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He looked down at his teacup, then picked it up and drank it empty. “I got the Big C. I might beat it, I might not. If I had my way, I’d be down in Muscle Shoals, crabbing with my grandchildren. Except I need the income for my daughter and her kids, and I can’t retire. Maybe you can help me with something here.”
“I doubt it.”
“Your friend the Robicheaux girl? She’s sure she didn’t see who shot that arrow at her?”
“Ask her.”
“Like I was saying on the phone, we got the arrow from her, but the only prints on it were hers. That means the guy who shot it wiped it down. Which means he was operating in a premeditated fashion to commit a homicide. Wyatt Dixon had no reason to target the Robicheaux girl.”
“Then who was it?”
He rubbed his palms up and down on his thighs, a spark of static electricity jumping off the heel of his hand. “I got a theory. Close the door and sit down. You want a glass of wine or a Pepsi? My guess is you’d rather have a Pepsi.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you’re all business, lady. You don’t mess around. I doubt you ever take guff off a man, either.”
He went to the small kitchen just off the living room and opened the refrigerator and placed the ice tray and a tall glass on the counter and ripped the tab on a soda can and filled the glass, all the while talking about his grandchildren with his back to her. She was standing in the same spot when he came back into the living room. “Mind if I close this? I think it’s fixing to rain again,” he said, pushing the front door shut. “Dixon may not have shot at your friend, but that doesn’t mean he’s an innocent man. He stays viable through deception. He loved what I did to him this morning because he was center stage. I’ve known his kind all my life, ignorant peckerwoods always spouting from the Bible. They say they’re born-again, but they’ll cut your throat for a quarter and lick the cut clean for an extra dime.”
“You seem to really hate him.”
“What I hate is deceit. I’ll tell you something I don’t tell many people. My father was a brakeman on the old L and N line. He took pity on a black vagabond and fed him and let him sleep in a boxcar parked on a siding. When the guy woke up, he killed my father with a pocketknife and took his billfold and left his body on the tracks. We moved to a place on an alley in Macon, and I grew up shining shoes, and my mother and little sister did housecleaning. You learn a lot about the world looking up from a shoeshine box. How do you think that Indian girl got killed? Somebody deceived her. We know she knew Dixon because she bought a bracelet from him. Maybe her killer was Dixon’s friend, maybe a partner of some kind.”
She sat down in a chair across from him. “Run that by me again.”
He went into a circuitous history about Dixon’s background, the crimes of which he was suspected but never charged, the fact that Dixon had been a member of a separatist group in Texas and on the edge of the same circles as Timothy McVeigh. She sipped from her glass, the fatigue of the day starting to catch up with her, her concentration starting to stray. She noticed the tidy drabness of the room, the frayed carpets, the nicked furniture, like a re-creation of an impoverished working-class home from many years ago. He seemed to become frustrated with her inattention, his hands moving more rapidly, his chest swelling. He loosened his collar. “Are you listening?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To talk.”
“Then why don’t you talk? Maybe you came here for something else.”
“I think we’ve straightened it out.”
“What were you going to do if that didn’t happen?”
Her mouth was dry, the muscles in her chest not working right.
“Why don’t you answer the question?” he said.
“What did you just say?”
“I was talking about deception. Haven’t you been listening? You look a little woozy.”
She set her glass on the coffee table and looked at it. She had drunk half the glass, and the ice had melted and seemed as thin as frost-coated dimes floating on top of the Pepsi. Her skin felt rubbery and dead to the touch, and her tongue was thick and her words slurred when she tried to speak.
“It’s kind of like being in a slow-motion film, isn’t it?” he said. “I got you, girlie.”
Rohypnol, she thought.
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He picked up her tote bag from the floor and pulled it open against the drawstring and lifted out the can of Mace and the expandable baton known as an ASP. “I checked you out today. Miami-Dade PD says you may have been a female badass for the Mob. This is Montana, girl. You don’t do a beatdown on a Missoula County sheriff’s detective. You seriously fucked yourself tonight.” He got up from the couch and turned off the light in the kitchen and the table lamps in the living room. “My van is in back. But just so you know there’re no hard feelings—”
He leaned down, the heat and the smell in his clothes almost suffocating her. She could taste the tobacco on his tongue when he put it in her mouth.
