I told him.
“That fellow Fincher sold you out?” he said.
“That’s what it looks like. I think I’m going down the drain, Grandfather.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk like that.”
“I’m fixing to call up Dalton Wiseheart and tell him he can have our company at market price.”
“That’s not what they’re after, Satch. They want to break your spirit. Spit in their mouths.”
“What about Rosita?”
He removed his reading glasses and stared at the lawn. It was bright and sunny outside, as though the weather were mocking our problems. “I made a mess of everything in my life,” he said. “I shouldn’t be giving you advice.”
“What would you do?”
“What I always did. Sling blood on the trees. But look where it got me. None of my children, including your mother, have ever forgiven me for the violent and drunken man I was.”
“Will you be all right if I’m gone for a while?”
His pale blue eyes were rheumy and distant. “I wish I was younger,” he said.
I HAD NO ACCESSIBLE target for my rage and sense of helplessness. I couldn’t prove my suspicions about the treachery of Lloyd Fincher. I shouldn’t have been surprised by his behavior. He had been a midlevel functionary all of his life, one of those who liked nothing better than a public admission of wrongdoing so he could quickly move on to the next disaster in the making. Fincher’s kind of corruption was endemic to the system he served. He was the gland that prevented the infection from reaching the brain of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.
There was only one face I could put on all our troubles. My lawyer had told me a few things about him, but nothing I wouldn’t expect in the file of a bad cop, and nothing that told me of his day-to-day patterns. For that very reason, I had retained a private investigator, a friend, to take a close look at Hubert Timmons Slakely.
I called the PI. His name was Boone Larson. He had worked for the Pinkertons and once told me the agency believed Butch Cassidy had not been killed during a bank robbery in Bolivia but had lived until 1937 in Spokane, Washington. I always liked that story.
I did not tell Boone of the attack on Hershel or the vigilante raid on Fincher’s hunting camp. “If a fellow wanted to have a private chat with Slakely, where would he catch up to him?” I asked.
“You might try his apartment.”
“Somewhere else.”
“What’s wrong with his apartment?”
“He might be having friends or relatives over. Why disturb him?”
“Are you sure you want to do this, Weldon?”
“I’m curious about what a guy like that does in his free time.”
“He’s got a place he goes to on weekends or on his off days. You know he used to work vice in Galveston?”
“Right.”
“I think he has yearnings for the old days.”
I went upstairs to the attic and opened the army-surplus footlocker where I kept many things from my boyhood: pocketknives, my Boy Scout Handbook, my first jitterbug bass lure, my collection of arrowheads, my catcher’s glove, three musket balls I had cut out of a dead cottonwood tree, an Indian trade ax that had a small tobacco bowl on one end and an air passage drilled through the handle so it could be smoked.
I waited until dark and drove to the place twenty miles outside of town where Slakely kept a shiny tin trailer on a bayou that dumped into the San Jacinto River. A fine mist was falling when I cut my headlights in a woods and walked toward the trailer, wearing gloves, a bandanna tied across the lower half of my face, a shapeless fedora pulled down on my brow, the trade ax hanging from my right hand. From the edge of the woods, I could see the trailer, a pickup truck, a toolshed in back, trash burning in an oil barrel, sparks twisting into the mist, a light burning on a pole above a boathouse, an old water tower silhouetted against the sky. Through a small pair of binoculars, I could see Slakely drinking a bottle of Pearl at a table in the trailer. He was talking to a young, round-shouldered, thin-hipped girl in a shift printed with pink hearts. Her face had no expression. She blinked when he raised his finger to make a point.
I went to the toolshed and kicked a pile of newspapers across the floor, then poured a can of paint thinner on them and set them alight with a paper match. The flames climbed up the wall and spread around the sides of a broken window, a draft sucking it out of the glass into the cold air. I went back into the darkness of the trees and waited. I told myself I had no plan. I had not taken the Luger with me. If I’d been acting with premeditation, I surely would have carried it on my person, wouldn’t I? There was no registration on it, no chain of possession that could link it to me. The lethality of a trade ax was a subjective matter. It could be used as a tool to cut meat or to make pemmican; it could be used as a ceremonial pipe. I had chosen latitude over specificity. When you roll the dice, you roll the dice and let the arithmetic take care of itself.
It all seemed quite reasonable to me.
The fire was not long in gaining Slakely’s attention. He came out the side door of his trailer without a hat, pulling on a raincoat. Sparks were fanning from the oil barrel onto the shed, and I’m sure he thought they were the cause of the fire. He turned on a garden hose and extinguished the flames inside the shed first, then flooded the barrel. He turned off the faucet and went into the shed to examine the damage.