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"No. I'm not feeling too good." He looked out into the shadows and the water dripping out of the trees. "I got in over my head. It's my fault. I'm not used to this crap."
"She's got strong feelings for you, Clete."
"Yeah, my temp loves her cat. See you tomorrow, Dave."
I watched him back out into the road, then shift into low, his big head bent forward over the wheel, his expression as meaningless as a jack-o'-lantern's.
AFTER BOOTSIE AND ALAFAIR and I ate dinner, I drove up the Loreauville road to Cisco Flynn's house. When no one answered the bell, I walked the length of the gallery, past the baskets of hanging ferns, and looked through the side yard. In back, inside a screened pavilion, Cisco and Megan were eating steaks at a linen-covered table with Swede Boxleiter. I walked across the grass toward the yellow circle of light made by an outside bug lamp. Their faces were warm, animated with their conversation, their movements automatic when one or the other wanted a dish passed or his silver wine goblet refilled. My loafer cracked a small twig.
"Sorry to interrupt," I said.
"Is that you, Dave? Join us. We have plenty," Cisco said.
"I wanted to see Megan a minute. I'll wait out in my truck," I said.
The three of them were looking out into the darkness, the tossed salad and pink slices of steak on their plates like part of a nineteenth-century French still life. In that instant I knew that whatever differences defined them today, the three of them were held together by a mutual experience that an outsider would never understand. Then Boxleiter broke the moment by picking up a decanter and pouring wine into his goblet, spilling it like drops of blood on the linen.
Ten minutes later Megan found me in the front yard.
"This morning you told me I had Boxleiter all wrong," I said.
"That's right. He's not what he seems."
"He's a criminal."
"To some."
"I saw pictures of the dude he shanked in the Canon City pen."
"Probably courtesy of Adrien Glazier. By the way, the guy you think he did? He was in the Mexican Mafia. He had Swede's cell partner drowned in a toilet… This is why you came out here?"
"No, I wanted to tell you I'm going to leave y'all alone. Y'all take your own fall, Megan."
"Who asked you to intercede on our behalf anyway? You're still pissed off about Clete, aren't you?" she said.
I walked across the lawn toward my truck. The wind was loud in the trees and made shadows on the grass. She caught up with me just as I opened the door to the truck.
"The problem is you don't understand your own thinking," she said. "You were raised in the church. You see my father's death as St. Sebastian's martyrdom or something. You believe in forgiving people for what's not yours to forgive. I'd like to take their eyes out."
"Their eyes. Who is their, Megan?"
"Every hypocrite in this—" She stopped, stepping back as though retreating from her own words.
"Ah, we finally got to it," I said.
I got in the truck and closed the door. I could hear her heated breathing in the dark, see her chest rise and fall against her shirt. Swede Boxleiter walked out of the side yard into the glow of light from the front gallery, an empty plate in one hand, a meat fork in the other.
* * *
FOURTEEN
THE TALL MAN WHO WORE yellow-tinted glasses and cowboy boots and a weathered, smoke-colored Stetson made a mistake. While the clerk in a Lafayette pawnshop and gun store bagged up two boxes of .22 magnum shells for him, the man in the Stetson happened to notice a bolt-action military rifle up on the rack.
"That's an Italian 6.5 Carcano, ain't it? Hand it down here and I'll show you something," he said.
He wrapped the leather sling over his left arm, opened the bolt, and inserted his thumb in the chamber to make sure the gun was not loaded.
"This is the same kind Oswald used. Now, here's the mathematics. The shooter up in that book building had to get off three shots in five and a half seconds. You got a stopwatch?" he said.
