Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“Sometimes I think I’m a jinx. Is your plane okay?”

“Did it seem okay when we flew through the canyon above the Marias?”

“Take care of yourself. Call me on my cell when you get to Spokane.”

“You’re a worrywart,” he said.

Later, on her way to use the women’s room, she felt rather than saw a man standing at the corner of her vision, his eyes dissecting her. It was a sensation she could compare only with a spider crawling across her face in her sleep as she lay helpless inside a dream from which she couldn’t wake. She shifted the weight of her backpack from one shoulder to the other, her expression flat, turning her head slightly to get a look at a figure silhouetted aga

inst the entranceway.

His face was shadowed by the sunlight shining through the front of the building. She pretended to study a stuffed grizzly bear in a giant showcase, its upraised paws and bared teeth looming above her. In the reflection of the glass, she watched the man walking toward the waiting room. She turned slowly and saw a late-middle-aged man about six feet, with a tapered waist and hair combed in ducktails like a 1950s hood’s. He wore an unpressed white shirt and Roman sandals and black socks and a cheap brown belt and rumpled slacks with dirt on the cuffs. A tobacco pipe was stuck through one of his belt loops. For just a moment she smelled an odor that didn’t belong inside an air terminal.

Then she lost sight of him in the concourse. He had gone into either the men’s room or the lounge. She walked through a crowd in front of the souvenir store and stood at the entrance to the lounge and studied the people eating at the tables or drinking at the bar or playing the video poker machines. If he was in there, she didn’t see him.

She waited in front of the men’s room for two minutes, then pushed the door open and went inside. A man at a urinal grinned at her. “One of us is in the wrong place,” he said.

She dropped her backpack on the floor and put a hand inside her tote bag. “You see a rumpled-looking guy with a duck ass in back?”

“A what?”

“Zip up and get out.”

A fat man came out of a stall, tucking in his shirt with his thumbs. “You, too,” she said. “Beat it.”

“Who do you think you are?” the fat man asked.

“I think there’s a bad guy in one of these stalls. Now get the fuck out, unless you want to catch a stray bullet,” she said.

Both men rushed out, looking over their shoulders at her. She walked the length of the stalls but saw no feet under the doors. She began kicking open each door, slamming it back against the partition, the Airweight .38 special in her right hand.

They were all empty. As she kicked open the last stall, an odor rose into her face that made her gag.

She backed away from the stall and blew out her breath and dropped the Airweight in her tote bag just as the front door opened and a tall man in a Stetson entered the room.

“Come on in. I went in the wrong room. I’m on my way out,” she said.

“No problem,” he said. He cleared his throat loudly and pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth. “Good Lord!” he said.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “You see a guy in Roman sandals with ducktails out there?”

“Come to think of it, I did.”

“Where?”

“Going out the front. Is there something a little strange going on here?”

She went back into the concourse, expecting to see security personnel heading toward her. The concourse, the souvenir shop, the waiting area, and the lines at the counters were as they had been when she entered the restroom.

She went through the revolving door onto the sidewalk. The air was warm, the sun little more than a spark between the hills, the clouds in the west orange against a blue sky. She felt a wave of exhaustion wash through her. Was the man with the 1950s hairstyle the same one she had seen at the bar in the Depot, the same one who had tried to kill her below the Higgins Street Bridge?

Was the abominable odor in the men’s room his? Was she losing her mind? She was too tired to answer her own questions. She started walking toward her pickup. Percy Wolcott’s twin-engine flew overhead into the sun’s afterglow, its propellers spinning with a silvery light, almost in tribute to the day. As the drone of the engines faded, she walked farther into the parking lot, the equipment in her backpack knocking against her side.

Then she heard a sound that was like dry thunder, a rumbling that had no source, a reverberation that seemed to bounce off rock walls and the trunks of trees, as though magnifying itself, refusing to be gathered into the sky.

She stared at the hills, dark with shadow on the slopes and lit from behind by clouds that were as orange as Halloween pumpkins. Don’t think those thoughts, she told herself. Do not look in his direction. Do not become the jinx you called yourself.

Others in the parking lot were pointing toward the west. At what? How can you point at a sound? Before she could think about the denial in her question, she saw a fire burning inside the trees on a distant hill and a dark mushroom cloud rising from it.