“I think you’re leaving something out,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“You’ve described what you did, but you haven’t talked about why you did it, Dave.”
“Click is a charlatan. He preys on young girls. He lied about knowing those two kids who were killed. He belongs to the bunch that Jesus recommended millstones for.”
Good try.
“Is that the only reason?” the priest asked.
I scratched my arm and looked out the window. “I wanted to tear him apart. Maybe I wanted to kill him. I don’t know what else to say, Father. I’ve done these kinds of things before. It’s an old problem.”
“What do you think the cause is?”
I did not w
ant to answer the question. He waited a long time, then gave it up. “Well, neither of us is a psychiatrist.” He started to give me his absolution.
“I did it because I want to drink,” I said. “The desire is always there — in my sleep, in the middle of a fine day, in the middle of a rainstorm. It doesn’t matter, it’s always there.”
He nodded, his face empty, his eyes directed away from mine. The silence was such that my ears were ringing.
BUT MY EXPERIENCE with the Reverend Sonny Click wasn’t over. I had turned my cell phone off at the A.A. meeting and had left it off until I drove away from the church. When I turned it back on, I had a voice mail from Sheriff Joe Bim Higgins: “Call me when you get this message. This isn’t a request, either.” The message had been left only ten minutes earlier.
I punched in his callback number. “This is Dave Robicheaux,” I said.
“Where are you?” Higgins said.
“In my truck. By Christ the King Church.”
“I’m on my way to Rock Creek. I’ll meet you at Sonny Click’s house.”
“What for?”
“You’d better be there in twenty minutes, or you’ll be under arrest.”
I took him at his word. When I turned in to the Rock Creek drainage, I could see two Missoula County Sheriff’s Department cruisers parked in front of Click’s house. I also saw an ambulance parked on the yellow grass in the side yard.
Joe Bim Higgins walked toward me, his trousers stuffed inside his cowboy boots, his suit flecked with chaff blowing out of the field. The burned side of his face made me think of plaster that has dried unevenly on a wall. “What time were you out here?” he asked.
“Who says I was?”
“You want to be a smart-ass?”
“Midday.”
“What time, exactly?” he asked.
“Somewhere around one-thirty. I’m not sure.”
“The mailman says a guy answering your description left here at about a quarter to two. Would you say that’s correct?”
“I just told you.”
“Did you come back later in the afternoon?”
“No, I didn’t.”