“I did. He wasn't there.”
“Call him again.”
~ 'Mother.”
“Call him, Richard, call him now. You silly little fool.
You cannot let people simply walk on you. It's why you always end up with nothing and why I always have to bail you out. I pay for everything, Richard. You get everything for free.”
He made the call.
The man was there.
“Uh, Mr. Peed, sorry, I told you I'd come by if I could.
But the art critic thing is only part of my job; I also have to read all the Sunday feature copy and we got a little behind and I just couldn't make it. It's not The New York Times, you know. It's just the Daily Oklahoman.”
He hung up.
“Call him again,” his mother said.
He was never sure, not then, not in the immediate aftermath, not in the months of meditation, why it happened the way it did when it happened.
Why that day, that minute? It could have been any other day, any other minute.
It was the maid who called the police.
He tried to make them see, he wasn't trying to blind her.
He was really trying to kill her. But the knife was short—it was a butter knife, quite blunt—and somehow she had proven so much stronger than he thought; she'd gotten down beneath him so he couldn't reach her heart. After the first pitiful blow, she'd sort of curled up, so he had to un peel her, but she was very strong. The only place he could stab her was the face. The eyes? Well, the eyes are on the face, aren't they? It wasn't his fault.
Richard suddenly broke the surface of the water. He was way out in the river. The trees were hurtling by. It was much lighter.
A flood of sweet oxygen poured into his lungs. He smiled, but the water sucked him down again.
Richard yielded to death.
It embraced him and he embraced it. He felt its strong arms pull him in, smother him. There was no pain at all, only a persistent tugging that broke through the numbness in his body. He had a last dream of Lamar, of all things:
pitiful, crude, powerful, violent Lamar. Odd that he should think of Lamar here at the end.
Lamar had him up on the surface. Richard choked on air.
“Calm down, goddammit, Richard,” screamed Lamar, 'don't fight me.”
He was upside down in somebody's strong arms. The sky was bright and blue, the clouds rushed by. A helicopter should have come, but it didn't. Nothing came. The roaring had ceased. He felt as if he were in one of the swimming pools of his boyhood and wanted to spit a gurgle of water to see if he could make Mother laugh.
He felt the ground, and in his exhaustion looked up to see that O’Dell had him and was pulling him ashore.
Lamar came out of the rushing red water a second later, beautiful in the gray dawn, soaked and muscular, his hair wet, his denim clothes plastered to him, his face grave with effort and pain.
He smiled at Richard.
“You are a peck of trouble, Richard, I swear.”
“C'mon, boys,” said Ruta Beth.
“Let's git before goddamned Johnny Cop shows.”
CHAPTER 18
No one knew how to run a crime scene anymore, the old man lamented. It was stunning they got any evidence at all these days. These sloppy damn kids, rough and eager as untrained young dogs. No one had even erected a windbreak.
“Can't you do a little something about the breeze, son?”
he gently corrected. A young OSBI agent began to look around for something out of which to construct a barrier to prevent more wind erosion, but he was so clumsy in his efforts, C.D. worried that he'd do more harm than good.
The old man hawked a gob of phlegm out of his dry old throat and squatted in the dust. The wind whipped through the scrub oaks and, two hundred yards away, the angry red torrent of the river surged along toward Arkansas. It was high this time of year, full of the melted snows of the winter, and treacherous; other times of the year, it'd dry to a trickle. Had Lamar calculated on that, too? Was he that smart?
“It could be nothing,” said a young Ranger captain named Tippahoe, offered up by the great state of Texas as his opposite number.
“It could be our goddamn break,”
“You said It. Henderson.
“I musta run a thousand tire tracks and I ain't come up with diddly, 'less it's to tie a specific vehicle to a specific location. Don't know what good the goddamned track is without the vehicle.”
“Well, son, maybe you're right and maybe you ain't.
Believe I'll just play the hand out, as it's the only one the Good Lord deemed fit to deal me.” He turned from the obstreperous Texas Ranger to a foolish-looking young Oklahoma highway patrolman lurking nearby with a walkie-talkie.
“You got any word yet on those evidence technicians?”
“Sir, they's coming. Tied up in traffic outside of Oklahoma City.”
“They can't chopper ’em in?”
“Sir, all the choppers tied up in trauma delivery.”
“Okay, tell you what. You tell them Lieutenant Henderson says to call Colonel Mcclutcheon, the operations officer of the Four Hundred and First Aviation Battalion at Fort Sill. See if he can free up a Huey and get those boys in here before the glaciers arrive from Canada.
Colonel Robert M. Mcclutcheon. He owes me a thing or two.”
“Yes, sir, I'll tell ’em, but—”
“That's all, son.”
The small party was standing under a gloomy sky in the wasteland of scrub and low vegetation that was part of the Red River basin, on the Oklahoma side. A half mile or so away, on the Texas side, a Texas policeman had located a stolen Volvo in a ditch. This discovery had led to another: a stolen Camaro, once white, now painted orange and covered in a camouflaged tarpaulin. They were currently being dusted for prints by Ranger technicians, but C.D. knew what the prints would show: These were the various getaway vehicles stolen by Lamar Pye and his crew members.
There might be a print of the fourth member of the gang, but C.D. doubted it. Lamar was too smart.
But those discoveries, in turn, had yielded this tiny little scrap of hope on the Oklahoma riverbank. Here, in the dirt, a very, very good track off still another vehicle. C.D. appreciated the orderly way Lamar's mind had worked, how cleverly he'd planned it out, stashing the legal vehicle at the end of the train of stolen ones so that as they made their final fallback to their hideout, they'd do so in a car that couldn't, of itself, attract attention and whose plates would run legal if checked. Such a smart boy.
C.D. turned and made as if to mosey off just a bit in search of new evidence. But of course he slipped the brown paper bag from his left inside pocket, unscrewed the lid, and took a fast swig. I. W. Harper, seven years old, like the smoke off a prairie fire. He went to wooziness, then came back out, feeling calmer and more in charge. He screwed the lid back on, lightly, and slipped the pint into his pocket.
He turned back and had that odd feeling that everyone had been staring at him but had just that second looked away so as not to embarrass him.
Everyone, that is, except for young Captain Tippahoe, whose face was knitted up with contempt and
