“I believe you. Do what you have to do. I can’t change it.”
I walked all the way to the swing bridge before I looked back at him. He had not moved. He was staring at the ground, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans, his back at a crooked angle. I walked back toward him and he heard my footsteps in the grass. He turned, the colorless, glasslike quality of his eyes tinted with the redness of the sun.
“Bible says, ‘Don’t tempt the Lord thy God.’ Same warning applies to some men,” he said.
“The name ‘Mabus’ was written on the notepaper you gave me. What does it mean?”
“It was wrote down on several places inside the house that got reconnoitered. But let’s stick with the subject at hand. Why’d you run a game on me, counselor? Why’d you go and do that to both of us?”
For just a moment I thought I saw a genuine look of sadness in his face.
I HATED VIOLENCE. Or at least I told myself I did. My family history was filled with it. My great-grandfather was Sam Morgan Holland, an ex–Confederate soldier and gunfighter and finally a saddle preacher who shot between five and nine men. My father died in a pipeline blowout while doing a repair weld, and his death may have been deliberately caused by a man who envied and hated him and opened a valve at a pump station to ensure that gas would be inside the pipe when the electric arc struck it.
As Texas Rangers, L. Q. Navarro and I had waged a private war against drug mules in northern Mexico. We never shot down an unarmed man or refused him quarter when he walked toward us with his hands on his head. But the night ambushes we set up were guaranteed to result in firefights and not negotiations. This particular group of drug transporters, or at least their compatriots, tortured a friend of ours to death, a DEA agent who was one of the finest men I ever knew. We trapped them in adobe huts, mesquite thickets, river-bottoms, and arroyos thick with cactus, and dawn would find us inserting playing cards emblazoned with the shield of the Texas Rangers into the mouths of the dead.
But no matter what the war advocates of our times tell us, no violent excursion ends well. L. Q. Navarro paid with his life for our grandiose schemes, and I still feared sleep and the images that dwelt in my unconscious. That night I sat by myself in the living room until 3 A.M. The valley was dark, the fir trees on the mountains shaggy in the starlight. I could hear deer or elk clatter against our rail fence, a rock tumble from the hillside, a pinecone ping on the barn’s metal roof. Was Wyatt out there? I doubted it, not tonight.
But it was only a matter of time, I thought. Men such as Wyatt Dixon were driven by ego and a visceral pride in themselves. In fact, their perception of themselves was actually their only possession. I had just managed to cheapen Wyatt’s image of himself, and I knew one day soon the bill would come due.
At the time I did not know there were other people in the area who were even more foolish and reckless than I, a bunch who had just embarked on the worst mistake in their lives.
Chapter 11
THE NEXT MORNING started off in earnest with Darrel McComb in my
office, a martial light in his face. His cheeks were bladed with color, his crew cut stiff as hog bristles, his suit freshly pressed, his shoes spit-shined and gleaming.
“You look like a man in motion, Darrel,” I said.
“What were you doing at Wyatt Dixon’s place yesterday?”
“You’ve got Dixon under surveillance?”
“Duh,” he answered.
“It’s none of your business what I was doing there.”
“Somebody tossed Greta Lundstrum’s house. Somebody who could tear two-by-four joists in half with his hands. Sound like anybody you know?”
“If you think Dixon is a viable suspect, go talk to him. Right now I’m pretty busy.”
“What was he looking for?”
I could tell he didn’t expect an answer, but I surprised him and myself as well. “I think a couple of new shooters are in the area.” I wrote down the names Dixon had given me and shoved them across the desk. “Temple came up empty on these guys. Maybe you’ll do better.”
“You’re running some type of police investigation on your own?”
“I didn’t say that. And I don’t know anything about Dixon breaking into a house, either. If I were you, I’d be careful, Darrel.”
“About what?”
“I’m not sure what kind of work you used to do for the G, but I suspect it was down in the basement, off the computer, and genuinely nasty. If I know that, other people do, too. My guess is they’re not happy you know their secrets or how they operate.”
“I’ve known some prissy lawyers in my career, but you’ve got your own zip code, Holland. You got these names from Dixon, didn’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“What makes you think you have some kind of privileged status in this case? If I catch you holding back information in a homicide investigation, I’ll do everything in my power to have you disbarred. Who the hell do you think you are?”