DR17 - Swan Peak

  “My father’s nickname was Smilin’ Jack. He had impractical dreams. He thought he was gonna find gold in the Cascades,” she said.

  “Yeah?” Troyce said, not understanding.

  “I don’t know if he found his gold or not. If he did, he probably died doing it. He never came out of the mountains. But he believed in his dreams.”

  “Your meaning is I don’t?”

  “You don’t know how to dream. You’re caught up in a mission. You’re like a bat trying to find its hole in the daylight.”

  “Wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”

  “You break my heart,” she said.

  He crossed his knife and fork on his plate and rested his hands on the table. “I thought you wanted to come here,” he said. “What the hell is going on?”

  She stared at nothing, her face wan.

  “I bet your old man was a good guy,” Troyce said. “It’s too bad he went away. But everybody gets hurt. Life’s a sonofabitch, then you die. In the meantime, you don’t let people run you over.”

  She thought about leaving and walking back to the motel. But if she did that, eventually she would have to tell Troyce why — namely that she had recognized the man he had come to Montana to find. “The food is real good. I’m glad we came here,” she said. “After we eat, I’d like to go back to the motel, though. I’m not feeling too good.”

  He picked up his knife and fork and began eating again. A few minutes later, up on the bandstand, the dark-skinned man in jeans and a denim jacket sat down in a straight-back chair and placed a Dobro across his thighs. Another musician lowered a microphone so it would pick up the notes from the Dobro’s resonator. The man in the denim jacket slipped three steel picks on his left hand and slid a chrome-plated bar along the guitar’s neck, the resonator picking up the steel hum of the strings, a sustained tremolo like the vibration in the blade of a saw. The band and the man in the denim jacket began to play in earnest. Troyce kept eating, seemingly unmindful of the music, his face empty.

  Then he looked up from his plate and smiled. “What’s the name of that piece?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “It’s a Bob Wills number, ain’t it?” he said.

  “I don’t know, Troyce,” she replied.

  “‘Cimarron,’ that’s what it is,” he said.

  “I got to go to the restroom. I really don’t feel good.”

  But Troyce had spent a lifetime reading lies in other people’s faces. “Did that actor upset you? Tell me the truth. I’m not gonna hurt him. You got my word. But tell me what’s going on here.”

  “I got the headspins, that’s all. I don’t know what it is.”

  She got up unsteadily from the table and walked between the dance floor and the groups of people drinking at the bar. The actor was facing the bar, talking to his friends. When he saw her approach, he stepped away from them into her path. “Decide to join us?” he said.

  “Tell the guy playing the bottle-neck guitar that Troyce Nix is here. Tell him to get his ass out the back door,” Candace said.

  “That’s J. D. Gribble. He’s a quiet, gentle guy. I think you’ve got him mistaken for somebody else.”

  “I don’t know his name. If you like your friend, take him somewhere else, you hear me?” she said.

  “What’d he do?”

  “You asked if Troyce was in an accident. The accident was the guy up there on the bandstand.”

  The actor raised his eyebrows and set his drink on the bar. His cheeks were slightly sunken, his jaw well defined, his eyes clear as he looked at her. “I’d like to help,” he said. “But it’s not my business.”

  She walked away, not surprised by the actor’s unwillingness to involve himself in the plight of another, but oddly depressed just the same. When she returned from the restroom, the actor was still looking at her. “I did it,” he said.

  “Did what?”

  “What you said. I did it. But I don’t think J.D. could hear me over the noise. He was toking on a jay earlier. I tried. What’s your last name?”

  “Why?”

  “You’re fucking beautiful is why.”

  “It’s my tattoos and the pits in my skin that turn men on,” she replied.

  When she sat back down with Troyce, he was looking at her strangely. “Were you talking with that actor again?”

  “He said I was beautiful.”

  “He’s got good judgment.”

  “My stomach’s not right. I’d like to go back to the motel,” she said.

  “You’re jerking me around about something. I just don’t know what it is,” he replied.

  “You ever hear of Looney Larry Lewis?”

  “No.”

  “He was a black roller-derby star in Miami. He told me I was the only girl he ever met who was as crazy as he was. He meant it as a compliment. I can’t finish my food.”

  Troyce put down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair. He wiped his mouth with a paper towel and dropped the towel on the table. “I’ll get a box,” he said.

  CLETE PURCEL CALLED me on his cell phone just after nine P.M. I had not seen him all day. Since he had become involved with Special Agent Rosecrans, which in Clete’s case meant in the sack and in trouble, I had seen less and less of him.

  “I’m in the parking lot of a joint on the two-lane in East Missoula. I could use some backup,” he said.

  “What’s the deal?” I asked.

  “I interviewed this prison guard Troyce Nix and his girlfriend at their motel, then decided to follow them later, just to see what might develop. So I ended up at this juke joint where—”

  “Why are you following Nix?”

  “Because both he and his girlfriend are hinky.”

  “In what way?”

  “The guy who tried to fry me had a mask on. I don’t think it was because he’s seen too many chain-saw movies. I think his face is deformed, like Nix’s or the sheriff’s or Leslie Wellstone’s.”

  “We’ve talked about this before.”

  “Quince Whitley is here, too.”

  “Where?”

  “At the juke joint. Are you listening to anything I say?”

  “Anything else going on?”

  “Yeah, J. D. Gribble is up on the bandstand. How’s that for a perfecta? Jesus—”

  “What?”

  “I’m outside. Gribble just came out the back door with this actor and some other people. What’s that actor’s name, the guy in that new western? They’re smoking dope.”

  QUINCE WHITLEY WAS getting sick of watching this collection of Hollywood characters down the bar from him. Who were they, anyway? They all thought their shit was chocolate ice cream, but probably not one of them had ever heard of Tammy Wynette or Marty Stuart or knew they came from Mississippi, or knew that Marty Stuart was from Neshoba County, where those civil rights workers got killed back in the 1960s, because that racial crap was all they cared about, not the fact that a celebrity like Elvis grew up in Tupelo. One guy had even been hitting on Troyce Nix’s punch, keeping his eyes level with hers, like he wasn’t aware of her tattooed bongos sticking out of the top of her blouse. For just a second Quince entertained a fantasy in which he was a movie director, orchestrating the deaths of Nix, the girl, and the actor, turning the three of them into a bloody swatch across a camera lens. Now, that would be a movie worth seeing, he thought.

  From his bar stool in the shadows, he had a wide view of the building’s interior, with enough people between him and Nix and the girl so they wouldn’t take particular notice of him. Also, he realized that his new persona — clean-shaved, immaculately dressed, his sideburns trimmed, the Resistol low on his brow — was not cosmetic. Quince had become somebody else, on his own, no longer taking orders from the Wellstones. He was the captain of his soul, with the power to arbitrarily decide whom he would leave his mark on.

  “See that couple eating at the table by the door?” he said to the bartender.

  “What about them?” the barte
nder said, looking at Quince, not the doorway.

  “Send them some Champale or a beer and a shot or whatever they’re drinking. Just don’t tell them who sent it over.”

  “Somebody’s birthday?” the bartender asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m a mixologist. Talk to the table waiter.”

  “I should have known that. I can see this is an uptown joint,” Quince said.

  The band had taken a break, and the actor who had been scoping out Nix’s girl was going in and out of the back door with one of the guitar players, a guy who looked familiar for some reason. The guitar player had put his Dobro in a case and carried it outside with him; he was evidently through playing for the evening. He looked like a Mexican or an Indian. Where had Quince seen him? Was he the guy the Wellstones were looking for, the one who had been putting the wood to Jamie Sue down in Texas? No, it couldn’t be. Not unless the guy had a death wish or wanted to go back to prison.

  Whenever the back door opened and closed, Quince could smell an odor like leaves and damp moss burning on a winter day. Those Hollywood douche bags were smoking dope in full view in a state that still officially employed a hangman. What a bunch of idiots, he thought. Then he glanced toward the front of the building. Troyce Nix was boxing up his girlfriend’s food, preparing to leave.

  Quince swallowed the rest of his beer and went out the back door, ignoring the dope smokers and the breed with the guitar case. How was Quince going to play it with Nix and the girl? Answer: any way he felt like it. The “new” Quince was in control, dealing the play, doing what he wanted to his victims, every moment of their fate in his hands. His victims didn’t have any kick coming, either. The girl had dissed him at the gas pump up in the Swan, and Nix had attacked him without provocation in the can, smashing his head into the rubber machine, breaking his mouth and bridge apart on the rim of the bowl. Maybe he should take down Nix and the girl in an isolated place where he could make each of them watch the fate of the other. The thought made his colon constrict and his genitalia hum like a nest of bees. This was a payback he was going to savor.

  The question was one of method and how to make it hurt as long as possible. He stood at the corner of the building and watched Nix and the girl emerge from the front door and walk toward their SUV. The mountainsides were black with shadow, the trees hardly distinguishable, the sky purple, Venus twinkling in the west. Quince watched Nix open the passenger door for his girl, then hand her the boxed remnants of her supper.

  Take both Nix and the girl down at once? Or pop Nix with the twenty-five and get the girl into the truck?

  Bad idea. Gunfire would draw witnesses. Quince’s concept of revenge did not include doing time in Deer Lodge. The challenge was to get Nix out of the way so he could mess up the girl proper. He wondered how Nix would like her without a nose or with eyes that had been burned out of their sockets.

  Nix shut the passenger door and started around the front of the vehicle. Then he touched his shirt pocket. The girl rolled down the window and stuck her head out. “What is it?” she said.

  “Guess,” he said.

  “I saw them on the table,” she said.

  “I’ll be right back,” Nix said.

  Quince couldn’t believe his luck. Nix was headed back inside the nightclub, and the girl with the muskmelon boobs had gotten out of the SUV and propped her ass against the headlight while she watched a Forest Service slurry bomber approach the airport.

  The girl first, then Nix later, Quince thought. So Nix would have the opportunity to see what happened when you tried to dump on a Whitley.

  THE MAN WHO called himself J. D. Gribble took a final hit off the roach clips being passed around the circle, hefted up his Dobro case, and said good night to his newly acquired friends.

  “Come see me in the Palisades,” the actor said. “I really dig your voice. You sound like Ben Johnson. I could cast you in a minute.”

  “Who’s Ben Johnson?” J.D. asked.

  J.D.’s new friends grinned, pretty sure he was kidding. J.D. walked along the side of the nightclub into the main parking lot. He never did well with booze or weed, and he could not explain why he used either one. But use them he did. This evening he’d drunk four beers and smoked dope on top of them, and now the high he had experienced had been replaced by feelings of both corpulence and carnality, as though his metabolism had been systemically invaded by weevil worms. He paused and took a breath under a cone of light emanating from a pole above his head. The air was heavy and damp and stained with smoke from fires that were breaking out north of Seeley Lake. Then he proceeded toward Albert Hollister’s pickup truck, which he had borrowed for the evening. But something was happening on the periphery of his vision, something that was out of place or wrong or nonsensical, like a broken shard of memory that had tangled itself on the corner of his eye.

  A man in a cowboy hat and western vest like a gunfighter would wear was walking toward an SUV. J.D. thought he had seen the same man outside the café on Swan Lake, sitting behind the wheel of Jamie Sue Wellstone’s Mercedes, waiting patiently for her to leave the saloon next door. Even in that innocuous setting, J.D. had made Jamie Sue’s driver as a violent man for hire. But why would he be here? Had Leslie Wellstone finally run J.D. to ground and sicced his dogs on him?

  A girl was leaning against the front end of the SUV, watching a large plane descend through the valley toward the airport. Her back was turned to the man in the vest.

  J.D. stepped out of the cone of light and let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The man in the vest held a brown pill bottle in his right hand and was unscrewing the cap as he walked. His trousers were tight on his hips, the bottoms tucked into his cowboy boots. A fat wallet on a chain protruded from his back pocket. The silk back of his vest glowed like dull tin when a pair of car lights flashed across it. He moved mechanically, his torso rigid, his stiff hat jiggling on his head. J.D. saw him hold the uncapped bottle away from his body, his fingers pinched hard against the glass, careful not to spill the contents on his skin. The girl heard the sound of feet on the gravel and turned around. She was smiling, as though she expected to see a friend.

  MY CELL RANG at 9:21 P.M. “What’s your ten-twenty? There’s some weird shit going down,” Clete said.

  “There’s been an accident on Brooks. What weird shit?” I said.

  “Gribble and Whitley are both in the parking lot. So is Nix’s girl. Dave—”

  The connection went dead.

  QUINCE WHITLEY COULD smell the fumes rising from the bottle in his hand. He had wanted to bring a paper cup of water with him and throw it in the girl’s face before he hit her with the acid. His uncle the Klansman had told him sulfuric acid and water produced a devastating combination on human tissue, but there hadn’t been time to plan. Well, that’s just the way it was. No worry, though. Pitching the acid directly into her eyes would do the job, and it was doubtful that the girl would ever be identifying her attacker in a lineup.

  She had been smiling when he approached her, but now she was staring at him curiously, not recognizing him, the smile starting to die on her mouth. It took all of Quince’s self-restraint not to tell her who he was before he stole her sight and destroyed her face.

  “Hey, you! What the hell you doin’?” a voice called out.

  Quince’s head jerked sideways, and he almost spilled the acid on himself. The musician he had seen on the bandstand was running at him, his guitar case swinging out in front of him, like a man trying to catch a train.

  Do it now, Quince thought. Then drop the breed and bag ass. Do it, do it, do it.

  He flung the acid at the girl’s face. But the breed lifted his guitar case in front of her, and the acid flattened against its top and foamed on the plastic and cardboard and filled the air with a stench like rotten eggs. Some of the splatter also landed on Quince’s hand and wrist and cheek, and the pain was like someone touching his skin with a soldering iron.

  But his ordeal was not over. The
breed smashed him in the face with the end of the guitar case, knocking him backward onto the gravel. Quince tried to make sense out of what was happening to him. Only seconds earlier, he had been the “new” Quince Whitley, in control, dressed like a gunfighter, painted with magic, the giver of death. Now he lay in a parking lot, his skin burning, far from the place of his birth, a girl — no, a bitch — and a half-breed staring down at him, their faces dour with disgust and loathing, not because of what he had tried to do but because of what he was — a failure, unwanted in the womb, despised at birth, raised in a world where every day he had to prove he was better than a black person.

  What does a Whitley do when he doesn’t have anything else to lose?

  He could almost hear his uncle’s voice: “That one’s easy, boy. Leave hair on the walls.”

  Quince got to his feet, pulling the twenty-five auto from the Velcro-strapped holster on his ankle. “Suck on this, all y’all, starting with you, sweetheart,” he said. He felt his finger tighten inside the trigger guard. He aimed carefully so the first round would take the girl in the mouth.

  That was when Clete Purcel came out of nowhere and lifted his thirty-eight revolver with both hands and blew Quince Whitley’s skullcap and brains all over Troyce Nix’s windshield.

  CHAPTER 19

  CITY AND COUNTY emergency vehicles were already at the scene when I arrived. Clete was sitting in the passenger seat of a cruiser, the door open, his feet outside on the gravel, while a plainclothes investigator interviewed him. His face looked poached, pale around the eyes. He was looking up at the investigator, who stood outside the cruiser. I could see Clete’s chest rising and falling under his oversize Hawaiian shirt. He reminded me of a guppy seeking oxygen at the top of a polluted aquarium. The paramedics had just zipped up a body bag on a corpse and were pushing the gurney toward the back of an ambulance. There was a stench in the air like smoke from burning garbage or a dead fire. The overhead lights in the parking lot glowed with a greasy iridescence inside the humidity, buzzing with a sound that made me think of blowflies. The two-lane highway the club was on threaded its way back through a place called Hellgate Canyon. The only good thing I could see in the entire scene was the absence of cuffs on Clete’s wrists.