Feast Day of Fools

CHAPTER EIGHT

Danny Boy Lorca’s home was not so much a house as a collection of buildings and shacks and pole sheds in or under which he cooked his food or ate or slept or worked or got drunk. He smoked his own meat and grew his own vegetables, did his own repairs on his army-surplus flatbed truck, and washed his clothes in an outdoor bathtub and dried them on a smooth-wire fence. He seldom locked his doors, except on a shed whose walls were layered like armor plate from the roof to the ground with chrome hubcaps. The interior of the shed had nothing to do with mechanized vehicles. It was there that he kept the cases of Corona and the gallon bottles of Bacardi and Oso Negro he bought in Mexico and brought back into the States through a ravine where seventeenth-century Spaniards had carved Christian crosses on the rocks to commemorate a battle in which they had slain dozens of Indians.

When Danny Boy drank, he did it methodically and with dedication, his time frame open-ended, his progress from the first drink to the last as steady and unrelenting and disciplined as anyone’s can be while he is systematically sawing himself apart. His benders lasted from a few days to a few weeks, and they always commenced when a clock inside him would go off without warning and a voice would whisper, It’s time. Danny Boy never argued with the voice. He would fill a bucket with crushed ice he bought from a filling station down the road, unlock the shed where he kept his beer and liquor, and stuff a dozen bottles of Corona into the ice. Then he would sit down at a plank table that overlooked the miles of ancient topography to the south, pour three inches of Bacardi into a jelly glass, and snap the cap off a Corona, the foam sliding down the bottle neck and wrapping around his wrist like a white snake.

The first drink produced the second, then the third, and eventually he would lose count of his consumption and slip into a blackout in which his motor control still functioned but his soul went somewhere else. When his supply in the shed was gone, he would panhandle on the streets or swamp out bars in exchange for alcohol, sleeping in alleys or on the floor of a jail cell. The pattern never changed. The first two days of his bender were memorable. The rest of it was a void that he learned about later from police officers and bailiffs.

It was four A.M. when he began his current bender at the plank table behind his house. The sky was spangled with stars, the desert floor silvery and pale green and rustling with forms of life that no one saw in the daytime. The visions he had of the land and its great alluvial vastness were always a puzzle to him. Sometimes he thought he saw dinosaurs rearing their long necks out of a marshy bog, great tendrils of vegetation and root systems hanging from their mouths, while people wearing animal skins squatted by campfires up in the rocks. Someone had told him that his visions were nonsense, that dinosaurs were extinct long before man appeared on the planet. Danny Boy did not argue with his detractors. How could he? Even though he had once claimed the powers of a shaman, he had hidden, as a coward would, while a defenseless man was tortured to death. Any powers he had possessed had been taken from him and surely given to someone else. Danny Boy did not contend with his fate. He had failed. A shaman did not fear either this world or the next. But if his power was gone, why was he experiencing another vision, in this instance a figure walking up the long alluvial plain toward him, a man who seemed made of sticks? The figure was wearing a pale wide-brimmed hat and a shapeless business suit, the cuffs of his trousers stuffed inside the tops of his cowboy boots, an old-style holster slung at an angle on his hip, brass cartridges inserted in the leather ammunition loops.

Danny Boy watched the figure draw nearer, the toes of his boots cracking through the shell of baked clay along the streambed, the sky behind him a royal purple, the mesquite and pinon trees on the hillsides alive with birds that only minutes ago had been sleeping. Danny Boy drank the rum from his jelly glass and lifted the Corona bottle and swallowed until he could no longer taste the rum in his mouth, until his tongue was dead and his chest was warm and empty of fear. He rubbed at his eyes with the back of his wrist, hoping that when he stared back down the slope, the figure would be gone, just another gargoyle that took up temporary residence in Danny Boy’s dreams and went away.

“Some people say insomnia is a disorder. I say it’s not,” the man said, the wind ruffling the brim of his hat and fanning open his coat over his flat stomach. “I say it’s a mark of somebody who sees things as they are.”

Danny Boy remained silent, his face as square and expressionless as a stone carving, his shoulders slumped, his hands resting palms down on the table, like animal paws.

“You know who I am?” the man asked.

Danny Boy seemed to think about the question. “Maybe,” he replied. “But probably not. I get things mixed up in my head sometimes.”

“It doesn’t make any difference. I’m here. That’s all that counts. It’s a fine spot to stand on, too. What a vista.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Out yonder.” The man looked over his shoulder and pointed at a distant spot on the horizon.

“Where you’re pointing at is Mexico.”

“I get around.”

“Why you carrying a pistol?”

“For snakes and such. You getting a jump on the morning or tapering off from last night? You look like you got rode hard and put away wet.”

Danny Boy thought about what the man had said. “I reckon some people’s ways ain’t the best,” he replied. He looked without focus at the tops of his hands and at the grain in the table’s planks. He kept waiting for the visitor to speak, but he didn’t. “You want a drink?”

“I’m not keen on alcohol. Can I sit down?”

This time it was Danny who didn’t speak. He felt the visitor’s eyes roving over his face in the silence. “You spend some time in the prize ring?” the visitor asked.

“I was a club fighter.”

“You took some hits.”

“Not from fighting other pugs. We traveled from town to town, like wrestlers do. The owner wheeled the fights any way he wanted. We all knew each other and slept at the same motel.”

“So what happened to your face?”

“For a hundred bucks, locals could go three rounds with me. I got half of the hundred to let them go the full three. I got sixty-five if I let them work me over.” He tried to smile when he spoke, the scar tissue in his eyebrows stretching his eyes into the shape of a Chinaman’s. “They’d knock my mouthpiece into the seats. All the time I was holding them up, and they’d be hitting me with everything they had. Their gloves would be shiny with my blood, and all the time they’d be thinking how they busted up a pro.”

“What you did back then isn’t important. You’re not an ordinary guy.” The visitor turned and looked behind him, down the slope, his gaze lifting into the stars. Then he looked at Danny Boy again. “What do you see out yonder?”

“Rocks and sand. A desert. Sometimes bad people bringing dope through the ravines.”

“I’m not an ordinary fellow, either, so don’t talk down to me. I came a long way to see you. I’m going to sit down now. But don’t you disrespect me again.”

“I don’t know why you’re talking to me like this,” Danny Boy said.

“Because you just lied to me.”

Danny Boy watched his visitor raise one foot over the plank seat and sit down at the table, his body all angles, like coat hangers, his holstered pistol binding against his belt and thigh, the leather creaking. “I see an ocean sometimes,” Danny Boy said. “I can hear the waves in the wind. Or maybe it’s just the sound the wind makes in the trees. It sounds like water rushing through a canyon.”

When the visitor made no reply, Danny Boy lifted his arm and pointed. “The turtle eggs used to hatch in the sand, right at the base of those cliffs. If they hatched in the sunlight, the baby turtles would try to run to the surf before the birds got them. Sometimes I hear the sounds the turtles make when the birds have got them in their beaks. Or maybe it’s the birds squeaking.”

“Is that what you see now?”

“Not no more. I see sand and cactus. I ain’t got no power now. You’re him, ain’t you?”

“Depends on who you mean.”

“Him.”

“You lost me. Some folks get around, but I get around a lot. Is that what you mean, a guy who gets around?”

“There ain’t anything here you want.”

“I’ll decide that.”

Danny Boy watched his visitor’s eyes and hands in the starlight. “I’m gonna put my jacket on. It’s cold. At least for this time of year,” he said.

“Why should I care what you do?”

“I just thought I’d say.”

“Your name was in the newspaper. You saw a man tortured to death. He was a corrupt Mexican cop. The man who killed him was named Krill. I aim to find him.”

Danny Boy lowered his eyes. “Did you hear me?”

“I don’t know where he’s at.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

Danny Boy felt his fingers curl up and touch the heels of his hands. His mouth and throat went dry, and he could feel a stone drop in his chest and settle in the bottom of his stomach.

“Cat got your tongue?” the visitor said.

“I hid in a ravine while he killed that fellow.”

Danny Boy pulled the sleeve of his denim jacket up on one arm, then forgot what he was doing and stared emptily at his visitor. There were lumps on the visitor’s face, as though insects had fed on it.

“Is that why you’re a drunk, or were you a drunk before you hid in the ravine?”

“I don’t make no claims about myself. I am what I am.”

“So what are you?”

“What you’re looking at, I reckon.”

“A drunk Indian?”

Danny Boy felt a pain in one temple; it ran down through his eye like an electric current, obscuring his vision, as though a cataract had suddenly formed on the lens. “This is my place. Everything you see here, it’s mine. It’s where I grew up.”

“What’s that mean?”

Danny Boy couldn’t formulate an adequate answer to the question, but he tried. “My daddy drilled a deep-water well with an old Ford engine and grew corn and squash and melons. We sold them at the farmers’ market every Saturday. We’d go to the picture show in the afternoon and sneak in our own popcorn and Kool-Aid in a quart jar. My mother was alive back then. We all went into town together in our truck, with us kids sitting on the flatbed.”

“If there’s some kind of allegorical meaning, it eludes me.”

“You ain’t welcome here.”

“I want the man named Krill. Most of the illegals in this county come through your land or the Asian woman’s. So get used to me being around. Krill hurt a friend of mine. His name is Noie Barnum.”

“The guy named Krill ain’t your problem.”

“Explain that to me.”

Danny Boy reached for his bottle of Corona, but the visitor pulled it from his hand. “You shouldn’t drink any more,” the visitor said.

“Look out yonder.”

“At what?”

“Them.”

The visitor turned and gazed down the slope at the scrub brush and yuccas and mesquite trees rustling in the breeze. Then he stared at the mauve tint in the darkness of the sky and at the silhouettes of the mesas and hills and at the stars disappearing into the false dawn. “You see turtles out there?” the visitor said.

“No, I see the women and girls who been following you.”

“What’d you say?”

“All them Asian women and girls you killed. They’re standing just yonder. The Ghost Trail runs right through here. My people keep them safe now. After I hid from the man named Krill, I couldn’t see the Ghost Trail no more. But now I can.”

“I’d think twice before I ran my mouth to the wrong fellow.”

“They’re pointing at you. There’s nine of them. They want to know why you stole their lives. You didn’t have nothing to gain. They were begging when you did it. They had their fingers knitted together like they were in church. They were crying.”

The visitor reached out and tapped Danny Boy on the cheek with the flat of his hand. “I can hurt you, fellow.”

“Put a bullet in me. I was on Sugar Land Farm. You cain’t do no worse than has already been done to me.”

“You know the line ‘Don’t tempt the Lord thy God’?”

“But you ain’t Him.”

The visitor rose to his feet. The flap of his coat was hooked back on the butt of his revolver. He was breathing hard through his nose, his gaze wandering from one object to the next, as though his thoughts were of no avail to him. He stared at Danny Boy. “Sheriff Holland spat on me once. Did you know that?”

“No, sir.”

“You know what it feels like when another man spits on you? I’m not talking about a woman, because they do that sort of thing when a man offends their vanity. I’m talking about a man doing it. You know what that feels like?”

“No, sir.”

“Sheriff Holland did that to me. I could have shot him then, but I didn’t. Know why?”

“No, sir.”

“Because I’m a merciful man. Because when I deliver Sheriff Holland up to judgment, it won’t be the result of an emotional reaction. It will be under circumstances of my choosing.”

Danny Boy nodded, his gaze turned inward.

“Tell the sheriff I was here,” the visitor said. “Tell him I keep my word. Tell him he’ll know when it’s my ring. Can you keep all that in your head?”

“Yes, sir, I can,” Danny Boy said.

“That’s good. You’re a good listener.” Then the visitor poured the jelly glass half full of rum and picked it up from the table and threw it into Danny Boy’s face.

That same morning, Hackberry went to the office early, his mind clear after a good night’s sleep, the wind cool out of the north, the broken sidewalks dark with night damp, the hills outside town a soft green against an ink-wash sky. He could smell food cooking at the Eat Cafe down the street. Pam Tibbs met him at the back entrance of the department. “Danny Boy Lorca just came in half drunk and asked me to lock him up,” she said.

“You mean he wants to sleep it off?”

“No, he wants to be locked up. He says he had a visitor this morning.”

Hackberry walked through the hallway and hung his hat on a wood peg in his office. “I hate to ask,” he said.

“The guy didn’t give his name. Danny Boy said he was carrying a pistol. He was wearing a suit and a hat and beat-up needle-nose boots. He said he’d be looking you up and you’d know when it was his ring.”

“Why is Collins pestering Danny Boy?”

“That’s not all that happened this morning. I was down at the cafe, and two SUVs loaded with some cowboy cutie-pies came in. Stonewashed jeans, mustaches, two or three days of beard, stylized haircuts. They looked like porn actors.”

“Like the two guys Collins popped?”

“The guy in charge knew the waitress. He had on a blue suit and a silver western shirt without a tie, like he was one of the boys. After they left, I asked her who he was. She said that was Temple Dowling.”

“Forget about Dowling.”

She closed the office door and approached his desk. “It didn’t quite end there. I heard him talking in the booth. I heard him use your name.”

“We need to get to the point, Pam.”

“He called you a drunk.”

“That’s what I used to be.”

“That’s not all of it. I heard him whispering, then all of them laughed.”

“Blow it off. These guys aren’t worth talking about.”

“Then one guy said, ‘He brought clap home to his wife?’ Dowling said something I couldn’t hear, and they all laughed again, loud enough that everybody in the cafe turned around and looked at them.”

“What that man said isn’t true. But I don’t care whether he says it or not. If he does it in my presence, I’ll do something about it. In the meantime, let’s forget it and talk to Danny Boy.” Hackberry took the ring of cell keys off a peg next to his hat.

“I followed them into the parking lot,” Pam said.

“Did you hit somebody?”

“No.”

“All right, then let it go.”

“I took the motormouth aside, the one who said something about clap. He was the driver of one of the SUVs. I told him I wasn’t going to cite him for his broken taillights, but if I ever heard him slander your name again, I was going to beat the living shit out of him.”

“He had two broken taillights?”

“He did after I broke them.”

“Pam?”

“What?”

“What can I say?”

“I don’t know.”

He stepped closer to her, towering over her, and cupped his hand around the back of her neck. Her skin felt hot against his palm. He could smell the shampoo in her hair and the heat in her body and feel the hardness of the muscles in her neck. “You have to stop protecting me,” he said.

“You’re my boss, and I won’t allow white trash to tell lies about you.”

“You really know how to jump-start a man’s day,” he said.

She lifted her eyes to his. Her mouth looked like a flower that had crumpled in on itself in the shade. “Think so?” she said.

He removed his hand from the back of her neck and tried not to swallow. There was a thickness in his throat, a tightness in his chest, and a weakness in his loins that he did not want to recognize. “Why would Collins bother Danny Boy?” he said hoarsely.

“He wants to hurt you.”

“It’s that simple?”

“You bet your ass,” she replied.

They climbed up the spiral steel stairs in the back of the building and walked down the corridor to a cell whose outer wall was a checkerboard pattern of steel bands and cast-iron plates that had been painted white and were now crosshatched with scratch marks and stained by orange rust around the rivets. Danny Boy was looking out the window when they approached the cell. When he turned around, his head and neck were framed against the window, his body enveloped in shadow, so that his head seemed to rest, decapitated, upon a plate. “I don’t want out,” he said.

“Can’t lock up a man who hasn’t committed a crime,” Hackberry said.

“I’ll drink if I’m back on the street,” Danny Boy said.

“Incarceration is not the best way to find sobriety,” Hackberry said.

“I’m not like you. There’s still liquor at my house. I’ll drink it if I can get back to it. In a few days, I can go without it.”

“Was Preacher Jack Collins at your house?”

“If that’s his name.”

“Who’d he say he was?”

“He didn’t. I said ‘You’re him.’” “What did he say to that?”

“Nothing. Like it wasn’t important. Or it wasn’t important that a guy like me knew. When I told him the girls he’d killed were out there in the desert pointing at him, he told me to watch my mouth.”

“What else did he say?”

“He’s after the guy named Krill. He thought I might know where he was at.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That I hid when that fellow was murdered.”

“You listen to me,” Hackberry said. “You think I should feel guilty because I hid from the Chinese soldiers who were trying to kill me? You remember the name of General Patton?”

“No, who is he?”

“He was a famous military leader. He said you don’t win wars by giving your life for your country. You win them by making the other son of a bitch give his life.” Hackberry tried to smile and lift Danny Boy’s spirits, but it did no good. “What else did your visitor say?” he asked.

“He’d be looking you up.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. He threw a glass of rum in my face.”

Pam Tibbs tapped her ring on the steel door in order to direct Danny Boy’s attention to her. “Jack Collins has a way of showing up in people’s lives when they’re unarmed and vulnerable,” she said. “He wants to rob people of their self-respect because he has none for himself. Don’t be his victim.”

“Listen to her,” Hackberry said. “You’re a fine man. You have an illness in you that’s not your fault. One day you’ll wake up and decide you don’t want any more of the old life. That’s when you’ll start getting rid of all the problems that kept you drunk. In the meantime, you’re going to take a shower and put on some fresh jeans and a sport shirt I have in my closet, and then you and I are going to have a steak-and-egg breakfast down at the cafe.”

“I saw the Oriental girls standing in the desert. There was nine of them. They’re waiting for him,” Danny Boy said.

“You saw them when you were drinking?”

“It don’t matter what I was doing. They were there. Collins knew about my visions. He knew what was in them. No, that’s not exactly right. He knows things don’t happen in order, like past, present, and future. He knows things happen all at the same time, all around us, people we cain’t see are still living out their lives right next to us. Not many people know that.”

“Collins is a fraud. Don’t pay attention to what he says,” Hackberry said.

“If he’s a fraud, who’s he pretending to be? You ever know anybody like him?”

Pam Tibbs looked at Hackberry and raised her eyebrows. She took the ring of keys from his hand, unlocked the cell, and swung the door back heavily on its hinges, the bottom scraping the concrete. “Time to hit the shower and get something to eat, Danny,” she said.

By eleven A.M. the sun was bright and hot outside Hackberry’s office window, the blocklike sandstone courthouse on the square stark against a blue sky, the courthouse lawn green and cool-looking under the shade trees. A church group had opened a secondhand sale on the sidewalk in front of the Luna Theater, and people were going in and out of the courthouse and the old bank on the corner much as they had in an era when the town was supported by a viable agrarian economy. It was a good day, the kind when boys used to cut school to go bobber-fishing or tubing down a river. It was not a day when he wanted to deal with the unpleasant realities of his job or the vestiges of his past. But when a black SUV pulled to the curb in front of his office and Temple Dowling got out, followed by three of his men, Hackberry knew exactly how the rest of the morning would go.

There was a class of people who always supported law and order. They believed that police officers and sheriff’s deputies and the law enforcement agencies of the United States government constituted a vast servile army with the same raison d’etre as insurance carriers, tax accountants, medical providers, and gardeners-namely, to take care of problems that busy and productive people shouldn’t be concerned with.

Hackberry watched Temple Dowling stride toward the front door of the building, coatless, his silver shirt crinkling like tin, a martial glint in his eyes, his creamy complexion moist in the heat. But it was the man’s lips that Hackberry couldn’t get out of his mind. They seemed to have the coloration and texture of the rubber in a pencil eraser. They belonged on the mouth of a man who was cruel, whose sentiments were manufactured, whose physical appetites were visceral and base and infantile all at the same time. Watching him stride up the walk, Hackberry decided he had been too kind in assigning Dowling and his peers to that innocent and insular group who treated police officers as they would loyal servants. Temple Dowling, like his father, the senator, was a man who knew the value of the whip and how to turn the screw in order to bend others to his will. The fates may have given Temple Dowling a face that would never allow him to ascend to the throne. But Hackberry guessed that in Dowling’s view, the power behind the throne was gift enough.

Hackberry got up from his chair and met Dowling at the entrance to the building. “What’s your problem?” he said.

“I have a grocery list of them,” Dowling said.

The three men standing behind him had come to a stop. They wore western hats and sunglasses and had the physiques of men who worked out regularly in health clubs. They wore mustaches and a growth of beard that Hackberry guessed was deliberately maintained rather than shaved entirely off. Their hands were folded in front of them, their faces turned at a deferential angle so Hackberry would take note that they were not staring at him from behind their shades. One man had a puncture in his cheek that looked like a hole someone had made by inserting his thumb into putty. One man wore a tattoo inside the growth of beard on his throat. The third man had facial skin that was as dark as saddle leather and flecked with scars that resembled tiny pieces of brown string.

“Lose the entourage and come in,” Hackberry said.

“These men go wherever I go.”

“Not here they don’t.”

“Why do I continue to have trouble with you, Sheriff?”

“Because you asked for it.”

“I had to replace both the brake lights on my vehicle this morning.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. That’s too bad.”

“You’re aware your deputy broke them?”

“Be advised I support my deputy in whatever she does. I’m pretty busy. You want to stand out here in the sun or come inside?”

“Here will be just fine,” Dowling said. He wiped his forehead and upper lip with a handkerchief, then shook it out and wiped the back of his neck. He gazed down the street at the courthouse, a slick of sweat on one cheek, his eyes intense with the words he was preparing to speak. Hackberry realized Dowling’s next remarks would be part of a performance that was not for him but for his employees. “I’ve lost two good men to a psychopath who should have been mulch the first time you saw him. This same man has murdered an untold number of people in this county, your county, but you don’t seem to have a clue where he is, nor do you seem bothered by your ignorance. Instead of conducting an investigation, your personnel are vandalizing people’s SUVs. I understand that mediocrity is a way of life in a place like this, but I won’t abide incompetence when it comes to the welfare of my people or the security of my country. We’ll do your work for you, but you need to stay out of our way.”

“If you interfere in a homicide investigation, you’re going to find yourself in handcuffs, Mr. Dowling.”

“My father said something about you, Sheriff, that maybe you should hear. He said you were one of those rare politicians to whom nobody had to pay money in order to corrupt. All they needed to do was appeal to your Don Quixote complex. He said the only payment you required was a chance to play the role of the knight-errant so you could self-destruct and absolve yourself of your petty sins. I think my father read you like a book.”

“Tell you what, I changed my mind about something I told my chief deputy this morning. I said I couldn’t care less if you tried to slander my name. But on second thought, some might think the elements in your lies refer to my dead wife, Rie, and the nature of my relationship with her. You did make those remarks, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t have to make them. Everyone who knew you already has.”

“I don’t like to humiliate a man in front of his employees, but for you, I’m going to make an exception. I’m probably in the top of the eighth inning or the bottom of the ninth, which means I don’t have a lot to lose. You ever play much baseball, Mr. Dowling? If you crowd the plate with the wrong pitcher, you can bet the next pitch will be a forkball at the head, the kind that hits you like a dull-bladed guillotine.” Hackberry smiled pleasantly and winked at him. “What do you think about that?”

“Considering the source? Not very damn much,” Dowling said.

Hackberry went back inside his office, sat down at his desk, and did not look outside the window until he heard the SUV drive down the street. But the anger that had bloomed in his chest would not go away. A half hour later, the phone on his desk rang. He looked at the caller ID and answered. “?Que tal?”

“?Que tal?” Ethan Riser repeated.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“I know what it means.”

“Say what’s on your mind.”

“This is a personal call and off the record.”

“I’m the sheriff of this county. I’m sitting at my office desk, on the job, in my official capacity. Nothing that occurs here is off the record.”

“You sound a little short.”

“What do you want, Ethan?”

“I’m taking early retirement. I wanted to tell you that. Plus a couple of other things.”

“Like what?”

“You’re in the way.”

“Say again?”

“This guy Noie Barnum is the Holy Grail. We want him, Krill and his people want him, Al Qaeda wants him, Temple Dowling wants him, and now Josef Sholokoff wants him.”

“Why would a Russian porn dealer risk his immigration status by going into espionage?”

“Josef Sholokoff has been spreading drug and porn addiction around the country since he arrived in Brighton Beach. Why should doing business with third-world bedbugs bother him?”

“You said I was in the way.”

“Guys like you are not team players. You’re a hardhead, you don’t chug pud, and you cause major amounts of trouble. Government agencies might say otherwise, but they don’t care for guys like you.”

“What difference should that make to me?”

“They won’t have your back, bud.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“I’m at a driving range. I wish I’d done more of this a long time ago.”

“When do you retire?”

“Three months, more or less. Yeah, about three months.”

“You’re retiring but you’re not sure when?”

“I’m terminal.”

Hackberry leaned forward on his desk. Before he could speak, Riser cut him off. “I used to smoke three packs a day. Five years ago I quit and thought I’d gotten a free pass. I went in for a blister on my nose last week, and the doc said it was already in my liver and pancreas and had reached the brain.”

“I’m sorry, Ethan.”

“There’s something I never told you about my history with the Bureau. You remember right after 9/11 when a planeload of bin Laden’s relatives was allowed to leave the country without being detained, except for the fifteen minutes we were allowed to interview them on the tarmac? I was one of the agents who went on board the plane. I should have resigned in protest then. But I didn’t. I’ve always regretted that. Take this for a fact. When you get to the end of the track, you don’t regret the things you did. You regret the things you didn’t do. You’re a good man, Hack. But good men are usually admired in retrospect, after they’re safely dead.”

After he had hung up, Hackberry sat for a long time in his chair, the right side of his face numb, a sound like an electrical short humming in his ear.