“I breathed your friend in. While he died. In that little churchyard. I leaned over him and sucked out his soul. He lasted a long time while I used this on him. I breathed him and I tasted him. He died hard. His pain was great. My face was the last thing he saw in this life.”
“Why the women?”
“Rabbits are for eating. And I needed the pictures. While he was still with Peyote, I showed him what I had done to his wife. He took that with him when he died. I could see it in his face. It was… fine.”
Pinto leaned forward, put a hand on the ground, got a knee under him, and pushed himself to his feet, bracing his back on the cottonwood trunk. His chest was heaving and his long silver hair hung down limply over his brutal face. He was drenched in blood from his chest to his knees; Dalton could smell his blood across the clearing. The stiletto glinted in his right hand and he lifted it into the starlight.
“I make no excuses. They killed my sister and her baby. Not that I cared much for them. But they were mine and not to be killed by anybody else. And killing all those people, that was pleasant. Did you find the one in Butte, the one I left alive? I enjoyed him very much.”
Pinto jerked his arm.
Dalton moved to the left.
The stiletto hummed through the air.
Dalton brought the Colt up, but before he could squeeze the trigger, Pinto jerked suddenly forward. His chest blew wide open. Dalton saw thousands and thousands of glowing green maggots flying out of his body. Bits of lung and bone spattered wetly on Dalton’s boots.
From a long way away came the thunderclap sound of a heavy rifle, and then wind again, sighing in the sweetgrass.
Dalton walked over and looked down at Pinto.
His eyes were open and his mouth was working.
Dalton bent down over him. “Bill Knife says there are very bad spirits here.”
Pinto was staring up at him.
“The spirits of the people you hung in the trees here.”
Pinto’s eyes grew wide.
A bubble of blood burst from his lips.
“I’m going to send you to them, Pinto. They are waiting.”
Pinto opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out of it was a river of black blood. Pinto moved his head weakly, one hand raised, palm out, his eyes glimmering wetly in the starlight. Dalton placed the muzzle of the Colt against Pinto’s forehead, pressed down hard, and squeezed the trigger. His face was the last thing Pinto saw in this life.
He was still there, standing beside Pinto’s corpse, when the old men came silently out of the sweetgrass, three of them, two carrying long Winchester rifles, their faces barely visible in the starlight.
One of them stepped forward, looked down at Pinto’s body, and then up at Dalton.
“You okay, son? Not shot?”
“Not shot. I’m not quite right in the head.”
“Pinto laid his powder on the wind. You’ll be okay in a while.”
“Why did you shoot him? I had the Colt.”
Bill Knife looked down at Pinto’s body. “He knew how to make Goyathlay speak again. But we saw that he had maggots in his head. He killed young Wilson Horsecoat, just over there, a blood-simple boy, but he was kin to us, and he was a Comanche. Pinto never killed a Comanche before. So we figured it was time for him to go. Where’s the dog?”
“She’s back at the grave. Pinto cut her up pretty bad.”
“He did? Well, we’ll go take a look at her. I got a question?”
“Sure.”
“If the dog lives, can I have her? I do like a snake-mean dog.”
Dalton gave the matter some thought.
“Tell you what. I’ll trade you.”
“For what?”
“An ax.”
“Don’t have an ax. Will a hatchet do?”
“That’ll do.”
16
Dalton drove slowly up the long curving driveway, through the wrought-iron gates, and into the cobblestoned courtyard, coming to a stop at the foot of a wide curving staircase. Dr. Cassel — a tall, white-haired woman with a high, clear forehead, sharp brown eyes, and a hawklike nose — stood at the top of the stairs, her palepink linen dress ruffling in the ocean wind. Behind her the carved Spanish doors stood open under a broad portico, the old mission-style hospital rising up behind, pink adobe walls and carved wooden window frames, balconies, vines climbing up, heavy with bright red and blue flowers.
As he climbed out of the car, she smiled and came down the steps to meet him, her slender hand out, heavy gold on her wrist. She folded him into her frail birdlike body and kissed him in the French manner, a touch of the lips on the left cheek, and then the right, while holding his shoulders with her surprisingly strong grip. She smelled the way the sea did, salt and cypress, flowers and the tangy scent of cedar smoke.
“Micah, so wonderful to see you.”
Her expression altered as she looked up at him.
“You look terrible. Where have you been? No, no — I know you can’t tell me. Come upstairs, I have a table set on the veranda. Have you eaten? You really need to…”
She talked away at him, a stream of comforting trivial chatter while she walked him up the stairs and into the cool dark of the lobby, the floor of polished terra-cotta tiles gleaming in a shaft of sunlight coming in from the seaward sunroom, curved dark beams rising up into the darkness above, the smell of fresh flowers, coffee, a few patients staring down at them from the upper landings in that detached appraising way that the very sick or the very old have, the feeling of having stepped aside, of being raised above the bittersweet onrushing tide of everyday life. Dalton waved at the bent figure of an old man in a navy blue blazer and pressed gray slacks, a crisp white shirt. The old man may even have recognized Dalton — he lifted an empty pipe with a thick gold band and waved back to Dalton, smiling broadly.
Dr. Cassel walked him out through the greenhouse solarium and onto a wide flower-filled stone veranda encircled by thick pillars of pale pink marble.
Down the cliff and through the cypress trees, the broad Pacific boomed and roared, green waves curling up and crashing down against the cliffs, white spray flying, while beyond this the thunder and boom of the endless sea, rolling away to the uttermost ends of the world.
She sat him down at a green-painted wrought-iron table with a pink linen tablecloth and poured him a glass of wine from a dripping silver decanter, another for herself, and sat back to smile at him over the rim of her goblet.
“I was so sorry to hear about Porter. He was a lovely man.”
“He was.”
“Will there be a funeral? I don’t mean to pry. I know how delicate these things are in… in the company.”
“There isn’t, usually. But we’ve arranged a little ceremony in Cortona. That’s where the body is. The Carabinieri have been holding it for us. A Major Brancati, he has arranged for a mass at the church of San Nicolò—”
“I know it. That scruffy little hut, without a steeple, high up in the town. Why there, for all love?”
“It’s where Porter died,” said Dalton, pressing down the image that the words brought flowing into the top of his mind. Dr. Cassel saw the pain in his eyes and regretted the question.
“Well, that’s very lovely of the police there. Was Major Brancati a friend?”
“He became one. He was a great help in the investigation.”
“When do you leave?”