Dalton was leaning back on the mound, the rough river stones still giving off some of the day’s heat, his range jacket zipped tight, his collar up, holding the Colt in his left hand and feeling the slender shaft of a disposable hypodermic needle in his right. The needle was filled with Narcan. Maybe it would help. Maybe not. He was hungry and afraid and thinking about Florian’s in Venice, about the light on Saint Mark’s Basin, the taste of cold champagne on a hot afternoon. He did not expect to live through the night, but he found he could not leave. The world needed Pinto dead, and the work had come to him. Irene sat up and sniffed at the wind, whimpering. Dalton stood up and looked to the west, the breeze ruffling his collar as he faced into the wind. He saw a dark eddy in the waving grass.
He cocked the Colt.
He smelled eucalyptus and a nameless spice on the wind.
The world changed.
The sky grew very bright and he could feel the electric hum of the Milky Way on the back of his hands as it shimmered in the night sky. All the tall grasses around him turned into golden snakes, writhing and coiling. There were strange voices in their hissing, a song he could not quite understand, although the meaning seemed to float just beneath the surface of his mind, and he felt that if he concentrated on the song, the meaning would suddenly be revealed, and that revelation would be shattering, would open his soul to God and make him perfect.
Under the singing of the snakes he heard the clicking of the beetles busy in Moot Gibson’s grave. Irene was beside him now, quivering, as a tall broad shape, surrounded by a corona of emerald green light, rose up out of the long grass on the far side of Moot Gibson’s tomb. All the golden snakes faded away into silence, into a perfect stillness, so complete that Dalton could hear his own heart beating, a ragged fitful drumming.
“You’re the man from Venice,” said the figure across the grave, the deep voice low but carrying, a whisper full of menace and power.
“I am. You killed Porter Naumann.”
Pinto shook his head and green flies buzzed up in a great cloud around him. He spoke out of the swarm, in the buzzing voice of a hive. “Peyote killed him. He could not survive the question.”
“And the rest?”
“Rabbits are for eating. Who cares about them? Why should we talk? You have nothing to tell me. You have been given the breath of Peyote. I scattered it on the wind, while you sat there and dreamed about Italy. I could tell you to shoot yourself now, with that Colt in your hand, and you would do it. I could tell you to strangle that she-dog and you would do it. I told your friend to tear his face off and he ran away to do it. In a while I will tell you go to sleep and when you wake up I will have found something interesting to do with you.”
Now Pinto’s voice was no longer the voice of a swarm. It had changed into a deep drone, like a huge organ. He felt Pinto’s spirit walking around in the bridges and streets of his skull, his boots echoing off the bone the way they had echoed off the cobblestones in the streets of Venice. His mouth was stuffed with cold wet clay, as if he were lying beside Moot Gibson already, and there were shining green beetles feeding in his brain.
Dalton slid a careful hand into his jacket pocket, closed it around the disposable hypodermic needle.
“Where’s your spirit friend?” Pinto asked. “The green man.”
Dalton searched for his voice, found it at last, a dry croak. “He’s gone away.”
“Too bad. He was with you in Venice.”
“He saved me from your spider.”
“You liked the spider? Here, a gift—”
He threw something across the rock mound, something green and on fire, spinning legs of green fire. It landed with a thump on the ground at Dalton’s feet — a huge green spider.
Dalton squeezed his fist tight around the needle in his pocket, drove the tip deep into the palm, pressing the plunger. The Narcan rushed into his system, flooding it, driving everything before it.
Dalton stepped forward and crushed the green spider into the earth with the sole of his boot, feeling it pop under his sole.
Irene ran up the rock mound and launched herself at Pinto. Pinto slashed at her with a knife — Dalton saw the blood drops spray sideways across the sky, a constellation of rubies.
He lifted the Colt up. The gun kicked back. The muzzle flared, an expanding corona of fire that blazed like Andromeda.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six rounds off, the big Colt leaping in his hands, his shoulders jerking back. Then the hammer, clacking and clacking and clacking on the empty chambers. Dalton stood there for a timeless period, blinking, his retinas still imprinted with the flaring galaxy of the muzzle blast, and then he stepped up onto the top of Moot Gibson’s grave and looked down at the sweetgrass on the far side.
There was nothing there.
In the starlight Dalton could see a swath of crushed grasses, leading away into the open plains. He stepped off the mound and knelt down beside Irene. Her mouth was open and she was panting rapidly. He touched her ribs. Her heartbeat was faint but steady. The wound along her side gaped, and pink ribs showed. Dalton used his belt to wrap her chest, pinching the wound shut.
He patted her, stood up, took a ragged breath, and passed into the long grass with a hiss and a rustle, following Pinto’s path. In the distance he could hear the sound of someone racing through the grass, and when he looked into the middle distance he could see a black shape, stumbling now.
He reloaded the Colt.
Kept walking.
Far overhead a crow soared, a black flutter against the star field. Down on the starlit grass plain beneath the crow’s wings, the crow saw two dark figures moved through the waving grass, one man stumbling and staggering, the other man following, moving easily, coming on.
The crow wheeled higher and flew off toward Culebra.
After a long time Pinto reached a stand of cottonwoods by an arroyo where the Little Apishapa used to run. By now Pinto’s boots were full of blood and they squelched as he staggered forward toward the stand of trees, their bare branches pale in the starlight.
Pinto reached the clearing and fell forward against the trunk, wrapping himself around it, his bloody hands leaving black smears on the rough bark. He let his body slide to the ground, twisted; the pain in his belly was ferocious, like a wolf ripping at his guts.
He got his back against the tree and pulled out the long ivory-handled stiletto he wore in a sheath at his belt. Far out in the grassland he could see the tall figure of the man pursuing him.
Pinto lifted the Ruger, aimed the muzzle at the figure, pulled the trigger, a dry click. He threw the pistol down, laid the stiletto across his blood-soaked thighs, pulled in a long breath, and waited.
A few minutes later, Dalton walked out into the little clearing around the cottonwood tree, the Colt out, the muzzle steady.
Pinto looked up at him, his eyes dark, but two pale glints inside them. When he opened his mouth to speak, a black bubble formed, broke, and a ribbon of blood ran down his chin.
He began to laugh, a dry rattle.
“You know where you are?” asked Dalton.
“Yes. I am at my altar. This is where I tasted the government people. This is where I took the woman again and again. Her bones are here. And the two others.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I like it here. It smells… good.”
He pulled in a snuffling breath, like a dog taking a scent.
It ended in a wet cough.
“Three in my belly. You are a good chaser. I thought I had you, back in Wyoming, but you got onto the roof. I had to let you go.”
“Here I am.”
Pinto lifted the stiletto, turned it in the starlight.
Dalton could see the blue flicker along its edge, and beyond it Pinto’s bloody smile in the darkness.