“What is that?” Darrel said to the professor from the university.

“You’re listening to Aramaic, my friend. Something you can tell your grandchildren about,” the professor replied.

“It’s an Indian dialect?”

“It goes back nine centuries before the birth of Christ. It’s the language Jesus spoke,” the professor said.

“Right,” Darrel said. “Glad my tax money is going for a good cause out at the university.”

Darrel left the tent and went to a concrete building that contained showers and restrooms that were used by campers during tribal powwows. As he relieved himself in a trough, he could hear the tent session breaking up for dinner. If he was going to make a move on Dixon, now was the time. He used his cell phone to call directly into Fay Harback’s office, hoping she would be working late, which for her was customary.

“Fay?”

“Yes?” she said.

“I want to bring Dixon in as a material witness.”

“Witness to what?”

“The attack on his own person.”

“You want to lock up an assault and battery victim?”

“Got any better solutions for dealing with this guy?”

“Wyatt isn’t a guy you squeeze, Darrel.”

“Wyatt?” he said.

“He’s neither a snitch nor a rat, so forget it,” she said.

“Whose side are you on?”

“You should try to relax,” she replied.

He disconnected the transmission. Had everyone in the courthouse lost their minds? He left the stalls in the cement building and went back outside into the twilight. Wyatt Dixon was laboring across the rough ground, a soft cowboy hat the color of chewing tobacco low on his forehead, a festive group of men and women on each side of him. They were the homeliest people Darrel had ever seen, their faces creased and work-worn, their teeth decayed, their eyesight diminished by injuries and diseases that were never treated. What did they have to be happy about?

But the faces here at the revival were not new ones to him. He had seen them in El Salvador, Guatemala, and northern Nicaragua. He had seen them staring at him out of windows in government jails, shantytowns, and miserable huts on the fringes of large pepper plantations. He had also seen them at the bottom of excavations just before a bulldozer shoved a mountain of dirt down on them.

His depression was coming back. Get rid of morbid thoughts. He remembered George Patton’s famous admonition: You don’t win wars by giving your life for your country; you win by making the other sonofabitch give his. For Darrel, that meant taking it to them with red-hot tongs. He waited until Wyatt Dixon was inside the entrance of the men’s room, then braced him.

“Think you can just walk out of the hospital and say, ‘Screw you,’ to the sheriff’s department?” he said.

“Why, howdy doodie, Detective McComb?” Dixon said, straightening himself on his crutches. “We’re fixing to have a potluck dinner. Dinner on the ground and devil in the bush. Want to join us?”

The men who had entered the restroom with Dixon were staring at Darrel as though he were a Martian. He held up his badge so all of them could see it. “This is police business. Get out of here,” he said.

But they didn’t move. Not until Dixon turned to them and said, “Y’all go ’head on. I’ll be there directly.”

“Why don’t you leave him alone?” somebody in the back of the room said.

“Who said that?” Darrel asked.

But no one answered. Instead, one by one they left the room, their faces filled with hostility, their eyes lingering on his.

“You fool ignorant people, Dixon, but you don’t fool me,” Darrel said.

“I got twenty-seven thousand dollars in the bank, own my own truck, personal gear, and a prize Appaloosa cutting horse. I’m on the square with the state and the Man on High, and you ain’t got bean dip on me, Detective. Seems to me you’re flirting with a civil suit. I’ve already talked to my friend Brother Holland about taking over some of my legal issues.”

“Holland is actually your attorney?”

Wyatt didn’t reply. His shoulders were hunched atop his crutches, his head tilted at an odd angle. His eyes seemed to be peeling away the skin on Darrel’s face now, burrowing into his mind, prying secrets from him Darrel shared with no one. Then Darrel knew why it was he hated Dixon so much. Wyatt knew his past and looked upon him as a fraud. “You think you know everything about me, don’t you?” Darrel said.

“You hire men of my kind to hurt folks who get in your way. That’s why I don’t have no truck with the government. The whole bunch of you are hypocrites,” Dixon replied.

“Hear me real good on this, asswipe. People like you have no right to live in this country. You belong in a cage on an ice floe in Antarctica. You’re one of those guys who’s still dirty after he takes a shower. Both of us know you’re up to something. I just haven’t figured out what it is.”

“Least I ain’t up to somebody’s windowsill, looking at some young girl’s boobs. Now, if you’ll step aside, I’m fixing to take a drain that’s gonna blow the porcelain off the bowl.”

Dixon creaked forward on his crutches toward a stall, his shoulder brushing against Darrel’s. Then Darrel had thoughts of a kind that had probably been working in his unconscious all day, like yellow jackets trapped under a glass jar. Strapped to his ankle was a small holster with a hideaway.25 auto in it, all serial numbers acid-burned and ground off on an emery wheel. All he needed to do was say Dixon’s name, wait for him to turn around, and use his nine-Mike to pop one into the center of his forehead. It would be a simple matter to fold Dixon’s dead hand around the.25 auto.

“Dixon?” he said.

Wyatt stopped and turned slightly, the eagle on his shirt bunching with the twisted motion he made against the armrests of his crutches. “Spit it out. I’m tired of this game playing,” he said.

“You’re a piece of shit,” Darrel said.

“I’ve answered to worse. If that’s all you got to say, I got to urinate,” Dixon said.

A shaft of sunlight shone through the airspace between the restroom wall and roof and made Darrel’s eyes burn and twitch. The trough against the wall stank of piss and through the open door of a stall he could see a toilet that was up to the rim with brown water. Outside, somebody had set off a string of firecrackers and they popped like lesions splitting on the surface of Darrel’s brain. Darrel looked directly into Wyatt’s eyes and believed he could actually hear Wyatt laughing at him, as though Wyatt had stolen his soul and wiped his feet on it.

Darrel caught his breath. “I’m taking you in as a material witness. Then I’m going to get a warrant on your place and tear it apart. I’m also going to get your bank accounts frozen. That’s just for openers. When I’m finished with you, you’ll wish you were still a dirty thought in your father’s mind.”

Dixon sucked a canine tooth, then turned back toward the urinal. “I don’t think you got too many arrows in your quiver, Detective. I’m taking back my recommendation to President Bush. You just don’t measure up, boy,” he said.

Darrel cupped him by the upper arm and spun him around. He could not quite believe the level of power he felt in Wyatt’s arm and he wondered for a moment if he had made an irreversible mistake. But Wyatt didn’t resist. Darrel snapped a handcuff on Wyatt’s wrist, then locked the other manacle on an iron pipe that was anchored in the cinder-block wall and the cement floor. Wyatt was now helpless, balanced precariously on his crutches.

“I told you I got to urinate,” Wyatt said.

“Maybe you can start a new career doing adult diaper endorsements,” Darrel said.

He returned to the grove of cottonwood trees and started his car, his heart beating. What had he just done? Made a bust that wouldn’t stick, allowed Dixon to treat him with contempt, and jammed himself up with the D.A.’s office. But it was too late to change course now. He had to brass it out or become a worse object of ridicule than he already was.