CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jesse stooped over the utility tub in the mudroom snipping the ends off the stems of fresh-cut flowers she had collected from the garden. The sunshine through the window-pane cast half her face in shadow and emphasized the highlights in her hair. When she heard me come into the room, she gathered the cuttings into a bouquet of gold daffodils and purple crocus and iris with one hand, the pruning shears still clutched inside the other.

“Come with me to the kitchen,” she said, and bussed me on the cheek as she squeezed past me. “I want to put these in a vase.”

“Where’s Cricket?”

“She went off with Caleb and the boys, moving the horses to Three Roses.”

“They left you alone?”

“I can handle myself for a few hours.”

She stood on her toes and peered into the pantry.

“I’m sorry about this morning,” I said.

“Can you get the green one down for me? I can’t reach it.”

“Did you hear what I just said?”

“I did, and I am trying to change the subject. Will you please hand me that vase?”

I collected the vase and set it on the counter beside the kitchen sink.

“I can’t help from thinking I should be burying those bastards right now.”

“Those are not the times we live in, Ty,” she said, turned, and leaned her back against the sink.

“I’m tired of feeling like a hypocrite,” I admitted. “For a second this morning, I seriously considered shoving a manacled man down a flight of stairs.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Did you do it?”

“No.”

“Because that’s not who you are. Yesterday I watched you keep the peace at Teresa Pineu’s. A few hours later you rescued a young girl. You didn’t deal the cards.”

“You didn’t see her, Jesse; you didn’t see what they did to her. That could have been our daughter.”

“Emily Meeghan made bad choices.”

“She didn’t choose what happened,” I said. “I have no interest in judging her decisions.”

I had missed it when I’d first come in, walked right past it, but now my attention landed on the shotgun propped up beside the kitchen door. Jesse saw me study it, and something soft came in her eyes.

“Remember when I told you I’d seen the slide,” she said. “But I’d never seen it on you?”

“I remember.”

“I had no right to say something like that to you.”

She stepped into me and wrapped her arms around my waist. She laid her head against my chest and I could smell mulch from the garden and the sunlight on her skin.

“I need to take a shower,” I said.

“I’ll take one with you.”

“I’m ashamed to occupy the same universe as men like that. It’ll take a belt sander to scrape the filth off me.”

“You can’t scare me away,” she said, and kissed me gently on the mouth.

“You are a bullheaded woman.”

I phoned the hospital after I’d finished dressing, knowing I would not be satisfied until I had spoken with Emily and Chandle Meeghan. After several transfers, I finally spoke with a woman in admissions who informed me that Emily had been released earlier that morning.

I found an address for the Meeghans in the phone book, wrote it down on a sheet of notepaper, and tucked it into the pocket of my vest.

A continental Trailways bus was pulling away from the diner as I drove into town, grinding slowly away from the curb and trailing a black cloud of diesel exhaust. Rowan Boyle was smoking a cigarette in the shade of his sidewalk awning, on a lawn chair made of aluminum tubes and plasticized webbing, wearing a T-shirt and stained apron, a paper overseas cap pushed back on his head. He waved a lazy greeting to me as I drove past, and took another deep drag off his smoke.

I made a right turn into a small grid of residential streets that had been given the names of wildflowers. The whole town seemed uncommonly quiet; long afternoon shadows of alder and larch dappled the asphalt and a crosshatch of contrails slashed the sky. The address I’d been looking for was stenciled onto a concrete drainage swale where a moss-crusted brick walkway ran from the street to the front door of a two-story Craftsman. Dim lamplight shone like a damp cotton ball, through lace curtains drawn tight on the casements, the only sounds being those of my footfalls and the creak of a wicker porch swing in a riffle of wind.

I rapped on the doorframe and waited, heard a brief muffled exchange from inside the house. Chandle Meeghan drew a narrow part in the curtains and saw it was me. He stepped to the door, opening it only wide enough to poke his head through.

“I have nothing to say to you,” he said.

His face was unshaven and gray, and he still wore the blood-spattered clothes he’d been wearing the night before. The stale, overheated odor of confinement drifted out through the breach and his expression was one of both foreboding and defeat.

“I’m here because I want to help you,” I said.

“You can’t help me.”

“Did someone threaten you or Emily?”

He glanced past my shoulder, up both sides of the street, as if he were expecting to find something there. The tick of the pendulum on the grandfather clock in his foyer echoed on the hardwood floor. He startled visibly when the spring clip suddenly snapped into place and the Westminster chimes sounded the quarter hour.

“Please leave us alone, Dawson. I mean it.”

He pushed the door shut as I started to speak, and I heard the deadbolt lock into place.

I cruised the streets of the neighborhood, not knowing what I had expected to find. After nearly an hour, I drove home in silence, haunted by Meeghan’s disquiet, and the palpable sensation that I was about to have an arrow parked firmly between the blades of my shoulders.

The chain gate was unhooked and lay limp in the loose dirt of my driveway. A surge of adrenaline spiked through my veins when I saw the Harley leaning on its stand at the foot of my front porch. The Super Glide was spotless, painted the color of black cherries and reflecting the light of the low-hanging sun. I looked toward the sorting corral, but saw no one. The ranch hands had not yet returned.

I drew the Colt out of my holster and crept to the side door, hoping to get some sense of what was happening inside. I poked my head slowly up over the sill, and could only catch a glimpse of my wife, her posture attentive and erect and pressed deep into the cushions of our sofa. She appeared oddly composed, with one hand on the forestock and the other on the trigger of the shotgun that rested on her lap.

I slipped inside as silently as I was able and inched toward the living room, my revolver locked and loaded. I bore my sights down on the bridge of the intruder’s nose before I had time to determine who it was.

“Oh good, you’re here,” Rex Blackwood said.

He was seated opposite Jesse, one leg crossed over the other, perched comfortably in the upholstered lounge chair I favored when watching TV. His attitude and expression were calm and relaxed, but the muscles beneath his eyes and the pulse that showed at his temple told me that he was wound up like a spring trap. It was not the chemical-driven, hair-trigger tension I associated with junkies and armed thieves; it was the full body awareness that was the manifestation of rigorous training.

“Did this man threaten you?” I breathed.

“I’m fine,” she said. “He told me that he knows you, but he doesn’t look like any friend of yours.”

“You’ll notice she is the one with the Browning pointed at my throat,” Blackwood said to me. He had not once moved his eyes away from Jesse’s as he spoke. “For the record, I have no doubt whatsoever that she would pull the trigger if she felt the need to. Any chance you could stop aiming it at me?”

“What in the hell is the matter with you, Blackwood, coming out here unannounced?” I said.

He wore loose-fitting BDU fatigues and a blue-and-white striped shirt, a three-quarter length duster hanging open and unbuttoned over a faded denim vest. His wardrobe struck me as the stylistic opposite of the steel-stud crusted, leather-clad bike thug whose clothing squeaked and jangled from half a block away. Instead Blackwood was outfitted not only for the highway, but for stealth and physical engagement. The only leather he was wearing could be found on the soles of his paratrooper boots.

“Are you heeled, Blackwood?” I asked.

“I exercise my right to keep and bear,” he answered, careful that his hands never moved from their positions on the soft arms of my chair.

“Don’t leave me guessing,” I said.

“There’s a .44 pistol in a holster underneath my left arm; a 32-caliber Sauer on my right calf, and a Gerber fighting knife strapped to my left. Would you like me to unpack?”

“No,” I said. “But I’d love to hear why you came into my house armed for an insurrection.”

“I never face the threat of violence unarmed. And I’m not only referring to your wife.”

I reseated the hammer of my Colt and sat down on the couch beside her.

“You can stand down now, Jesse,” I said. “Meet Rex Blackwood. He was with me the other night at the Blossom.”

She shifted the muzzle six inches to the left, but kept her index finger inside the trigger guard. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

Dusk had fallen, and I heard Wyatt barking in the distance. I knew that at least part of the crew was returning. I hoped it was not the group that had my daughter riding with them.

“Any reason we couldn’t have had this discussion by phone?” I asked.

“I don’t trust telephones. This is a face-to-face kind of thing.”

The clock on the mantel ticked off several seconds, and the sound of horse hooves was growing nearer.

“Can we cut to it, please?” I asked. “As it turns out, life is short.”

Blackwood scratched at the stubble of his beard and shot a glance out the window.

“You’ve been correct not to underestimate the Charlatans,” he said. “I assume you’re aware of their history.”

I nodded and Blackwood shifted his gaze back indoors, looking first to Jesse, then to me.

“In the late forties they were one of the gangs that overran Hollister, California. Four thousand bikers took over a town and 4,500 of its citizens. Their police force at the time was seven men. They occupied the place for three full days. I don’t need to tell you how that went.

“In ’69 they were with the Hells Angels at Altamont when the Angels killed Meredith Hunter. The bike clubs had been hired as ‘security’ for a Stones concert. The promoters paid them with cases of beer.”

“I don’t—”

“Let me finish,” he said. “A few months ago in a small town in the Black Hills, they lit the highway on fire with gasoline and took turns driving through the flames. But not before they shot holes in all the town’s fire trucks.

“They make their money dealing weed, speed, and sunshine. Assault and murder are not crimes to them, but rites of fraternal passage. They are dangerous and unpredictable, and they hold no inhibitions about tracking their shit all over your world.”

I looked across the couch at Jesse, and saw that her eyes had gone stone cold.

“This is what you came here to tell me?” I asked.

“I came here to ask you a question.”

Fingers of light shone through branches of white oak and cedar as the floodlights switched on at the corral down below. The stock horses were being turned out for the night and their sounds floated up with the light.

“Ask it,” I said.

“Can you think of a good reason that a Charlatan with a bandaged-up hoof would be visiting with your sheriff at his house?”

My mouth went dry and I felt like I’d swallowed a road flare.

“I couldn’t think of one, either,” Blackwood said. “I thought you’d like to know. I’ll let myself out.”