I saw the blood drain out of the face of the woman behind the screen. Mapes's chest rose and fell with his breathing.
"Listen, you asshole" he said.
"But that's not why I'm here. You were at the school ground, in that Mercury there, looking at my daughter through field glasses, asking questions about her. Now, my message here is simple. If you come around her again, I'm going to kill you. Believe it. I've got nothing to lose at this point. I'm going to walk up to you, wherever you are, and blow your fucking head off."
I walked off the porch into the yard.
"Oh, no, you don't," he said.
"You, too, Betty. You stay out here and listen to this. My lawyer did some checking on this guy. He's a drunk, he's a mental case, he's got an obsession because he got his wife killed by some drug dealers. Then somebody threatened his daughter, and he accused me and my partner. The fact that he's an ex-cop with dozens of people who'd like to even a score with him doesn't seem to enter his head. Let me tell you something, Ro-bicheaux. Betty's son goes to a Catholic school in Missoula. She and her ex-husband have shared custody. Sometimes I pick him up or drop him off for her. If that's the same school your daughter goes to, it's coincidence, and that's all it is."
"You heard what I said. No warning light next time," I said.
I got inside my truck and closed the door.
"No, Harry, bring him back," the woman said.
"Who's Darlene? What's he talking about a rape? Harry?"
"He's leaving. Close the door," he said to her.
"Harry, I'll call the sheriff. He can't get away with saying that."
"He's leaving. He's not coming back."
Then he walked toward the truck window just as I started the engine.
"You're going to prison," he said.
"Nothing's going to change that. You can mess me up with my girl, you can say stuff about blowing me away if it makes you feel good, but in a few weeks you're going to be hoeing sweet potatoes in Angola."
I put the transmission in reverse and began backing around in a half circle. The wind blew his hair, and his skin looked grained and healthy in the sunlight. His eyes never left my face. My knuckles were ridged on top of the gearshift knob, and my thighs were shaking as I depressed the floor pedals.
It had all been for nothing.
But there was still time, the moment was still there. To pull the.45 from under the seat, to aim it suddenly at his face, knock him to his knees, screw the barrel hard into his neck and cock the hammer, let him experience the terror of his victims who clawed the inside of an automobile trunk while the metal heated and the flames spread to the gasoline tank. I could feel the.45 leap into my hand as though it had a life of its own.
I shut off the engine and stepped out of the truck. My face felt cool in the bright air. The yellow log house and the ponderosa and blue spruce on the hillsides seemed dazzling in the sun. His eyes dropped to my hands. I held my palms up.
"Did you ever go to the stake in Saigon?" I said.
"What?"
"Some ARVN and white mice would march them out to the stake, tie them to it, and put a round behind the ear. At least that was what I was told. I never saw it."
"I think you had some head damage over there. You've got thirty seconds to be past Betty's property line, then we call the sheriff."
"You'd better concentrate on my words, Harry. The executioner was probably a special kind of guy. He could kill people and go home and have lunch. He's somebody you can understand. You'd recognize each other in a group. But you know I'm not like you, and that's why you're not afraid of me. I can come out here and talk about cooling you out, but you know I won't do it. But how about Sally Dio?"
"Dio? You must truly be out of your mind. Get out of here, man."
"He was talking about whacking you out. That's not a shuck. He'sgot some new guys up at the lake. They're the real article, genuine syndicate hit men. You can call Dan Nygurski at the DEA in Great Falls and ask him. Or, better yet, ask him to deny it. If that's not enough for you, I can give you Sal's unlisted number and you can talk with him about it. If I'm just jerking you around, you can clear the whole matter up in a few minutes."
"What's Dio care about me? I only met the guy twice."
"Ask him. Maybe you shouldn't have gotten mixed up in his and Dixie Lee's lease deals. He's probably a borderline psychotic. I doubt if he thinks too straight."
His eyes looked like they were focused on a thought ten inches in front of his face. Then they came back on me.
"Where'd you hear this?" he asked.
"Stay away from my daughter. Don't come near that school. I don't care if your lady friend's son goes there or not," I said, and I got back into the truck and drove out on the dirt road.
In the rearview mirror I saw him standing alone in the yard, staring after me, the woman holding the screen door wide behind him.
I went back home, walked down the street to a noon AA meeting, bought groceries for our supper that evening, then sat on the back steps in the shade and tried to put myself inside the mind of Harry Mapes. He was a smart man. He had killed a number of people over the years his first when he was seventeen and God only knew how many in Vietnam and he had never spent a day in jail for it. He wasn't compulsive; he was calculating, and he used fear and violence to achieve an immediate, practical end. Like any sociopath's, his emotions were simple ones and concerned entirely with desires, survival, and the destruction of his enemies. He remained passive, functional, and innocuous in appearance until he felt threatened. Then he rose to the occasion.
When he saw me east of the Divide, on the dirt road between the Indian beer joint and the home of Clayton Desmarteau's mother, I scared him in some way. He went to the school ground to keep my mind on other things or, perhaps, to provoke me into attacking him again. Somehow he had also concluded that Darlene had sent me east of the Divide, had put me on that dirt road south of the Black-feet Reservation, and he feared that somewhere in that hardpan country I would discover what had happened to Clayton Desmar-teau and his cousin.
In the last two days I had managed to turn it around on both Dio and Mapes, to use some smoke and their own frame of reference against them, so that in all probability they wouldn't come around me and Alafair again. But my legal situation remained the same as it had been when I left Louisiana. My victory had become the restoration of the status quo. I lay down on the living room couch in a funk, with my arm across my eyes, and fell asleep.
The image in my dream was brief, like needles of light in the afternoon haze. Darlene kneeling by water, white-tailed deer thudding across the wet ground between the cottonwoods.
I felt feathers brushing across my forearm and cheek. I opened one eye and looked at Alafair's grinning face. The other day she had found an old feather duster in the house.
"How you doing, you cute little guy?" I said.
"How you doing, you cute little Dave?" she said. She wore jeans and her Baby Orca T-shirt.
I sat up on the couch.
"How'd you get home?" I said.
"Dixie Lee walked down and got me. You was asleep. Dave?"
"What?" I rubbed my face and tried to make the afternoon come into focus.
"We only got two more days of school. We going home then?"
"Maybe so, little guy."
"We better call Batist and tell him."
"Alafair, when we go back home, it might be for just a few days. I might have to sell a few things and raise some money so we can take another trip."
"Trip?"
"To a different place for a while. Down by the ocean, maybe."
"We're not going to live at the house no more?"
"I don't know, Alf."
I looked at the confusion in her face.
"Let's take things as they come," I said.