Light of the World Read Online Free

and bacon; and at least three cups of café au lait. Because he knew he had filled his digestive system with enough cholesterol and salt to clog the Suez Canal, he topped it off with a cup of stewed tomatoes or fruit cocktail, in the belief that it could neutralize a combination of grease and butter and animal fat with the viscosity of the lubricant used on train wheels.
    I told him about Alafair’s encounter with Wyatt Dixon and our exchange with him at the casino. Clete opened the grate to his stove and dropped two blocks of pinewood into the flames. “Dixon allowed the deputy to search his truck?” he said.
    “He was completely cooperative. The only weapon in there was an old lever-action Winchester.”
    “Maybe he’s not the guy.”
    “Alafair says nobody else was in the parking area or on the ridge. She’s sure Dixon is the only person who could have shot the arrow.”
    “You think he has a jacket?”
    “I called the sheriff an hour ago. Dixon has been around here for years, but nobody is sure what he is or who he is. He was mixed up with some militia people in the Bitterroot Valley who were afraid of him. When he went down for capping a rapist, Deer Lodge couldn’t deal with him.”
    “A prison in Montana can’t deal with somebody?”
    “They sent him to electroshock.”
    “I didn’t think they did that anymore.”
    “They made an exception. Dixon was kicked out of the army when he was fifteen for cutting the stripes off a black mess sergeant behind a saloon in San Antonio and stuffing them in the guy’s mouth. At a rodeo he knocked a bull unconscious with his fist. He says he’s born-again, and some people say he can speak in tongues. A university professor was recording a Pentecostal prayer meeting up on the rez when Wyatt Dixon got up and started testifying. The university professor claims Dixon was speaking Aramaic.”
    “What’s Aramaic?”
    “The language of Jesus.”
    Clete was looking at his coffee cup, his expression neutral, his little-boy haircut freshly combed and damp from his shower, his face unlined and youthful in the morning sunlight. “Dave, don’t get mad at me for what I’m about to say. But we got the living shit shot out of us on the bayou. Not once but twice. Alafair went through a big trauma, just like us. I shut my eyes and I imagine things.”
    “Alafair’s ear was cut.”
    “We don’t know that the arrow did it. You said something about ravens fighting in a tree. Maybe it’s all coincidence. Easy does it, right?”
    “Alafair is nobody’s fool. She doesn’t go around imagining things.”
    “She gets into it with people. This time it’s with a wack job. The guy’s truck was clean. Leave him alone and quit borrowing trouble.”
    “Do you know what I feel when you say something like that?” I asked.
    “No, what?”
    “Forget it. Have a few more slices of ham. Maybe that will help you think more clearly.”
    He blew out his breath. “You want to roust him?”
    “He doesn’t roust.”
    “You said he went down on a murder beef. How’d he get out?”
    “A technicality of some kind.”
    “Okay, we’ll keep an eye out, but the guy has no reason to hurtAlafair. And he doesn’t add up as a guy who randomly hunts people with a bow and arrow, particularly on his home turf.”
    Clete was the best investigative cop I ever knew and hard to argue with. He would lay down his life for me and Alafair and Molly. He was brave and gentle and violent and self-destructive, and each morning he woke with a succubus that had fed at his heart since childhood. Whenever I spoke impatiently to him or hurt his feelings, I felt an unrelieved sense of remorse and sorrow, because I knew that Clete Purcel was one of those guys who took the heat for the rest of us. I also knew that if he were not in our midst, the world would be a much worse place.
    “I guess I worry too much,” I said.
    “Alafair is your daughter. You’re supposed to worry, noble mon,” he said. “I still got