“Because beating up on clerks isn’t Dixon’s style. A woman, probably Bertha Phelps, was with him. You have any idea what they might be up to?”
“Dixon knows he’s Love Younger’s illegitimate son. He may be going to Younger’s cabin on Sweathouse Creek.”
“How long have you known this?”
“My daughter just told me. She found out from a third party. But all of what I’ve told you is speculation, Sheriff. How about easing up a little bit?”
“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Robicheaux. Before this is over, I think you’re going to be charged.”
“With what?”
“I’ll check with the district attorney and get back to you. By the way, he was stationed at Fort Polk and hates the state of Louisiana.”
“It’s not for everybody.”
“Is there anything else you’ve concealed from this office?” he said.
“Surrette may be on Flathead Lake. Somewhere around an orchard, close to the water. Maybe there’s an amphibian close by. I’m going up there in a few minutes.”
“You’re not going to do a goddamn thing, Mr. Robicheaux. I can’t express how angry you make me—”
Molly pulled the receiver from my hand and put it to her ear. “Listen, you simpleton,” she said. “My husband has dedicated his life to law enforcement. He doesn’t need a tobacco-chewing pinhead lecturing him on legal protocol. My husband was also in the shit. Do you know what that means? He’s the recipient of the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. Do not call here again unless you have something worthwhile to say. If you try to harass him again in any way, you’ll hear from me.” She slammed down the phone, her cheeks flaming.
“I don’t think he chews tobacco,” I said.
“Whatever,” she said.
Wyatt turned off the engine but left the headlights on. There was a silver skull on the tip of his key chain, hollow-eyed and buffed smooth, like old pewter, and it swung back and forth under the dash. When it stopped, he popped it with his thumb and index finger. There was no other sound inside the cab. He looked out the side window and saw lights in the sky.
“You still haven’t told me what you plan to do,” Bertha said.
“Maybe I’ll kill me an old man. I ain’t decided yet.”
“It won’t be prison this time. They’ll execute you.”
He reached behind him and took the vintage Winchester from the rack and placed the butt on the floorboards, the barrel resting against the seat. He clicked a switch on the headliner that would prevent the interior light from turning on when he opened the door. “This one ain’t gonna make the jail,” he said. “No matter how it plays out.”
“You’re breaking my heart, Wyatt.”
“There’s three thousand dollars taped in envelopes under my dresser drawers. There’s a quart jar of silver dollars buried under the rosebush in the flower bed. In my footlocker, you’ll find my championship buckle and a Nazi dagger with a pearl handle that’s got a ruby swastika set in it. You listening to me?”
“Let it go.”
“It ain’t me that’s doing all this. Time’s done run out. When that happens, people ain’t got no say in things.”
“We can just drive away. Leave the nasty old man to himself.”
“I saw some pictures in my mind this evening I ain’t told you about. I would have told you before, but I didn’t know they was there.”
“Pictures of what?”
“Something that happened in a piney woods. It was summertime and real hot inside the trees, so hot I couldn’t hardly breathe. I could smell sap running out of the bark. I never been inside a woods that smelled that raw, like the smell that comes off a buzz saw when you run a fresh-cut pine through it. Pap and my mother was there, looking at me. From the ground, I mean. They was both looking up into my face.”
“What are you telling me?” she asked, her voice starting to slip.
“I ain’t sure. I told them to get up, but there wasn’t no doubt they was dead. Somebody made sure of that. In the pictures in my head, I’m fifteen. That’s when I left home for Big D, riding on a side-door Pullman. I always knew I was gonna get on that train again. It’s been waiting for me all these years.”
He pushed down the door handle and started to get out, his right hand clutching the 1892 Winchester. His sheathed bowie knife rested on the dashboard. She held him by the arm. “We have a special thing between us,” she said. “Don’t let this man take that away.”
“I’m gonna fix it so he don’t ever hurt nobody again, Bertha. What happens after that ain’t in my hands.”
“They’ll crush us, Wyatt. You know why? Because you’re too good for them. They hate and fear a brave man. You don’t know you’re essentially good, so you keep giving away your power.”
The front door of the cabin opened. Love Younger stood in the doorway, squinting into the brilliance of the pickup’s high beams. “Begone, Wyatt Dixon,” he called out, his teeth baring in the headlights.
Wyatt was no longer listening to the thespian rhetoric of Love Younger. Bertha Phelps reached up on the dashboard and clutched his bowie knife. The blade was thick across the top and eleven inches long, the nickel-plated guard bigger than her cupped hand. “You stay here. Don’t you dare try to stop me,” she said.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Saving you from yourself. Paying a debt. Bringing judgment on the wicked. Call it anything you want. But it’s going to be over.”
She climbed out of the cab, her big rump sliding off the seat, carrying her cloud of perfume with her, the blade still sheathed in its beaded Indian scabbard.
Love Younger raised his hand against the glare of the headlights. His eyes were burning, his tear ducts streaming. He brushed at his cheeks with the back of his wrist, almost like a child recovering from an unfair reprimand. The air seemed lit with an oily iridescence that he could reach out and touch. “Who comes there?” he said, feeling like one of the grandiose characters he discovered in the medieval romances carried to the hollow by the bookmobile.
He smelled her before he saw her. The odor made him think of flowers on a warm night. Where had he smelled it before? Down south somewhere, perhaps in the tidewater country, a place where moss-hung oaks and palm trees both grew in profusion and the glory of a failed nation clinked and popped on a flagpole at every sunrise. Then he saw her and the reality that she represented.
He did not know who she was, but he quickly recognized the rage that lived in her face. He had seen it many times over the years and factored it in as part of the long gloomy march from Eden into the land of Canaan. Women were cursed with childbearing and scullery and the back of a man’s hand and the wanton breath of a drunkard against the cheek in the middle of the night. Until modern times, many of them died while giving birth, or were haggard and exhausted at forty, with tattered memories of the expectations they had brought to their beds on their wedding night. He had always considered it their misfortune and none of his own.
She flung the sheath off the knife she held in her right hand, the blade as bright and honed as an Arthurian sword pulled from stone.
“You corrupted and destroyed my brother,” she said. “His death is on you, not on the serial killer. Now you’re fixing to take my man.”
“Your brother? What brother?” he said. In his confusion, he tried to answer his own question. The faceless men he had destroyed were too numerous to count. He saw the knife blade rise to eye level, out of the headlights’ glare, and wondered how someone he had never met could hate him so much.
“Your dress is purple,” he said.
She drove the knife into his chest. He felt its point reach deep inside him, cutting through tendon and muscle, searching out the source of the blood that pounded in his temples and wrists when he was angered, now probing the outer edges of the heart, the steel tip going deeper each time the muscle swelled and receded. Her face was no more than three inches from his, her mouth a tight seam, her eyes burrowing into his, as she forced the knife deeper inside, pinching off the flow of light into his brain, stilling the fury and mire of veins and heart’s blood that, for a lifetime, had fed his thoughts and given him the libidinal power of a lion and allowed him to build a business empire that thrilled him as would the jingle of sabers and spurs.