Light of the World Read Online Free Page A

some buttered toast in the skillet. Eat up.”
    I knew he was kidding about the buttered toast, and I hoped that our vacation was on track and that my worries about Alafair and Wyatt Dixon were unfounded. But when he poured a cup of coffee in a tin cup and pushed it across the table toward me, his green eyes not meeting mine, I knew he was thinking about something else, not about a quasi-psychotic cowboy in a casino. I also knew that whenever Clete Purcel tried to hide something, both of us were headed for trouble.
    “Go ahead,” I said.
    “Go ahead what?”
    “Say whatever it is that’s bothering you.”
    “I was just going to update you, that’s all.”
    “About what?”
    “Gretchen just graduated from that film school in Los Angeles.”
    “Good,” I replied, my discomfort increasing.
    “She called and said she’d like to visit.”
    “Here?”
    “Yeah, since here is where I’m staying, this is where she’d like to visit. I already talked with Albert.”
    I tried to keep my eyes flat, my face empty, to clear the obstruction that was like a wishbone in my throat. He was staring into my face, expectant, wanting me to say words I couldn’t.
    Less than a year before, Clete discovered he had fathered a daughter out of wedlock. Her name was Gretchen Horowitz, and she had been raised in Miami by her mother, a heroin addict and a prostitute. He also found out that Gretchen had been a contract assassin for the Mafia and was known in the life as Caruso.
    “Think she’ll like Montana?” I said.
    “Why wouldn’t she?”
    “It’s cold country. I mean cold for a kid who grew up in the tropics.”
    I saw the light die in his eyes. “Sometimes you really get to me, Streak.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Sorry is right,” he said. He picked up his dishes and dropped them loudly in the sink.
    S IX MONTHS AGO, close to the Colorado-Kansas line, a little boy looked out the window of a house trailer not far from the intersection of a two-lane highway and a dirt road. The sky was lidded with black thunderclouds, the western rim of the landscape banded by a ribbon of cold blue light. The wind was blowing hard in the fields, lifting clouds of grit into the air, flapping the wash on the clotheslines behind the trailer. Even though the land was carpeted by miles and miles of wheat that was planted in the fall and harvested in the spring, the coldness of the season and the bitter edge in the elements made one feel this part of the world was condemned to permanent winter. It was the locale where the term “cabin fever” originated, where farm women went crazy in January and shot themselves, and a rancher had to tie a rope from the porch to the barn to find his way back to the house during a whiteout. It was a place where only the most religious and determined of people survived.
    While the little boy’s mother slept in front of a television screen buzzing with white noise, the boy watched a tattered man emerge from a beer joint at the crossroads and walk unsteadily down the edge of the two-lane, one hand clamped to the hat on his head, his coat whipping in the wind, his face leaning like a hatchet into theflying snow pellets that were as tiny and hard as bits of glass. Later, the boy would refer to the figure as “the scarecrow man.”
    A tanker truck appeared far down the wavy surface of the highway, headlights on, its weight and shimmering cylindrical shape and dedicated purpose so great and unrelenting that it seemed to move and jitter against the sun’s afterglow without sound or mechanically driven power, sustained by its own momentum, as though the truck had a destiny that had been planned long ago.
    From the opposite direction, a prison van with a driver and a guard in front was approaching the crossroads. The van was followed by an escort cruiser that had stopped so one of the state police officers could use the restroom. In the back of the van was a prisoner by the name of Asa Surrette, who was scheduled to testify