Lynette blinked up at her. “Dave,” she said. “He would.”
“Would what?”
“Hurt a kid. Molesting his own flesh and blood is hurting her, isn’t it? Not much of a step from that to worse. What if he tried to... you know, with Tess, and she got free and ran off to tell on him? What if he busted her skull with that rock to keep her quiet? And Anna came home and saw it or saw him putting her in the well?”
“My God.”
“It could’ve happened that way, couldn’t it? He’s the one who killed Tess and that’s why Anna killed him?”
23
The Wild Horse Casino was closed. Parking lot empty, windows dark, the high bucking stallion frozen and lightless.
“Damn!” Messenger said. “They must’ve shut down because of John T. Now we’ll have to go out to the gypsum mine to talk to Draper and Teal.”
“Don’t jump the gun, Jim. Casino bar’s not the only place in town with a big-screen TV.”
“How many others?”
“Two. Murphy’s and the Hardrock Tavern.”
“Will either of them be open?”
“Both. They’re shitkicker bars; they wouldn’t have shut down the day after Christ died.”
“Which one’s closer?”
Dacy said, “Murphy’s,” and swung the Jeep into an illegal U-turn across the highway.
Except for sporadic traffic passing through, the town had an empty look and feel. No pedestrians, not many parked cars, most of the businesses along Main — even the ones that normally stayed open late — closed and dark. Town in mourning for its boss hog, he thought. That was part of it, anyway; the other part was fear. Three brutal murders in less than a year, including the last two surviving members of one of Beulah’s pioneer families. People had closed ranks, locked windows and doors, dusted off pistols and rifles and shotguns. Their fear made them angry and skittish, and the combination of all three made them dangerous. It was a bad time for him to be roaming around here with night coming on, even in Dacy’s company. They’d turned on Anna, one of their own, and hounded her out of Beulah and eventually into oblivion in a tubful of bloody water. It wouldn’t take much for them to turn on the man they blamed for John T.’s murder, an outsider, a pariah. And if that happened, they wouldn’t settle for just driving him away.
The wind was hot and abrasive against his face as they dipped downhill past the new high school. He tasted the dryness, felt the tension in his body. But he wasn’t afraid. Fear all around him, hidden and gathering, but none in him. It occurred to him that he was no longer in a state of crisis or flux; no longer the same person he’d been a week ago, and not even a shadow of the one he’d been before Ms. Lonesome came into his life. The internal forces had finished their work and the changeling process was complete. Thirty-seven years old, and he’d finally gone through the chrysalis stage — his own personal rite of passage.
Dacy’s voice dragged him out of himself. “... Lynette said before we left?”
“What?”
“Before we left her. What she said about Dave killing Tess and Anna shooting him because of it. You think it could’ve happened that way?”
“No,” he said. And yet... “And you don’t either.”
“Tell me why I don’t. Ease my mind.”
“If it’d happened that way, why wouldn’t she have admitted it? The only reason to keep quiet would be to hide the abuse, and at that point it didn’t matter. She wasn’t that much of a martyr, was she?”
“Wasn’t a martyr at all,” Dacy said. “She’d have admitted it, all right. She never wanted pity, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to deal with than hatred and suspicion.”
Not that way, no. But suppose...
Draper and Teal weren’t at Murphy’s, a roadhouse on the flats below the shopping center: None of the half dozen pickups parked on its front lot was white. Both Messenger and Dacy were silent as she wheeled the Jeep back onto the highway heading north. The sky to the west, where the sun was sliding down toward the jagged crest of Montezuma Peak, was streaked with crimson and orange — fire colors, like the blaze that had consumed the skeletons of Anna’s ranch. Cloud puffs in that direction had dark red underbellies, as if they had been used like cotton swabs to mop up blood.
Back through the empty town, past the High Desert Lodge. A sheriff’s cruiser passed them there, but the driver wasn’t Ben Espinosa and he paid them no attention. Downhill and onto the northern plain. Pale flickering neon — the outlines of a blue miner with a red pick and a yellow gold pan — jutted from the roof of the Hardrock Tavern, marking its location when they were still some distance away. A cavvy of motorcycles and a dozen pickups and four-by-fours jammed front and side lots. He began scanning for the white pickup even before Dacy turned in.
Two white trucks. And the second of the two, near the end of the side lot, had a broken radio antenna.
Dacy parked across from it, in the only available space. When she shut off the Jeep’s engine, Messenger could hear the throb of country music and the muted jumble of voices from inside the low-slung building.
She caught hold of his arm, stopped him from getting out. “No, you wait here. I’ll bring them.”
“Bring them? Why not talk to them inside?”
“We’re doing this my way, remember?”
“I’m not arguing, just wondering.”
“It’s crowded in there,” she said. “The two of us walk in together and you’re recognized, we might not get a chance at Draper and Teal. You understand what I mean?”
She’d been sensitive to it, too, driving through town — the fear and nervous anger, the potential danger. He nodded and said, “I understand.”
“All right. Just stay put until you see the three of us by the pickup. Then walk on over.”
She was inside the tavern less than five minutes. When she came out she had two men with her, both in their thirties and rough-dressed, one sporting a thick freebooter’s beard. She spoke animatedly to them, gesturing with her hands, as she led the way to the white pickup. The bearded one bent to peer at the driver’s side door, the side farthest away from the roadhouse. Messenger, out of the Jeep and approaching at a fast walk, heard him say, “What the hell? I don’t see any dent. There ain’t even a scratch.” The voice was the same one he’d heard on the phone pretending to be Herb Mackey.
The other man, red-haired and wiry, saw him first. “Christ, Billy, look who’s coming.”
Billy Draper straightened; the two men stood staring at Messenger as he slid around the pickup and joined Dacy. She had positioned herself at the front of the truck, her back to the west; that put the glare of the setting sun in the eyes of the two miners. There was no room for them to sidestep in the narrow space between the pickup and the four-by-four next to it. All they could do was squint and raise shading hands.
“You’re Dacy Burgess,” Draper said to her. “Yeah, I thought you looked familiar. What’s the idea, Dacy? You and this dickhead up to something?”
“We’re after the answers to some questions.”
“Yeah? Well, we’re fresh out.”
“You haven’t heard the questions yet.”
“Don’t matter. We’re still fresh out.”
“Who paid you to set that snake trap at Mackey’s?”
“Snake trap? What’s she yammering about, Pete?”
“Beats me,” Pete Teal said. “Drunk or stoned, maybe.”
“Let’s cut the bullshit, boys.”
Almost casually Dacy slid a hand under the loose tails of her shirt, brought it out filled with a short-barreled revolver. Messenger was as taken aback as Draper and Teal. He might have expected that this was the sort of tactic she’d use, a pure Western improvisation, but he hadn’t. Babe in the desert, she’d called him earlier. Right.