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The light was on in the kitchen. The wind was blowing hard off the lake, bending the cherry trees that grew in tiers from the top of the slope down to the road. The mountain peaks looked as sharp-edged as sheared tin against an electric storm building in the west. Kyle saw someone get up from the kitchen table and look through the blinds and then go away from the window. Was that Rosa? If so, why didn’t she come to the door? What if Dixon was inside?
Kyle turned off the interior light before he got out of the truck. He removed the .357 from under the seat and snugged it inside the back of his jeans. Get a grip, he told himself. So what if Dixon was inside? Kyle had been in Tracey before he took a fall on the statutory beef, which involved getting it on with a sixteen-year-old runaway who turned out to be a cop’s daughter. Three years hard time for doing a good deed. How bad does it get? He did the three-bit straight up and went out max time and survived the black and Hispanic gangs in Quentin without joining the AB. He pumped iron and stacked his own time and didn’t get in anybody’s face. He even earned a degree of respect out on the yard. Could Dixon say the same? From what Kyle had heard, the state had melted Dixon’s brain with chemicals and electroshock treatments, and he thought he was a player in that end-of-times bullshit you hear about on late-night radio in the San Joaquin Valley. How nuts does it get?
By the time he reached the back steps of the cottage, he felt a sense of indignation and self-righteousness that almost relieved him of his fear. Time to concentrate on getting his ashes hauled. Rosa wasn’t half bad in the sack. Through the pane in the kitchen door, he saw a shadow on the wall, not far from the stove. He put his right hand behind him and gripped the checkered handles of the .357 and opened the door.
“Where you been?” the Mexican woman said. She wore an apron splattered with tomato sauce and held a wooden spoon. There was a half-eaten birthday cake on the table. “You said you was gonna be back at seven.”
“I had engine trouble. Was anybody here?”
“Yeah, me and the kids, waiting on you, you piece of shit. I tole the minister I’m tired of it. He said we was living in sin. I tole him he was right.”
“What minister?”
“What do you care? It’s Miguel’s birthday. He waited up.”
“I forgot.”
“Get out,” she said.
“Say that about the minister again. Did he have red hair and a Texas accent?”
She studied his face. “Somebody after you? I hope they are. You’re a cobard. That means ‘coward.’ A gusano, a yellow worm.”
“Shut your mouth,” Kyle replied.
She picked up a pan of tomato sauce from the stove and threw it in his face, almost blinding him. He stumbled down the steps into the driveway, his eyes staring out of a red mask. She slammed the door and shot the bolt.
He couldn’t believe how his life had changed in under two minutes. His hair and face and clothes were dripping with tomato sauce, his suitcase was locked in the house, and he was shivering in a cold wind blowing off a lake that offered no safe harbor for the likes of Kyle Schumacher. And he was absolutely convinced that the most frightening man he had ever encountered, a man whose face was as mindless as a Halloween pumpkin’s, had just missed catching him at Rosa’s cottage.
He thought about heading for British Columbia, except his passport was in his suitcase and his suitcase was locked in the house. This was a plot. It had to be. He picked up a brick and flung it through the kitchen window. “What did this minister look like?” he yelled.
“Chinga tu madre, maricón!” she shouted back.
He got in his truck and roared down the dirt road and fishtailed onto the Eastside Highway. Immediately, his engine began lurching and backfiring. He hit the brake and shifted into neutral and pumped the accelerator until the engine caught and started firing on all eight cylinders again, then sped down the two-lane in the dark, toward Polson, the storm clouds on the far side of the lake flickering as though strings of damp firecrackers were popping silently inside them.
There was not a soul on the highway. The stars had dimmed, and the lake was as black as an enormous pool of prehistoric oil. His engine was running hot and making a sound like the cylinders were firing out of sync. What was wrong? He’d had a tune-up only last week. Polson was at least fifteen miles down the road. He had to take control of his emotions and think. He had his .357. He had two hundred dollars and the credit cards in his wallet. He could check into a motel and come back to the cottage in the morning and reason with Rosa. She wanted a green card, didn’t she? He had always been nice to her kids, hadn’t he? So he forgot the boy’s birthday, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t like he didn’t have a couple of problems on his mind. Why didn’t she try a little empathy for a change?
Before he could continue his litany of grief, his engine backfired with enough force to blow out the muffler. Then the engine died, and all the warning icons lit up on his dashboard. When he pulled to the side of the road, he was surrounded by trees that had been planted to shield the house below from view. Polson was ten miles away, and the wind was cold and blowing at over twenty knots.
He looked in the rearview mirror and saw a truck approaching from the north, its high beams on. Was it a pickup with a camper shell inserted in the bed? An orange pickup, like Wyatt Dixon’s? No, it was a wrecker. He could see the boom and winch mounted on the rear. What a break, he told himself.
He got out on the asphalt and began waving his arms. The driver of the wrecker slowed and hit his emergency flashers and eased onto the shoulder. Kyle heard him open his door and step out of the cab, forgetting to click off his high beams. “Hey, I’m about to go blind here,” Kyle said.
“Sorry,” the driver said. He dimmed the lights. “I have to back around to hook you up. You want to go to the dealership in Polson?”
Kyle closed his eyes and saw red circles that seemed to have been burned onto the backs of the lids. “Yeah, that would be great,” he said. “You just cruising by?”
The driver of the wrecker had wide
shoulders and wore a rumpled suit and a baseball cap and tennis shoes. He seemed to be smiling. “I work irregular hours,” he said.
“I’d like to get to a motel and get some sleep. Can we get on the road?”
“You got to sign a form. Step back here, if you would.”
“Can we do that in town? It’s cold out there. I don’t have a coat. I also have tomato sauce all over me. I’m not having the best day of my life.”
“You have to sign a release before I hook you up. It’s for the insurance company.” The driver took a clipboard off the seat of the wrecker and handed it to Kyle, along with a pen from his shirt pocket. “Right there on the bottom line,” he said.
