Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“I think I’ll stick to rodeoing.”

“It’s been an honor talking to you,” Younger said. He put one hand on Wyatt’s shoulder and got to his feet. His hand felt like sandpaper on Wyatt’s skin. “What became of your folks?”

“I ain’t sure. I got these blank spots in my head. I see people walk in and out of my dreams, like they’re trying to tell me something. These are people I used to know. But I cain’t remember what happened to them or who they are. I get the feeling they’re dead and they don’t like staying under the ground.”

Wyatt stared at the river for a long time and listened to the humming sound the current made through the hollowed-out places under the bank. A cloud had covered the sun, and there was an impenetrable luster on the water’s surface, as though the light that lived in the rocks and the sand on the bottom had died and the world had become a colder and more threatening place. When he looked up, he realized Love Younger had mounted the suspension bridge and was walking toward the opposite side, indifferent to the bridge’s bouncing motion or the rapids below. Wyatt tried to remember what he had said to Love Younger that might have driven him back across the river, but the words were already gone from his memory, along with the images of the people who spoke to him in his dreams and that rarely gave him rest.

FELICITY LOUVIERE HAD asked Clete to meet her that evening at the Café Firenze, a lovely buff-colored restaurant on a side road in the Bitterroot Valley, set among aspens and poplar trees, backdropped by the Sapphire Mountains in the east and the gigantic outline of the Bitterroots in the west. Clete shined his shoes and laid out his clothes on the bed and shaved in the shower stall and stayed under the hot water until his skin glowed. Then he put on his beige slacks and tasseled loafers and a blue shirt with a lavender tie and the sport coat that he wore to the track in New Orleans. The perfection of the evening, the pink sky, the distant smell of rain, a flicker of electricity in a cloud, reminded him of springtime in Louisiana, when he was young and the season seemed eternal and all of his expectations were within inches of his grasp.

He arrived early at the restaurant and ordered a glass of red wine at a table by a window. He saw her turn off the highway in the fading twilight and come down the county road and park her Audi by a row of poplar trees. She put on a pair of dark glasses before she came into the restaurant.

When he stood up to hold out her chair, he saw the red abrasions at the corner of one eye and the bruise on her jaw that she had covered with foundation. “Did your husband do that?” he said.

“I told him I’m leaving. The prenup is a hundred thousand. I’m going out to Nevada with it.” She took a sip from his wineglass and smiled in a self-mocking way. “Want to roll the dice under the stars?”

“He beat you up?”

“Who cares? He’s a child.”

“I care.”

“He’s taken to drinking absinthe. It makes him go crazy sometimes. He’s a scheming, cruel little man, but nobody forced me to marry him. Now I’m going to unmarry him and do something with my life. You don’t want to come along?”

“I can’t think straight right now, Felicity. My daughter still has this bogus murder beef against her. It’ll go away, but in the meantime, I can’t just take off.”

She picked up the menu and stared at it without seeming to see it. “Can we order?” she asked.

He took the menu from her and set it on the tablecloth. “You want to get married out there?”

“I’m not divorced yet.”

“You want to or not? You ever spend time around Austin, Nevada?”

“No,” she said.

“It’s seven thousand feet up in the clouds. It’s like going back a hundred years. People play poker twenty-four hours a day. The river is so cold, the rainbow trout have a purple stripe down their sides. I could seriously dig a lifestyle like that.”

“You’re serious?” she said.

“I’ve got addictive issues. I’m no bargain.”

“I’ve got to make up for some wrong choices I’ve made, Clete. I haven’t thought it all out yet.”

“Get away from that kind of thinking. The past is the past. Why spend your time sticking thumbtacks in your head?”

“I married into wealth, and I did it for selfish reasons. Somehow I feel I’m responsible for Angel’s death. If I’d been a better mother, she wouldn’t have been drinking at the biker saloon.”

“Her presence in that saloon didn’t have anything to do with her death. The issue was money. In almost every homicide, the issue is sex or money.”

Felicity’s brow wrinkled. “Angel didn’t have any money. Not of her own.”

“This crap is all about money. I’m not sure how, but that’s the issue. Or most of it, anyway.”

“Your marriage offer is very generous. There’s another problem. Caspian is jealous and vindictive. He knows people who can hurt you.”

Clete looked out the window. “Are you expecting him?”

“Here? No, I’m not. He doesn’t know where I am. Unless he heard me on the phone.”