Then the trees began to thin and the road came out on the hill's rim, and he could see the moonlight on the river below and the piled wood burning on a sandy shelf of rock, one that protruded out into nothingness, and Darl's silhouette against the flames and the gleaming chrome and waxed surfaces of his friends' motorcycles.
Jack strained his eyes through the mud and water streaked on his windshield and the shadows his brights threw on the clearing. He did not see Lucas Smothers among the faces that looked like they had been caught in a searchlight, and he let. out his breath and felt the tension go out of his palms and he wiped them one at a time on the legs of his slacks.
Then he realized they did not know who he was.
'If you're dirty, kitties, now's the time to lose it,' he heard his son yell.
Bags of reefer and pills showered out into the darkness, sprinkling the water far below.
Darl Vanzandt swung his leg over his Harley, started the engine, his face shuttering with a familiar ecstasy as he twisted the gas feed forward and the engine's power climbed through his thighs and loins.
He cornered his bike on the far side of the fire, his boot biting into the dirt, then righted the bike's frame and roared down the road that Jack had just emerged from, his face turned into the shadows to avoid recognition.
His tire tracks showed he never hesitated when he hit the fork in the road, leaping potholes, occasionally touching the soft earth with his boot, his path marked by the strip of starry sky overhead, the province of gods who lived above the clouds, rather than the narrow, eroded track sweltering with heat and filmed with gnats between the trees.
The night had gone down bad, but he didn't doubt the wisdom of the plan he had conceived that morning, when he drank wine laced with speed out of a stone beer mug, nor did he doubt his partial execution of it. It was still a good plan, one he could pull off later, when that punk Lucas Smothers mustered enough guts to run a chicken race along the unbarricaded road that led back to the cliff's edge. Just let Lucas get in the lead and take the road that was open while he, Darl, swerved around the barricade and found his way to the bottom of the hill, safe and removed from whatever might happen when Lucas Smothers discovered the cost of jerking on the wrong guy's stick.
Or maybe he thought none of these things. Maybe he was simply intrigued with the frenetic bouncing of his headlight on the pines, the latent sexual power girded between his chaps, the way reefer wrapped a soft gauze around the uppers surging in his veins, as though his skin was a border between his universe and the one other people lived in.
Darl swerved around the barrier his father had moved, opened up the Harley, the back wheel ripping a trench through the earth, and plowed into the steel cable that was stretched neck-high between two pine trunks.
His bike spun away into the trees, the engine roaring impotently against the ground.
The cable was thinner in diameter than a pencil, and Darl had tightened each end until the steel loops had bitten so deeply into the pine bark that the cable looked like it grew horizontally out of the trunks.
He died on his back, the headlight of his Harley shining across his face. His mouth was open, as though he wanted to speak, but the cable's incision had cut his windpipe as well as his jugular. When his father found him, three misshapen, emaciated dogs with spots like hyenas were licking Darl's chest, and Jack had to drive them from his son's body with a stick. The medical examiner later said the dogs were rabid. He refused to answer when a reporter asked if the dogs had found Darl before the time of death.
chapter thirty-six
But when I drove down the rutted road to the Hart Ranch that same night I knew of none of the events I just described.
The gate that gave onto the ranch was open, the padlocked chain snapped by bolt cutters. I turned off my headlights and drove the Avalon across the cattle guard, parked in a grove of mesquite, and slipped L.Q.' s revolver from its holster. Then I pulled six extra rounds from the leather cartridge loops on the belt and dropped them in my pocket and stepped out into the darkness. The revolver felt heavy and cold and strange in my hand.
The moon was above the hills, and I could see deer grazing in the glade between the woods and the river, and in the distance the roofless Victorian home that had been gutted by fire and the log and slat outbuildings and rusted windmill in back, wrapped with tumbleweed.
The edges of the house were silhouetted by a white light that glowed in the backyard. I moved along the perimeter of the woods, spooking coveys of quail into the darkness. The grass was almost waist high from the rain, and a set of car tracks stretched through the glade and ended where a 1970s gas-guzzler was parked in the shadows. A second set of car tracks, fresher ones, the grass pressed flat and pale-sided into the wet sod, led past the parked car to the back of the house.
I walked between the woods and parked car and looked through the car window. In the moonlight I could see the ignition wires hanging below the dashboard. From behind the house I heard a metallic, screeching sound like a board with rusted nails in it being pried loose from a joist.
I walked to the right of the house, through a side yard that was strewn with plaster and broken laths that looked like they had been ripped from the interior walls and thrown outside. A Coleman lantern as bright as a phosphorous flare hissed on the ground in the center of the backyard. Farther on, a blue van was parked by a barn with a tractor shed built onto one side, and through a dirty window in the shed a second lantern burned inside and the shadows of at least two men moved back and forth across it.
I crossed the yard, outside the perimeter of light. My foot went out into a pool of shadow, where there should have been level ground, but instead I stepped into a hole at least a foot deep, my ankle twisting sideways inside my boot, a pain as bright as the sting of a jellyfish wrapping around the tendons in my lower back.
The shadows beyond the window froze against the light.
Then I thought I heard L.Q. Navarro's voice say, 'The dice are out of the cup. Make 'em religious, bud.'
I limped forward and flung the door back on its hinges and pointed L.Q.'s revolver into the room.
Felix Ringo and a second man stood just beyond a worktable where Garland T. Moon was wrapped fast against the wood planks with chains that were clamped and boomed down on his chest and thighs. Moon's face was turned away from me, as though he were napping. The clothes of Ringo and the second man were streaked with soot and bits of hay and dried horse manure. Behind them, the flooring in the barn had been ripped up, the plaster board gouged out of a bunk area, a rusty hot water tank split open with an ax.
The room was hotter than it should have been, filled with a hot smell that at first I thought came from the lantern.
'You don't look too good, man,' Ringo said.
I could feel the muscles constrict across my back, just like someone had taken pliers to my spine. I propped one arm against the doorjamb and held the pistol level with the other.
The second man clutched a plastic bag full of credit cards in his hand. He had the scarred eyebrows of a prizefighter and small ears and hair so blond it was almost white.
'Both you boys put your hands behind your head and get down on your knees,' I said.
The second man studied my face, his tongue moving across his bottom lip. 'Fuck you, buddy,' he said, and bolted into the barn, crashing out the door into the yard.
But I didn't fire. Instead, I kept the.45 pointed at Ringo's face, my other hand holding on to the doorjamb for balance. When I took a step forward, the pain caused my jaw to drop open. I heard the van start up outside and drive out of the yard.