Joanna had never heard of anyone named Asher Optime, and she suspected that to ask about him would gain her nothing. “If you kill me, you also kill the girl I once was.”
“You killed her!” he declared. “You! You! Your ambition, your need to acquire, to be somebody, to rise in the world. That’s what put an end to Jojo.”
Joanna’s fear was matched by indignation at the arrogance from which his fury grew. His anger wasn’t righteous, but self-righteous.
“When I was a girl, my mother read to me. I loved stories and wanted to grow up to be a storyteller. Jimmy—or you, whoever the hell you are—made four years of my life into a fantasy, a wonderful story. As much as anything, you set me on the path I took, a life of stories, the life of a novelist.”
He was not moved. “It is the human way to rationalize its destructive nature. To take no blame. To blame others.”
The edge of the windowsill was hard against the small of her back.
When Jimmy’s unknown master fell silent and when those fearsome eyes turned to the window again, Joanna said, “You loved me once, as perhaps my father never quite did. You were my secret friend—and I was yours.”
“There’s nothing but loneliness now,” he declared, as once more his mood changed in an instant, from anger to melancholy. “Until the final human being is eradicated, until the sun dies and the last of the stars is extinguished. Even then, under the big dark sky, that terrible sky, I’ll continue, the last sentient creature in a cold silent universe, forever thinking, forever yearning, forever without hope. The prospect haunts me, the endless horror.”
Joanna didn’t know what to say or do. She felt as though she stood on a narrow ledge, above a bottomless void, that the wrong word or a harmless gesture might trigger him, resulting in violence.
At last she risked three words. “Let me help.”
For the moment without malice, but in seeming sorrow, he said, “You can’t help. You drowned sweet Jojo just as your father drowned your mother. You’re not an answer to my despair, only another cause for it. I’ll never read you again, or any of your kind, except for Asher Optime. He’s shown me the true way. The rest of you are mere pestilence. After all these lonely years, I know what I must do. Now I gather myself to do it.” His sorrow became icy malice. “Starting with you, Miss Chase, for becoming corrupt, for murdering my Jojo.”
52
Two rounds from the .45, fired into the air, did not spook any of the four deer.
The buck stopped pawing the pavement with one hoof and raised his magnificent head, though not with alarm. He stared hard at Wyatt and snorted loudly, issuing a challenge that seemed too aggressive for a species designed to run fast rather than fight. He lowered his head and regarded the two men from under his brow, brandishing his rack of antlers as if it were a sword of many points. In mating season, contesting for a female, two males like this might fight for as long as two hours, until one gave up and ran off. Although their antlers would clash fiercely during the battle, neither would be seriously injured, most likely wouldn’t be cut at all. Wyatt sensed that in this case, the buck would gore him if it must and perhaps even crash into the Studebaker pickup with suicidal force if he and Hector tried to drive through the blockade.
The doe remained placid when he fired the pistol, relying on the buck, and the two youngsters actually came forward another few steps, bold as ordinary fawns would never be.
Hector said, “I haven’t seen anything like this little family here. Sometimes a brown bear will approach a vehicle, thinking maybe there’s food in it. But deer don’t scavenge like that. And I never did see deer that wouldn’t scoot when there was gunfire.”
Wyatt figured these animals were in thrall to Jimmy Alvarez, which could mean only one thing and maybe nothing good. Joanna’s secret friend didn’t want them to return yet, wanted her to himself for a while longer.
On this straightaway, the road was about two feet higher than the grassland to the right. A bank rose to the left, above which the forest loomed. The Studebaker wasn’t an all-wheel-drive vehicle capable of traveling overland.
“Might as well wait them out,” said Hector. “Won’t take long. Deer forage most of the day, and there’s nothing on this highway to feed a hungry belly.”
Hector climbed into the driver’s seat, Wyatt settled into the passenger seat, and they closed their doors. The deer didn’t move.
In spite of the wedge of storm clouds that pried into the day from the northwest, the declining sun still commanded the landscape, painting the afternoon with gold. The deer seemed to glow in that severely angled light. The county highway remained empty of traffic, as if Wyatt and Hector were the only survivors of Armageddon. The scene was as eerie as any encounter in a dream.