We were in the living room, and outside I could see snow crystals blowing in the light from the gallery. I told her about Wyatt Dixon’s visit.
“I can’t find words to describe my feelings on this. This man is out of the abyss, Billy Bob,” she said.
“I’ll get rid of him.”
“When?”
“Can you run these two names through NCIC?”
“You know I can. How are you going to get rid of Dixon?”
“I’ll figure a way. I give you my word,” I replied, refusing to meet her eyes.
But by next morning I still had no plan for getting Wyatt Dixon out of our lives, or at least off our property and away from my office. Temple went through her San Antonio contact and ran the two names Wyatt had given me through the computer at the National Crime Information Center. She called me at noon.
“There’s nothing on these guys,” she said.
“No arrests at all?”
“The names don’t correlate with any particular individual. Can you imagine how many offenders have the nickname Tex?”
“How about the other guy-Peeples?”
“Yeah, there’re plenty of them. But none with the initials L.W. Billy Bob, do you actually believe a basket case like Wyatt Dixon is a credible source of information?”
The rest of the afternoon I tried to think of a solution to my situation with Wyatt. Lawyers don’t ask witnesses questions they themselves don’t know the answer to; wise men don’t make deals with the devil; and sane people don’t unscrew the head of a man like Wyatt Dixon and spit in it. Why had I been so foolish?
By 5 P.M. my head was pounding. There was only one way out of my problem, and the thought of doing what I had to do made sweat run down my sides.
I drove through the sawmill town of Bonner and on up the Blackfoot, then parked on the roadside across the river from Wyatt’s property. When I crossed the swing bridge, the water down below was roaring with sound, pink and green in the sunset, braiding around rocks that steamed with mist. Wyatt’s truck was parked by the half- destroyed house in which he lived, but I saw no sign of him in the yard or down by the riverbank. No lights burned inside the house.
I walked under a birch tree and stood in front of the ruined first floor and called out his name. But there was no answer. I threw a rock on the tin roof. A stone barbecue pit was smoking by the side of the house, a steak dripping fat into the coals. I threw another rock on the roof.
“Why not knock on the door like a white man?” a voice said from above.
I looked up into the birch tree. Wyatt sat on a thick limb, his back against the trunk, eating from a carton of peach ice cream.
“I came here to make a confession to you,” I said.
“I look like a papist minister?”
“That threatening note you found in your mailbox?” I was looking almost straight up in the tree, my vertebrae and neck tendons starting to stress. But that was not the real cause of my discomfort. I could actually feel my heart hitting against my ribs. “It was a fake. I wrote it. Your cinch breaking at the rodeo was an accident. I was in the stands and saw you get stomped and decided to make use of the situation.”
He continued to spoon ice cream out of the carton and put it in his mouth, his eyes hooded, his mouth as cold-looking as a slit in a side of frozen meat.
“I was playing with your head, Wyatt. I showed you a lack of respect, and for that I’m here to apologize,” I said. “But I’m also asking you not to come around us anymore. We’ve got to have that understanding.”
The only sound was the wind puffing in the tree and the water coursing along the riverbank, as steady as the sustained hum of a sewing machine. I swallowed as I waited for him to speak, then tried to work the crick out of my neck. I heard him drop the spoon into the empty carton.
“There’s a heifer herebouts I punched a time or two, and I don’t mean put my brand on, either,” he said. “The house she lives in got tore up pretty bad during my reconnoitering.”
“Hold on a minute. As an officer of the court, I have to report any crimes I have knowledge of, outside of those confessed to me by a client.”
“Work out your own goddamn problems, counselor. Right now I’m having thoughts that tell me it’s time for my chemical cocktail or I might do something both of us is gonna regret.” He dropped to the ground suddenly and was standing in front of me, his breath cold in my face, the veins in his neck like purple spiderweb. “That detective, Darrel McComb, has got me figured for the break-in at that woman’s house. That means she’s got me figured for it. That means them two killers got me figured for it. You starting to get the picture?”
I slipped my hands in my back pockets and stepped back from him. “In the past you did great injury to my wife,” I said. “As a Christian, I’m supposed to forgive you for it. I don’t know if I’ve done that, but I’ve tried to put it aside. I’m asking you to do the same. If you don’t, one of us is going to end up in long-term refrigeration.”
He wiped ice cream off his mouth with his wrist and looked at it. “Ain’t no man uses me, Brother Holland.”
“I believe you. Do what you have to do. I can’t change it.”
I walked all the way to the swing bridge before I looked back at him. He had not moved. He was staring at the ground, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans, his back at a crooked angle. I walked back toward him and he heard my footsteps in the grass. He turned, the colorless, glasslike quality of his eyes tinted with the redness of the sun.
“Bible says, ‘Don’t tempt the Lord thy God.’ Same warning applies to some men,” he said.
“The name ‘Mabus’ was written on the notepaper you gave me. What does it mean?”
“It was wrote down on several places inside the house that got reconnoitered. But let’s stick with the subject at hand. Why’d you run a game on me, counselor? Why’d you go and do that to both of us?”
For just a moment I thought I saw a genuine look of sadness in his face.
I hated violence. Or at least I told myself I did. My family history was filled with it. My great-grandfather was Sam Morgan Holland, an ex-Confederate soldier and gunfighter and finally a saddle preacher who shot between five and nine men. My father died in a pipeline blowout while doing a repair weld, and his death may have been deliberately caused by a man who envied and hated him and opened a valve at a pump station to ensure that gas would be inside the pipe when the electric arc struck it.
As Texas Rangers, L. Q. Navarro and I had waged a private war against drug mules in northern Mexico. We never shot down an unarmed man or refused him quarter when he walked toward us with his hands on his head. But the night ambushes we set up were guaranteed to result in firefights and not negotiations. This particular group of drug transporters, or at least their compatriots, tortured a friend of ours to death, a DEA agent who was one of the finest men I ever knew. We trapped them in adobe huts, mesquite thickets, river-bottoms, and arroyos thick with cactus, and dawn would find us inserting playing cards emblazoned with the shield of the Texas Rangers into the mouths of the dead.
But no matter what the war advocates of our times tell us, no violent excursion ends well. L. Q. Navarro paid with his life for our grandiose schemes, and I still feared sleep and the images that dwelt in my unconscious. That night I sat by myself in the living room until 3 A.M. The valley was dark, the fir trees on the mountains shaggy in the starlight. I could hear deer or elk clatter against our rail fence, a rock tumble from the hillside, a pinecone ping on the barn’s metal roof. Was Wyatt out there? I doubted it, not tonight.
But it was only a matter of time, I thought. Men such as Wyatt Dixon were driven by ego and a visceral pride in themselves. In fact, their perception of themselves was actually their only possession. I had just managed to cheapen Wyatt’s image of himself, and I knew one day soon the bill would come due.
At the time I did not know there were other people in the area who were even more foolish and reckless than I, a bunch who had just embarked on the worst mistake in their lives.
Chapter 11
The next morning started off in earnest with Darrel McComb in my office, a martial light in his face. His
