Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“What’s that?”

“You try to intimidate a witness, you just create more trouble for yourself. Figure it out.”

“So you’re holding all the cards. Look, I don’t have a weapon. Why don’t you step outside? Nobody’s going to eat you.”

His fingers were long on the sides of the automatic. I had seen only one or two like it since I had left Vietnam. It was a 7.62-millimeter Russian Tokarev, a side arm often carried by NVA officers.

I saw Mapes wet the triangular scar on his lip, his mouth tight, his eyes narrowed as though he were biting down softly on a piece of string. He wasn’t a bad-looking man. He still had the build of a basketball player or a man who could do an easy five-mile morning run. You wouldn’t pay particular attention to him in a supermarket line. Except for his eyes. He was the kind who was always taking your inventory, provided you represented or possessed something he was interested in; and sometimes when you studied the eyes in his kind you saw a hidden thought there that made you look away hurriedly.

“You’re right,” he said, and set the pistol on the arm of a couch by the door. “Because you’re all smoke. A guy who’s always firing in the well. A big nuisance who couldn’t mind his own business.”

He opened the screen door and stepped out on the porch.

“You think it’s going to come out different somehow at your trial?” he said. “You think following me around Montana is going to make all that evidence go away?”

“You’ve got it wrong, Harry. I gave up on trying to nail you. You’re too slick a guy. You’ve fooled people all your life. You burned two people to death when you were seventeen, you murdered the Indians, the waitress in Louisiana, your partner, and I think you raped and murdered Darlene. You got away with all of it.”

I saw the blood drain out of the face of the woman behind the screen. Mapes’s chest rose and fell with his breathing.

“Listen, you asshole—” he said.

“But that’s not why I’m here. You were at the school ground, in that Mercury there, looking at my daughter through field glasses, asking questions about her. Now, my message here is simple. If you come around her again, I’m going to kill you. Believe it. I’ve got nothing to lose at this point. I’m going to walk up to you, wherever you are, and blow your fucking head off.”

I walked off the porch into the yard.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “You, too, Betty. You stay

out here and listen to this. My lawyer did some checking on this guy. He’s a drunk, he’s a mental case, he’s got an obsession because he got his wife killed by some drug dealers. Then somebody threatened his daughter, and he accused me and my partner. The fact that he’s an ex-cop with dozens of people who’d like to even a score with him doesn’t seem to enter his head. Let me tell you something, Robicheaux. Betty’s son goes to a Catholic school in Missoula. She and her ex-husband have shared custody. Sometimes I pick him up or drop him off for her. If that’s the same school your daughter goes to, it’s coincidence, and that’s all it is.”

“You heard what I said. No warning light next time,” I said.

I got inside my truck and closed the door.

“No, Harry, bring him back,” the woman said. “Who’s Darlene? What’s he talking about a rape? Harry?”

“He’s leaving. Close the door,” he said to her.

“Harry, I’ll call the sheriff. He can’t get away with saying that.”

“He’s leaving. He’s not coming back.”

Then he walked toward the truck window just as I started the engine.

“You’re going to prison,” he said. “Nothing’s going to change that. You can mess me up with my girl, you can say stuff about blowing me away if it makes you feel good, but in a few weeks you’re going to be hoeing sweet potatoes in Angola.”

I put the transmission in reverse and began backing around in a half circle. The wind blew his hair, and his skin looked grained and healthy in the sunlight. His eyes never left my face. My knuckles were ridged on top of the gearshift knob, and my thighs were shaking as I depressed the floor pedals.

It had all been for nothing.

But there was still time, the moment was still there. To pull the .45 from under the seat, to aim it suddenly at his face, knock him to his knees, screw the barrel hard into his neck and cock the hammer, let him experience the terror of his victims who clawed the inside of an automobile trunk while the metal heated and the flames spread to the gasoline tank. I could feel the .45 leap into my hand as though it had a life of its own.

I shut off the engine and stepped out of the truck. My face felt cool in the bright air. The yellow log house and the ponderosa and blue spruce on the hillsides seemed dazzling in the sun. His eyes dropped to my hands. I held my palms up.

“Did you ever go to the stake in Saigon?” I said.

“What?”

“Some ARVN and white mice would march them out to the stake, tie them to it, and put a round behind the ear. At least that was what I was told. I never saw it.”