Only minutes earlier, Alafair had told me of Gretchen’s speculations on the whereabouts of Asa Surrette. “Why would he think that?” I asked.
“Surrette was living within a quarter mile of Albert Hollister’s house, but you had no suspicions that he was there. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“The agent doesn’t believe that.”
“If I thought Surrette was living up the road, why wouldn’t I tell you or the FBI?”
“Because you wanted to bust a cap on him yourself.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
He was silent a moment. “Maybe it is. Here’s the second reason for my call. A short while ago Wyatt Dixon caused a disturbance at the truck stop in Lolo. He tried to put air in his tires, but the hose was leaking, and he lost ten pounds of pressure on a tire that was already low. He pulled the clerk over the counter and threw him into a stack of oil cans.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I said, growing more uncomfortable.
“Because beating up on clerks isn’t Dixon’s style. A woman, probably Bertha Phelps, was with him. You have any idea what they might be up to?”
“Dixon knows he’s Love Younger’s illegitimate son. He may be going to Younger’s cabin on Sweathouse Creek.”
“How long have you known this?”
“My daughter just told me. She found out from a third party. But all of what I’ve told you is speculation, Sheriff. How about easing up a little bit?”
“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Robicheaux. Before this is over, I think you’re going to be charged.”
“With what?”
“I’ll check with the district attorney and get back to you. By the way, he was stationed at Fort Polk and hates the state of Louisiana.”
“It’s not for everybody.”
“Is there anything else you’ve concealed from this office?” he said.
“Surrette may be on Flathead Lake. Somewhere around an orchard, close to the water. Maybe there’s an amphibian close by. I’m going up there in a few minutes.”
“You’re not going to do a goddamn thing, Mr. Robicheaux. I can’t express how angry you make me—”
Molly pulled the receiver from my hand and put it to her ear. “Listen, you simpleton,” she said. “My husband has dedicated his life to law enforcement. He doesn’t need a tobacco-chewing pinhead lecturing him on legal protocol. My husband was also in the shit. Do you know what that means? He’s the recipient of the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts. Do not call here again unless you have something worthwhile to say. If you try to harass him again in any way, you’ll hear from me.” She slammed down the phone, her cheeks flaming.
“I don’t think he chews tobacco,” I said.
“Whatever,” she said.
WYATT TURNED OFF the engine but left the headlights on. There was a silver skull on the tip of his key chain, hollow-eyed and buffed smooth, like old pewter, and it swung back and forth under the dash. When it stopped, he popped it with his thumb and index finger. There was no other sound inside the cab. He looked out the side window and saw lights in the sky.
“You still haven’t told me what you plan to do,” Bertha said.
“Maybe I’ll kill me an old man. I ain’t decided yet.”
“It won’t be prison this time. They’ll execute you.”
He reached behind him and took the vintage Winchester from the rack and placed the butt on the floorboards, the barrel resting against the seat. He clicked a switch on the headliner that would prevent the interior light from turning on when he opened the door. “This one ain’t gonna make the jail,” he said. “No matter how it plays out.”
“You’re breaking my heart, Wyatt.”
“There’s three thousand dollars taped in envelopes under my dresser drawers. There’s a quart jar of silver dollars buried under the rosebush in the flower bed. In my footlocker, you’ll find my championship buckle and a Nazi dagger with a pearl handle that’s got a ruby swastika set in it. You listening to me?”
“Let it go.”
“It ain’t me that’s doing all this. Time’s done run out. When that happens, people ain’t got no say in things.”
“We can just drive away. Leave the nasty old man to himself.”
“I saw some pictures in my mind this evening I ain’t told you about. I would have told you before, but I didn’t know they was there.”
“Pictures of what?”
“Something that happened in a piney woods. It was summertime and real hot inside the trees, so hot I couldn’t hardly breathe. I could smell sap running out of the bark. I never been inside a woods that smelled that raw, like the smell that comes off a buzz saw when you run a fresh-cut pine through it. Pap and my mother was there, looking at me. From the ground, I mean. They was both looking up into my face.”
“What are you telling me?” she asked, her voice starting to slip.
“I ain’t sure. I told them to get up, but there wasn’t no doubt they was dead. Somebody made sure of that. In the pictures in my head, I’m fifteen. That’s when I left home for Big D, riding on a side-door Pullman. I always knew I was gonna get on that train again. It’s been waiting for me all these years.”
He pushed down the door handle and started to get out, his right hand clutching the 1892 Winchester. His sheathed bowie knife rested on the dashboard. She held him by the arm. “We have a special thing between us,” she said. “Don’t let this man take that away.”
“I’m gonna fix it so he don’t ever hurt nobody again, Bertha. What happens after that ain’t in my hands.”
“They’ll crush us, Wyatt. You know why? Because you’re too good for them. They hate and fear a brave man. You don’t know you’re essentially good, so you keep giving away your power.”
The front door of the cabin opened. Love Younger stood in the doorway, squinting into the brilliance of the pickup’s high beams. “Begone, Wyatt Dixon,” he called out, his teeth baring in the headlights.
Wyatt was no longer listening to the thespian rhetoric of Love Younger. Bertha Phelps reached up on the dashboard and clutched his bowie knife. The blade was thick across the top and eleven inches long, the nickel-plated guard bigger than her cupped hand. “You stay here. Don’t you dare try to stop me,” she said.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Saving you from yourself. Paying a debt. Bringing judgment on the wicked. Call it anything you want. But it’s going to be over.”
She climbed out of the cab, her big rump sliding off the seat, carrying her cloud of perfume with her, the blade still sheathed in its beaded Indian scabbard.
LOVE YOUNGER RAISED his hand against the glare of the headlights. His eyes were burning, his tear ducts streaming. He brushed at his cheeks with the back of his wrist, almost like a child recovering from an unfair reprimand. The air seemed lit with an oily iridescence that he could reach out and touch. “Who comes there?” he said, feeling like one of the grandiose characters he discovered in the medieval romances carried to the hollow by the bookmobile.
He smelled her before he saw her. The odor made him think of flowers on a warm night. Where had he smelled it before? Down south somewhere, perhaps in the tidewater country, a place where moss-hung oaks and palm trees both grew in profusion and the glory of a failed nation clinked and popped on a flagpole at every sunrise. Then he saw her and the reality that she represented.
He did not know who she was, but he quickly recognized the rage that lived in her face. He had seen it many times over the years and factored it in as part of the long gloomy march from Eden into the land of Canaan. Women were cursed with childbearing and scullery and the back of a man’s hand and the wanton breath of a drunkard against the cheek in the middle of the night. Until modern times, many of them died while giving birth, or were haggard and exhausted at forty, with tattered memories of the expectations they had brought to their beds on their wedding night. He had always considered it their misfortune and none of his own.
&nb
sp; She flung the sheath off the knife she held in her right hand, the blade as bright and honed as an Arthurian sword pulled from stone.
“You corrupted and destroyed my brother,” she said. “His death is on you, not on the serial killer. Now you’re fixing to take my man.”
“Your brother? What brother?” he said. In his confusion, he tried to answer his own question. The faceless men he had destroyed were too numerous to count. He saw the knife blade rise to eye level, out of the headlights’ glare, and wondered how someone he had never met could hate him so much.
“Your dress is purple,” he said.
She drove the knife into his chest. He felt its point reach deep inside him, cutting through tendon and muscle, searching out the source of the blood that pounded in his temples and wrists when he was angered, now probing the outer edges of the heart, the steel tip going deeper each time the muscle swelled and receded. Her face was no more than three inches from his, her mouth a tight seam, her eyes burrowing into his, as she forced the knife deeper inside, pinching off the flow of light into his brain, stilling the fury and mire of veins and heart’s blood that, for a lifetime, had fed his thoughts and given him the libidinal power of a lion and allowed him to build a business empire that thrilled him as would the jingle of sabers and spurs.
He felt himself slip off her knife blade and fall backward through the open door of the cabin. He could see the Colt revolver hanging on the back of the wicker chair and wondered if he could crawl across the floor and reach up to the holster and pull it loose and raise it and cock the hammer in a last effort to save his life.
“What do you care if I wear purple?” she asked.
It befits royalty and should be worn even by the king’s executioner, he tried to say. The words would not leave his throat.
He rolled on his side and tried to crawl toward the chair. Or was he watching himself and the woman from someplace in the rafters, as though he had left his body? He couldn’t be sure. He felt her tangle her fingers in his hair and pull his head back, stretching his throat tight, her shadow falling across him like a headsman’s.
“Where do you think you’re going, Buster Brown?” she said. “I’m not through with you. This is for Bill Pepper.”
AFTER MY ABORTED conversation with the sheriff, I asked Albert for permission to borrow his M-1.
“What for?” he asked.
“There’s a chance we can find Surrette. Gretchen thinks he might be holed up in a place down by the water.”
“The lake is twenty-four miles long,” he said.
“I won’t be able to sleep tonight, thinking about the two girls he took from the minister’s house.”
He handed me the key to one of the gun cabinets in the hallway. “There’s a bandolier full of clips in the drawer under the glass doors. Dave?”
“Yes?”
“Know the worst thing about age? You start thinking you’ve seen it all, no different from the way you looked at the world when you were seventeen. All this started with me. I brought Surrette here.”
“You’re wrong about that. All this started when Surrette was born,” I said.
“Take care of yourself, boy. Take care of Clete, too,” he said.
There was finality in his voice that bothered me. Maybe it was resignation on his part. With the passage of time, we wish to feel we can find the answers to all our problems, but sometimes there are no answers. The minister and his wife had been murdered in their home a short distance from Albert’s ranch. The daughters were in the hands of a fiend. And there was nothing we could do about it. How do you resign yourself to a situation like that? The answer is, you don’t. You arm yourself with a World War II infantry weapon and a canvas bandolier stuffed with eight-round clips, at least one clip loaded with armor-piercing rounds, and drive up to an enormous alpine watershed in the hope that you can find a psychopath who had outwitted all of us, and by “us,” I mean every decent person who wants to see the earth scrubbed clean of men like Asa Surrette.
He had changed all of us. He had taken over our thinking processes, invaded our dreams, and set us against one another. His evil would live on long after he was gone. To dismiss him as a transitory aberration was a denial of reality. Surrette left his thumbprint on the soul in the same way that a stone can leave a bruise buried deep inside the soft tissue of your foot. In the meantime, all we could do was try to save others. In this instance, Felicity Louviere and the two girls from up the road. If I had to, I would knock on every door along the shore of Flathead Lake.
I slung the M-1 and the bandolier over my shoulder and was almost out the door when the kitchen phone rang again. Molly picked it up, then removed it from her ear and looked at me. “Guess who?” she said.
“Hello?” I said.
“You know where Sweathouse Creek is?” the sheriff said.
“West of Victor?”
“I want you and Purcel here. Now. Got it?”
“No, I don’t got it at all.”
“Some rock climbers called in the 911. I want you to see what they found.”
“Doesn’t Love Younger have a place up there?”
“Past tense. Either get your ass up here or I’ll have you charged as an accessory, Mr. Robicheaux. I give you my word on that,” he replied. “Tell Purcel the same. I’m sick of you guys.”
I truly wanted to abandon all restraint and tell him to go fuck himself, but he didn’t give me the chance.
I DOUBTED WE HAD incurred a level of legal jeopardy that would allow the sheriff to charge us as accessories in a crime, but Clete and I did as he asked and drove south on Highway 93 to the little tree-lined town of Victor, couched against a backdrop of jagged blue-gray mountains whose peaks stay veined with snow through most of the summer. It had been a long day for the sheriff, and I didn’t blame him for his exasperation. The investigative process taking place in front of Love Younger’s cabin was one that was altogether too familiar. Law enforcement agencies don’t prevent crimes; they arrive in their aftermath. In this instance, the aftermath was one that I think Love Younger never would have anticipated as his fate. Even though I did not like him, when I looked through the doorway, I silently said a prayer that his end had come more quickly than it probably had.
“Watch where you step,” the sheriff said. He glanced out the door. “You, too, Purcel. Get in here.”
“What’s the point in bringing us down here?” Clete said.
“You guys knew Dixon and the woman were on their way to do harm to Mr. Younger, but you didn’t inform us until I got ahold of you,” the sheriff said. He stepped aside to let a crime scene tech photograph the body on the floor. “How do you like it? Use your phone to take a picture if you like.”
“I think I’ll go sit in Dave’s truck. You mind?” Clete said.
“Is that a revolver under your coat?”
“It’s a thirty-eight special. Old-school,” Clete said, peeling back his jacket to expose his holster and shoulder rig.
“Do you have a concealed weapons permit?”
“I don’t remember,” Clete said. “With all respect, Sheriff, we didn’t have squat to do with this. You guys were chugging pud for Love Younger long before we came to Missoula. Don’t put your problems on us.”
“What did you say?” the sheriff asked.
“You got a weapon, Sheriff?” I asked. “Any forensics that put it on Wyatt Dixon?”
“Not yet,” he replied, his eyes leaving Clete’s face. “I think whoever did it sat in that stuffed chair over there and wiped the blood on that towel on the floor. I want you to smell something.”
“I don’t think we can be of any help here,” I replied.
“Just hold your water,” he said. He walked to the chair and pulled a fringed coverlet off the back and held it up to me. “The place smelled like a perfume factory when we got here. Take a whiff. Recognize it?”
“No,” I lied. “I don’t.”
“It smells like orange blossoms or magnolia to me,” he said. “M
y wife is the expert on flowers. What about you, Mr. Purcel? Does this awaken any memories in you?”
“Sorry, I’ve got a head cold,” Clete replied. He pointed at a leather jacket someone had used to cover a round object on the floor. “Is that the rest of him?”
“Yeah, it is,” the sheriff said. “I want both of you to see it.” He leaned over and picked up the leather jacket by one sleeve, pulling it loose from the blood that had congealed in Love Younger’s hair. “You guys had no idea Wyatt would do something like this? A man who evidently believed the Youngers sent rapists after his girlfriend?”
Clete nodded as though agreeing with a profound truth. “The VC did that sometimes,” he said. “A guy who was genuinely medevac in my recon group did it, too. By ‘medevac,’ I mean he was nuts, you dig? He rolled a head into a fire where we were cooking a pig. It scared the shit out of us. Then we all laughed. I didn’t take any pics, or I’d show you one.”
“I want both of you out of my sight,” the sheriff said.
Clete’s face looked poached in the artificial light, his green eyes neutral and unblinking, puffing air with one cheek and then the other, like a man gargling with mouthwash. The scar that ran through his eyebrow resembled a strip of welted rubber on a bicycle tire. “One of your guys just stepped in Younger’s blood,” he said. “Too bad Bill Pepper and Jack Boyd aren’t still on the job.”
Tell me Clete didn’t know how to do it.
WE DROVE THROUGH Missoula and into the Jocko Valley and onto the Salish Indian reservation. We passed under a pedestrian bridge that had been created out of stone and dirt and trees for big-game animals, and through the tangle of shrubbery and birch trees planted along the retaining wall, I could see the multipointed racks of half a dozen elk crossing right above us.
“One day you and I will come up here and stay at the campground on the Jocko and fish for a week, then head on up to British Columbia,” Clete said. “A guy was telling me you can take a dozen twenty-inch cutthroat trout a day on the Elk River. You don’t even have to rent a canoe. You can catch a dozen lunkers right off the bank.”