Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

Bertha got to her feet, stumbling off balance down the hill, her backside covered with dirt and twigs and leaves and pine needles. Wyatt kicked a man in the groin and split his scalp when he doubled over, and was sure he broke a third man’s ribs when he stomped him on the ground.

There was blood on the trunks of the trees. Wyatt was revolving in a circle, hitting his assailants as many times as he could, inflicting as much bone damage as possible before their superiority in numbers took its toll. One man fell out of the fight and scrambled away on his hands and knees, then rose to his feet and began running, his mask off, his long blond hair tumbling from a bandana that had come loose on his head. That was the moment when Wyatt made a critical mistake. He took time to try to see the running man’s face and instead saw a hand with a rock in it swing from the corner of his vision. His eyebrow split against the bone, and he tumbled down the side of a ravine into a creek bed.

The man who had struck the blow followed Wyatt in his slide down to the water’s edge. He wore a painter’s cap pulled down tightly on his scalp and a long-sleeved black shirt and tan strap overalls. The hair on his chest resembled gold wires. Wyatt was standing in the creek, his feet freezing. He had another problem. Just before he went over the side of the ravine, he felt his ankle fold under him, like a thick tuber bent back on itself.

The man in the painter’s hat opened Wyatt’s six-inch clasp knife and held it out from his body, blade up. “I’m gonna cut off your sack, Jack,” he said, his voice echoing inside his mask.

Wyatt had dropped the e-tool at the top of the ravine. He picked up part of a cottonwood limb from the rocks. It felt soggy and cold and foolish in his hands, the leaves dripping into the stream.

Long ago, on the yard, Wyatt had learned that real badasses didn’t talk. Nor did they shave their heads and wear tats from the wrist to the armpit. Nor did they mob up with the Aryan Brotherhood. Genuine badasses curled 150 pounds, picked up five hundred on their shoulders, and did fifty push-ups while another guy sat on their backs. Their bodies radiated lethality the way hog shit radiated stink. As an old con in Huntsville once told him, silence was your greatest strength. It forced your enemies into the theater of the mind, where their fears ate them alive.

“Then we’re gonna finish our date with your gash,” the man in overalls said.

Wyatt didn’t move. He could hear the water coursing around his feet and ankles and the cuffs of his jeans, the canopy swaying high above the ravine.

“Looks like you might have broke your ankle,” the man in tan overalls said.

Had he heard the voice behind that mask before? He couldn’t be sure. It was distorted, as though rising from the bottom of a stone well. Why wasn’t the man carrying a piece?

“Maybe we’ll call it a draw,” the man said. “Maybe you learned your lesson.”

Lesson about what? Wyatt thought.

“You got nothing to say?”

He blinked inside the mask. He’s lost his guts. He’s fixing to step backward.

“Count your blessings, Tex,” the man said. “We’re going to allow you to walk out of here. The broad got off easy, too. If you ask me, she majored in ugly.”

When the man in strap overalls stepped backward, Wyatt whipped the cottonwood limb down on his forearm, knocking the knife from his hand onto the rocks. He swung again and missed, his ankle folding under him, a sickening pain traveling upward into his genitals and stomach. He threw himself forward and grabbed the man’s legs and tried to pull him down but lost his purchase in the stream and was barely able to hang on to the man’s right wrist.

The man fell backward, stomping Wyatt in the face. His gloves were cloth, the kind you would buy in a garden store. As he pulled away from Wyatt, his left glove slipped down to his knuckles, exposing the back of his hand. On it was a tattoo of a red spider. He kicked Wyatt in the side of the head and in seconds was running through the trees.

TWO HOURS LATER, Wyatt was sitting on the side of an examination table in the ER at Community Medical Center, out by old Fort Missoula, his ankle wrapped, his eyebrow stitched. A plainclothes detective pulled back the curtain and stared at him. “Heard you had some bad luck today.”

“You could call it that,” Wyatt said. “I seen you somewhere before?”

“I don’t know. Have you?”

“By that cave up behind Albert Hollister’s house. Except you were in uniform. You and Detective Pepper was talking about the Horowitz woman, something about needing a board across your ass so you wouldn’t fall in.”

The detective was a lean and angular man with grainy skin and jet-black hair and sideburns that flared on his cheeks. He had a mustache and wore a new suit of dark fabric with blue stripes. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in at least two days. “Did you recognize any of your assailants?” he asked.

“They had on masks. I need to see Miss Bertha.”

“I just left her. She’s fine.”

“When was the last time you seen a rape victim doing fine?”

“Were they white men? Not Indian or African-American or Hispanic?”

“I don’t know what they was.”

“You see any identifying marks?”

“No.”

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