James Burke - Light of the World

Wyatt removed his hat and unknotted his bandana and wiped his face and gazed at the Indian paintbrush and wild roses that grew in the grass along the riverbank. The river was deep and wide from the runoff and contained a coppery green light where the sun shone directly upon it. Wyatt put his hat back on and fingered the long red welt that ran down his side. For just a second he thought about the bull that had impaled him at the Calgary Stampede, shaking him on its horns like a piñata and goring him again on the ground, the crowd rising, the women holding their hands to their mouths.

“Howdy-doody, boys,” he said.

The lead deputy had to squint into the sun to look up at Wyatt. “Know why we’re here?”

“To pester people?”

“Somebody killed Bill Pepper up at Swan Lake.”

“I’m totally broke up,” Wyatt said.

“We’d like to have you come down to the department.”

“I already been there. I didn’t enjoy it too much.”

“The sheriff probably wants to exclude you.”

“I’ll save y’all the time. Just consider me excluded.”

“It’s important, Wyatt.”

“Not to me it ain’t.”

“We’re just doing our job. How about hooking yourself up? It’s not personal.”

“Speaking of job performance, I’d rate y’all’s somewhere between mediocre to piss-poor.”

“Is it true you can speak dead languages?”

Wyatt blew his breath up into his face and looked at the sunlight wobbling inside the riffle on the river, then jumped down from the flatbed into the middle of the deputies. All of them stepped backward before they could check themselves. He began picking pieces of hay off his arms and chest, dropping each one into the wind. “How’d Pepper go out?” he asked.

“Hard,” the lead deputy said.

“How hard?”

“Hard as it gets.”

“It happened this morning?”

The deputy shook his head noncommittally. Wyatt lifted his T-shirt off the outside mirror on the driver’s side of the flatbed truck. He studied his reflection in the mirror, touching at a razor nick on his jaw, then worked his shirt over his arms and head and neck. The T-shirt fitted him so tightly, it looked like latex on his skin. His eyes were empty when he looked at the deputy. “Did Pepper go out with a bag over his head?”

“I don’t know all the details,” the deputy said. “I can’t discuss them with you, anyway.”

“Did you know Angel Deer Heart?”

“Afraid not,” the deputy said.

“Did you ever wonder why rich people would adopt a raggedy-ass little girl from the rez?”

“Put on the cuffs, Wyatt.”

“Half of them come out of the womb with alcohol on the brain. The other half are crack babies.”

“You could ask the lead investigator about all this, except he’s dead.”

“You ever hear Southerners talk about the ‘dumbest white person’ they ever met?”

“Nope.”

“Most people think that’s an insult to people of color. What that really means is the dumbest person on earth is a stupid white man. You can teach a horse, a dog, or even a tree frog to tap-dance before you can teach toilet training to a white man who is willfully ignorant. All colored people know that.”

The deputy cupped his hand around Wyatt’s upper arm. “You’re a puzzle, buddy.”

“Did you know y’all are living in the middle of biblical events?”

“Biblical?”

“That’s what I said.”

The deputy walked with him to the cruiser. “I love your accent, Wyatt. Watch your head getting in,” he said.

At one-thirty P.M. on Saturday, the sheriff called me again. “You want to come down here and talk to this crazy bastard?” he said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Most of the DIs I knew in the service were from the South. I always thought someone had pissed inside their brains when they were infants. Now I’m sure of it. I just spent twenty minutes listening to Wyatt Dixon talk about the history of the earth and the coming of the Antichrist. Did you know the world is sixty-four hundred years old?”

“He’s probably psychotic. Why pay any attention to anything he says?”

“Because he had motivation to kill Detective Pepper. He’s also one of the last people to see Angel Deer Heart alive.”

I didn’t want to remind the sheriff that he had spoken favorably of Dixon after Alafair and I had trouble with him. “Does he have an alibi for last night?”

“His neighbors across the river say there was a light on in his barn and they thought they saw him shoeing horses until after midnight.”

“So he’s not your guy?”

“Probably not. But he has information about the Deer Heart girl that he’s not sharing.”

“What kind of information?”

“He thinks she was adopted for reasons other than humanitarian ones.”

“What reasons?”

“He’s a little vague on that.”

“Why’d you call me?” I asked.

“Because I don’t know what the hell I’m dealing with. What makes it worse is that Wyatt Dixon has almost convinced me.”

“Of what?”

“That there’s an evil presence in our midst. That the cave behind Albert Hollister’s house is the source of something that I hate to even think about.”

“Don’t let this guy get to you,” I said.

“Come down here and tell me that after you look at Bill Pepper’s face in the crime scene photos. One of his eyes looked like an eight ball. The coroner says he was alive when he was castrated. Where’s the Horowitz girl?”

I looked out the window. Gretchen’s pickup was parked by the guest cabin. “She didn’t do this,” I said.

“We talked to a homicide investigator at Miami-Dade. She was known in the trade as Caruso. You want to vouch for Caruso, Mr. Robicheaux?”

After Clete was released from the holding jail in Big Fork, he did not ask Gretchen if she’d had anything to do with the death of Bill Pepper. At the cabin, she kept waiting for him to stop talking and look directly in her face and ask the question, but he didn’t. She fixed bacon and scrambled eggs and set his plate on the table and sat down across from him and waited some more. He started eating, buttering a biscuit, drinking his coffee, spearing his fork through the eggs, but he didn’t ask the question.

“I went looking for you,” she said.

“I figured you would,” he replied.

“You didn’t find Pepper, did you?”

“Not alive, I didn’t.”

“You think I did him?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“If he’d drawn down on you or tried to attack you again, you would have blown him out of his socks. Maybe you would have broken a couple of his spokes. But you didn’t have anything to do with what happened inside that cottage. Neither did I. Anyone who thinks different doesn’t know anything about either of us.”

“I told you what I wanted to do to him. I told you how I wanted him to suffer.”

“You’re like most brave people, Gretchen: too brave to know you’re supposed to be afraid, and too good to understand you’re incapable of doing bad.”

She thought she was going to cry.

He stopped eating. “Dave and I did a lot of stuff at NOPD that we don’t like to remember. We called it operating under a black flag. That’s when the Contras and the Colombians were filling our cities with cocaine. But we never did anything beyond what we had to. That’s the only rule there is. You do what you have to, and you never hurt people unnecessarily.” He started eating again.

She got up from the table and went into the bathroom and washed her face and dried it. When she came back out, he was looking at the FedEx mailer she had left on the coffee table. “What’s that?” he said.