"I checked with your son. He confirms your story," the sheriff said.
"Then kick me loose."
"Not till I tell Cleo she made a mistake. What'd you do to her, anyway?"
"You're keeping me here for my own protection?" I said incredulously.
A long curlicue of apple skin dangled from the sheriff's knife blade. "Let's see if I can remember her words. Something like 'I'd better not see that sorry sack of shit before you do.' You think she meant anything by that?"
"Where's my son?"
"Safe and snug in his tent. The Voss girl is with her daddy. You don't need to worry about them."
"Let me out of here, sir."
"I hear Carl Hinkel told you he was sixty years old outside that town meeting at the Holiday Inn. Made everybody think you was picking on an old man."
"I've had better moments."
"He's fifty-three. He isn't no military hero, either. He was kicked out of the Army for running some kind of PX scam in Vietnam. You know how you can tell when Carl Hinkel is lying? His lips are moving."
The sheriff split the apple longways and hollowed the seeds out of the pulp and stuck one piece into his mouth and speared the other half on his knife blade and extended it through the bars. "You got a good heart, Mr. Holland. But I suspect you was off playing pocket pool when the Lord passed out the brains."
Later, I lay down on a bench at the back of the cell and rested my arm across my eyes and tried to sleep. But I found no rest. L.Q. Navarro stood in the gloom, his arms folded, one foot propped backward on the wall, his eyes lost in thought.
"Want to share what's on your mind?" I asked.
"Wyatt Dixon's gonna pay you back by hurting somebody close to you he don't have no connection with hisself."
"Who?" I asked.
"He's a cruel man. He's got womanhood on the brain. You figure it out."
"He's seen me with Cleo. Maybe it was Dixon who busted up her carpenter."
"Good try, bud," L.Q. replied, and looked toward the window as a clap of dry thunder rolled through the mountains.
The light was turning gray outside and the storm clouds of last night now looked as if they were filled with snow. A trusty walked by my cell door with a mop and bucket in one hand.
"Get the turnkey down here," I said to him.
Chapter 20
Temple went to the health club for her workout at six that morning. She couldn't believe the change in the weather. The temperature had dropped perhaps forty degrees and the fir trees at the top of the canyon were powdered with snow. She went up to the Nautilus room on the second floor of the club and did stomach crunches on a recliner board and watched through the window as a gray curtain of rain and mist and snow moved through the canyon, obscuring the cliff walls, smudging the trees, leaving only the emerald green ribbon of the river inside the mist.
The parking lot was white now and she could see the curlicues of car tracks on the cement and her Ford Explorer parked by the river. A low-slung red automobile pulled up on the far side of it, as though the driver could not decide whether to park. Then the mist and snow swirled over the lot and her vehicle faded and disappeared inside it.
She finished her workout and showered and dressed in her khaki jeans and a warm flannel shirt and her scuffed boots and put on a cotton jacket with a hood and began to tie it with a drawstring, then accidently pulled the plastic tippet off the string. She dropped the tippet into her shirt pocket and hung her workout bag on her shoulder and walked to her vehicle.
She shut the Explorer's door and started the engine. The windows had frosted and she turned on the heater and felt the coldness of the air surge into her face. While she waited for the engine to warm and the air vents to dry the moisture on the windows she pushed in the cigarette lighter so she could so
ften the plastic tippet and mold it back on the drawstring of her hood.
For just a second she saw a man's face under a hat brim in the rearview mirror, then the face slipped out of the glass and a pair of arms and gloved hands seized her neck and upper torso. Her attacker's strength was incredible. He lifted her over the seat and into the back as though she were stuffed with straw. Then he fitted his forearms on her neck and began to squeeze.
But the cigarette lighter was still in her hand and she reached backward with it blindly and felt the heated coils bite into his skin. An odor like animal hair burning in a trash barrel struck her nostrils. Even with the blood flow to her brain shutting down she held the lighter tightly against his flesh. She expected him to give up, his arms to fling her from him, but instead his body trembled and grew more rigid as he ate his pain and tightened his hold on her neck and crushed her head into the point of his chin, a grinding sound like a wood saw rasping against metal issuing from his throat.
The defroster was forming an oval-shaped clear area over the steering wheel now and Temple could see snow crystals blowing horizontally above the river. She could see college kids in bright winter clothes climbing a zigzag trail to the top of the mountain, their scarves whipping in the wind. She could see orange cliffs and trees and a solitary ball of tum-bleweed bouncing across the land toward her vehicle. Her right hand went limp and she felt the cigarette lighter drop from her fingers, then the vision in her left eye clouded over and one side of her body went dead and she saw the tumbleweed bounce once over the hood of her vehicle and slap wetly against the defrosted clearing on the window glass like an angry man stuffing a cork in a bottle.