There was a long silence.
"You know anything about Carl Hinkel being kidnapped?" he said.
"No."
"He went to Victor to get his hair cut. A fellow with him went inside the bar to shoot pool. He says when he come out a little boy told him a bunch of men threw Hinkel in a car and took off with him."
"Boy, that breaks me up."
"You been putting glass in these people's heads, Mr. Holland. Now it's done turned around on you. I don't want to listen to your whining."
"You left Dixon on the street, Sheriff. If he comes around me or mine, I'm going to kill him."
"Oh, I'm sure you will. You stay home today. You stay away from these people. And you stay out of my business," the sheriff said. His voice was like a heated wire when he hung up the receiver.
Terry Witherspoon had taken two showers that afternoon but couldn't get clean. As soon as he dried himself and put his clothes on, a smell like soiled kitty litter rose from his armpits. He tried to eat a can of Vienna sausages and vomited in the backyard.
He had never been so frightened in his life.
Wyatt had said seven o'clock. Terry wiped his face and mouth with a soiled towel and looked at the slanting rays of the sun through the pines, the flecks of gold on the river's surface down below, the bats that were already flying through the evening shadows.
If he had a car, he would run. If he had a phone, he would ring Carl. But he was trapped in an eighty-buck-a-month shack that was worse than the shack he grew up in, at the mercy of Wyatt and his craziness. Where had everything gone wrong? Why had Maisey treated him the way she did? Why did a Mobbed-up guy like Nicki Molinari, a real player on the Coast, want to beat the shit out of him over a kid and his father getting killed on the Clearwater National Forest?
Terry's head throbbed.
He
went out into the railed dirt lot behind the shack and stood listening to the sounds of birds in the trees, the crack of a stick under a deer's hoof, the tumble of water in the river down below, the muttering of an owl up a larch that was shaggy and black with moss.
Nobody could be this alone, he thought. These feelings would pass. Maybe it was just a stomach virus. He wasn't a coward. Ask the queens he'd beaten cross-eyed with a sock full of sand.
Down the road he heard Wyatt's car coming hard, the engine roaring, rocks ricocheting like bullets under the fenders. Terry's throat trembled when he took a breath. If he only had the.22 rifle. But that damn lawyer had splintered it across a tree trunk.
He faced the road just as Wyatt turned into the yard, a cloud of cinnamon-colored dust drifting across his car into the light that slanted through the pines.
Wyatt cut the engine and stepped out on the ground in a new pair of striped black trousers, a hand-tooled belt with a gold bucking horse embossed on the huge silver buckle, a heavy, long-sleeve, snap-button cotton shirt, a new white Stetson with a gray feather in the band, a shined pair of oxblood Tony Lamas powdered with dust. He had just shaved and rubbed talcum on his neck and cologne on his cheeks, and for some reason he looked more handsome than Terry had ever seen him.
"You ready to ride?" Wyatt asked.
"You say an Indian woman knows me from the clinic?"
"Don't worry about that now. You know ole Carl disappeared? Too bad that happened just after he promoted you."
"Disappeared?"
"He'll probably turn up. I got a chore for you tonight."
"What?"
"You're gonna do the Voss girl. Then we're both gonna do that lawyer."
"No, sir," Terry said, shaking his head, one hand on the top rail of the fence, his eyes averted.
"Say that again."
"The ATF and the FBI are all over the place, Wyatt."
"That's when they least expect it. I got it all planned. Get in the car."