Yellow Mesquite (41 page)

Lights came on in the front room, yard lit red with the blowing sand. Whitehead came stumbling out onto the portico, shirtless, barefooted, peering into the gloom. He yelled something but it was carried away on the wind.
 

Thumbing in two replacement shells, Harley stepped out and raised the shotgun, thinking to shoot out the big picture window next to Whitehead—but no, Leah might be somewhere inside.

Harley stepped forward into the porch light, aware of pain in his left leg just above his ankle.

Whitehead, backlit, shaded his eyes, then turned as if to run. Harley pulled the trigger. Stucco exploded off the porch support. Whitehead spun around and fell back, clutching one side of his face where the plaster had peppered him. Harley thumbed in a replacement shell and cocked both hammers. Whitehead hovered against the support, eyes gleaming as Harley went up the steps. He jammed the muzzle hard against Whitehead’s cheek, forced his face against the wall.

“Boy…you crazy?” Whitehead said from the fleshy warp of his mouth.

Harley reached aside and jerked the door open. He spun Whitehead around and shoved him through the entranceway, the muzzle pressed against the back of his head. Whitehead half turned. Figure-eight circles showed red on his cheek from the gun muzzle.

“Where’s Sherylynne?” Harley said in a voice he himself didn’t recognize.

A clatter of noise sounded from the kitchen. Wesley Earl burst in through the dining room and came to a stop in the doorway. Harley wheeled Whitehead around between them.
 

Wesley Earl had rolled out of bed in a hurry, shirtless, hair sticking up, but his eyes were wide-open. A small-caliber pistol in one hand.
 

“Leave ’im alone,” Whitehead mumbled to Wesley Earl.
 

Wesley Earl leaped back as Harley lifted the shotgun toward him. The shaggy head of a buffalo exploded off the living room wall in a mist of coarse hair and went spinning over the floor, glass eyes glittering in the arc.
 

Wesley Earl jerked the pistol up.

“One shot left here!” Harley shouted, holding Whitehead between them. “I don’t want to kill you with it!”
 

“Leave ’im alone!” Whitehead yelled again.

Wesley Earl hesitated.

“Do like I tell you!” Whitehead said.

“You’re gonna get you and him both killed,” Harley said.
 

Wesley Earl stared. “Harley Jay, you gone plumb crazy, or what?”
 

“I got no fuss with you.”

“Want me to call the sheriff?” Wesley Earl asked.

“I want you to get on outta here like I told you.”
 

“Throw that gun over here,” Harley ordered.

Whitehead nodded. “Go on. Give it to ’im.”

“Give it… You mean…?”

“Go on. Do it!”

Wesley Earl looked from one to the other. He let the hammer down with slow deliberation, then slid the pistol across the floor, skipping over the tiles, coming to a stop on the rug.

Harley dipped down and scooped it up.
 

“You go on now,” Whitehead said. “Git.”

Wesley Earl slipped uneasily back behind the door facing.
 

“You pop back in here with another gun, you’re both dead as hell,” Harley shouted.

Harley heard a door slam shut out back. By now he realized Sherylynne and Leah weren’t here.

He turned and stiff-armed Whitehead into a chair. Whitehead looked up from under his spiny brows, but his eyes were without spirit. Yellow flesh hung from his rib cage in stitched puckers. He looked old for fifty-one, decayed.
 

Harley tucked Wesley Earl’s pistol in his belt and pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against Whitehead’s forehead.

“Where is she?”
 

Whitehead lifted his gaze. “Like I done told you, they wasn’t here but a little while.”

Harley grabbed him by the hair, jerked his head up, leaned into his face. “Where’d she go?”

“I done told you that, too,” Whitehead managed. “I don’t know. If I did I’d tell you. It ain’t nothin’ to me.”

“What do you mean, ‘it ain’t nothin’ to me’? Your own child? She doesn’t mean anything?”

Whitehead glared. “Boy, all in the world Sherylynne ever wanted from me was my money. That’s all that gal ever thought about. Money. She ain’t never thought about you or me or nobody else. You’re just too damn dumb to see it.”

“Well, you two had that in common, didn’t you—money.”

“You married ’er, I didn’t.”
 

“I read a letter she wrote, said all she ever wanted was to make you happy.”

Whitehead narrowed his eyes in disgust. “Bullshit. You don’t know a goddamn thing about nothin’. I don’t know how you ever got to be so goddamn ignert.”

“Like you’re one to talk.”

“You’re ignert and you’re stupid,” Whitehead said again. There was a trace of the old belligerent glitter in his eyes now. “Just lookit you, runnin’ around here like a goddamn chicken with his head cut off. ‘Sherylynne! Sherylynne! Where’s Sherylynne!’”

Harley took a second shell from his jacket and broke the breech open again. “You never cared about anybody, Mavis or anybody else.”
 

“I ain’t no goddamn bleedin’ heart, if that’s what you mean.”

“It’s called emotion…a conscience.”

Whitehead looked on as Harley smoothed the shell in and snapped the breech shut. He felt cheated that Whitehead had so easily resigned himself to his end.

“Money,” Whitehead said. “She thought if she had a baby she’d get it.”

“Where do you send her stuff?”

“What stuff?”

“The things I sent. The letters and presents for Leah. How do you get them to her?”

“All that junk’s back there in the barn. I told you, I don’t know where she is. Can’t you understand English?”

Harley grabbed him by the shirtfront, jerked him out of the chair and shoved him back toward the den, all the while keeping an eye out for Wesley Earl.

A playpen stood behind the leather sofa in what Whitehead called “the barn.” Inside were the presents he had sent to Leah, the doll and tea sets, the Playskool toys, his letters to Sherylynne packaged in rubber bands. Everything.
 

A warthog glared off the wall. A wildebeest stared with a wild, frenetic eye. The pizza parlor mirrors wavered. The high-pitched whine in his head intensified. “You never sent any of her things…”
 

Whitehead shrugged.
 

Harley caught him by the hair, jerked him around, shoved him back into the living room, and slammed him down in the chair against the wall. Whitehead slumped, hands bony and yellow as chicken feet, folded in his lap.
 

“You know I’m gonna kill you.” He felt outside of himself, an observer, looking on. He pressed the muzzle against Whitehead’s jawbone and cocked one hammer.
 

Whitehead turned watery eyes up at him. “I send money to ’er at a bank in Lake Charles. But like I told you, I don’t know where she’s at.”
 

“Lake Charles? What bank?”
 

“I don’t know. First National Citizens. But I got no address for ’er.”

Harley laughed without humor. “I’m gonna blow your brains plumb out the back of your sorry head.”

Whitehead screwed his face up, glaring at the gun, teeth clenched.
 

Harley slapped the barrel against his jaw, a sharp
crack
. Whitehead’s head snapped to one side. He teetered briefly on the chair. Harley clicked the other hammer back. Whitehead clenched his eyes shut, ground his teeth. Harley glared at the filigreed web of veins beneath the thinning hair, imagined the skull flying apart under the blast like a rotten egg. At the same time, he visualized the Doberman’s head from minutes earlier.
 

“Go on if you’re gonna!”
 

Harley jabbed him in the chest with the gun muzzle. “Shut up!”

“Go on!” Whitehead shouted, opening his eyes in the same instant Harley lifted the gun and fired both barrels, one after the other, roaring into the wall just over his head. Whitehead jerked upright; an involuntary cry barked out in the after-noise ringing in the room. Plaster and dust rained down. Whitehead began to shake, saliva drooling down his chin.
 

“Y-you’re a goddamn pussy,” Whitehead stuttered. “Y-you hear? I-I fucked your wife…made her a baby…y-you goddamn pussy…”
 

Harley stared. “You
want
to die…”

“R-right under your nose…”

“Well, this is your day. I’m gonna make your wishes come true.” With one quick motion he shoved the muzzle against the old eagle nose, cocked both barrels and snapped them—
click-click
—on the empties.

Whitehead shuddered, mouth working, unable to speak.
 

“Die and die and
die
!” Harley screamed.
 

He broke the breech and shoved in two more shells just as Wesley Earl peered around the dining room door, Álvaro directly behind. Harley swung the shotgun up. Wesley Earl leaped back, knocking into Álvaro as the big crystal chandelier over the table disintegrated in a crescendo of light and noise, the huge shimmering mass dropping onto the tabletop, crystal raining down in glittering arcs, clattering, rattling, tinkling over the tile floor. Harley swung the shotgun and knocked Whitehead off the chair; the blow jarred sickeningly in the marrow of Harley’s bones.
 

He went out through the front door and across the yard past the dead Doberman. His gaze turned on the old pump-jack towering above the swimming pool, the dull red light of the sandstorm glowing on it like a pagan idol. Harley ran at it and beat at it mindlessly with the shotgun until the stock splintered and the gun came to pieces. He wheeled about and, drawing Wesley Earl’s pistol from his belt, stumbled toward Whitehead’s Mercedes, firing into it, the little flat cracks of sound carrying away on the wind. He emptied the gun and hurled it at the windshield, but it skipped off into the blowing sand. He climbed into the car, fished the keys from the ashtray, fired it up, gunned the engine and popped the clutch. The big vehicle plowed through the yucca plants, throwing prickly pears and gravel across the yard, and hit the pump-jack with a
whump
that slammed his face against the steering wheel, filling his vision with electric splinters of light, and for a moment he lost his equilibrium, a grainy darkness closing in. He held to consciousness, held his foot hard on the accelerator as the pump-jack skidded and ground over the concrete, engine screaming, rear tires squalling, throwing up blue smoke as the pump-jack slowly tilted over into the pool with a huge
ka-sloosh
, taking the winter cover to the bottom. One big wave washed out over the sides as the car’s front end followed the pump-jack over into the pool. The chassis slammed the tiled edge. Smoke wrapped around the rear tires, the undercarriage grinding over the tiles, the rear wheels rising, bouncing on the concrete with short chirping sounds. Harley hit the power window button just as the rear-end began to lift, and then the whole thing slid in on top of the pump with a second
ka-sloosh
. The engine snorted and went dead in a roiling gush of steam. The back wheels squeaked to a stop, the rear bumper hanging on the edge. Bubbles glubbered up.

Harley pushed out through the window against a rush of water pouring in over the sill, then pulled himself up on top of the car, crawled up the trunk deck and stepped off onto the concrete.

His clothes were plastered to his body. Blood leaked from his nose and soaked his shirtfront. His boots were heavy, pinkish water leaking from the one Paladin had damaged.
 

He spotted Wesley Earl near the portico, crouched, as if unsure of what to do. Álvaro knelt, half-hidden around the corner. Whitehead came staggering out, bloodied face cupped in his hands. He trundled down into the yard looking like he was dug up from the dead. He stood near Wesley Earl, the three of them looking on as Harley hobbled to the rental car and got in. Teeth chattering, he fired it up and drove away.
 

Sand swept the road in sheets. Scrub beat about, jittering beneath the wailing wind.

Chapter 44

Mrs. Riley

H
E TURNED THE
car in at the Midland Odessa airport, changed planes in Dallas, and arrived at the Lake Charles, Louisiana regional airport at one that afternoon.
 

The plastic cup protector the doctor had taped over his broken nose felt too tight, and he had a headache. His eyes were swollen and turning dark. His left leg was bandaged just above the ankle, and he’d had a tetanus shot, though his boot had kept the Doberman from tearing his foot off. The doctor said he was lucky that the wound was above the ankle and not in the ankle itself. He downed another painkiller with a vodka and tonic in the airport’s bar, then made his way, limping a little, to the Hertz car-rental counter.

The attendant, a barrel-chested man in a too-small blazer eyed him with suspicion. “Cash or check?”

Harley laid seven one-hundred-dollar bills along with his BankAmericard and his driver’s license on the countertop.
 

“Your employer?”

“Self-employed.”

“Phone.”

“212-555-7177.”

“Address.”

“One-fifty Franklin, New York, New York.”

“Oh? Your drivers license says Midland, Texas.”

“Yes. I’ve moved, but I keep my Texas license updated.”

The attendant eyed him closely. “Then we’ll need the phone number of your nearest relative.”

“Look, buddy, there’s my credit card and seven hundred dollars cash, complete with my New York address. Now, all I want to do is rent a damn car and get the hell out of here. You don’t want to rent me one, I’ll go over to Avis.”

The attendant’s eyes glimmered. “I’ll get you a car, if you’ll just be patient,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Patient? Dammit to hell…!”

The man’s ballpoint pen dug through the carbons. Trembling a little, he glared over the counter. “Go through that door there. I’ll call the attendant to bring your car around. Give him this paperwork.”