The Triggerman Dance (35 page)

John nods but says nothing, as if confirming the importance of friends. The smell of Valerie and her lotion sends his stomach into a sweet freefall, the kind he used to get in the family car, going fast over dips in a highway.

He thinks: there she is, talking about college boys while I'm trying to find a way to send her father to prison for the rest of his life.

She knocks over her glass of wine, trying to lift it from the sheet.

"Oh, damn."

"There's more. Here . . ."

He refills her glass and their eyes meet just briefly, before she looks away.

"What are you thinking about?" she asks.

That I will hurt you, he thinks. I hurt Rebecca, and I hurt Joshua, and I am here to hurt your father, and if you touch me I will hurt you too. It's contagious. It's inevitable. It's assured.

"Rusty."

They are sitting cross-legged and side-by-side, but she turns to look at him. She has a plate of food on her lap, her feet buried under the summer dress. Her golden hair is loose, and the breeze lifts a strand onto her forehead. He reaches out to set it back, but hesitates. John knows that to touch her would betray the truth of his desire and the falsehood of his intentions.

"Do it," she says. "Go ahead. Please."

He touches her forehead with his fingertips. It is warm and moist. He moves the lock of hair back into place, and it promptly blows onto her face again. He moves it back once more. His fingers move slowly over her skin because it is damp and no matter how lightly he tries to touch it the tips slow against its soft resistance.

"Just a damned hair," he says.

They finish the wine, then row back to shore by moonlight. Valerie is slow and unsteady as she walks, arm-in-arm with John, up to the door of the big house.

"Like to come in?"

"Sure."

"You can see my room."

Inside, they leave off the lights because the moonlight comes through the high windows and turns everything ice blue. John stands in the semi-darkness of the kitchen and opens another bottle of wine.

"I'm a little tipsy," she says.

"I'll pour you a glass. You can take or leave it."

She takes it and they climb the stairs. Valerie's room is a suite, actually—a huge, high-ceilinged living room, a kitchen with a bar and stools that opens up to a dining area, a bath, and a bedroom into which she leads him. The bedroom has French doors leading to a deck. She still has not turned on the lights sc things are both visible and mysterious—sixty percent present.

They drink in the half-light of the bedroom. Valerie's eyes are little pools of light hidden behind her hair. They sit close together on the bed, leaning against each other, her pillows piled against the headboard.

"I've captured you," she says. "You're my trophy."

"Are you going to mount my head on your wall?"

"I like you better breathing. How could I throw away all those other good parts? Like you hands and your back and your arms?"

"Well, you could do a full-body job. Stand me up in the corner like a polar bear."

"Ugh. Have you see Dad's trophy room?"

"No."

"It's his sanctuary. His ultimate place. With all of the paintings and sculpture everywhere, all the valuables littered around this place, the trophy room is still the only one he locks. He says it's because of the humidifier and air conditioning, but I know it's just because he loves the place so much.
His
place. Nobody else's. His little chapel full of animals. Over a hundred of them. Most of them are real trophies, too—Boone & Crockett, Safari International—true record-book stuff."

"He gave me a house tour, but didn't mention it."

"It's in the basement, actually."

"Your father is a remarkable man."

Valerie sips her wine. "He truly is. He went a little crazy when Patrick died and mom got wounded. I can't blame him. I do feel sorry for him."

"Crazy?"

"Inward. Secretive. Half-there. I mean, he was always secretive about his work—you knew he was FBI for almost thirty years, didn't you? But after Pat and Mom,
well ...
he got even more vague. He'd sit for hours with a Scotch in his hand and stare out a window. Wouldn't talk. Wouldn't move. Wouldn't even drink. You
know
something's wrong with Dad when he won't drink. I'd sit down with him and we'd go hours without talking much. It was like sitting with Mom. Pat was killed by that bullet, and Mom was paralyzed by it, but part of it got into Dad, too. Maybe into me, also—I mean, it changed the way I look at things."

"How?"

"It made me love more, and hate more. It made me old. It got into my dreams. It took away two things that were a big part of me, and nothing good can take their place. You have this hole inside, and you've got to protect it, keep the bad things out. I don't know—it's hard to explain."

"I think I understand."

He can feel her looking at him. She drinks more wine. "Yes, you do. When I saw the way you looked at Rusty, I knew you would understand. And when I was sitting across from you at dinner, I knew you'd understand. You're old, too."

"A lot older than you."

"Not years old. Life old. Miles old."

John looks at her bedstand clock: 3:53 a.m. "It's late."

"Who are you?"

He smiles a smile of falsehood. "John."

"Besides that."

"What I told you."

"I'm not fully convinced."

"I'm not who I say I am?"

"No. You're more than that. Much more than that."

"Well," he says, opening the bedroom door. "Let me know when you find out the truth."

At 4:08 a.m. John is back in his cottage, snatching his penlight from the bedstand drawer. A moment later he crouches under the rear bumper of his truck to find the magnetized hide-a-box containing his tension wrench and lockpick.

At 4:16 a.m. he is in Vann Holt's private library office shooting copies of all of Holt's handwritten notes in the "B" file Brief and unrevealing as they are, John has wondered if perhaps Baum is being discussed somewhere here, under a code that only Holt knows. He holds the penlight camera to his eye and listen; to the faint click of the shutter opening and closing as he rotate: the shaft.

At 4:24 he is standing in front of the basement door of what he assumes is the trophy room. It takes him five minutes to get in because the deadbolt has eight springs and he is half drunk and nervous as all get-out crouching here with the penlight in his mouth, the pick clicking in the lock and the sweat running down his neck.

He steps inside and turns on a light.

The room is not what he was expecting. There are no head: on the walls, no antlers, no horns, no ivory, no racks. There are no skins or pelts. There are no flattened bodies with stuffed head: tacked to the wall as decoration.

Instead, there is the natural world. Or something that look: like the natural world.

It is an astonishingly large room, and standing in it John feels like he is in a natural history museum.

Along the eastern wall are dioramas of what appear to be India, China and Nepal. Each stretches from floor to ceiling and is probably forty-feet wide. They are built out from the far wall and literally spill forward into the room. They are separated by massive stanchions of river rock that form a kind of border for each. Opposite, along the western wall, is Africa, the Belizean jungle and the Canadian Rockies. The southern wall offers the Australian bush and the Ecuadoran lowlands. And the middle of the world is an immense North America rising from plains of buffalo and ending high up near the ceiling where a magnificent puma stands alert atop a pile of stones and gazes down toward
John.

The dioramas teem with figures that were once alive and now, almost, seem to be living again. Greater Kudu stand alert, on guard for danger, their horns gently tapering and their beards full and pale. A black rhinoceros moves through the veld, one huge foot raised, mid-step. A pride of lions lounges in the savanna, watching a splendid female drag down a fleeing zebra. Hippopotami loiter in a lake while bongo and wildebeest and hartebeest and gnu race past. Water buffalo bathe; tapir drink; a leopard jumps from the jungle, tail trailing up and back, ears back and mouth open, feet extended and claws out, eyes focused on the startled axis deer in front of him. A grizzly bear towers and bares its teeth. A Marco Polo's ram stands at the highest point of Central Asia, his horns curled up, back and out in a spiral more stupendous than any John has ever seen or imagined. Many of the animals are beyond his experience. Tiny red antelope spring through a meadow; spotted, yellow-eyed cats lounge in an Asian treetop; a pure white buck with an eight-point rack peers over his shoulder with an indifferent, patriarchal majesty.

John moves within the world, a tourist. He meanders, walking sometimes forward and sometimes backward, lost in a state of amazement, unwilling to miss anything, eager to see it all at once. Standing in front of the Africa diorama, he begins reading the plaques.

He is even more astonished when the general introduction to Africa blurb instructs him to push the red button on the stand before him when he's finished with this scene. Though unfinished, he pushes the button anyway. His heart jumps as the entire ceiling-high display begins to rotate, smoothly and almost noiselessly disappearing into the wall as another tableau circles forward to take its place.

A bull elephant looms above him, trunk up and tusks hooking toward the sky. His ears are extended—each one, John thinks—the size of a bedsheet. He looks ready to charge, because the taxidermist has captured the huge shift of weight to the animals' columnar rear legs, leaving the front legs lighter, their flesh looser, one mammoth knee just now bending and one immense foot almost ready to leave the grass.

John pushes the red button again and the original diorama returns, like an alternate world gliding into place.

He stands there, heart thumping, ears buzzing, amazed. Then he tries more red buttons. He moves through the great shifting room, pushing one after another. The world is a kaleidoscope.

Australia becomes Montana.

China becomes Kodiak Island.

A wolfpack tears down an elk.

A Cape Buffalo tilts a Jeep.

And perhaps the most interesting thing of all are the little horizontal platforms beside each information plaque. They are tall and narrow as candleholders. And topping each, like a golden flame, is a rifle cartridge. In the light of the trophy room John can see that the casings contain written information. He leans forward to read the engraved brass that is displayed in front of the Cape Buffalo.