It took Christine out of her way, but I persuaded her to turn and drive toward the trailer.
I made her drop me at the end of the lane beside the mailbox. The lane disappeared immediately as it melted into the shadows under the trees, but it was safer this way.
"I promise," I said, "I will call you in the morning. I'm betting everything's going to be resolved by then, and there's be nothing left but the mop-up."
She peered at the blackness under the trees.
"You think he'll come back here, huh? Joe's brother?"
I nodded.
"Coming back to the scene of the crime or something like that?"
"Something like that," I said.
She shifted into gear.
"You know, right now I just want to get good and drunk," she said. "But with being pregnant, I can't even do that."
That qualified as her goodbye; she rolled up her window and drove away.
I watched her disappear and listened as her engine gradually faded into the subtle white noise of the outdoors.
Then I turned to face the inky opening in the trees, where it seemed that the entire intensity of the early morning hours' blackness had pooled. The air was almost motionless, just moving enough to nudge the bare tree branches in a shifting whisper. There were quiet, staccato rustlings of whatever damned fool animals and birds inhabit an October mountain night.
I took a deep breath, then stepped across the threshold that cut the dim starlight night off from the blackness.
I hadn't realized how long Weston and Christine's lane was on foot, especially when you've practically no sense of sight and are hoping to spontaneously evolve echolocation abilities to avoid ruts and stones in the road. I had almost convinced myself that there was a fork in the road and I had gone hopelessly astray when finally a lighter darkness ahead of me showed where the lane ended in the clearing around the trailer.
Police tape surrounded the scene of the earlier shooting, with numbered bits of masking tape showing bullet holes on Joshua's car, Weston's truck, and the trailer itself. The grass all around was mashed down by successive sets of tire treads; the entire force of the local sheriff's office had probably shown up to try to make sense of the bizarre outbreak of violence. Now it was quiet in a way that still retained the subliminal echoes of the shootout.
As I ducked under the police tape on my way to the front door, I realized that I had probably never shot, or been shot at, as often as I had in the last twenty-four hours.
And it probably wasn't over.
The front door was still unlocked; Weston hadn't had time to lock up properly when we had run for out lives yesterday. I edged in quietly, and listened to the more profound silence inside. There weren't many ambient sounds, no central air or furnace. I could hear the overlapping hums of an electric clock and the refrigerator in the kitchen.
When I was sure I was alone, I went to the refrigerator in the dark and peeked in. There were two cans of Diet Pepsi, waiting as if they had been meant for me personally. I took both and made my way back into the living room.
I positioned an armchair to face the door and settled in. The trailer was a little to cold to be comfortable, and the cold sodas made me shiver, but I left the wood stove alone and just sat in the darkness, sipping my drinks and worrying at the edges of the bullethole in my sleeve.
Waiting.
It was more than an hour and a half before I heard a car engine stop at the edge of the clearing. I tried not to think about where Joshua had gotten this one and how many bodies he had left behind in the process.
Sitting in the quiet and dark so long had extended the sensitivity of my hearing. I followed his footsteps through the grass up to the porch, the creak of each stair under his feet, the click as his hand wrapped cautiously around the door handle.
My gun was in my lap, hidden in a fold of my jacket. My other hand was on the lamp switch.
The door swung open slowly, and I saw Joshua Blakely's silhouette against the paler dark outside.
Then the door shut again, and I switched on the light.
The sudden brilliance was dazzling, but more so for Joshua, as I had angled the lamp to shine full on the doorway. He carried his .45 in his hand. He also had a small hatchet.
"I had wondered," he said blandly, "if you would be sleeping."
"I might have been," I said. "If I hadn't figured out that it was me you were following. Nice hatchet."
"It came with the car."
"You killed the driver, I presume?"
"Think about how many billions of people there are in the world," he said. "And how many hundreds of billions there have been. Caring about any individual seems pretty foolish against those numbers."
"That's not the attitude I'd hope to hear out of the presumptive Messiah."
His eyes were adjusting, and he watched me with what looked like only faint interest.
"Don't confuse me with Jesus," he said. "He was a wimp. A bleeding-heart pacifist. I come to bring a sword, not peace."
"So I've heard."
He took a step forward. I raised my gun off my lap so he could see it pointed toward him. He stopped.
"So," I said. "What do we do now?"
"How about you put down your gun and surrender to me, and I won't consign your soul to everlasting torment."
I had to smile at that. "But kill me here and now, I assume."
"Of course. You've been an impediment to me. You deserve nothing less."
"Well, I'm no Messiah," I said, "but I like my idea better. You drop the gun and the axe, I truss you up and turn you over to the police, and you spend the rest of your days moldering in a high-security mental ward."
"All of this, and you still don't know who I am," he said.
"I know what you are, Joshua. You're psychic. I'll give you that. You've got some special abilities, like the one that allowed you to track me, and maybe others. I don't know. You're also a murderous sociopath with overwhelming delusions of grandeur. And I am pretty damned tired of this whole banter, so why don't you drop your shit before I blow you away."
For the first time that I had ever seen, Joshua Blakely smiled. It was a sickening sight. There was no warmth or human contentment in that face; there was only the expression of a confident carnivore anticipating an easy meal.
"I haven't come into my kingdom yes," he said through gleaming yellow teeth, "but do you think my Father would abandon me so close to my fulfillment? Do you think you could actually kill me?"
He raised the gun and the hatchet and started forward.
I fired three shots, and the trailer shook with the reports.
The first bullet hit him just above the right clavicle. The second struck on the upper left side of his chest, just low enough to strike his heart. The third went right through his left carotid artery and sprayed bright blood on the trailer wall behind him.
The force of the impact countered his forward inertia, and for half a second he hung in the air, one foot off the floor. The smile was still on his face; it didn't start to sag until his knee buckled and he collapsed forward. His blood pooled beneath him.
I reached for the phone.
** ** **
The mop-up was hell.
A sheriff whose hardest regular duty had been listening to stoned teenagers try to talk their way out of possession charges had to hear the whole story four times from each of us. So did the district attorney, a couple of FBI agents, and the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
For the two days it took for the local authorities to check Weston's story with California, we languished in the sheriff's station. They did let me call the Gordell sisters, and I downplayed the seriousness of it all as much as I could; they both sounded like they were on edge after having been up with Beth's nightmares.
Eventually, once it became clear that Joshua was the one who had been picking off locals every time he wanted a vehicle, they released us. The FBI made noises about charging Weston for identity fraud, but everyone else told them to take the pickle out of their asses and get over it. The last I saw Weston, he and Christine were having a very awkward reunion on the sheriff's station steps, with about five feet between them and far more separating them.
The state was a little less forgiving of me as far as my professional license was concerned. They suspended it as the laborious machinery of review ground into action. Among their many concerns were whether I had committed an ethic indiscretion in leaving the employ of Joshua Blakely and working for the person he was searching for.
I had gotten adept at telling different versions of the story. For the judge and the authorities, I left out just about every reference to Joshua's psychic abilities. To Sammy after the fact, I explained Joshua's talents without mentioning my past experiences that allowed me to identify them.
What I didn't tell anyone at all was that, when I had pulled the trigger in the trailer, there was a small part of me -- a small, but relentlessly shrill part -- that feared that Joshua would laugh his way through the bullets and continue toward me with his hatchet.
