McComb squatted down by the cellar door and clicked on a pen-light, moving it back and forth in the darkness. “What mark?” he said.
Wyatt limped back to where the dead man lay. The blood had already settled in the lower regions of the body and the face had turned unnaturally white, the eyes fixed and half-lidded. “Shine the light again?” Wyatt said.
He studied the dead man’s forearm, then touched the skin gingerly with the balls of his fingers. He held on to the rifle with two hands and pushed himself to his feet.
“Where you going?” Darrel said.
“To sleep.”
“There’s nothing on the guy’s arm. Why’d you tell me to look at it?” Darrel said.
“He was carrying the mark of the beast. But it ain’t there now. They don’t take it with them when they die. Don’t bust in my house again, McComb. Next time I’ll take your head off.”
Chapter 18
THE DEAD MAN had been a Marine Corps veteran and inveterate gambler from Elko, Nevada. He had no criminal record, but he had gone into debt to moneylenders in Vegas and disappeared from the computer five years before. The insides of his arms and thighs were laced with scar tissue from repeated hypodermic injections. The most recent ones were infected.
The investigation into the homicide behind Wyatt’s house cleared Wyatt of any culpability, but not Darrel McComb. He was suspended from the department without pay, pending a determination by Internal Affairs regarding the general deterioration of both his private and professional life. He had now shown up in the middle of two firefights without adequate explanation, been witness to the death of a federal agent he was following without authorization, and broken into the house of an ex-felon. To make matters worse, Darrel had been on the premises while the ex-felon killed a man. One of the investigators from Internal Affairs, dead serious, asked Darrel if he had been recently tested for syphilis of the brain. Humorous insiders at the courthouse suggested that Darrel resign his job now and consider a career as a mortician’s assistant in a town that had never heard of him.
The following week I saw him on a steel bench on the walk by the river, feeding pigeons from a bag of caramel popcorn. In his scuffed, boxlike shoes, white socks, ill-fitting dark suit, and pale blue necktie printed with trout flies, he was probably the saddest-looking plainclothes cop I’d ever seen.
“Wyatt Dixon told me everything that happened,” I said.
“So?” he replied.
“If you’d been a little creative in your report, you could have skated and jammed up Dixon at the same time. I think you’re a stand-up guy, Darrel.”
“Fay Harback ratted me out with Internal Affairs.”
“Doesn’t seem like Fay’s style.”
“Yeah? Well, she dimed me good. Those I.A. guys think I’m having a nervous breakdown. They say it’s been a concern to the D.A.’s office for months. Ever try proving to people you’re not nuts?”
“Why were those guys trying to break into Wyatt Dixon’s potato cellar?”
“I spread the word the goods from the Global Research robbery were in there.”
“Through Greta Lundstrum?”
“Maybe.”
“You told the sheriff all this?”
“I don’t trust anyone in that courthouse. You want justice, you got to get it yourself.” He felt the inside of his swollen jaw with his tongue, his eyes slitted.
“Why do you hate Wyatt Dixon?” I asked.
“It’s enough I hate him. He’s a psycho. What do you care, anyway?”
“Sometimes we hate the people who remind us most of ourselves. It can flat eat you up.”
He nodded his head. “You a churchgoing man?” he asked.
“I guess.”
“Keep doing that. It looks good on you,” he said. He dumped his popcorn on the cement, then walked across the lawn of a Holiday Inn to a cul-de-sac where his car was illegally parked.
JOHNNY AMERICAN HORSE was hurt. He had been hurt several times while federal agents and county lawmen chased him across the state—abrasions, sprains, and cuts from falls—but this time it was serious and he had lost the medical supplies Amber had sent him. Up in the Bob Marshall Wilderness a sharpshooter’s round had ricocheted off a boulder and driven a stone splinter deep into his left forearm. He had removed the splinter, bled the wound, and washed it clean in a stream, but two days later the edges of the hole were red and tender, a tiny pearl of infection in the center. He gashed the wound open with the point of his survival knife, an electrical current climbing instantly into his armpit, then heated the knife blade in his campfire and stuck the point inside his flesh.