Larry Wraike was dead long before Mitch took the knife and began carving up his face. Andy would have called that gratuitous. It might even have been more than Andy himself would have done. If so, it was a way for Mitch to prove to himself that he had graduated, that he had moved beyond being Andrew Carlisle’s student. He was, in fact, a talented killer in his own right, out to get a little of his own back from those who had wronged him in the past.
It took only a matter of seconds to mangle Larry Wraike’s face. Afterward, while Mitch was showering, he laughed to think of Lori being called into a coroner’s office to identify the bloody remains. Other than Lori and a few cops, not many people would see what he had done, but the thought of Lori seeing her husband that way made Mitch happy.
She was, after all, the only one who mattered.
As expected, Mitch himself was miles away from the motel when the teenaged prostitute from the other side of the border let herself into the room and discovered the body. Despite her frenzied screams and her subsequent protestations of innocence, she and her pimp would be going on trial soon, down in Santa Cruz County, for the savage murder of Larry Wraike.
Mitch Johnson had made it back to his RV on Coleman Road without any questions asked. And if any homicide cops from Nogales ever went looking for the old man who had met with the victim in a bar a few hours before his death, they never had any luck finding him.
Nope, as far as Larry Wraike was concerned, Mitch Johnson got away clean.
More relaxed now, Mitch stood up, stretched, and went inside, but he still didn’t feel like sleeping. Instead, he took out a sketchbook and went to work.
“What was the author’s name again?” Noreen Kennedy, the prison librarian, had asked.
“Nicolaïdes,” Mitch Johnson answered. “He’s Greek.”
“And the name of the book?”
“The Natural Way to Draw.”
Noreen was a firm believer in the importance of rehabilitation. “You’re studying art, then?” she asked.
Mitch smiled diffidently. “I’ve always been interested in art,” he said. “But there was never enough time to do anything about it. Now I’ve got nothing but time. This book is supposed to be the best there is.”
The book arrived eventually, courtesy of an inter-library loan. And it was every bit as good as Mitch had been told it would be. With a pencil and a cheap sketchbook, he went to work doing the exercises. The book contained a year-long course of study. Unfortunately, the checkout period was limited to two weeks.
“Could you order it for me again, Mrs. Kennedy?” he asked, the day he returned it to the library. “In two weeks’ time, I barely got started. What I really need is my own copy.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
It was a month before Mitch received a summons to the library. Noreen Kennedy, who was almost as wide as she was tall, smiled broadly at him. “You’ll never guess what I found,” she said, holding up a shabby volume Mitch instantly recognized as a much-used copy of the Nicolaïdes book.
“I got it from a used-book dealer in Phoenix who’s an old friend of mine,” she said. “We went to Library School together. Jack said he’s had it in inventory for years and he only charged me five bucks. Can you afford to buy it, or should I just go ahead and put it in the collection?”
“I’d really like to have my own copy, if you don’t mind,” Mitch said.
“I thought you would,” Noreen said, handing it over.
The book had been a godsend. When Mitch was sketching, the hours seemed to fly by. As the months went past, it was easy to recognize the increasing skill in the way he executed the exercises. While he sketched, Andrew Carlisle talked. It was as though he had an almost physical need to share his exploits with someone. Mitch Johnson became Andy’s chosen vessel.
Andy’s bragging about the tapes was how Mitch first heard about them. At first it made him uneasy that Andy had taken such pains to make a record of all he had done, but in the long run, Mitch realized that recordings were just that—mechanical reproductions. They didn’t allow for any artistic license. Painting did.
There was a locked storage unit under the bed in the Bounder. In it were two 18-by-24-inch canvases. Each oil painting was of Larry Wraike, one before and one after. The first was of a moderately handsome overfed businessman in a well-pressed suit, the kind of dully representative portrait that an overly proud wife might have commissioned in honor of some special occasion. An art critic seeing the second painting would have assumed, mistakenly, that this was an imaginative rendition of a soul in torment.
Only Mitch Johnson knew that that one, too, was fully representational. He thought of them as a matched pair—“Larry Wraike Before” and “Larry Wraike After.”
Half an hour after returning to the RV, when he held the unfinished drawing up to a mirror to examine it, the artist was pleased with the likeness. Anyone who knew Quentin Walker would have recognized him. The picture showed him sitting slump-shouldered, his elbows resting on the bar, his eyes morosely focused on the beer in the bottom of the glass in front of him. Quentin Walker Before.
Looking at the picture, though, Mitch Johnson realized something else about it—something he had never noticed before that moment—how very much the son resembled the father. That hadn’t been nearly so apparent when Quentin first showed up in Florence as it was now. He had come to prison as nothing but a punk kid. The hard years in between had matured and hardened him into what Brandon Walker had been when Mitch first knew him.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Mitch said to the picture reflected back from the mirror. “If you aren’t your daddy’s spitting image, Mr. Quentin Walker. Imagine that!”
5
They say it happened long ago that the weather grew very hot—the hottest year the Tohono O’othham had ever known. And all this happened in the hottest part of that year.
For many weeks the Indians and the animals had looked at the sky, hoping to find one cloud that would show them that Chewagi O’othham—Cloud Man—was still alive. There was not a cloud.
The water holes had been dry for a long time. The Desert People had gone far away to find water. The coyotes had followed the Indians. The wolves and foxes had gone into the mountains. All the birds had left. Even Kakaichu—Quail—who seldom leaves his own land, was forced to go away.
Gohhim Chuk—Lame Jackrabbit—had found a little shade. It was not much, just enough to keep him from burning. The tips of his ears and his tail were already burned black. And that, nawoj, is why that particular kind of jackrabbit—chuk chuhwi—is marked that same way, even today.
As Gohhim Chuk—Lame Jackrabbit—lay panting in his little bit of shade, he was wondering how he would manage the few days’ journey to a cooler place. Then he saw Nuhwi—Buzzard—flying over him.
Now it is the law of the desert to live and let live, that one should only kill in self-defense or to keep from starving. The animals forget this law sometimes when their stomachs are full and when there is plenty of water, but when the earth burns and when everyone is in danger, the law is always remembered. So Lame Jackrabbit did not run away when he saw Buzzard circling down over him. Buzzard knew the law of the desert as well as Lame Jackrabbit did.
Nuhwi flew in circles, lower and lower. When he was low enough, he called to Lame Jackrabbit. “I have seen something very odd back in the desert,” Nuhwi said. When he was high up over the part of the desert which was burned bare, he told Lame Jackrabbit, he saw on the ground a black place that seemed to be in motion. He had circled down hoping it was water. But it was only a great crowd of Ali-chu’uchum O’othham, the Little People.