Light of the World by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

her of the iniquitous light in their eyes when they tried to tantalize listeners with details about their methods in stalking victims, and the obvious pleasure they took when they suggested other bodies were out there. I told her of their inabilityto understand the level of suffering and despair they had imposed upon others. I told her how they picked at themselves while they talked and how their eyes reached past you and settled on someone who did not know he or she was being watched. I told her of their thespian performances when they made the big score in custody—namely, finding a defense psychiatrist who would buy into their claims of multiple personalities and other psychological complexities that gave them the dimensions of Titans.
    They saw themselves as players in a Homeric epic, but what was the reality? They were terrified at the prospect of being transferred into “gen” or “main pop,” where they would be shanked in the yard or the shower or lit up in their cells with a Molotov.
    I compared them to the moral cowards who sat in the dock at Nuremberg. I told her that Jack the Ripper’s name was used today with an almost comic-book connotation because his victims were the poorest and most desperate and vulnerable of women in London’s East End. I told her I doubted Jack would have been given the sobriquet “Ripper” by the newspapers of his time if the victims were the wealthy female members of Victorian society. I told her of his final victim, an Irish prostitute who slept every night in either the workhouse or an alley. Her name was Mary Jane Kelly. The last words she spoke to a friend on the evening she died were “How do you like me jolly hat?”
    “If you go inside the mind of a guy like Surrette, you’ll never be the same,” I told her.
    “I can’t handle it, but reporters from the Wichita Eagle can?”
    “People ‘handle’ cancer. That doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to live with.”
    “I’ve already made the arrangement. I’m driving to Wichita tomorrow.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what you’re going to do. You will not be happy until you do just that.”
    “You worry too much. I’ll be fine.”
    “Alf—”
    “Stop calling me that name.”
    “Be careful.”
    “He’s just a man. He’s not Lucifer. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not your little girl anymore.”
    “Don’t ever say that again. Never .”
    W YATT DIXON SAW no great puzzle at work in the universe. You got yourself squeezed out of a woman’s womb; you got the hell away from home as soon as you could; and you enjoyed every pleasure the earth had to offer and busted up any man who claimed he had authority over you. You rodeoed and got bull-hooked and stove in and stirrup-drug and flung into the boards and whipped like a rag doll when you tied yourself down with a suicide wrap, but you wore your scars like the Medal of Honor, and you took the women you wanted and drank whiskey like soda water and doffed your hat to no man and in effect said to hell with the rest of the human race.
    Then one day, way down the line, on a morning you thought might last forever, you heard a whistle blow unexpectedly, and minutes later, against all your wishes, you climbed aboard a passing freight and sat on the spine and rode through a canyon alongside a river that had no name, wondering what lay in store on the far side of the Divide. Was it the end of the track? Or was the party just getting started?
    He didn’t study on his childhood. He wasn’t sure he’d had one. He knew he was born in a boxcar not far from the birthplace of Clyde Barrow. He also knew he and his family lived in a tenant shack up in Northeast Texas and picked cotton and broke corn close to the birthplace of Audie Murphy. Sometimes he had dreams about his father and would see him sitting by the window, dressed in strap overalls without a shirt, his dugs like those of a woman, drinking from a fruit jar and staring at a railroad track on which a