James Burke - Light of the World

For most of Wyatt’s life, survival had meant war, and the rules of engagement had remained the same: If you wanted women, you had to fly the flag; if you wanted the respect of men, you never showed fear, and when provoked, you rattled only once.

Bertha Phelps was an ongoing riddle he couldn’t figure out. She was an educated and intelligent countrywoman who seemed to genuinely like him and accept him, and smelled like a floral delivery truck on a hot day. She also had sand. After the attack, she called a women’s crisis hotline and made an appointment with a psychotherapist, as though contracting a pest exterminator to rid her house of termites. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she insisted that she and Wyatt immediately go to bed to prove she wasn’t snakebit. He had the feeling Bertha Phelps had an aggressive side that she herself wasn’t aware of; the kind of woman who’d slap the hat off your head if you didn’t remove it in the house on your own. Any man who said he wasn’t attracted to the Calamity Janes of the world was a damn liar.

Bertha was staring at the television screen. “Listen to this, Wyatt,” she said.

A sheriff’s detective was being interviewed in front of a frame house sheathed with asbestos shingles up by Lookout Pass. The tenant, a woman named Rhonda Fayhee, had gone missing, not unlike a Hutterite woman who had gone for a walk outside St. Regis two months ago and hadn’t been seen since.

In the background, Wyatt could see a parked Mazda and a side yard with wash hanging on a line. A uniformed deputy was crossing the grass with a pet cage in his hand. The local anchorwoman came back on the screen and said that investigators could not account for the fact that the windows were locked and the doors bolted from inside.

“This ain’t the first time he’s done this,” Wyatt said. “He’s what’s called a house creep.”

“Who is?” Bertha said.

“The guy who snatched her. It’s like the ship in the bottle, except the house is the bottle.”

“I’m sure that makes sense to you, but it doesn’t to me.”

“The guy dead-bolted the door, then went out a window and used a rig to slip the latch from the outside. The newslady said the animals was watered and fed. The guy who done this is a stage director. He gives the cops plenty to study on. It makes him feel powerful. In the meantime, the woman is probably going through hell, if she ain’t already dead.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I knew men in Huntsville pen the devil wouldn’t let wash his socks.”

“Do you think it’s him?”

“The guy who killed Angel Deer Heart? Yeah, I do.”

She sat down next to him, the couch sinking under her. “I have to tell you something. Both the city police and the sheriff’s department interviewed me. They wanted to know if you owned any cap-and-ball weapons.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“I don’t even know what cap-and-ball means.”

“Black-powder firearms. Somebody put three lead balls in a man who worked for Love Younger. The cops want to put it on me. Except I don’t own no cap-and-ball guns.”

“The man who was killed is one of the men who attacked us, isn’t he?”

“No doubt about it.”

“He was kidnapped and tortured in a motel. That’s what the paper said.”

“I wouldn’t call it torture.”

“You were there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t want you doing things like that, Wyatt.”

“He was a son of a bitch and deserved a whole lot worse than what he got.”

“You can’t do those kinds of things in my name.”

“I done it in my own name.”

She placed her hand on his forehead and smoothed back his hair. His eyes never changed expression. “I have to confess something to you,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I think you’ll be very disappointed in me.”

“No, I won’t.”

“You don’t know what I’m about to say.”

“I got my suspicions.”

“Like what?”

“Those trashy ballpoint pens you was using, you didn’t get them from Walmart, did you?”

He saw her swallow. “No, I didn’t.”

“You knew that no-good detective Bill Pepper.”

“I did. I knew him very well.”

“Out in Los Angeles, when he was with the LAPD?”

“Before that,” she said.

“You’re saying you were sexually involved with him?”

“He was my brother.”

Wyatt’s colorless eyes showed no reaction, but the blood in his head seemed to go somewhere else and leave helium in its place.

“So you thought it was me who done him in, carved him up with a knife and such? Thought you’d get next to me and maybe do some payback? Is that what you thought, Bertha?”

“I didn’t know you. Then I learned you’re incapable of doing something like that.”

“You don’t know what I’m capable of doing. You didn’t get to know me before the state turned my head into a pinball machine and made me drink all them chemical cocktails. Maybe the man I used to be is hiding in the weeds. Ever give that some thought?”

“Remember when I saw the corn on your lawn?”

“What about it?”

“You were putting out feed for the injured doe and her fawn. I knew then I was wrong about you and that you were a kind man.”

“Maybe I knew that was exactly what you’d think. Maybe I did that for show. I got two sets of cops trying to put me back inside. I don’t need a Jezebel in my life.”

“I know I’ve hurt you deeply.”

“For somebody to hurt me, they got to mean something to me in the first place,” he said, rising from the couch.

“Please don’t say that, Wyatt.”

“I already did,” he replied.

Three seconds later, he was out the door, the window at the end of the corridor lit by dry lightning, a sound like a windstorm roaring in his ears.

Friday morning he woke early at his place up the Blackfoot River and put on a western-cut suit and buffed his boots and took a new Stetson from a hatbox in the back of his closet. He sorted through a drawer full of Indian and western jewelry and broken watches and rabbit-foot key rings and found an honorary sheriff’s badge that a barmaid in Prescott, Arizona, had given him years ago. He found an empty wallet and fitted the badge onto one side and slipped a photo ID he had gotten at the Houston livestock show into the celluloid compartment on the other side. An hour later, he pulled into the parking lot of the café on I-90 where Rhonda Fayhee had been employed.

“Howdy-doody. The name is Wyatt Dixon,” he said to the owner, opening his improvised badge holder. “I’d like to talk to you about the Fayhee lady.”

The owner was squirting a hose on the roof of the café to rinse off the ash drifting down from a fire that was burning out of control on the mountainside. He tried to study the badge, but Wyatt put it back in his coat pocket. “I’ve already told the sheriff’s department everything I know,” the owner replied.

“I’m running at it from a different angle,” Wyatt said. “I think the man who grabbed her was a little different from your normal motel guests and the regular customers at your café.”

“What do you mean, ‘different’? What makes you think one of my guests or customers abducted her?”

“I don’t think I said that. Maybe you weren’t listening. Maybe somebody followed her from work to her house.”

The owner’s eyes wandered over Wyatt’s face. “Let me turn off my hose.”

“What I’m really asking you is whether Ms. Fayhee would talk in a personal way with just anybody. Would she tell a trucker or a low-rider or a husband on the make where she lived or what time she got off work?”

“No, she’s not that kind of girl.”