Light of the World

Chapter 31

Asa Surrette called again at noon on Saturday and told her where to park her car. “I’ll be watching you,” he said. “If everything meets my approval, you’ll be given a sign.”

“I need to see the girl,” Felicity said.

“You will. She’ll be glad to see you. She hasn’t seen a human face in some time.”

“What do you mean?” Felicity asked.

“You’re a foolish woman,” he replied.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed. She closed her eyes, shutting out the light from the French doors, and tried to think. What was he saying? “She hasn’t seen your face?”

“She hasn’t heard my voice, either. At least not since somebody came in the back door of her little house up by Lookout Pass. What do you think of that?”

“I’m not interested in your games.”

“You have a strange way of showing it,” he replied. “I have reservations about you. You wouldn’t try to trick me, would you?”

“Why did you kill my daughter?”

“Who says I did? From what I’ve read, it’s an unsolved crime.”

“Tell me where to go or I’ll hang up.”

“You know where the Alberton Gorge is?” he said. “Get off at the Cyr exit. Cross the river and go four miles north on the dirt road, then wait.”

After he broke the connection, she called Clete Purcel and got his voice mail. “Clete, I’m not sure if I’ll ever see you again,” she said. “There’s a good chance you’ll never know what became of me. I want you to know that none of this is your fault. I also want to apologize to Gretchen for stealing her cell phone. You’re a lovely man. I wish we had met years ago in New Orleans. It’s not really such a bad place. We could have had great fun there.”

She stood up from the bedside, her palms dry and stiff, the skin around her fingernails split and painful whenever she touched a hard surface. In the silence, she could hear the pine needles sifting across the roof in the wind, scattering in the sunlight onto the balcony. The house seemed to swell with the wind, the joists and walls creaking in the silence. She had no idea where Caspian was. Maybe he was drunk; maybe he was with his father. Her footsteps were as loud as a pendulum knocking inside a wood clock as she walked down the stairs and into Love’s den. She opened one of the toolboxes on his worktable and lifted out a leather punch that he used sometimes when he made a holster for one of his antique revolvers. It was sharp at the tip and mounted on a T-shaped wood handle. She lifted her dress and taped it inside her thigh, then walked outside and got in her Audi and drove away. The sun had passed its high point, and the shadows of the poplars that lined the road looked as sharp-edged as spear points on the asphalt.

At 1:48 P.M. Clete came up to the main house. I was sitting on the deck by myself, Albert’s potted petunias in full bloom all around me. It was a fine day, the kind that, at a certain age, you do not let go of easily. When I looked at Clete’s face, I knew that whatever plans I’d had for the afternoon were about to change. He played Felicity’s message. “She knows where Surrette is,” he said. “She’s going to meet him.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“You don’t know her. She loved her daughter. She thinks she closed her eyes to what her husband was doing.”

“Maybe she plans to kill Surrette.”

“That’s not like her. Surrette has outsmarted us, Dave. He’ll kill Felicity and the waitress, too.”

“I don’t think that’s the way it’s going down. He has something else planned. I think he’ll let the waitress go.”

“Why?”

“To show his power. He decides who lives and who dies. He also proves he’s not governed by compulsion. Look, Clete, Felicity Louviere may be suicidal. She’s going to let Surrette do it for her.”

“She’s risking her life to help somebody else. Why don’t you show a little respect?”

I had been drinking a glass of iced tea with a twist of lemon. I wished I had not come to Montana. I wished I had the authority and power and latitude that my badge in Louisiana gave me. I also wished I had the option of operating under a black flag and going after Surrette with a chain saw.

“I’m trying to figure out what we can do,” I said. “I think we should contact the sheriff or the feds.”

“They’re not going to believe us. We’re on our own.”

“We should start with Caspian Younger.”

“I kicked the shit out of him. He laughed at me,” he said.

“Who do you know in Vegas and Atlantic City?”

“Lowlifes and warmed-over greaseballs who wouldn’t piss on me if I was burning to death.”

“Dial them up.”

“Talking to those guys is like drinking out of a spittoon.”

I set down my iced tea and looked at it.

“He’s going to kill her, isn’t he?” Clete said.

I lowered my eyes and didn’t reply. The twist of lemon in my glass made me think of a yellow worm couched inside the ice, the canker inside the rose, the inalterable fact that you cannot hide from evil.

Felicity Louviere followed the instructions and drove through the tiny settlement of Alberton. She exited not far from a railroad track and crossed the Clark Fork and continued up a dirt road into an unpopulated area of wooded hills and outcroppings of gray rock that resembled the knuckle bones of prehistoric animals. Rain clouds had moved across the sun, dropping the countryside into shadow. She turned on the car heater, even though the dashboard told her the temperature outside was sixty-seven degrees. When the odometer indicated she had traveled exactly four miles from the bridge, she pulled to a wide spot in the road, next to a hill that sloped up into lodgepole and ponderosa pine and black snags left over from an old burn.

She cut the engine and stepped out into the wind, her ears popping slightly with the gain in elevation. What’s that sound? She turned in a circle and saw no other vehicle but thought she heard the throaty rumble of twin exhausts, a sound she associated with 1950s films about hot rods, or one she’d heard in the parking lot at the health club.

She suspected that her caller was watching her through binoculars and that her wait would be a long one. The air smelled of night damp and the outcroppings of rock that seldom saw sunlight and were freckled with lichen.

He surprised her. No more than three minutes passed before she saw a figure inside the trees up on the hillside, just below a switchback logging road left over from the days of clear-cutting. He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and held it in the air. There was nothing histrionic in the gesture. He didn’t wave it; he simply held it, showing his control over the situation.

She walked to the front of the Audi and stared up the hill, the wind blowing her hair over her face. The figure turned and walked back in the shadows, then reemerged with a woman wearing shorts and a T-shirt; a drawstring bag had been pulled over her head, and her wrists were fastened behind her.

Felicity began walking up the hill, her eyes lowered, stepping carefully over the holes burrowed between the rocks by pocket gophers and badgers. The sun had disappeared from the sky entirely, and she felt as though a cold wind were blowing through her soul. Give me strength, give me strength, give me strength, a voice chanted in her head.

She heard the rumble of the twin exhausts again, echoing in a canyon, trailing away into the trees. She was forty yards from the man on the hill and could see his wide shoulders and the tropical shirt that he wore inside a cheap tan suit. He held his captive by the arm with his right hand and began cupping the fingers of his left, indicating that Felicity should keep walking toward him.

“You have to let her go first,” she said.

He stared at her without replying. Behind him, up on the logging road, Felicity could see a gray SUV, a spray of rust on one side. “I’ve done what you asked,” she said. “Release the young woman and I’ll go with you.”

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He walked the woman thirty feet away, upwind from where he had been standing. He eased her into a sitting position on top of a fallen tree trunk and returned. The bound woman was out of earshot. Still he did not speak. He turned up his palms as though they glowed with spiritual grace.

“She’s never heard your voice or seen your face?” Felicity said.

He shook his head, his grin in place.

“You’re Asa Surrette,” she said. “You’re older than your pictures, a little more coarse. Your hair is dyed, but you’re him.”

“Nice to meet you in person. Please get in my vehicle. I’m looking forward to our association.”

“You had all of this planned.”

“Of course.”

“Why do you want me?”

“I think we knew each other in another life. I knew it when I first saw you from afar. I could smell the heat in the sand and the ring of swords on copper shields. I could hear a crowd roaring. Sound familiar?”

“What you’re describing are the symptoms of schizophrenia.”

“Could be. But as Charles Dickens wrote, ‘It’s a mad, mad world, Master Copperfield.’ ” Then he seemed to hear the twin exhausts, too. “You didn’t try to get clever on me, did you?”

“If I’d wanted to do that, I would have called the FBI.”

“I suspect that’s true. Well, let’s leave Rhonda to find her way out of here and toggle on down the road.”

“I have to use the bathroom.”

“You are a strange duck, aren’t you?”

“Do you mind turning around?”

“You’re cute,” he said.

She kept her eyes on his, her expression flat.

“Go ahead. I’ll just step up here a little ways,” he said.

She squatted in the leaves and pine needles, her back to him, her dress spread. She reached between her legs and pulled Love Younger’s leather punch from the tape on her thigh.

“Finished?” he said.

“Yes,” she replied, standing erect.

He extended his hand, leaning forward, his eyes merry. “You’re very pretty. A nice little package.”

She let him take her left hand in his. “Is the place we’re going very far?” she asked.

“What do you care? I’ve got you, you little whore.”

“Asa?”

“What do you want?” he replied.

“Here’s something for you,” she said.

The T-shaped handle of the leather punch was snugged tightly against her palm when she drove it into his face, the point sinking cleanly through his cheek, her knuckles touching his skin. When she pulled the shaft free, his eyes were popping, and blood was spurting from his mouth. On the edge of her vision, she saw the waitress trying to walk downhill, the cloth bag still over her head. Felicity drove the leather punch at his throat.

He knocked it aside and struck her with his fist. The blow exploded against her eyebrow and the bridge of her nose, tearing something loose inside her, blurring the trees. As she rolled down the slope, she could smell the drowsy odor of leaves and pine needles and the raw damp ground, and she wanted to crawl inside a cocoon and remain there in the coolness of the afternoon and the swaying of the trees for the rest of her life, secure in the knowledge that she had done all she could and her ordeal was over.

That was when he lifted her to her knees, his clothes exuding an eye-watering fecal stench, the bloody drool from his mouth matting in her hair. She blacked out as he dragged her up the slope toward his vehicle, hardly aware of the grinding sounds that issued from his throat or the fingers that sank like talons into her skin.

Gretchen Horowitz had followed Felicity’s Audi from Missoula and lost sight of it after taking the exit by the Alberton Gorge. She made a wrong choice at a fork and ended up in a blind canyon, then had to retrace her route, and only through dumb luck did she see the Audi a hundred yards away, parked in a bare spot by the side of the road.

Wherever she traveled, she kept several weapons in a long steel box welded to the floor behind the seat, one of which was a scoped K-98 German Mauser. She left the truck in a grove of pine trees, the rifle slung on her shoulder, and crossed the dirt road and worked her way uphill until she caught sight of Felicity Louviere standing below a switchback. Felicity was looking up at a figure who stood in the shadows. Gretchen unslung the rifle and dropped to one knee behind a boulder, gazing through the telescopic lens at the bizarre scene on the hillside.

A bound woman with a cloth bag over her head was sitting on a log, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts, her knees skinned. Gretchen moved the lens from the bound woman to Felicity. She unlocked the bolt on the Mauser and slid it back, then eased an eight-millimeter soft-nosed round into the chamber, locking down the bolt soundlessly with the heel of her hand.

The K-98 had never failed her. It was amazingly light for its size and era, deadly accurate at long range, even with iron sights, the bolt action as fluid and smooth as water. She had no doubt that the third person was Asa Surrette. But the light was bad, his outline dissolving into the shadows when Gretchen tried to lock him inside the crosshairs of the scope.

Then he stepped forward, extending his hand. His unshaved cheeks and the prune-line furrows in his throat and his boxlike head came into focus inside the lens. She took a breath, releasing it slowly, her finger tightening inside the trigger guard. In under a half second, the eight-millimeter round would strike home with almost no trajectory, coring through the brow, flattening inside the brain, cutting his motors, extinguishing all light from his eyes, before he ever heard the report echoing through the hills.

It didn’t happen. Felicity decided to take matters into her own hands and attack Surrette with a tool of some kind, and she made a mess of it.

Gretchen took her finger from the trigger guard, her right eye focused through the scope, and watched the situation come apart.

Take the shot, she heard a voice say.

I’ll hit Felicity, she answered.

Do it. She screwed things up.

My head hurts. I can’t think. Just shut the fuck up.

She saw Surrette hit Felicity, and she tightened the stock against her shoulder again, sure that this time she had a clean shot. She didn’t. Surrette grabbed Felicity as he would a slab of beef and wrestled her to his vehicle, blood leaking from his mouth. He opened the driver’s door and began stuffing her inside, at the same time driving his right fist into her ribs and the side of her head.

He’s going to kill her, the voice said. Do it while there’s still time. Have you grown weak?

I don’t have the right to risk someone else’s life.

You want to feel good about yourself at the woman’s expense?

If you were in the SUV with Surrette, what would you want me to do?

Take the shot.

I see. Just spit into the wind and see what happens? Oh, I hit you in the brisket? Sorry about that.

Take the shot, Gretchen.

You’re not inside the vehicle. You’re one of those who like to use terms like “collateral damage.”

He’ll torture her to death. Try to imagine the level of pain she’ll suffer in just one minute. Then multiply that by several hours.

I can’t do it.

Take the shot now, bitch, or stop pretending you’re a player. Sign up with the titty-baby brigade and burn candles for the person you could have saved.

Gretchen rose to her feet, lifting the rifle, trying to refocus on the target and catch the exact moment when Surrette’s image stood out in clear relief, separate from Felicity Louviere’s, framed forever inside the crosshairs, his face about to dissolve like a photograph curling over a flame.

Surrette slammed the door and turned and looked back down the slope. The sun had just broken from behind a cloud, and he had probably seen the glint on her scope. He appeared puzzled rather than alarmed, as though no one had the right to intrude upon what was clearly his province.

Eat this, Gretchen thought.

Just as she squeezed the trigger, she saw Felicity Louviere raise her bloodied head directly behind Asa Surrette’s.

The round ticked the top of the steering wheel, an inch from Surrette’s hand, and pocked a hole the size of a nickel through the windshield, powdering the dashboard with splinters of glass. He floored the accelerator, the tires spinning on the slick logging road, and bounced over the apex of the switchback and down the far side. Felicity Louviere was thrown against the passenger door by the SUV’s momentum, her hair in her eyes, her face swollen and bleeding.

“You told Gretchen Horowitz we were out here?” he said.

“What does it matter?” Felicity replied. “She’ll hunt you down for the rodent you are. She’ll make you beg.”

“Not like you will. Wait till you see what I have planned.”

She was losing consciousness and talking at the same time. Surrette hit chuckhole after chuckhole, bouncing in the seat, looking sideways at her, his safety strap not snapped in place. “What are you mumbling about?” he asked.

“He is risen,” she replied.

He hit the brake and skidded to a stop. He lifted himself up on one knee in the seat and began beating her in the face with both fists, as though his rage could never be sated.

Gretchen worked her way up the slope, through the tree trunks, carrying the Mauser at port arms. The bound woman had tripped over a log and fallen to the ground. Her bare legs were smeared with dirt and leaves and deer droppings and tiny twigs; a mewing sound came from the cloth bag cinched under her chin.

“Hey, it’s okay. You’re safe,” Gretchen said, kneeling beside her, propping the rifle on the log. “Surrette is gone. I’m here to help you.”

She placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder and felt her shiver as though she had been touched with a piece of dry ice. “My name is Gretchen Horowitz,” she said. “I’m going to remove the bag from your head now, then cut the tape on your wrists. Don’t be afraid.”

The woman did not reply. Gretchen loosened the drawstring and slipped the bag from her face. The woman stared into Gretchen’s eyes with the expression of an infant just emerging from its mother’s womb.

“What’s your name?” Gretchen asked.

“Rhonda. My name is Rhonda Fayhee. I live up by Lookout Pass. I work in the café. I went home from work. I don’t know what happened to me.”

“Many people have been looking for you, Rhonda. They’re all your friends. The whole world is on your side.” She opened her pocketknife and cut the tape on Rhonda Fayhee’s wrists.

“Who kidnapped me?” Rhonda asked.

“You don’t know?”

“I never saw anyone. I felt the needles someone put in me. Somebody fed me, too. A man did. The same one who put his—” She couldn’t finish.

“It’s all right,” Gretchen said. “I’m going to take you to the hospital in Missoula.”

“I don’t want to go there.”

Gretchen sat down next to her. “Why don’t you want to go to the hospital?”

“He did things to me.”

“We’re going to fix him for that. I promise you,” Gretchen said.

“I want someone to kill him.”

Gretchen put her arm around Rhonda and kissed her on the cheek. “You’re going to be all right,” she said. “Not all at once but with time. Do you hear me? All of this will pass. None of it is your fault. All of the things that were done to you happened outside of you and have nothing to do with your soul or who you are.”

“He had a smell. It will never go away.”

“Yes, it will. I promise. Terrible things were done to me when I was a child, and also when I was an adult. But I’m still here. I’m here for you, too. Are you listening, Rhonda? I give you my word: We’re going to blow up this guy’s shit.” She pressed Rhonda Fayhee’s head against her breast and kissed her hair. “We’ve got to go now,” she said.

“Not yet.”

“He has another hostage, Rhonda. She traded herself for you. Her name is Felicity Louviere.”

“I don’t know anyone by that name. Who is she?”

I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does.

Gretchen did not share her thoughts and simply said, “We don’t have any phone service here. Let me help you up. There you go. Just put one foot after the other. See? You’re doing fine.”

Gretchen did not return to Albert’s ranch until almost dark. The news media cooperated with the sheriff’s department and released a minimum amount of information about the rescue of Rhonda Fayhee, to avoid telling Surrette that he’d been identified as her kidnapper. However, the redacted story was troubling on another level. There was no mention that Felicity Louviere had been abducted.

I still had Love Younger’s unlisted number. I called it at 10:17 P.M. I thought he might screen the call, but he didn’t. When he picked up, I was treated to another instance of his irritability. “Why have you called my home?” he said.

“I suspect by now you know that Surrette has abducted your daughter-in-law,” I said.

“Why is that your business?”

“Where’s your son?”

“You’re probably the most presumptuous man I’ve ever met, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Sir, what in the name of suffering God is wrong with you? This isn’t about me or you. It’s about Felicity Louviere and my daughter, Alafair. It’s also about Gretchen Horowitz, who was almost killed by Asa Surrette.”

“Yes, the same woman who shot at him and may have wounded my daughter-in-law.”

He was a master at deflecting any reasonable form of redress for a problem that involved his agenda and his pride. Or in this instance, his profligate son. I asked again if he knew Caspian’s whereabouts.

“I have no idea,” he said. His voice had dropped in register. “He’s drinking or using drugs. He’s been gone all day. Why do you torment us so?”

“Every perp I ever met feigned the role of victim, Mr. Younger. A role like that is unworthy of you.”

I did not expect what he said next. “My son may have become deranged. He’s always been frightened, ever since he was a little boy. Caspian, Caspian, my poor son Caspian. What else can I say, sir? His sins are mine. It’s I who planted the seeds of doubt and self-hatred in him. Do you know what it’s like for a father to accept the fact he has ruined his son, Mr. Robicheaux? Do you have any idea what that is like?”

“Why would Surrette kidnap Felicity Louviere? Why would she be of interest to him? Is he working with Caspian?”

The line went dead.