“Did you hear what I said?” Darrel asked.
“My chemical cocktails ain’t working no more,” Wyatt said.
“Say again?”
Wyatt continued to stare at nothing, his hooked jaw and Roman profile as immobile and chiseled as a statue’s. Darrel shook his head in exasperation, then heard rocks sliding on the hillside behind the house. He went to the back window and looked out at the trees and at the shadows they made in the moonlight. The potato cellar he had told Greta about was cut back into the face of the hill, shored up with pine logs, covered with a slat door. Pieces of gravel or dirt bounced down the hillside above the cellar and fell into the yard. Darrel strained his eyes at the shaggy outlines of the fir trees and saw the shape of a man move through a patch of moonlight, then disappear. He looked over his shoulder at Wyatt.
“They’re coming. You stay out of the way,” he said.
“That was you said I wasn’t worth the broken rubber that got me born?” Wyatt asked.
“What?” Darrel said.
If Wyatt answered, Darrel did not hear him. Up on the hill a second shape, then a third, moved across the illuminated spot in the trees. His cut-down twelve-gauge pump was in the kitchen, along with a high-powered flashlight. He had a full magazine in his nine-Mike and five shells loaded with double-ought buckshot in the pump, enough to make everyone’s evening an interesting event. But he wondered at his own recklessness and whether his words to Dixon about repressed suicidal intentions were not better directed at himself.
He stepped back from the window. “If I don’t walk out of this, get on your cell and call for the meat wagon.” He flipped his credit card on Wyatt’s bed. “Then buy yourself a dinner on me.”
He turned back toward the window. He thought he heard someone sliding down the slope through slag, perhaps fighting to catch his balance. A fine mist, mixed with smoke, had drifted into the canyon, and the moonlight inside it gave off a sulfurous yellow glow. The floor creaked behind him. He turned curiously, having already forgotten about Wyatt Dixon and his exchange with him.
Wyatt stood shirtless and barefoot in the center of the room, wearing only a pair of jeans, one leg split to accommodate his cast, a Sharps buffalo rifle held at port arms. His mouth made Darrel think of the square teeth carved in the face of a Halloween pumpkin.
“Ain’t no man uses me, Detective. Ain’t no man comes in my home and wipes his feet on me, either,” Wyatt said.
He butt-stroked Darrel so hard across the jaw Darrel’s partial bridge flew from his mouth, his head snapping back into the wall. Then the floor came up and hit him in the face. He felt the room, the house, and the ground it stood on float away like a wood chip on the river’s surface.
Wyatt filled his hand from a box of fifty-caliber shells, stuffed them in his pocket, and shuffled through the kitchen and out the back door. Smoke or ground fog or a mixture of both had rolled off the river into the yard and hung as thick as wet cotton in the trees. He could make out three men at the opening of the potato cellar. He thought he saw two more, up on the hillside, where the old railroad bed used to be, before the tracks had been torn up and hauled away for scrap. What had McComb said? They were coming to pop Wyatt and take out McComb for extra measure. But why were they at the potato cellar? It contained nothing but a set of studded snow tires for his truck. It made no sense.
&
nbsp; But the two men on the railroad bed did. They were going to flank the house or pop Wyatt when he moved into the backyard. He went back through the house, out the front, and circled around the side, deep inside the shadows, out of the moonlight.
A rusted tractor, spiked with weeds, its engine stripped for parts, was parked by the back corner of the house, a perfect shield between himself and the men up on the hill and the three using a pair of bolt cutters on the lock and chain strung across the potato cellar door.
The tractor had been used to drag logs off the hillside, and the owner had welded a steel cab over the seat in the event the tractor ever rolled. Wyatt positioned himself at the edge of the cab, took aim across the hood, and clicked back the hammer on the Sharps.
“What do you collection of pissants think you’re doin’?” he said.
Two of the figures automatically crouched down and one ran into the undergrowth at the base of the hill. One of the crouching men shined a flashlight on the tractor, then he and the man next to him opened up, the fire from their pistol barrels slashing into the dark, the rounds whanging and sparking off the tractor. Wyatt squeezed the trigger on the Sharps and felt the rifle’s weight heave into his shoulder. One of the men by the cellar was propelled backwards as though he had been jerked on a wire.
Wyatt worked the lever under the Sharps, ejecting the spent casing, fitted another cartridge into the chamber, and closed the breech. He took aim at one of the men up on the hill and squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck a boulder and whined away into trees. Wyatt sank to one knee and reloaded just as a man broke from the brush and ran up a deer trail into the timber. Wyatt swung his sights on the man’s back, pulled the trigger, and saw the man crash against a ponderosa trunk.
Wyatt’s eardrums were numb from the explosions of the fifty-caliber rounds and he could no longer hear the men running through the slag or the trees. The first man he hit had stayed down, but the second one was being lifted to his feet by the two men Wyatt had seen on the abandoned railroad bed. Wyatt stood erect, trying to keep his weight off his bad leg, worked the lever on the Sharps, and fumbled another round into the chamber.
But the home invaders were gone, except for a man with five days of unshaved whiskers and hair like black snakes who lay slumped against the door of the potato cellar, a hole as big as a thumb in his sternum. Wyatt picked up the man’s wrist and felt for a pulse, then set the man’s hand back in his lap. In the center of the man’s forearm was a red welt, like wire that had been threaded into a design under the skin. Wyatt touched it with his fingertips, felt the hardness in the tissue, then wiped his fingers clean in the dirt.
He stood erect by pressing his weight down on the rifle butt and limped back toward the kitchen door.
Darrel McComb stepped outside, holding his jaw. “Where are they?” he said.
“Gone, except for that one yonder. Sunk one in a second man, but my aim was off.”
“I could lie and mess you up, Gomer. But I’m letting this slide for now. What happens down the road is another matter,” he said.
“You a student of Scripture?”
Darrel waited for him to go on.
“Take a look at the mark on that fellow’s right arm,” Wyatt said.