For a college guy, Holland didn’t seem too smart, Darrel thought to himself. The key to taking down Karsten Mabus was getting inside his compound. But even though Darrel had made Greta his personal snitch, he had not figured a way to put her inside Mabus’s place with a wire. Then American Horse had escaped from federal custody, which made him a likely candidate for the sniper shootings at Mabus’s ranch.
The only other viable candidate was Wyatt Dixon. But Darrel didn’t believe Dixon had the brains to get inside the property, shoot two men, and safely escape. It had to be American Horse. Or at least that was the case Darrel was going to make.
The shooting couldn’t have happened at a more perfect time. Now Darrel had the leverage he had lacked earlier. It was just a matter of convincing Karsten Mabus that Greta and her boyfriend, one Darrel McComb, a disgraced police officer with no moral bottom, had information that could prevent another assassination attempt on Mabus’s life.
He glanced at his breakfast table, where the tools of his trade rested like an ugly testimony to everything that he was: his Beretta, the sap he had beaten American Horse with, his cuffs, a switchblade knife, two miniaturized recorders with tiny microphones, a .25 hideaway and holster with a Velcro ankle strap, and a throw-down that had the serial numbers burned off.
Darrel finished recording the events of the last few days that were connected in any way to the homicides committed on the property of Johnny American Horse. He used the spell-check mechanism to correct any misspellings in the file, reviewed his prose for its accuracy and specificity, then decided to add another paragraph.
It read: “Please consider the following statement as my summation of my time on earth—Hey, I never had to sell shoes at Thom McAn.”
He exchanged the fourteen rounds out of the old magazine on his Beretta, inserting them into a new magazine with a taut spring, examined the surveillance equipment he had bought off an alcoholic P.I., and finished his beer out on the balcony. The sunset that had flamed at the bottom of the sky was almost gone, and a cool wind was blowing off the river. The evening shade had spread across the valley, the gold light on the eastern hills dying before his eyes, and he thought he smelled the autumnal odor of gas and dead leaves inside the wind. But surely fall had not already come, had it? Wasn’t there another summer concert and dance on the river tomorrow night?
AT 1:00 A.M. THURSDAY, someone reported a fire burning inside Brendan Merwood’s downtown law office. Two fire trucks were dispatched, but when firemen and the security service searched the building, they found nothing out of the ordinary. By the time Brendan Merwood arrived at the scene, wearing his pajamas and bathrobe, the firemen were packing up to leave. Across the street, at the entrance to an alley, several homeless men had evidently started a fire in a trash barrel, and the firemen told Merwood the flames from the barrel had probably been reflected in the windows of the law office.
I’VE HEARD RECOVERING drunks and addicts say they treat their own minds like dangerous neighborhoods they don’t enter by themselves. All night I kept seeing the face of Elton T. Sneed and imagining the level of pain and fear he must have experienced before he died. How could I have been so foolish not to realize Mabus’s people would target someone close to Wyatt rather than Wyatt himself, considering the fact he had already shot or torn several of them apart?
Wyatt had told me Sneed’s death was on him. But it
wasn’t. It was on me.
Whether I liked it or not, my guilt had joined me at the hip with a man I had once considered the most repellent human being I had ever known.
I woke in the false dawn, and without waking Temple I took a croissant and a carton of chocolate milk from the icebox and drove up the Blackfoot to Wyatt’s place.
It was cold in the canyon, the rocks up on the hillside pink inside the mist, a sliver of moon hanging above the fir trees. My boots clanged on the steel swing bridge, while down below the river roared like rainwater flooding through a stone pipe. I could smell the odor of woodsmoke from Wyatt’s kitchen and steak frying in a skillet, and I wondered briefly, considering the nature of my mission, if I would leave Wyatt’s property alive.
He met me at his back door, shirtless, barefoot, a blue-and-white-freckled coffeepot in his hand. He stared at me blankly, his face marked from a lack of sleep. I waited for him to speak, but he didn’t. “You wear a hat in your house?” I said.
“If it suits me,” he replied.
“Can I come in?”
“I don’t give a damn,” he said, turning his back, flipping over the steak in his skillet.
“I told Karsten Mabus you had the goods from the Global job. I wasn’t going to let my family take your fall, Wyatt,” I said, standing no more than two feet behind him. I felt my mouth go dry, my hands open and close at my sides.
He forked the steak onto a plate and began browning three pieces of white bread in the skillet grease, his face bloodless, without expression, like a severed head upon a platter.
“Wyatt?”
“I heard you.” He sat down at the table and started eating, cutting his meat with his right hand, forking it upside down into his mouth with his left.
“We can go after Mabus on environmental issues. Maybe he’s violated federal laws in dealing with Saddam Hussein.”
“I done give up on your thinking skills, counselor.”
“I see.”
“All them government people belong to the same club. Play golf together, let each other in on stock market deals, diddle the same women. Think you’re gonna change that with some pissant civil suit?”
“I’m sorry about the reverend.”
“You didn’t have nothing to do with it. My farrier seen Mabus’s people up on that ridge where I found the lockbox. They seen them unshoed hoofprints and put it together just like you and that FBI agent, what’s-his-name, Broussard, done.”
“Where’s the lockbox?”
“Everything in it went FedEx last night for Dallas. It’s going to some people got a newspaper down there, one I can trust.”