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“I’ve already told you I don’t work for them. I’m a freelance journalist.”
“Right. Tell Mr. Younger I know what he can do to me if he takes a mind. But I’ll leave my mark on him before we get done. He’ll know when it’s my ring, too.”
“If you want to make threats, Mr. Dixon, you’ll have to do that on your own.”
“It ain’t no threat.”
“I think maybe I should leave.”
“Suit yourself.”
She stood up, then looked out the window at the deer. “There’s corn on the grass,” she said.
“The doe’s got a hurt leg. I put it out at night for her and the fawn.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“I didn’t check.”
“Maybe you are a kinder man than you pretend to be, Mr. Dixon,” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You’re a right handsome woman, if a little on the heavy side,” he said.
“That’s supposed to be a compliment?”
“I’d call it a statement of fact. You’re a nice-looking lady. I get out of sorts sometime. You already ate breakfast?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Stick around.”
“I’m not sure for what purpose.”
“My huevos rancheros ain’t half bad. I got coffee and biscuits, too. There’s a bowl of pineapple in the icebox I chopped up. I learned cooking in the army before they kicked me out.”
“You do have manners,” she said.
“You’re working for Love Younger, though, ain’t you?”
“I most certainly am not. I do not care for Mr. Younger. I do not care for his ilk, his progeny, or the industries he owns.”
“What was that second one?”
“His offspring. They’re like their father. They’re notorious for their lack of morality.”
He snapped the buttons into place on his cowboy shirt, the tails splaying across his narrow hips. He pulled on his boots and filled the coffeepot under the spigot, his mouth a slit, his eyes as empty as glass.
“Is there some reason you’re not speaking to me now?” she asked.
“There’s something you hid from me. I just ain’t figured out what it is,” he replied. His eyes rested on the ballpoint in her hand. “You like ham or a chunk of steak with your eggs?”
WYATT DIXON HAD never been on the property of a wealthy man and had always assumed that the geographical passage from the world of those who ate potatoes and those whose bread was served on a gold plate would involve rumbling over a drawbridge and a moat, not simply driving up a maple-shaded road through an open gate and cutting his engine in front of a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion overlooking the Clark Fork of the Columbia River.
The gardens were bursting with flowers, the lawn a blue-green mixture of fescue and clover and Bermuda grass. Three men who looked like gardeners were watering the flowers and weeding the beds, hummingbirds hanging in midair above them, the sun a yellow flame through trees that grew higher than the roof.
One of the gardeners snipped a rose and set it in a bucket of water and walked toward Wyatt, sticking his cloth gloves in his back pocket, smiling behind a pair of Ray-Ban wraparounds. His hair was gold and braided in cornrows, his tanned scalp popping with perspiration. A red spider was tattooed on the back of one hand. “You the plumber?” he said.
“I look like a plumber?” Wyatt replied.
