DR17 - Swan Peak

  “What about Greenwood and the Sweeney woman?”

  “We’ll walk to the top of the mountain. That’s all we can do. It’s my fault, Cletus. I don’t see any other tire tracks. I think it’s a bum lead.”

  “No, the tracks could be washed out. Let’s bounce it out of the hole and go all the way up with the car. If we’re on the right road, there should be enough space by the lodge to drive the Caddy in a circle so we can head back down.”

  We got the jack out of the trunk, fitted it under the frame, and raised the Caddy high enough so that when we pushed it off the jack, it fell sideways, partially clear of the hole the wheel had sunk into. We repeated the process three times, filling in the hole each time with rocks and mud and rotted timber that was as soft as old cork. Our clothes were soaked with rainwater and splattered with mud. Clete’s porkpie hat looked like a wilted blue flower on his head.

  “What are you grinning at?” I asked.

  “Us.”

  “What for?”

  “Broads and booze, that’s what has always gotten us in trouble. Every time. I can’t think of one exception.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I said.

  The Caddy’s engine was still running, and the headlights were on. I could see the whiteness of Clete’s teeth and his chest shaking while he laughed without sound. This time he was not going to reply to the ridiculous nature of my denial.

  “Look down the road,” I said, my hand slowing on the jack handle.

  “What?”

  “Headlights,” I said.

  Clete raised up so he could see beyond the length of the Caddy. “It’s Troyce Nix,” he said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “It’s a blue Ford pickup with an extended cab. It’s Nix. What’s the Jewish expression? ‘A good deed by a Cossack is still a good deed’?” he said. “I didn’t think I’d ever be glad to see a dickhead like that.”

  No, it’s not blue. It’s purple, I thought. I remember thinking that distinctly. But the jack was starting to slip, the Caddy yawing inward on it, back toward the deepest part of the hole, the steel shaft arching slightly with the tension. I forgot about the color of the truck. “Clete, get away from the jack,” I said.

  But typical of Clete, he didn’t listen. He went around behind me and dug one foot into the mud and shoved his shoulder against the fender, pushing the Caddy’s weight back against the jack. “Come on, pump it, big mon. One more bounce and we’re out.”

  He was right. I ratcheted up the jack three more notches, then we pushed the Caddy sideways until it teetered briefly and fell clear of the hole. Clete’s face was happy and beaded with raindrops in the headlights. He stared into the high beams of the pickup, blinking against the glare. Inside the sound of the wind and the rain in the trees, I thought I heard a sound I’d heard before, one that didn’t fit the place and the situation. It was a rhythmic clanking and thudding sound, accompanied by labored breathing — a thudding clank, a hard breath, another thudding clank.

  I rose to my feet. My forty-five was on the car seat, and Clete’s thirty-eight was on the dash. Ridley Wellstone worked his aluminum braces over a rut in the road and stood by the passenger door of the Caddy, his arms held stiffly inside the metal half-moon guides of his braces. He wore a Stetson that had long since lost its shape to rainwater and sweat. He even looked handsome and patriarchal in it, rain running in strings off the brim and dissolving in the wind, his face craggy like that of a trail boss in a western painting.

  “You fellows having a little car trouble?” he asked.

  I shielded my eyes from the glare of the pickup’s high beams. Behind Ridley Wellstone was a man I didn’t know. He was holding a Mac-10 with a suppressor attached to it. Leslie Wellstone opened the door of the pickup, turning on the inside light. Behind the rain-beaded glass in the extended cab, I saw a third man and the pinched and resentful face of Jamie Sue Wellstone with an expression on it that had more to do with resignation than with fear.

  “We’ve already informed the FBI of where we are,” I said.

  “Then why are you here? Why aren’t you having a drink somewhere, watching the light show in the sky, minding your own business?” Ridley said.

  “Use your head, sir. You can’t airbrush all of us off the planet,” I said.

  “Perhaps you’re right. Then again, perhaps you’re not,” Ridley said. “You did this to yourself, Mr. Robicheaux. I have a feeling most people who know you have long considered your fate a foregone conclusion.”

  “Don’t talk to these cocksuckers, Dave,” Clete said. “They wouldn’t be out here if they weren’t scared shitless.”

  “You’re wrong about that, Clete,” Leslie Wellstone said.

  “Where do you get off calling me by my first name?” Clete said, already knowing the answer.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Purcel,” Leslie Wellstone said. “I forgot what a civilized individual you are. Do you mind walking ahead of us, Mr. Purcel? It’s not far. Just over a couple of rises and you’ll see a happy gathering. You’ll be joining up with them. You’ll like it.”

  Our weapons remained a few feet away, inside the Caddy, as useless to us as pieces of scrap iron. The man with the Mac-10 pushed us both against the car hood and shook us down, while the other man from the pickup truck held a cut-down pump on us. The man with the Mac-10 was especially invasive toward Clete. After he found a switchblade Velcro-strapped to Clete’s ankle, he felt inside his thighs, working his hand hard into Clete’s scrotum.

  Clete twisted his head around, his legs spread, his arms stretched on the hood. “When this is over, I’m going to be looking you up,” he said.

  “They’re clean,” the man with the Mac-10 said to Leslie, ignoring Clete’s remark.

  “Clasp your fingers behind your heads and let’s take a walk, gentlemen,” Leslie said.

  And that’s what we did, like humiliated prisoners of war, walking up the incline, the pickup following behind us with Ridley and Jamie Sue inside. I couldn’t believe how our fortunes had turned around so quickly. Was it stupidity, naïveté, professional incompetence, or just bad luck? No, you don’t try to jack up a Cadillac convertible and turn it in a circle on an uphill slope in an electric storm with a heavy gun like a 1911-model forty-five auto stuck in your belt or a thirty-eight shoulder harness wrapped around your chest and shoulders. We simply screwed up on the identification of Troyce Nix’s vehicle. In the bad light, the dark blue of Nix’s truck resembled the purple paint job on the Wellstone vehicle. It happens. We called Vietnam the “sorry-about-that war.” I just hated to have a repeat of the experience on a hillside above a lake in an electric storm in western Montana.

  But where was Troyce Nix? He had followed us all the way up the highway along the side of Flathead Lake, then had disappeared. As we trudged up the slope through the trees, I knew Clete was thinking the same thoughts.

  “We got to get them distracted,” he said under his breath. “Nix is out there somewhere.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “The girl. He won’t rest till he gets the girl back,” Clete said.

  “Shut up, fat man,” the man with the Mac-10 said.

  “Blow me, you prick,” Clete replied.

  The man with the Mac-10 walked closer to Clete, leaning forward slightly, his professional restraint slipping for the first time. His body was hard and compact, like that of a gymnast, his hair mowed military-style, balding through the pate. His skin seemed luminescent in the shadows created by the headlights of the pickup following us, his lips taking on a purplish cast. “For me, it’s usually just business. But I’m gonna enjoy this one,” he said.

  “I think I know you,” Clete said.

  “Yeah? From where?”

  “A hot-pillow joint for losers in Honolulu. You were standing in line to screw your mother. I’m sure of it.”

  “Tell me that joke again in about fifteen minutes,” the man with the Mac-10 replied.

  JIMMY DALE GREENWOOD could smell the rawnes
s of the freshly dug pit in which he lay, the severed tree roots, the water leaking out of the scalped sides, the cold odor of broken stone, and he knew, even though his eyes were taped, that his greatest fear, the one that had pursued him all his life, was about to be realized: In the next few minutes, he would be buried alive.

  He kept twisting and jerking at the tape that bound his wrists, but it was wound deeply into the skin, cutting off the blood in the veins, numbing his fingers and palms. Troyce Nix’s woman lay next to him, but there was a third person in the pit, and Jimmy Dale had no idea who the person was or why he or she had been put there. He could hear the voices of the men who had abducted him in the cargo van, and the voice of the man who had dragged him from the van and flung him into the pit. He could also smell the stench of diesel exhaust and the odor of electric lights smoking in the mist.

  He tried to reach inside himself for the strength to accept whatever ordeal lay in store for him. He remembered all the great challenges in his life that in one way or another he had mastered and come out on the other side of: a horse named Bad Whiskey that he rode to the buzzer in Vegas with two broken ribs; his first appearance on a stage, at an amateur competition in Bandera, Texas, when he was so frightened his voice broke and his fingers shook on the frets but he finished the song regardless and won a third-place ribbon; the time he tied himself down with a suicide wrap on a bull that slung him into the boards and whipped two extra inches on his height; and the biggest crossroads of all, the day he decided to get a shank and end the abuse visited upon him by Troyce Nix.

  But all those milestones in his life, or the degree of victory over fear they may have represented, had been of no help in overcoming his nightmares about premature burial. Now the nightmare was about to become a reality. Once, in a beery fog at a roach motel outside Elko, Nevada, he had flicked on the television set and inadvertently started watching a documentary about the atrocities committed during the Chinese civil war between the nationalists and the communists. Peasants with their hands bound behind them had been laid out in rows and were being buried alive, a shovelful at a time, the dirt striking their faces while they pleaded in vain for mercy.

  Jimmy Dale had never rid himself of that image, and now he was at the bottom of a pit, waiting to become one of the images he had seen in that grainy black-and-white film years ago.

  He felt a hand touch his wrist and pull against the tape. It was the woman; she had gotten her fingers on the tip of the tape and was peeling back a long strand from his wrist.

  “Can you hear me?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” he said, the word barely audible behind the tape that covered his mouth.

  “Don’t move, don’t talk. I’ll get you loose,” she said.

  He heard footsteps and other voices by the pit, and he felt the woman’s hand go limp.

  “You’re putting a mask on?” Layne said.

  “What about it?”

  “Why do you put on a mask if we all know what you look like?”

  “Because I like to.”

  “Each to his own, huh?”

  “You seem to have a lot of comments to make about what other people do.”

  “No sir, I don’t. I’m sorry if I gave that impression.”

  “You’re sorry, all right. You don’t know how sorry you really are.”

  Layne was obviously not sure what he was being told. Nor did he seem to know how to respond. “There’s some lights coming up the road,” he said.

  “You figured that out, did you?”

  “I got nothing else to say to you, man.”

  “You were watching the girl, weren’t you, thinking about what’s going to happen to her?”

  “I was gonna have a smoke.”

  “No, you were imagining her fate. But you don’t have the courage to make that fate happen, do you?”

  “Buddy, I won’t say another word to you. I got no issue with what you do.”

  “No issue? You mimic the language of people who don’t have brains.”

  The speaker walked away, his footsteps heavy, booted, a man whose movements and speech were all in exact measure to his purpose. Jimmy Dale heard Layne exhale.

  WE CAME OVER a knoll and walked down into a depression that was flanked on either side by fir and larch trees. Ahead, the road climbed again, and just beyond the spot where it peaked, I could see a glow shining upward through the trees, and I knew this was the place where all the roads Clete and I had followed for a lifetime had finally converged. Leslie Wellstone and the man with the Mac kept behind us, their shoes padding softly on the layer of wet pine needles that carpeted the ground, the truck with Jamie Sue and Ridley Wellstone and the other hired man bringing up the rear.

  At the corner of my vision, I saw a movement in the trees. Or at least I thought I did. Perhaps it had been wishful thinking, I told myself. But I saw Clete’s eyes glance sideways, too. A moment later, the wind blew in a violent gust across Swan Lake and swept up the side of the mountain, shaking the trees, filling the air with pine needles and a smell like water and humus and cold stone. Have you ever been in a nocturnal environment where snipers lurk inside the foliage? The wind becomes your indispensable ally. When the trees and undergrowth and sometimes the elephant grass begin to thrash, the object that does not move or the shadow that remains like a tin cutout becomes the entity that is out there in the darkness, preparing to take your life.

  Except in this case, the presence on our perimeter, among the fir and larch and pine trees, was our friend and not our enemy.

  Nix was a military man and knew what to do when wind or a pistol flare threatened to reveal his position. He settled himself quickly into the undergrowth, his arms freezing into sticks, his face downturned so as not to reflect light. But I had seen him, and I knew Clete had seen him, too.

  Neither Leslie Wellstone nor the man with the Mac had taken their eyes off us. Wellstone obviously had noticed something in our manner that was making him suspicious.

  Clete had told me to keep them distracted.

  “There’re too many loose ends,” I said. “You guys won’t get away with this.”

  “Your lack of both wisdom and judgment never ceases to amaze me, Mr. Robicheaux,” Wellstone said.

  “I majored in low expectations,” I replied.

  “That’s not bad. I’ll have to remember that,” he said.

  “Remember this,” Clete said. “Every one of these morons working for you is for sale. You don’t think the feds are going to start squeezing them? Who are they going to roll over on?”

  “God, you two guys are slow on the uptake,” Wellstone said. “You know why most crimes go unsolved? Because most cops have IQs of minus eight. Those are the smart ones.”

  For a moment the supercilious accent and manner were gone, and I heard the clipped ethnic speech that I used to associate with only two crime families — one in Orleans Parish, one in Galveston, Texas.

  “You think the FBI is stupid, too, Sal?” Clete said.

  “What’d you call me?”

  “You’re Sally Dee, right?” Clete said.

  “What’s he talking about, Mr. Wellstone?” the man with the Mac asked.

  “Nothing. Mr. Purcel is a noisy fat man who’s having a hard time accepting that he ruined his career and his life and that his options are quickly running out. Is that fair to say, Mr. Purcel?”

  “No matter how it plays out, you’re still a french fry, Sal. And I’m the dude who did it to you.”

  Shut up, Clete, I thought.

  “Well, maybe someone is arranging a special event for you tonight. The gentleman who will be taking care of it is quite imaginative,” Leslie Wellstone said.

  “Sal, you were a pretentious douche bag twenty years ago, and you’re a pretentious douche bag now. In the joint, you were a sissy and a cunt. Your old man sent you out to Reno because you couldn’t even run one of his whorehouses on your own. After your plane crashed, a couple of your ex-punches told me you were a needle dick your skanks la
ughed at behind your back.”

  “You want me to shut him up?” the man with the Mac asked.

  “Mr. Purcel is a frightened man, Billy. Frightened people talk a lot.”

  “The guy you’re working for is a cheap punk from Galveston by the name of Sally Dio,” Clete said to the man with the Mac. “He ran the skim for his family out in Vegas and Reno. He’ll rat-fuck his friends, and he’ll rat-fuck you. He used to put on speed-bag gloves and hang up his hookers on doorframes and beat them unconscious. Don’t believe me? Ask him.”

  The man with the Mac was looking strangely at Leslie Wellstone.

  “Something wrong, Billy?” Wellstone said.

  “Yeah, why we putting up with this guy?”

  “Because we’re kind to those who have Charon’s boat waiting for them,” Wellstone said.

  Billy looked confused. Wellstone’s smile sent ice water through my veins.

  We topped the rise in the road and walked down the other side into a clearing that was lit by the lights on a backhoe, a battery-powered lantern on the ground, and the headlights of a cargo van. In the background were a partially completed log building and a machine for planing the bark off logs. Three men I had never seen were sitting inside the van, the sliding door open wide.

  A man in a black suit was standing between the van and an open pit. He wore a full-face mask whose plastic contortions imitated the expression of the screaming man in the famous painting by Edvard Munch. His suit was spotted with gray mud that had dried in crusted patterns like tailed amphibians. He wore a denim shirt that was buttoned at the throat, and heavy lace-up steel-toed work boots. He was pulling on a pair of rawhide gloves, his eyes staring at us from behind the mask.

  “I want you to meet an old friend, Clete,” Leslie Wellstone said.

  TROYCE NIX HAD gotten caught behind several cars as he had followed the Caddy up the lakeside highway, finally losing sight of it south of Bigfork. At Bigfork he had swung off the two-lane highway and crossed the bridge over the Swan River. When he had not seen the Caddy anywhere around the Swan Lake area, he had reversed his direction and retraced his route back across the bridge, his frustration and anger and helplessness growing by the minute. Then, standing in front of a café, wondering what he should do next, he saw the Wellstone pickup truck roar past him and turn onto the dirt road that accessed the peninsula on the west side of Swan Lake. He jumped in his truck and followed.