I watched my father’s elder brother through the windshield of my car as I spoke. He had his face buried in his hands. I had to admit there was a part of me that wanted him to look up so I could see an expression of shame or remorse, maybe even regret, something to let me know that he recognized the evil he had brought into the world. Something other than the emotional distance he had already shown me, the same emotional distance I felt toward his son and him.
My blood.
My family.
It frightened me how very much alike we were.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Where’s his mother?”
Neither of us had spoken since we left the trailer. I’d imagine both of us wanted to burn it down, but for different reasons.
“None of your business.”
I recognized his tone. It was the one he used to end a conversation. I truthfully didn’t care whether he wanted to talk or not, nor did I care if I pissed him off in the process. He wasn’t the only one who was in a vile mood.
“She leave you? Is that it?”
“You’re walking a thin line. Blood or not, you’re still an outsider here.”
His cheeks flushed with anger, but he kept his eyes straight ahead, on the road. He was trying his best to keep his expression studiously neutral. I’d been doing this for so long that I could see the cracks forming before he even realized there was the possibility that they might. And the more he protested, the more I started to think that whatever happened to her had some bearing on what was happening here now.
“Was that her in your bedroom? The pictures on the dresser?”
His lips whitened as he tightened them against his teeth. I didn’t have to see his hands to know they were balled into fists.
“There are some things that aren’t any of your business. Things that were never meant to be your business. You can run all over this reservation, saying and doing whatever you want, but this subject is off limits. Especially to you.” I slowed the car as we neared the turnoff for his driveway. The tactic was transparent. “Just let me out anywhere through here.”
“Was it another man? Did she run off and leave you with the kid?”
“Stop the car. Let me out.”
“Did she recognize the fact that her own son was a monster, is that it?”
“I’m warning you. I don’t care what kind of badge you carry.”
“Did she sense the evil in him and decide she’d sooner—”
I didn’t see the punch coming. I heard the crack, tasted copper on the back of my tongue, and the next thing I knew we were barreling through the desert, tearing up creosote and cacti and heading straight toward his house in a cloud of dust. I stomped the brake and the car skidded sideways to a halt. Before we were even fully stopped, Roman was climbing out the door.
“She died,” he shouted through the closing door. I watched him walking away until he turned and pointed at me. I could barely hear him through the car door, but his expression alone would have sufficed. “Don’t you come back here again! Ever!”
And with that, he vanished into the settling cloud of dust.
I stretched my jaw and rubbed at the spot where he had belted me. His fist had connected with the curvature of my mandible, just beneath my right earlobe. I might have seen it coming in time if he’d swung with his right. It didn’t matter. I was man enough to admit that I’d had it coming. I knew I was pushing too hard and I’m sure my words had been barbed, but I was angry and I needed to take it out on someone. I know he wasn’t responsible for murdering those people, nor was he directly to blame for the actions of his son. I wanted to hurt him because he could have stopped Ban. He could have intervened before it ever reached this point. Maybe Ban could have even received help. As it stood now, if he wasn’t killed out here in the desert, he would end up riding a needle. Of course, after murdering a federal agent, he wouldn’t survive his first night in prison.
I sat there a while longer, watching the dust settle like snow onto my windshield and hood. It turned the blazing sun an orangish color while the sky appeared to fill with ash. Finally, I reversed the car and backed toward to road, dragging branches and whole uprooted bushes with me. The scraping sounds that came from under the car made me grateful this was a pool car and not my personal vehicle. I backed right out onto the main road and stared at the trail of destruction I had left in my wake. The branches under the hood had nearly erased the tire tracks. There was a thought on the edge of my consciousness, like a tip-of-the-tongue kind of thing, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. Something about the way the brush marks obscured my trail struck a chord.
It would come to me eventually. When I was ready.
I put the car into drive and headed back toward town. The last shrub had just shaken loose from my undercarriage when the first Crown Vic blew past me in the opposite direction at close to ninety. Two more whipped past right behind it, so fast that the wind from their passage nearly buffeted my car onto the shoulder. The ME’s office must have called the Bureau first. I watched for brake lights in the rearview mirror, but none of them so much as slowed. I guess I should have been thankful for the desert camouflage that now disguised my vehicle.
There was that elusive thought again, but I still couldn’t catch it.
I focused again on the road. I had enjoyed spending time with my uncle so very much that I figured now would be a wonderful time to have a little chat with Chief Antone. Why waste a perfectly rotten mood on myself when I could share it with someone as deserving as the chief? I understood the hypocrisy of being angered by the fact that he was keeping information from me, but, damn it, I was a federal agent. It was in my job description.
The police station looked pretty much the same as it had earlier, although things seemed to have calmed down in the interim. The aura of panic had faded to the more manageable bedlam I associated with most rural station houses. And still the chief’s cruiser was nowhere to be found. Maybe his absence was nothing out of the ordinary. Could have even been his day off for all I knew. Besides, tracking him down might not be such a terrible thing. It gave me the opportunity to see him in his element, or at least his element, whether he was in it at the time or not. There was something about him that still didn’t sit right with me.
Who was I kidding? It was downright maddening.
It took all of about thirty seconds to pull his home address from my computer. I was there in ten minutes flat. He lived in an old adobe home not unlike the one in which my father had been raised. It was the same color as the dust that trailed my car and apparently utilized the same repairman as the police station. The cracks in the adobe showed through the discolored patches from a hundred feet away as I turned down his dirt driveway. Brown juniper shrubs lined the rutted drive. A nopales cactus sagged to my right, the pads black and eroded. Generations of tumbleweeds had aggregated against a ramshackle picket fence enclosing what I assumed passed for a front yard, although it was little more than a rectangular slice of the same desert that stretched away from me to the distant horizon.
I parked beside the fence and watched the curtains through the front windows while I waited for the dust to settle. I climbed out and walked toward the gate, which was ordinarily held closed by a frayed length of rope, but now clapped open and closed on the gentle breeze that had arisen from the southwest. The rusted hinges squealed when I opened it and passed through. The front porch was a faded wooden number that had been built over a crumbling concrete pad. The planter boxes on it contained potting soil that had dried to a pale gray and spilled through the cracks in the pottery. There was a cholla carcass beneath the window to my right, over which hung the bleached skull of a bull, and a dead row of sage along the fence line. Considering the cacti and shrubs grew naturally around here, it must have taken some doing to kill them off. The entire house gave the same impression of carefully tended decrepitude as the police station.