James Burke - Light of the World

The man fell backward, stomping Wyatt in the face. His gloves were cloth, the kind you would buy in a garden store. As he pulled away from Wyatt, his left glove slipped down to his knuckles, exposing the back of his hand. On it was a tattoo of a red spider. He kicked Wyatt in the side of the head and in seconds was running through the trees.

Two hours later, Wyatt was sitting on the side of an examination table in the ER at Community Medical Center, out by old Fort Missoula, his ankle wrapped, his eyebrow stitched. A plainclothes detective pulled back the curtain and stared at him. “Heard you had some bad luck today.”

“You could call it that,” Wyatt said. “I seen you somewhere before?”

“I don’t know. Have you?”

“By that cave up behind Albert Hollister’s house. Except you were in uniform. You and Detective Pepper was talking about the Horowitz woman, something about needing a board across your ass so you wouldn’t fall in.”

The detective was a lean and angular man with grainy skin and jet-black hair and sideburns that flared on his cheeks. He had a mustache and wore a new suit of dark fabric with blue stripes. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in at least two days. “Did you recognize any of your assailants?” he asked.

“They had on masks. I need to see Miss Bertha.”

“I just left her. She’s fine.”

“When was the last time you seen a rape victim doing fine?”

“Were they white men? Not Indian or African-American or Hispanic?”

“I don’t know what they was.”

“You see any identifying marks?”

“No.”

“None? No tattoos, scars, that sort of thing?”

“They were buttoned up. One man had a baton.”

“Like a policeman’s?”

“Or an MP’s. He put himself into it.”

“What was it made of?”

“Wood. It had a lanyard.”

“Police officers don’t use that kind anymore.”

“That makes me feel a whole lot better.”

The detective stopped writing in his notebook. “You don’t like us much, do you?”

“I learned to read lips in prison.”

“I’m not quite making the connection.”

“I saw you out in the hall earlier. You was telling a joke to another guy. It was about Miss Bertha.”

The detective dropped his eyes to his notepad and wrote in it.

“What are you putting down?” Wyatt asked.

“That you read lips. That’s quite a talent.”

“What’s your name?”

“Detective Jack Boyd. I don’t have a business card yet. Call the department if you want to add anything to your statement.”

“You took Detective Pepper’s place?”

“What about it?”

“I think they got the right man for the job,” Wyatt said.

Molly and I were clearing the table at sunset when she glanced out the French doors at the backyard. “Dave, come here,” she said.

A man in a slouched cowboy hat was sitting atop the fence that bordered the north end of the pasture. He was drinking from a longneck, tilting it up, letting the foam slide down his throat, his boots hooked on the rail below him. He dropped the empty bottle on the grass and took a second one from the pocket of his canvas coat and twisted off the cap, then put the cap in his coat pocket. Albert’s horses were gathered around a circular water tank on the other side of the fence, their tails whipping at flies. The sky was purple, hung with dark clouds that looked like torn cotton. The man on the fence looked up at the lights in the kitchen and dining area and took a long drink from his beer bottle. “That’s Wyatt Dixon,” I said.

“The one Alafair had the run-in with?”

“The one and only.”

“Why is he here?”

“The day you figure out a guy like Dixon is the day you check yourself into rehab.”

I put on a coat and walked down to the fence. The double metal gate to the pasture was creaking in the wind, the lock chain clinking softly. “You always throw your beer bottles on other people’s lawns?” I said.

“I was gonna pick it up when I left.” He glanced at the cabin in the south pasture. The light was on inside, and you could see Clete’s rubber waders hanging upside down on the gallery. “Where’s Dumbo at?”

“I’d give some thought to what I said about Clete Purcel. What happened to your eye?”

“A guy caught me with a rock. That was after him and two others attacked the woman I was with. She’s at Community Hospital now.”

“Who were the guys?”

“I got an idea who one of them was.”

“You told the cops that?”

He twisted his mouth into a button. He was wearing half-top boots that looked like buckets on his feet and seemed out of character. “I come here to get your opinion on something,” he said.

“Why me?”

“I checked out you and that fat-ass friend of yours. Y’all got in a shoot-out down in Louisiana and flushed the grits of some guys just like Love Younger and his crowd.”

“You have reason to believe Love Younger sent these three men after you?”

“One guy had a tattoo on the back of his hand. I’ve seen it before.”

“On somebody who works for Love Younger?”

“Here’s what don’t compute. I got nothing on Love Younger. He’s rich and powerful, and I’m an ex-con and rough-stock supplier at state fairs. Why would I be a threat to him?”

“Who was the woman they attacked?”

“Her name is Bertha Phelps.”

“The lady at the rez?”

“She probably never hurt a soul in her life. With time she may get over it. But she won’t be the same. They never are.”

“If I understand you correctly, these guys did everything they could to provoke you, but they managed to leave you alive, knowing what you’d probably do.”

“None of them tried to pull a piece. Maybe they wasn’t carrying. Maybe they just wanted to shake me up. They ain’t high-end operators, that’s for sure. One of them stole my cordovan Tony Lama boots.”

“You think you’re being set up?”

“Ever see a bullfight? Before the matador comes out, the banderilleros stick the banderillas in the bull’s neck. They’re like miniature harpoons. The barbs hurt like hell and get the bull into a rage. That’s when he makes mistakes and gets a sword in the soft spot between the shoulder blades.”

“Knowing all that, you still want to get even?”

“An eye for an eye.”

“That’s not what the admonition means.”

“What it means is don’t tread on me. I celled with a guy in Texas whose kid was murdered by a pedophile. He chain-drug him down a highway. What do you think of that?”

He took a sip from his beer, looking sideways at me, waiting for me to answer. His mind-set was one that every Southerner recognizes. Whether it’s a defective element in the gene pool or an atavistic throwback to the peat bogs of Celtic Europe, it is nonetheless the family heirloom of a class of people who are not only uneducable but take pride in their ignorance and their potential for violence. If you have the opportunity, study their faces carefully in a photograph, perhaps one taken at what they call a “cross lighting,” and tell me they descend from the same tree as the rest of us.

“You just conceded somebody is trying to throw you a slider. Why swing on it?” I said.

“Maybe I got tricks they don’t know about. Maybe I’ll call down fire and lightning on the whole bunch.”

“You think you have that kind of power?”

He shook his head. “No, I ain’t got no power at all. I was just talking. They done permanent harm to Miss Bertha, and they got to pay for it, Mr. Robicheaux. You’d do the same. Don’t be telling me you wouldn’t. I know the kind of man you are. You might try to hide it, but I can see it in your eyes.”