THAT EVENING I SAT by Wyatt Dixon’s bed at St. Pat’s Hospital and tried to figure out the strange processes that must have governed his thinking. Had he called me rather than 911 only because my number was automatically activated by the redial button? Or had he factored me into his life as some kind of symbiotic brother-in-arms? And, more essentially, how could a man who was so brave be capable of so much evil? He had perhaps come within fifteen minutes of dying, had been in surgery four hours, and now lay in traction, his thigh encased in plaster, refusing painkillers, because, he explained, “Dope puts un-Christian-like thoughts in my brain cells.”
He stonewalled the cops, stating he had no idea who had attacked him or where the attackers had gone. “What I have told you officers is just a picture from the other side of life in this land of the free and home of the brave,” he said. “It is like many a sad situation in the world of dim lights, thick smoke, and loud, loud music, where honky-tonk angels and men with broken hearts play. Sirs, I have came often upon these scenes of destruction, and I heard the groans of the dying but I didn’t hear nobody pray.”
The cops put away their notebooks in disgust and left the room.
Except for Darrel McComb, who stood at the foot of the bed, snapping a piece of gum between his molars. “You a fan of Vern Gosdin and Hank Williams? Don’t bother answering that. I just wanted you to be aware I know where all that cornpone crap comes from,” Darrel said.
“In my correspondence with President Bush, I have asked him to put aside extra money for lawmen such as yourself. While the rest of us is sleeping safe in our beds, you are out there fighting the criminals that is turning our great country into a dungheap. Even when I was standing dirty and hungry on the punishment barrel in Huntsville Pen, I knowed it was men like you that was protecting the nation from the likes of me. You have kept the Stars and Stripes popping smartly atop every institution in our fine nation, including the jails where this lonely cowboy slept in shackles and chains. I say God bless you, noble sir.”
“You listen, you hillbilly moron,” Darrel said. “I know you broke into Greta Lundstrum’s house. You think you’re some kind of one-man intelligence operation? Here’s a big flash for you. Meltdowns and ignorant peckerwoods don’t get to be intelligence operatives. You got the names of Tex Barker and Lynwood Peeples out of her house. Those are the guys who buried that shank in your thigh. They were carrying a bagful of tools to torture you with. Is it starting to add up for you now? You’ve stuck your dork in the wall socket, Gomer. That means you start cooperating with us or we’re going to let them recycle you into fish chum.”
Wyatt stared at Darrel McComb, his mouth twisting with each word Darrel spoke, his eyes blinking with feigned awe. “You have done convinced me of the fact you are not an ordinary policeman. I am contacting President Bush immediately to see if he can find federal employment for you. I have never seen such a shameful waste of mental talents.”
“Who’s Mabus?” Darrel asked.
Wyatt started to speak, then was silent. A strange transformation seemed to take place in his face. He looked straight ahead, his eyes thoughtful, his mouth compressed. He raised his right hand off the sheet and ticked a callus with his thumbnail, his eyes uplifted at Darrel now. “I ain’t sure who he is. But I got a notion he’s a whole lot bigger than any little shithouse operation you got around here. I seen that name wrote inside a-”
“Inside what?” Darrel said.
“I need my chemical cocktail. I’m done talking with you,” Wyatt said, his sardonic attitude gone now, his expression sullen.
After Darrel McComb left the room, a nurse brought in a glass containing the orange medicine that smelled as if it had been dipped out of a settling pond at a sewage works. Wyatt drank the glass empty and continued to stare into space.
“You saw the name ‘Mabus’ written inside what, Wyatt?” I said.
“A pentagram. The woman who wrote it there knows what a pentagram means, too. Her daddy was a preacher.”
“The sign of the devil?”
“I ain’t got no more to say on it. God, my leg hurts. Them boys who visited me was a pair of mean motor scooters, wasn’t they?”
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Saturday, I was Johnny American Horse’s best man at his and Amber Finley’s wedding on the lawn of a small white woodframe church with a tiny belfry, set against the backdrop of the Mission Mountains, rising like ancient glaciers straight out of the green earth into the clouds. The ceremony was conducted by both a Methodist minister and an Indian shaman who was the great-grandson of the Lakota mystic Black Elk. Amber wore a white dress with frills on it and purple suede cowboy boots, and looked radiant and happy and beautiful in the sunshine. Johnny, conservative as always, wore what was evidently his only suit, one that brought back memories I did not want to entertain on such a fine afternoon. The suit and vest were narrow-cut, dark pinstripe, just like the suit worn by L. Q. Navarro on the night he died.
Johnny and Amber had sent out no formal invitations, but the churchyard was crowded with their friends-wranglers, feed growers from the Jocko Valley, musicians, log haulers, university professors, hard-core drunks, organic farmers, writers and artists, Indians from the Salish, Northern Cheyenne, Crow, and Blackfeet reservations, and weirded-out, mind-altered people who still believed the year was 1968.
The reception was in a saloon, the dinner a pig and half of a buffalo barbecued over a pit of flaming wood dug in a grove of cottonwoods. The orchestra was a western string band put together by my son, Lucas, and the dance was held on a cement pad under a lilac sky, the snow on the Missions red in the sunset, the music of Bob Wills and Rose Maddox floating out over a countryside knee-deep in alfalfa and pooled with duck ponds.
Everyone important in Amber’s life was there. Except for her father, United States Senator Romulus Finley.
SENATOR FINLEY was at my office by 8 A.M. Monday. When he didn’t find me there, he went to the courthouse, where I was involved in a trial, and caught me in the corridor outside the courtroom. “What in the goddamn hell do you think you’re doing, son?” he said, his grip biting into my arm.
“I’d appreciate your taking your hand off my person,” I said.
“A murderer just married my daughter, and you helped him do it.”
“I’m not going to ask you again,” I said.
He released me and took a step back. “I won’t put up with this bullshit, Mr. Holland.”
“I think you embarrass yourself, sir,” I said.
“Say that again?”
“Your daughter is a good person. Why don’t you show her a little respect?”
“Son, I’m just about a half inch from busting you between the lights.”
“My father was a stringer-bead welder on gaslines all over the Southwest. He was a fine man and called me ‘son.’ Other men don’t.”
“Have it your way. As far as I’m concerned, Johnny American Horse is a subversive and a traitor. He’s taken advantage of my daughter’s naïveté and you, an educated man and officer of the court, have helped him do it. I won’t put up with it.”
He walked back down the corridor toward the courthouse entrance, his leather soles loud, his meaty shoulders and neck framed against the light outside.
I should have dismissed the insult, even the implied threat, as the expression of wounded pride in a childish man. But there was something about Finley that was hard to abide, a prototypical personality any southerner recognizes-one characterized by a combination of self-satisfaction, stupidity, and a suggestion of imminent violence, all of it glossed over with a veneer of moral and patriotic respectability.
I followed him down the sidewalk through the maples on the courthouse lawn to a steel-gray limousine with charcoal-tinted windows that was parked by the curb. He opened the back door to get in, and on the far side of the leather seat I saw a man in his fifties who had a good-natured face, blond hair that was white on the tips, a smile that was both familiar and likable. His eyes were friendly and warm, his teeth almost perfect. There were gin roses in his face, but they gave his countenance a vulnerability and consequently a greater humanity. I was sure I knew him and at the same time equally sure we had never met.
Romulus Finley started to raise a remonstrative finger at me, but his companion leaned over so he could look at both of us and said, “Now, now, let’s don’t have this. Mr. Holland, take a ride with us. We’ll have coffee at a dandy place on the river.”
“Thank you just the same, but I have an issue here with Senator Finley,” I replied.
“Whatever it is, we can work it out,” Finley’s companion replied. He stretched out his arm and handed me a business card that was inserted between two of his fingers. “My home phone is on the back. I’m impressed with your legal reputation. Your father died in a natural gas blowout down in Texas, didn’t he? I bet he’d be mighty proud of you today.”
“What did you say about my father?”
“Call me,” he said. “I’d like to help you cut through some of the problems you’re encountering.”
He was still smiling at me when Finley got in the limo and closed the door. I stared dumbly at the tinted back window of the limo as it drove away, then looked at the business card in my hand. The name on it was KARSTEN MABUS.
THAT EVENING, Temple and I fixed sliced chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches and iced tea and fruit salad for dinner and took it out on the side gallery to eat. The sky was blue above the valley, the sunlight a pale yellow on the hillsides, and hawks floated above the trees up in the saddles. But I couldn’t concentrate on either our conversation or the loveliness of the evening. I wiped my mouth with a napkin and pushed away my plate.
“Want to tell me what happened today?” Temple said.
“I had a run-in with Senator Finley. He seems to think I’m responsible for his daughter marrying Johnny American Horse.”
“Tell him to grow up.”
“I think I did, but I don’t remember. I was pretty angry.”
“So that’s what’s been on your mind all day?”
“Finley was with another man. I’d swear I know him but I don’t know from where. He gave me his business card.”
I took the card out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the pine-knot table where she could read it. Unconsciously, I wiped my fingers on my shirt.
“Mabus? He’s the CEO of a chemical company?” she said.
“He knew about my father’s death on the pipeline.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. There’s something disturbing about this guy.”
“You’re listening to Wyatt Dixon-that stuff about a pentagram. Dixon’s a nutjob, Billy Bob.”
“Maybe.” I got up from the table and leaned against the railing on the gallery. A string of white-tailed deer were working their way down a switchback trail into the pasture, their summer coats gold in the shadows. “What right does this guy Mabus have to mention my father’s death?”
“So tomorrow morning we check him out. Now sit down and eat,” she said.
I thought about Johnny and Amber’s wedding and how much Johnny, in his pinstripe suit and vest, had reminded me of L. Q. Navarro. “You believe in premonitions?” I said.
“No,” she said.
“I don’t, either,” I said.
THE NEXT MORNING, as I was leaving for work, I found a note under the windshield wiper of my Avalon. It read:
Billy Bob,
Go to Sheep Flats up on the Blackfoot at 9:00 A.M. today. I’ll be parked off the dirt track, down in the trees. Drive past my vehicle, then walk back along the riverbank and up the incline to my vehicle. Carry a fishing rod. Do not mention our meeting on either a cell phone or a land line.
I’ll wait for you fifteen minutes. If you’re not there, I’ll assume you’re tied up in court. Thanks,
Seth
I drove up into the Blackfoot drainage, crossed a long cement bridge over the river, then turned up a dusty road that climbed high above the river, so that down below, the water looked like a blue ribbon winding through boulders and sloping hills covered with larch and ponderosa and fir trees. I crossed over a rocky point that jutted into space, then coasted down the road into shade and a wooded, parklike area where the remains of a nineteenth-century logging camp had moldered into dark brown pulp.
I saw a Jeep Cherokee parked in the trees and a tall man in a shapeless felt hat leaning against the grille, smoking a pipe, watching the river course over the rocks down below. I did as Seth had asked and drove past the Jeep, then worked my way back on the riverbank through dry boulders and the willows that grew in the shallows, my fly rod over my shoulder.
“Have I got a tap on my phone?” I said.
“Hard to say. My guess is you probably do,” he replied.
“I don’t care for that, Seth.”
“Join the club.” He knocked his pipe clean on a rock, then pressed the ashes deep into the soil. “Let me lay it out for you. I gave the Bureau thirty days’ notice. This time next month, my wife and I will be on a passenger ship headed up to the Alaskan coast. This fall we’ll be hiking in Silver City, New Mexico. I’ll officially be an old fart. In the meantime I have to play out this American Horse situation here. You with me so far?”
“I’ll try to grab a noun here and there and work with it,” I replied. Then I looked at the cast in his eyes and regretted my flippant attitude.
He unzipped a thin vinyl satchel on the Jeep’s hood and removed a folder that contained a stack of enlarged mug shots. “You know any of these guys?” he said.
I shuffled through the photos one by one. “No, I’ve never seen them,” I said.
“All of them are either professional intelligence operatives or assassins. I didn’t say mobbed-up button men. I said assassins.”
“They work for the government?”
“No, guys like me work for the government. These characters work for people in the government. At least that’s the distinction I’ve always tried to make. I want you to talk with Amber Finley and Johnny American Horse.”
“About what?”
“I believe Amber was with Lester Antelope and the other Indians who creeped that research lab down at Stevensville. The computer files in their possession are going to get each of them killed, in the same way Lester Antelope was killed, in a way nobody even wants to think about. Tell American Horse and the Finley woman to dump whatever they have. Now, not later. They can put it in a paper bag marked ‘FBI’ and drop it in a mailbox or tie a rock on it and throw it through a window glass in the Federal Building.”
“Who’s behind this, Seth?”
“That’s like asking how original sin got started. I did two tours in Vietnam. I believed in what we were doing there. Then I spent the next thirty-five years picking snakes out of my head. My dad had a great expression. He’d say, ‘Son, if everybody agrees on it, it’s wrong.’ ”
Seth’s eyes crinkled when he grinned.
I walked back downstream to my car. When I drove back out of the main dirt road, Seth’s Jeep was gone. For a moment I thought I saw a flash of light on metal or a pair of binoculars across the river. I stopped my car and stared at the trees on the opposite bank until my eyes burned, then told myself the sunlight was simply dancing on the early morning wetness of the trees and that my eyes and mind were playing tricks on me.
TEMPLE CALLED ME at the office later in the day. “Karsten Mabus is the CEO of the parent company that owns Global Research,” she said. “He’s been in the biotech business for around twenty years. Owns homes in Arlington, Palm Beach, East Hampton, Santa Barbara, and a place he just built out on Highway Twelve. Has a degree in American Studies from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard. He never married, although he appears to be a ladies’ man. His estimated worth is over five hundred million.”
“How about a military record?”
“None.”
“Did he ever live in Texas?”
I heard her leafing through some papers. “He owns a company in Houston and one in Dallas,” she said.
“When he mentioned my father’s death, he said my father would be mighty proud of me.”
“Like he was home folks?” she said.
“That’s right.”
“According to a feature on him in The Washington Post, he was born in Minneapolis and grew up there and in Milwaukee. The article says his father was a hardware store owner and his mother a school-teacher. Except I couldn’t find any records on the family in either city.”
“What’s his connection to Finley?”
“A friend and campaign contributor, as far as I can see.”
“Do you have any idea what Global Research does?”
“They have lots of government contracts. Some of them have to do with genetically altered foods. Some of their other dealings are anybody’s guess. They’re a high-security outfit. It’s amazing their facility was successfully burglarized…Did you just hear something on your line?”
“Yeah, I think we’re tapped,” I said.
“Tapped?” she said.
“Tapped,” I said.
THAT SAME DAY Johnny American Horse and two of his workers were putting in a rail fence on a new dude ranch out on Highway 12, not far from the Idaho line, when a panel truck stopped in a rooster tail of dust and the driver, an unshaved man wearing aviator’s shades, slacks, and a dirty white shirt, got out and approached Johnny with a grin at the corner of his mouth. “Got some sportsman’s hardware to sell before I move out to California,” he said.
“Like what?” Johnny said.
The driver threw open the back door of the truck, exposing at least a dozen shotguns and rifles that were laid out on a blanket. “I’ll sell them individual or the whole bunch. Dirt cheap, brother. I’ll take pretty near any offer,” he said.
Johnny shook his head and went back to setting a post in a hole and packing crushed rock around it.
“How about you fellows?” the man asked the two white boys working with Johnny.
“Johnny doesn’t pay us that kind of money,” one of them replied.
The boys laughed. The driver of the panel truck picked up an AR-15 that was wrapped in an oilcloth, released the magazine, and pulled back the bolt to show the gun was empty. Instead, a shell ejected from the chamber. “Damn, my nephew left a round in there,” he said.
Johnny picked the shell out of the dirt and threw it inside the truck. The man held out the rifle for Johnny to examine it. “Three hundred dollars,” he said.
“It’s worth six, easy,” Johnny said.
“You know your guns.” The man tossed the rifle to Johnny.
Johnny caught it in one hand, then walked to the back of the panel truck and set the rifle down on the blanket. “I’ve said no to you once. Hate to say it again,” he said.
“No offense meant. A guy’s got to try,” the man said.
Johnny and his two employees watched the man drive away, the dust from the truck blowing across a field of timothy. The man stopped at a crossroads where several land surveyors were eating their lunch under a tree and began making the same presentation to them. Johnny lost interest in the gun seller and went back to work.
TWO DAYS LATER, a Thursday, Darrel McComb was in a bad mood. Wyatt Dixon had just checked himself out of the hospital, against medical advice, and the hospital had not informed Darrel, as it had been instructed. Also, Wyatt had continued to stonewall the investigation into the identity of his assailants, speaking in disjointed hillbilly song lyrics, treating the detectives to his idiot’s grin and feigning incredulity at the detectives’ wisdom.
The nurses and pink ladies puffed his pillows and brought him soft drinks and outdoor magazines from the gift shop and extra desserts from the dining room. In turn, he signed autographs for them as well as the plaster casts of other patients. Darrel tried to explain to the head nurse that Wyatt Dixon was a recidivist whose brain belonged in a jar of alcohol. She replied, “I don’t believe that at all. If he’s done anything bad, he’s already paid his debt to society. Why don’t you people leave him alone?”
Later that afternoon Darrel drove up to Dixon’s place on the Blackfoot, but no one was at home and Dixon’s truck was gone. The neighbor on the opposite side of the river said he believed Wyatt was at a revival up at the Indian reservation.
“Dixon at a revival?” Darrel said.
“That’s right.”
“This man is a criminal.”
“He’s a polite man who always tips his hat to my wife. Why don’t you flatfeet stop picking on him?” the neighbor said, and slammed the door in Darrel’s face.
Darrel drove up to the Indian reservation in the Jocko Valley. It wasn’t hard to find the revival. Between a grove of cottonwood trees and a small rodeo arena and pavilion where the annual summer powwows were held, a huge, open-air striped canopy flapped gently in the warm breeze, the mountains blue and jagged in the distance. Darrel parked his unmarked car in the shade of the cottonwoods and watched the people who were arriving for the revival. They were both Indian and white, poor, uneducated, with the distorted physiques of people who ate the wrong food and had the wrong habits. He wondered how people who had already been so badly treated by life could allow what little they had to be taken from them by charlatans.
He could not shake the vague sense of anger that seemed to foul his blood. Why did Wyatt Dixon bother him so much? Because he had beat the system and was back on the street, lauded by people who had no idea of the man’s violent history? Yes, that was part of it. But in his heart Darrel knew Wyatt Dixon bothered him for other reasons as well, ones that went to a central dilemma in Darrel’s life. Darrel himself, lawman and soldier, had recruited men like Dixon for military and political operations that were shameful and dishonorable in nature. The qualifications for the job had always been simple: the recruits needed only to be disposable and totally devoid of humanity. Darrel had been their mentor, feeding them patriotic Valium when in reality the men Darrel reported to would not spit on them if they were burning to death.
The sky was yellow in the west, filled with dust and rain, the air smelling of mown hay and the watermelons someone was splitting apart on a wood table. The tent was filling now, a preacher mounting a stage above the rows and rows of folding chairs. Then Darrel saw Wyatt Dixon working his way on crutches down the aisle toward a chair an usher was unfolding especially for him. Dixon wore a shirt emblazoned with blue and white stars and steel-colored eagles with thunderbolts in their talons, one dark blue pants leg split up to the hip to expose the plaster cast on his thigh. He was gripping his hat between his fingers and the handle of his crutch, his mouth like a slit in his face.
Darrel got out of the car and took a seat at the back of the tent. Next to him a tall man, wearing sandals and eyeglasses that hung on a velvet cord around his neck, was setting up a tape recorder.
“What’s going on?” Darrel asked him.
“I’m a professor at the university. I have permission to be here, if that’s what you mean,” the tall man replied.
No, that’s not what he had meant, but he didn’t pursue it. The preacher introduced himself as Elton T. Sneed, then immediately went into a histrionic sermon that Darrel could only associate with an epileptic seizure. But the preacher’s performance, the Appalachian accent and heated gasping for breath at the end of each sentence, was nothing compared to what Darrel saw and heard next.
One by one people rose from their seats at the front of the tent and began to rant and shake, their faces lifted skyward, their eyes closed as though they were experiencing orgasm. But the sounds or words coming out of their throats were like none Darrel had ever heard. Wyatt Dixon rose, too, wobbling into the aisle on his crutches, his chin jacked in the air, a staccato stream of unintelligible language rising from his throat louder than anyone else’s.
“What is that?” Darrel said to the professor from the university.
“You’re listening to Aramaic, my friend. Something you can tell your grandchildren about,” the professor replied.
“It’s an Indian dialect?”
“It goes back nine centuries before the birth of Christ. It’s the language Jesus spoke,” the professor said.
“Right,” Darrel said. “Glad my tax money is going for a good cause out at the university.”
Darrel left the tent and went to a concrete building that contained showers and restrooms that were used by campers during tribal powwows. As he relieved himself in a trough, he could hear the tent session breaking up for dinner. If he was going to make a move on Dixon, now was the time. He used his cell phone to call directly into Fay Harback’s office, hoping she would be working late, which for her was customary.
“Fay?”
“Yes?” she said.
“I want to bring Dixon in as a material witness.”
“Witness to what?”
“The attack on his own person.”
“You want to lock up an assault and battery victim?”
“Got any better solutions for dealing with this guy?”
“Wyatt isn’t a guy you squeeze, Darrel.”
“Wyatt?” he said.
“He’s neither a snitch nor a rat, so forget it,” she said.
“Whose side are you on?”
“You should try to relax,” she replied.
He disconnected the transmission. Had everyone in the courthouse lost their minds? He left the stalls in the cement building and went back outside into the twilight. Wyatt Dixon was laboring across the rough ground, a soft cowboy hat the color of chewing tobacco low on his forehead, a festive group of men and women on each side of him. They were the homeliest people Darrel had ever seen, their faces creased and work-worn, their teeth decayed, their eyesight diminished by injuries and diseases that were never treated. What did they have to be happy about?
But the faces here at the revival were not new ones to him. He had seen them in El Salvador, Guatemala, and northern Nicaragua. He had seen them staring at him out of windows in government jails, shantytowns, and miserable huts on the fringes of large pepper plantations. He had also seen them at the bottom of excavations just before a bulldozer shoved a mountain of dirt down on them.
His depression was coming back. Get rid of morbid thoughts. He remembered George Patton’s famous admonition: You don’t win wars by giving your life for your country; you win by making the other sonofabitch give his. For Darrel, that meant taking it to them with red-hot tongs. He waited until Wyatt Dixon was inside the entrance of the men’s room, then braced him.
“Think you can just walk out of the hospital and say, ‘Screw you,’ to the sheriff’s department?” he said.
“Why, howdy doodie, Detective McComb?” Dixon said, straightening himself on his crutches. “We’re fixing to have a potluck dinner. Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush. Want to join us?”
The men who had entered the restroom with Dixon were staring at Darrel as though he were a Martian. He held up his badge so all of them could see it. “This is police business. Get out of here,” he said.
But they didn’t move. Not until Dixon turned to them and said, “Y’all go ’head on. I’ll be there directly.”
“Why don’t you leave him alone?” somebody in the back of the room said.
“Who said that?” Darrel asked.
But no one answered. Instead, one by one they left the room, their faces filled with hostility, their eyes lingering on his.
“You fool ignorant people, Dixon, but you don’t fool me,” Darrel said.
“I got twenty-seven thousand dollars in the bank, own my own truck, personal gear, and a prize Appaloosa cutting horse. I’m on the square with the state and the Man on High, and you ain’t got bean dip on me, Detective. Seems to me you’re flirting with a civil suit. I’ve already talked to my friend Brother Holland about taking over some of my legal issues.”
“Holland is actually your attorney?”
Wyatt didn’t reply. His shoulders were hunched atop his crutches, his head tilted at an odd angle. His eyes seemed to be peeling away the skin on Darrel’s face now, burrowing into his mind, prying secrets from him Darrel shared with no one. Then Darrel knew why it was he hated Dixon so much. Wyatt knew his past and looked upon him as a fraud. “You think you know everything about me, don’t you?” Darrel said.
“You hire men of my kind to hurt folks who get in your way. That’s why I don’t have no truck with the government. The whole bunch of you are hypocrites,” Dixon replied.
“Hear me real good on this, asswipe. People like you have no right to live in this country. You belong in a cage on an ice floe in Antarctica. You’re one of those guys who’s still dirty after he takes a shower. Both of us know you’re up to something. I just haven’t figured out what it is.”
“Least I ain’t up to somebody’s windowsill, looking at some young girl’s boobs. Now, if you’ll step aside, I’m fixing to take a drain that’s gonna blow the porcelain off the bowl.”
Dixon creaked forward on his crutches toward a stall, his shoulder brushing against Darrel’s. Then Darrel had thoughts of a kind that had probably been working in his unconscious all day, like yellow jackets trapped under a glass jar. Strapped to his ankle was a small holster with a hideaway.25 auto in it, all serial numbers acid-burned and ground off on an emery wheel. All he needed to do was say Dixon’s name, wait for him to turn around, and use his nine-Mike to pop one into the center of his forehead. It would be a simple matter to fold Dixon’s dead hand around the.25 auto.
“Dixon?” he said.
Wyatt stopped and turned slightly, the eagle on his shirt bunching with the twisted motion he made against the armrests of his crutches. “Spit it out. I’m tired of this game playing,” he said.
“You’re a piece of shit,” Darrel said.
“I’ve answered to worse. If that’s all you got to say, I got to urinate,” Dixon said.
A shaft of sunlight shone through the airspace between the restroom wall and roof and made Darrel’s eyes burn and twitch. The trough against the wall stank of piss and through the open door of a stall he could see a toilet that was up to the rim with brown water. Outside, somebody had set off a string of firecrackers and they popped like lesions splitting on the surface of Darrel’s brain. Darrel looked directly into Wyatt’s eyes and believed he could actually hear Wyatt laughing at him, as though Wyatt had stolen his soul and wiped his feet on it.
Darrel caught his breath. “I’m taking you in as a material witness. Then I’m going to get a warrant on your place and tear it apart. I’m also going to get your bank accounts frozen. That’s just for openers. When I’m finished with you, you’ll wish you were still a dirty thought in your father’s mind.”
Dixon sucked a canine tooth, then turned back toward the urinal. “I don’t think you got too many arrows in your quiver, Detective. I’m taking back my recommendation to President Bush. You just don’t measure up, boy,” he said.
Darrel cupped him by the upper arm and spun him around. He could not quite believe the level of power he felt in Wyatt’s arm and he wondered for a moment if he had made an irreversible mistake. But Wyatt didn’t resist. Darrel snapped a handcuff on Wyatt’s wrist, then locked the other manacle on an iron pipe that was anchored in the cinder-block wall and the cement floor. Wyatt was now helpless, balanced precariously on his crutches.
“I told you I got to urinate,” Wyatt said.
“Maybe you can start a new career doing adult diaper endorsements,” Darrel said.
He returned to the grove of cottonwood trees and started his car, his heart beating. What had he just done? Made a bust that wouldn’t stick, allowed Dixon to treat him with contempt, and jammed himself up with the D.A.’s office. But it was too late to change course now. He had to brass it out or become a worse object of ridicule than he already was.
He drove his car to the restroom area, blowing his horn to discourage Dixon’s revivalist friends who had started to reenter the building. He hit the redial button on his cell phone and heard Fay’s voice on the other end. “I’m bringing him in. I’ll do the paperwork in the morning,” he said.
“You’re not doing this on my authorization,” she said.
“This guy is a menace. Are you going to back my play or not?”
“Come in tomorrow morning and we’ll talk. In the meantime, I don’t want-”
He snapped the cell phone shut, parked the car, and opened the back door so he could move Dixon quickly into the car and lock him to the D-ring inset in the floor before Dixon’s friends could cause more trouble. He entered the restroom, then stared dumbfounded at Wyatt relieving himself in the trough, one manacle hanging from his wrist. The iron pipe to which he had been hooked up lay on the floor like a broken pugil stick, each end festooned with a chunk of concrete or cement.
Wyatt shook himself off and put his equipment back in his pants. Blood was leaking from the gauze and plaster on his thigh. “Best whiz I ever had,” he said, his face beaming with visceral satisfaction.
THAT NIGHT, Darrel McComb ended up in a skin joint and got drunker than he had ever been in his life. The early dawn found him on Greta Lundstrum’s doorstep, sick and trembling, afraid he would continue drinking through the day but even more afraid that he would get sober and have to look at himself in the hard light of day. The eastern sky was the color of a Tequila Sunrise, the mountains quaking with lightning. He sat on the steps and removed his piece from his clip-on holster and held it in both hands between his legs. He closed his eyes and imagined himself fitting the barrel between his teeth, touching the roof of his mouth, the astringent taste of gun lubricant mixing with his saliva.
Did Valhalla lie on the other side or only a great blackness? His life was a joke, hardly worth sustaining. One round fired upward into the brain would scroll his name on the wall, then it would be over.
Or perhaps he might take a few people with him. Behind him, he heard the door open.