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“What?”
“I want to hear you pronounce my name. You accented the first syllable. You think that’s funny?”
“No. You sound like you’re from New York.”
“Try Miami. That’s in Florida. New York is north of Florida. Why not let the cowboy put on his boots?”
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“You don’t want to find out, bacon. Where’s your boss?”
I HAD GONE INTO Missoula with Albert early that morning to buy a fishing license, and until we pulled into the driveway, I didn’t realize the forensic team was up on the hill.
“Waste of tax money,” Albert said.
“What is?” I asked.
“Messing around on that ridge. Homeless people wander off the highway all the time. They camp in the woods because they don’t have any other place to go. They don’t kidnap girls out of biker saloons or shoot at people with hunters’ bows.”
“Some of them are deranged and dangerous, Albert.”
“There’s nothing like fearing a man with a hole in his shoe.”
I didn’t feel like arguing with Albert’s proletarian views. “I’m going to walk up on the ridge. I’ll see you inside.”
“Tell that bunch I’d better not find their nasty cigarette butts on the property,” he replied.
As I worked my way up the slope, I could hear people talking on the far side of the trees. Then I saw a deputy in uniform, a second man in a baggy brown suit, a man in a checkered shirt I figured for a crime scene technician, and Wyatt Dixon, who was barefoot and hatless and sitting against the hillside, wrists manacled behind his back, clothes mud-streaked and sticking wetly to his skin. Gretchen Horowitz had just started back down the slope, her face as hot as a woodstove.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Don’t ask,” she said. She went past me as though I were a wood post.
I gained the road and looked down at Dixon. His teeth were red when he grinned. “Howdy-doody, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.
“You all right, Mr. Dixon?”
The mud in his hair and the drip from the trees were running into his eyes, and he had to squint to look up at me. “Do not misinterpret the situation of this poor rodeo cowboy. I am honored to once again find myself surrounded by such noble men as yourselves. God bless America and the ground that men such as yourselves walk on.”
“Where are your boots?”
He studied the bloodied tops of his feet as though seeing them for the first time. “The detective stomped my toes proper and told me I wouldn’t need no foot covering for a while.”
“What do you want here?” the man in the baggy suit said.
I opened my badge holder. “I’m Dave Robicheaux. I’m a homicide detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. What did y’all do to this fellow?”
“Nothing. He slipped down the slope,” the man in the suit said.
“He must have slid a long way. Did you say something to Miss Gretchen?”
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“The woman who just left here. She was angry about something.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”