Rosita and I walked as briskly as we could to the motor court. My eyes were watering; my face felt blistered from the wind. The room seemed to crawl with static electricity. If I touched a metal surface, a spark jumped from my fingers. I looked out the side of the curtain. The street and the two-lane highway were empty, newspaper swirling in a vortex next to a knocked-over garbage can.
“What do you want to do?” Rosita said.
“Get out of town.”
“Where?”
It was hard to think. If we went south, we would drive into sparsely populated badlands where our level of visibility would be maximized and our ability to change our route reduced to nil. Driving east into the Texas Panhandle would put us in the bull’s-eye again. Taos was a viable option, located down a winding road among wooded mountains, but it was full of artists and writers and bohemians, the kind of people who take note of everything they see and hear. The best choice—the only one, in my opinion—was to get out of New Mexico and into Colorado.
“We’re a half hour from Trinidad,” I said. “We’ll be out of sight and out of mind. We can go into the San Juan or Sangre de Cristo Mountains or keep going into Denver. They’ll never find us in Denver.”
“But they’ll find us somewhere,” Rosita said.
“Time’s on our side.”
“I want to talk to Linda Gail. I want to get a message to Roy Wiseheart and his wife,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It doesn’t matter at this point,” she said. “Call them collect. Or would you rather I do it?”
I picked up the phone. “What’s the message?”
“Tell Linda Gail that if we live through this, I’m going to kill Roy and Clara Wiseheart.”
“That’s not like you.”
“Look at what they’ve done to us.”
Her attitude was hard to argue with. Clara and her father-in-law, Dalton Wiseheart, seemed to nurse their anti-Semitism like a poisonous orchid, and one or both of them was responsible for the grief we had been through. But prejudice took second place to their lust for money and power. I made the call, although not for the reason Rosita thought.
Linda Gail answered the phone and accepted the charges.
“I’ll make this quick,” I said. “Our meter may be running out. If something happens to me, the company goes to Hershel. That’s in my will. The will also states that my mother and grandfather are to be cared for for the rest of their lives. If you see Roy, tell him I hope he has a good life. If you ever see Dalton Wiseheart, tell him he
failed. Tell him that in the House of Jesse, he wouldn’t be allowed to clean a chamber pot.”
“He failed at what?”
“Destroying me and my wife.”
“I don’t think you know what’s going on here,” she said. “Clara Wiseheart came to our house in a rage. Her friends in the DAR won’t take her calls. Her picture has been in the newspaper twice, once with her mouth hanging open. Roy went to the airport last night and left town for parts unknown. She thought he went to Los Angeles with me. Spit was flying off her lips while she was yelling at me in the driveway. The neighbors enjoyed the show tremendously.”
“I have to go.”
“Where do you think Roy went?”
“You and Hershel take care of each other. Take care of Grandfather, too. He’s not as tough as he lets on.”
“This sounds like a deathbed statement. What’s happening? Where are you?”
“We’re better than any of them. Remember that, Linda Gail,” I said.
When I hung up, Rosita was sitting in a wooden chair by the window. “You don’t like to leave threatening messages for people like the Wisehearts?”
“Grandfather faced down Wes Hardin and the Dalton gang. I asked him how he did it. He said, ‘You don’t say a word. You fill their ears with your silence. The only voice they’ll hear will be their own fear.’”
“I meant what I said about not going back.”