“I want to talk to you.”
I wasn’t up to one of Albert’s philosophic sessions. He’d had chains on his ankles when he was seventeen and had belonged to the Industrial Wor
kers of the World and had known Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. He’d followed the wheat harvest from the Texas Panhandle to southern Alberta and had been on a freighter that hit a mine in the Strait of Hormuz. He was a charitable and fine man, and I held him in the highest regard. There were also times when he could drive you crazy and make you want to throttle him.
“You were raised up in a superstitious culture,” he said. “When you let your imagination get the best of you, you start to see the devil’s hand at work in your life. The devil isn’t a man, Dave.”
“Then what is he?”
“Those goddamn corporations.”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“You’re going to whether you like it or not. They bust our unions and use coolie labor in China and buy every goddamn president we elect.”
“I can’t take this, Albert.”
“Those men who tried to kill Miss Gretchen were working for somebody. Who would that be? Satan or Love Younger?”
“A man like Younger doesn’t hire hit men.”
“You don’t know your enemy, Dave. You never did.”
“You want to translate that?”
“How’d your father die?”
“As the result of an accident. Don’t be using my old man in your polemics.”
He placed his hand on my shoulder. “All right, I won’t. But don’t hurt yourself like this. The enemy is flesh and blood, not a creature who wears a pentacle for a hat.”
I took the extinguisher and finished spraying the cave and the bushes around the entrance. “Better come have a look,” I said.
“What is it?” he said, getting to his feet.
“Check out the wall.”
He stood at the entrance, the smoke from the ash rising into his face, his eyes watering. “It’s an aberration caused by the heat,” he said.
I wanted to believe him, except in this case, I think Albert also had his doubts.
The message had probably been incised into the lichen with the point of a rock. The letters had not been cut much deeper than the moldy green patina. The intensity of the fire, augmented by two bottles of gasoline, should have burned the wall as clean as old bone. Instead, the letters were black and smoking, as though they had been seared into the stone with a branding iron.
“Don’t just walk away,” I said.
“I’m done with this foolishness, and I won’t discuss it with you or anybody else,” he replied. “Not now, not ever. You get yourself to a psychiatrist, Dave.”
AT DAWN ON Sunday, Wyatt Dixon awoke to a sound that didn’t fit with either his dreams or the sounds he usually heard at daybreak. It was a sound like the pages of a book or magazine flipping in the breeze. Had he left a window open? No, the temperature had dropped last night, and he had shut and latched all of them. He sat up in bed and removed the sheathed bowie knife he kept under his pillow. He put on his jeans and limped barefoot and shirtless into the kitchen, his hair hanging in his face, his bad ankle wrapped with an elastic bandage.
She was sitting at the table, her long legs propped on a chair, reading a copy of People, a cup of Starbucks coffee in her hand. “What are you doing in my house?” he said.
“I didn’t want to wake you, so I let myself in,” Gretchen said.
“My door was dead-bolted.”
“It was dead-bolted until I got a coat hanger on it. Dave Robicheaux told me about the three guys who attacked you and your friend. How is she doing?”
“She’s home.”