“What do you think I’m doing? Where else am I gonna look?”
“When is the last time you saw Asa Surrette?”
“Who?”
“You were wired up earlier,” she said. “Why would a guy who did time in Lompoc and Atascadero be wired up in a yuppie bar on Sunday evening?”
“Because I’m not good with women. Because you got big knockers. Because you look like you could rip the ass out of an elephant. I get nervous about those things.”
She pulled off her latex gloves and dropped them on the floor. “Bill Pepper drugged and sexually tortured me.”
“I don’t know anybody by that name.”
“I believe you. You know why?”
“Because I’m telling the truth?”
“No, because you blinked after you spoke.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“When I asked you the previous questions, you widened your eyes so you wouldn’t blink. That means you were lying, Tony,” she said. “We’re back to square one. You remember what square one was, don’t you? On square one, you were the rapist who attacked Wyatt’s friend. For me, that makes you the kind of guy who deserves anything that happens to him. I don’t want you to misunderstand. I’m not trying to scare you. I just want you to know what your victims feel about you and what they’re capable of doing when they get the chance. Am I getting through?”
“No,” he said.
“There was this mobbed-up guy named Bix Golightly who forced his cock into the mouth of a six-year-old girl on her birthday and told her he’d kill her if she ever told her mother. The little girl grew up and found this guy in New Orleans sitting behind the wheel of his van. She parked one in his forehead, one in the middle of his face, and one in his mouth. It was pretty messy. See, the shooter was using twenty-two hollow-points. They don’t exit, they bounce around inside the skull. As I recall, Bix Golightly’s brains were running out his nose.”
Zappa’s lips were gray, his elongated eyes sweeping around the room, as though an answer to his situation lay inside the shadows.
“Wyatt is not the person you need to worry about,” she said. “I want to pop you and do it in pieces. I hope you keep lying. I’ve got a feeling you’ve hurt lots of women, and all of them will be cheering wh
en we drop you in a Dumpster. Want to clear your conscience?”
“I’m a gardener. I stacked time when I was young. I got a good job in Carson City and cleaned up my act. If you know everything, check my sheet. I work for the Youngers, but I never talk to them. The old man is in his helicopter or in his library with his guns. The daughter-in-law acts like her shit don’t stink and we don’t exist. Caspian hands out the chores through the head groundsman.”
“Let me show you something, Miss Gretchen,” Wyatt said. He positioned himself in front of Tony Zappa and ripped open his shirt, popping off all the buttons. Then he tore the shirt off his shoulders and peeled it down his arms. “See that bruise on his forearm? That’s where I hit him with a cottonwood limb. See that gold hair on his chest? It was sticking out of his shirt when he come at me with the knife he took off me.” Dixon looked down at Zappa. “I told Miss Bertha I was gonna bring her your ears. She cried. That’s the kind of lady y’all ripped the clothes off. You smiling at me, boy?”
Wyatt picked up the telephone book and swung it with both hands into Zappa’s head. The chair toppled backward, Zappa falling with it hard against the floor, the back of his head thudding against the concrete beneath the carpet. He stared at the ceiling with the empty look of a man who had plunged backward to the bottom of a well. “I wasn’t smiling. I wasn’t doing anything,” he said. “Do to me whatever you want. I heard talk about a guy you’re not gonna like meeting.”
“Maybe the guy who did Bill Pepper?” Gretchen said.
“They say this guy can’t die. I’ve heard about what he’s done to some women. I hope you meet him. I hope I’m there to watch it.”
Gretchen squatted on her haunches so she could look directly into Tony Zappa’s face. She could smell the weed on his clothes and the beer on his breath and the deodorant layered under his armpits and the sunblock he had rubbed into his scalp and cornrows. She took her Airweight .38 special from her side pocket and flipped out the cylinder and removed four of the five rounds loaded in the chambers. “You were one of the guys who attacked Wyatt and his friend, weren’t you?”
“I never saw the guy. Why should I want to attack him?”
“Earlier tonight you were worried about a cowboy with a limp and a cut on his head. That’s the man you’re looking at right now. How could you describe him to me if you never saw him?”
The blood drained from Tony Zappa’s cheeks. Gretchen rotated the cylinder of the Airweight with her palm without looking at it, then snapped it back into the pistol’s frame. “Do you know who Percy Wolcott was?”
“No.”
“He was my friend. I think someone you know sabotaged his plane.”
“I never heard of him.”
“I had a feeling you might say that. Are you good at math?”