Pam kept firing, advancing toward the dark place in the corner, positioning herself between the shooter and Hackberry, shouting, “Suck on this, you motherfucker! How does it feel? Did you like that? Take it, take it, take it!”

Hackberry could not see the man she was shooting at. When Hackberry fell into the boxes, he saw Anton Ling and Krill and the silhouettes of two men who had made it to the bottom of the stairs without being hit. Mostly, he saw the cellar turning sideways and the cardboard boxes coming up to meet him and his shotgun falling from his grasp as the boxes collapsed on top of him, all of this inside a roar of sound that was like a locomotive engine blowing apart, like an artillery barrage marching across a frozen rice paddy south of the Yalu River.

The shooting stopped as quickly as it had begun. The air was filled with smoke and lint and dust and tiny pieces of fiberboard. In the light from the hallway door, he could see two of Sholokoff’s men standing in the drift of smoke, one with a revolver, the other with a semiautomatic carbine that was fitted with a skeleton stock. He realized that Pam Tibbs was down, somewhere behind several crates of wine bottles that were broken and draining onto the floor. He could not see either Krill or Anton Ling. He found his shotgun among the cardboard boxes and propped the butt against the floor and used it to raise himself to one knee, his side and back on fire.

He saw the silhouette of a small man go across the doorway at the head of the stairs. “Frank?” a voice with a Russian accent said. “What’s happening down there?”

“We nailed the sheriff and his deputy,” Frank said. “I’ve got everything under control.”

“Are they dead?” the man with the Russian accent said.

“I’m not sure, sir.”

“Then be sure. Kill them. I want to see their heads.”

“You want to see their-”

“I want you to bring me their heads,” the man with the Russian accent said.

“Where’s Collins, sir?” Frank asked.

“Somewhere in the house. You finish down there and come around behind him. This is your opportunity to redeem yourself. Do not disappoint me, Frank.”

Frank raised the carbine with the wire stock to his shoulder and began firing at random all over the cellar, the bullets notching the stone walls, whanging off the cell doors, splintering the cases of wine that were bleeding pools of burgundy on the floor. With one knee for support, Hackberry raised the twelve-gauge and fired at the two men who stood at the bottom of the stairs. Most of the pattern struck a wood post, and the rest of the load flattened harmlessly against a wall behind the stairs.

Hackberry tried to work the pump and hold the shotgun with one hand, but instead of ejecting the spent shell, the mechanism jammed, and the spent shell was crimped sideways between the bolt and the chamber. In the gloom, he saw Pam sitting flatly on her buttocks behind a stack of rubber tires, her legs stretched out straight in front of her. There was a bullet wound in her back and what appeared to be an exit wound in the top of her left arm. She was trying to free her. 357 from her holster, but her hand kept fluttering on the grips and the leather strap fastened at the base of the hammer.

“Throw out your piece, Sheriff Holland,” Frank said. “I’ll talk with Mr. Sholokoff. He’s a businessman. This doesn’t have to end badly. Our common enemy up there is that smelly son of a bitch Jack Collins. Why take his weight?”

Hackberry’s side was throbbing, his face breaking with sweat. He could hear glass crunching under the boots of Sholokoff’s men as they began working their way carefully toward the pile of tires behind which Pam Tibbs had taken cover.

“Think about it, Sheriff,” Frank said. “The people you’re trying to rescue down here are killers. They murdered a guy who tried to treat them in a kindly way. Yeah, that’s right. Mike was his name. He was a good guy. He’s lying dead on the floor now, with shoestrings wrapped around his throat. How about it, Sheriff? How many guys get a second chance like this?”

Frank had grown cavalier about Krill and the Asian woman. When Anton Ling gathered herself up from the floor with the Air-weight. 38 five-round Smith amp; Wesson in her hand, Frank’s expression seemed amused, taking her inventory, his eyes sliding over her blood-streaked shift, the bruises on her face and arms and shoulders, the gash in her lower lip.

“I had a Chinese bitch of my own once,” Frank said. “Play your cards right and I might keep you around.”

Her first shot hit him an inch above the groin; the second one entered his mouth and exited an inch above the neatly etched hairline on the back of his neck.

His friend dropped his semiautomatic to the floor and lifted his hands in the air just before Anton Ling shot him in the heart.

Upstairs, the Thompson began firing again without letup, the rounds thudding into walls all over the house, the casings dancing on the floors, as though Jack Collins had declared war on all things that were level or square or plumb or that possessed any degree of geometric integrity.