“The guy’s having a seizure!” Clete shouted, his face dilated with feigned alarm. “Get an ambulance!” He pushed his way through the crowd, not looking back.
“What happened?” I said.
“I’ve got one of his boots. It’s a Tony Lama,” he said.
“What did you do?” Alafair said.
“I think the guy fell down and got the wind knocked out of him. Don’t run. Everything is copacetic.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I take that back. Haul ass!”
SUNDAY MORNING WYATT Dixon was lying shirtless and in his socks in a hammock strung between two cottonwoods, down by the water’s edge, in front of his house on the Blackfoot. When he heard somebody clanging across the steel swing bridge, he didn’t know if the sound was real or if a junkyard was rolling around in his head. He picked up his pint of mint-flavored sloe gin and took a sip and gargled with it, then swallowed. With one eye closed, he watched a slender man with a jet-black mustache and flared sideburns approach him. The man was carrying a paper sack.
“Do you know some people say a law dog has a smell that don’t wash off?” Wyatt said. “They say it’s like trying to launder
the stink out of shit.”
“You’re a hard man to find, Dixon.”
“Not if you come to the place I happen to be at. You can call me Mr. Dixon.”
“Your neighbors say you’ve been drunk for the last couple of days.”
“I cain’t necessarily say one way or the other. I have these empty spaces in my memory, kind of like holes in rat cheese. My neighbors are still giving out news bulletins on me, huh?”
“You remember me?”
“Jack Something. I know it’s not Jack Shit. Wait a minute, it’s coming. You replaced Detective Pepper. The name is Jack Boyd. Or do you like Jack Shit better?”
The detective lifted his finger at the pint bottle balanced on Wyatt’s chest. “I always heard that stuff tasted like mouthwash with turpentine poured in it.”
“It does. That’s why I drink it.”
“I went by your girlfriend’s apartment. Bertha Phelps is still your girlfriend, right?”
“We’re in a holding pattern.”
The detective gazed at the river. It was wide and green and veined with froth from a beaver dam upstream. “You must have your women trained. I wish I knew the trick.”
“About what?”
“Training women. You use Viagra?”
Wyatt screwed the cap on his gin bottle and set it down in the grass. He looked at the detective with one eye. “I’m having a little trouble focusing on the direction of your conversation.”
“She accused the department of trying to put you back inside. From what she says, you’re an innocent man. In fact, you hung the moon. What’s your secret? That’s what I’m saying.”
“Secret about what?”
“Lighting up a woman’s inner self. You don’t ride them hard and put them away wet, I guess. I thought that was the cowboy way.”
Wyatt sat up in the hammock and rested his sock feet on the grass. “I don’t know as I care for the way you’re talking about Miss Bertha.”
The detective turned the paper bag upside down and let the contents slip loose and fall on the ground. “Ever see that before?”
“It’s a boot.”
“It’s a Tony Lama boot. You claimed the men who attacked you stole your Tony Lama boots. They were cordovan. So is this.”
“It ain’t mine.”