Light of the World

Chapter 5

It was dust in downtown Missoula when Detective Bill Pepper entered a workingman’s saloon called the Union Club and ordered his first shot and beer of the evening. He knocked back the shot and drank from his mug of draft and wiped the foam off his mouth with a paper napkin, then tapped his fingernail on the lip of the shot glass for another. He was not aware that across the street, in the gloaming of the day, a young woman with a scarf wrapped around her hair had watched him enter the saloon and was now waiting for him to leave.

At eight P.M., just as the sun was setting, he emerged on the street and began walking toward the brick cottage where he lived on the opposite side of the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. In minutes he reached North Higgins and walked past the steamed windows of a Mexican restaurant filled with college kids and family people, then past an old vaudeville theater and over a long bridge, the roar of the water and its cold, heavy smell rising from far below, the sun descending in a red melt where the river fanned out and disappeared between the mountains.

On the far end of the bridge, he turned right and descended a set of steps that led down past an old train station and onto the maple-shadowed sidewalk that reminded him of the neighborhood in Mobile where he had lived as a child. He lit an unfiltered cigarette and removed a flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb and tilted the flask to his mouth, closing his eyes while a warm burn radiated through his viscera.

Down the street, a chopped-down pickup with Hollywood mufflers eased to a stop under a maple tree that blocked the light from the streetlamp. The woman in the scarf behind the wheel fitted on a pair of dark glasses and layered her mouth with lipstick, then got out and looped a tote bag over her arm. She began walking on the opposite side of the street toward a small brick bungalow set close to the river. Baskets of petunias hung from the eaves of the porch. There was a swing set in the yard and a basketball hoop nailed above the porte cochere.

She stopped under a tree directly across from the bungalow. The lights were on in the front, and she could see Bill Pepper pacing up and down in his living room while he talked on his cell phone. She removed her dark glasses and took a tiny pair of binoculars from her tote bag and adjusted the lenses on his face. There was a coarseness in his skin that reminded her of the skin around a turtle’s eyes. His hands were big and knuckled, his shoulders as thick as a piano mover’s. He was the kind of man who drank whiskey as casually as someone flinging an accelerant on a fire. He had probably been a brig chaser in the Corps or with CID in the army or an administrative sergeant in the air force or a land-based pencil pusher in the navy; but he was someone who knew how to make use of the system and milk it for all it was worth while staying off the firing line.

She had sworn she was through with her former life. She had seen a counselor in West Hollywood, attended Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings in the Palisades, and worked as a volunteer at a shelter in East Los Angeles to get her mind off her own problems. Unfortunately, the latter was not as therapeutic as the former. She saw women who had been raped, sodomized, burned, and beaten until they were unrecognizable. She was daily witness to the terror that never left their eyes, because each of them knew she would have to return to a home where any night a man whose children she had borne, whose problems she had shared, whose body had settled between her thighs, would rip the door out of the jamb and perhaps tear her apart. Nor could Gretchen forget their haunted look when they asked how they could change their lives, where they could work, where they could hide. She never answered their questions. If she told them what she would do, they would probably flee her presence.

She remembered the early lessons in the trade that she had learned from a retired button man in Hialeah whom everyone referred to as Louie, no last name. Louie had grown up in Brooklyn with Joey Gallo and claimed to be the character in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight who walked Joey’s pet lion down to the neighborhood car wash and clipped his leash to the chain that moved all the vehicles through the water jets and revolving brushes. “Don’t let your feelings get mixed up in it,” Louie said. “The target broke the rules or he wouldn’t be the target. He made the choice, you didn’t. Don’t use anything bigger than a .25. You want the round to bounce around inside. One in the ear, one between the lamps. If he’s a rat, the third round goes in the mouth.”

Louie did not go out in a blaze of glory. He died in a lawn chair while watching a shuffleboard game at the retirement center where he lived. At his funeral, a woman in the viewing line leaned over the coffin and spat in his face. Many thought she was the widow of a victim. As it turned out, she was his landlady, and Louie had stiffed her on a winning lottery ticket they had purchased together. In death, Louie was no more dignified or intriguing than he had been in life, and all his lessons were no more than the self-serving rationale of a psychopath. The problem was that Gretchen hadn’t gotten into the life for money. What she learned from Louie was a means to another end — namely, to get even for the burns that had been inflicted on an infant and for the day a man named Golightly had forever robbed her of her innocence.

Don’t let your feelings get involved in it? What a laugh, she thought.

She put her dark glasses back on and dipped her hand in her tote bag and felt the can of Mace and the foamed butt of the telescopic baton she carried. She waited until a car passed, then crossed the street and stepped up on Bill Pepper’s darkened porch. The bulb above the door made a loud squeak when she unscrewed it. Beyond the house, she could see the moon shining on a church steeple and hear the river humming through the willows and rocks along the riverbank.

Go home. There’s still time. He’s a cop. Don’t throw everything away over an insult, a voice said.

Another voice replied, Don’t let anyone get over on you ever again.

She tapped on the door with her left hand, her breath coming hard in her chest as she stared through the glass at the detective’s face approaching hers.

When he opened the door, she could smell the whiskey and cigarettes through the screen. He worked the light switch up and down, his expression puzzled. “Must have burned out a bulb,” he said. “Who’s that?”

Her scarf was tied down tightly on her head, the lenses in her glasses as dark as a welder’s goggles. She tightened her hand around the can of Mace. On the living room wall was a framed photograph of the detective holding a little girl in a pinafore on his hip, both of them smiling. Another photograph showed him with a little boy. “You the lady from the church?” he said.

“Pardon?” she said.

“The one who called about Sarah going to Bible camp? Why are you wearing sunglasses?”

“I’m Gretchen Horowitz, and I need to talk to you about a comment you made.”

His eyes went away from her. Then he smiled with recognition. “Oh yeah, I got it. Come in,” he said, pushing open the screen. “I need to explain some things.”

Don’t do it, the voice said.

“I heard what you and your deputy said.”

“I’m sorry about that. I’m expecting a phone call,” he said, stepping back, motioning her in. “My granddaughter is gonna be visiting in June. I’m supposed to enroll her in Bible camp. That’s why I thought—” The phone rang on a hallway table. He made a face and picked it up, leaving her in the doorway, gesturing at her to come in while he talked.

She could hear only part of the conversation, but it was obvious he was agitated and conflicted, trying to suppress his irritation and at the same time please the party on the other end of the line. “No, sir, Dixon may be a partner in the crime, but not necessarily,” he said. “We have the arrow somebody shot at the Robicheaux girl. I found a salesman at Bob Ward’s sporting goods who remembers a guy buying a bow and arrows of the same kind three days ago. He remembers the guy wearing a bracelet woven from metal wire... No, sir, the guy paid cash, so all we have on him is the salesman’s description. Trust me on this, sir. I’m gonna nail the man who did this to your granddaughter.”

She was standing inside the doorway when he hung up. He seemed to look at her without seeing her.

“Was that the grandfather of the Indian girl who was killed?” she asked.

“I was just doing a little outreach,” he said. “Where were we? My treatment of Wyatt Dixon this morning? He’s got people around here fooled, but I knew him when he was a member of a white-power group down in the Bitterroot Valley, the same bunch at Hayden Lake over in Idaho. I saw what somebody did to that Indian girl, and this morning I went a little crazy. I lost it. I wish I hadn’t.”

She had taken off her glasses and placed them in her tote bag. She continued to stare at him, not speaking.

“You want a drink?” he said.

When she didn’t answer, he sat down on a couch with a cheap flower-print cover. He pulled the cork from a whiskey bottle and poured into a teacup. “Let me catch my breath. Sit down, will you, please? Okay, this is what it is: I went up there on the logging road, and the deputy made a wiseacre sexist remark, and I thought I’d say something smart back. I shot off my mouth. I’m sorry I did that. Look, this doesn’t excuse my behavior, but I’ve got a couple of problems myself, one with my prostate, the other with my daughter, who can’t get her life on track.”

He looked down at his teacup, then picked it up and drank it empty. “I got the Big C. I might beat it, I might not. If I had my way, I’d be down in Muscle Shoals, crabbing with my grandchildren. Except I need the income for my daughter and her kids, and I can’t retire. Maybe you can help me with something here.”

“I doubt it.”

“Your friend the Robicheaux girl? She’s sure she didn’t see who shot that arrow at her?”

“Ask her.”

“Like I was saying on the phone, we got the arrow from her, but the only prints on it were hers. That means the guy who shot it wiped it down. Which means he was operating in a premeditated fashion to commit a homicide. Wyatt Dixon had no reason to target the Robicheaux girl.”

“Then who was it?”

He rubbed his palms up and down on his thighs, a spark of static electricity jumping off the heel of his hand. “I got a theory. Close the door and sit down. You want a glass of wine or a Pepsi? My guess is you’d rather have a Pepsi.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because you’re all business, lady. You don’t mess around. I doubt you ever take guff off a man, either.”

He went to the small kitchen just off the living room and opened the refrigerator and placed the ice tray and a tall glass on the counter and ripped the tab on a soda can and filled the glass, all the while talking about his grandchildren with his back to her. She was standing in the same spot when he came back into the living room. “Mind if I close this? I think it’s fixing to rain again,” he said, pushing the front door shut. “Dixon may not have shot at your friend, but that doesn’t mean he’s an innocent man. He stays viable through deception. He loved what I did to him this morning because he was center stage. I’ve known his kind all my life, ignorant peckerwoods always spouting from the Bible. They say they’re born-again, but they’ll cut your throat for a quarter and lick the cut clean for an extra dime.”

“You seem to really hate him.”

“What I hate is deceit. I’ll tell you something I don’t tell many people. My father was a brakeman on the old L and N line. He took pity on a black vagabond and fed him and let him sleep in a boxcar parked on a siding. When the guy woke up, he killed my father with a pocketknife and took his billfold and left his body on the tracks. We moved to a place on an alley in Macon, and I grew up shining shoes, and my mother and little sister did housecleaning. You learn a lot about the world looking up from a shoeshine box. How do you think that Indian girl got killed? Somebody deceived her. We know she knew Dixon because she bought a bracelet from him. Maybe her killer was Dixon’s friend, maybe a partner of some kind.”

She sat down in a chair across from him. “Run that by me again.”

He went into a circuitous history about Dixon’s background, the crimes of which he was suspected but never charged, the fact that Dixon had been a member of a separatist group in Texas and on the edge of the same circles as Timothy McVeigh. She sipped from her glass, the fatigue of the day starting to catch up with her, her concentration starting to stray. She noticed the tidy drabness of the room, the frayed carpets, the nicked furniture, like a re-creation of an impoverished working-class home from many years ago. He seemed to become frustrated with her inattention, his hands moving more rapidly, his chest swelling. He loosened his collar. “Are you listening?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why did you come here?”

“To talk.”

“Then why don’t you talk? Maybe you came here for something else.”

“I think we’ve straightened it out.”

“What were you going to do if that didn’t happen?”

Her mouth was dry, the muscles in her chest not working right.

“Why don’t you answer the question?” he said.

“What did you just say?”

“I was talking about deception. Haven’t you been listening? You look a little woozy.”

She set her glass on the coffee table and looked at it. She had drunk half the glass, and the ice had melted and seemed as thin as frost-coated dimes floating on top of the Pepsi. Her skin felt rubbery and dead to the touch, and her tongue was thick and her words slurred when she tried to speak.

“It’s kind of like being in a slow-motion film, isn’t it?” he said. “I got you, girlie.”

Rohypnol, she thought.

He picked up her tote bag from the floor and pulled it open against the drawstring and lifted out the can of Mace and the expandable baton known as an ASP. “I checked you out today. Miami-Dade PD says you may have been a female badass for the Mob. This is Montana, girl. You don’t do a beatdown on a Missoula County sheriff’s detective. You seriously fucked yourself tonight.” He got up from the couch and turned off the light in the kitchen and the table lamps in the living room. “My van is in back. But just so you know there’re no hard feelings—”

He leaned down, the heat and the smell in his clothes almost suffocating her. She could taste the tobacco on his tongue when he put it in her mouth.

The accident on the state highway happened a short distance before the turnoff onto the dirt road that led to Albert Hollister’s ranch. A tractor-trailer rig carrying a three-story-high piece of oil field equipment bound for Canada had blown two tires and skidded off the shoulder, toppling the load into a stand of cottonwoods by the creek. The few cars coming off the crest of Lolo Pass had come to a stop, as well as the traffic from the town. Clete and I got out of my pickup truck and started walking toward the accident. There was a trace of purple at the bottom of the sky, the evening star twinkling just above the mountains. A helicopter was hovering directly overhead. I thought it carried a news team from a local television station. I was wrong. The chopper landed on the highway, not in a field but on the highway, and one of the wealthiest men in the United States stepped out of it.

I had seen him once before, in Lafayette, right after an offshore blowout had killed eleven men on the derrick and strung miles of fecal-colored oil all over the Gulf Coast. If I ever saw a Jacksonian man, it was Love Younger. He was as rough-hewn as carved oak, with the broad forehead and wide-set eyes we associate with the Anglo-Scotch minutemen who fired the first shots at Lexington and Concord. He had grown up in a place in eastern Kentucky I visited once, a wretched community of shacks, some with dirt floors, where the residents drew their water from the same creek their privies were on. Paradoxically, he had not come to Lafayette to talk about the oil well blowout but to establish a scholarship fund based on merit and need at the University of Louisiana.

I saw Alafair standing by the side of her Honda, looking down at the massive load of machinery that had toppled off the trailer into the edge of the creek, snapping all the boomer chains like string. The stand of cottonwoods it had fallen on had been crushed into the mud. “Was he speeding?” I said, looking up toward Lolo Pass.

“I heard the driver say his tires blew,” she replied.

Evidently, that explanation did not work for Love Younger. He was arguing with a highway patrolman, jabbing his finger in the air, motioning at a hilltop on the far side of the highway. The patrolman kept nodding, his mouth a tight seam, raising his eyes only to nod again.

“That guy’s name is Love?” Clete said.

“He claims to be a descendant of Cole Younger.”

Clete wasn’t impressed. “He also smeared a guy with the Silver Star and a Purple Heart.”

“Have y’all heard from Gretchen?” Alafair said.

“What about her?” Clete said.

“We were going to have a drink in Missoula. She doesn’t answer her cell phone.”

“When’s the last time you talked with her?” Clete said.

“Six.”

He checked his cell phone for missed calls. “Did she say where she was going?”

“She said she had to take care of some personal business.”

Clete looked at her. “What kind of personal business?”

“The personal kind,” she said. “She wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

“Did it have anything to do with those cops who were up on the ridge this morning?” I asked.

“Maybe. I didn’t think about it at the time. I gave the arrow to a plainclothes detective named Pepper. He made me kind of queasy.”

“How?” I said.

“His eyes. They look at you, but there’s no light behind them.”

Clete began punching a number into his cell phone with his thumb. “Direct to voice mail,” he said. “What’s the name of that plainclothes again?”

“Bill Pepper,” I said. “Let me see how long this is going to take.” I walked up to within four feet of the highway patrolman and Love Younger and two of his aides who were standing close by. None of them took any notice of me.

“My driver says he’s almost sure he heard the crack of a rifle,” Younger said to the patrolman.

“That’s not what I heard him say, sir,” the officer said.

“You calling me a liar?”

“No, sir. Your driver said he heard two popping sounds. That could have been his tires.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Younger said. “We’re two miles from the ranch of Albert Hollister. He’s well known as an environmental fanatic and rabble-rouser. He and the Sierra Club have done everything in their power to stop the transportation of my equipment.”

I opened my badge holder. “Would you mind if we pull out on the shoulder and work our way on up to the next turnoff?”

“Yes, sir, go right ahead,” the patrolman said.

“Mr. Younger, could I have a word with you?” I said.

“Concerning what?”

“Your granddaughter.”

In the illumination of emergency flares and headlights, I saw Love Younger’s eyes sharpen and fix on mine. There were tiny blue and red veins in his cheeks, a bit of stubble on his throat above his collar, and a look of heated intensity in the face that usually hides either great tragedy or great anger.

“Up on that ridge just west of us, somebody shot a hunter’s arrow at my daughter. It cut her ear,” I said. “A half inch closer, she probably would have been killed. We think the guy who did it could be connected to the death of your granddaughter.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dave Robicheaux. I’m a sheriff’s detective in New Iberia, Louisiana.”

“Get his information,” Younger said to one of his aides.

“No, sir, I’ll talk to you, or we’ll not talk at all.”

He turned toward me, his expression neutral, and seemed to take my measure a second time. He pulled a notepad from his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “Write down your contact number. I’ll call you as soon as I clean up this mess. What’s your name again?”

I told him.

“You were involved in a shooting in Louisiana. I was there when it happened. You killed a man named Alexis Dupree,” he said. “I knew him.”

“I didn’t do it, but a friend of mine did. I was there and watched it and thought my friend did the right thing. I think the world is a better place for it. I’ll look forward to your call, Mr. Younger. My condolences for your loss.” I walked back down the line of cars and rejoined Alafair and Clete.

“What’s the haps?” Clete said.

“Jacksonian democracy is highly overrated,” I replied. “Did you hear from Gretchen?”

“No, something’s wrong. She always lets me know where she is, even out in California. Does a day come when you don’t have to worry about your kid?”

“Never,” I said.

As she lay helpless in the back of the van, her wrists fastened behind her with plastic ligatures, she could see the black shapes of the mountains through the rear windows and the rain slapping against the roof and sweeping in sheets across the highway. Her muscles felt like butter, her neck so weak it could barely support the weight of her head. She estimated that the van had been on the four-lane only about ten minutes before it made a turn, and she guessed they were now on the two-lane state road that led through the old company mill town of Bonner and on up the Blackfoot River. Pepper had been silent the whole time, filling the inside of the van with the smoke from his unfiltered cigarettes.

She heard the hollow rumbling of a bridge under the van. Abruptly, the van swung off the asphalt onto a dirt surface, gravel pinging the undercarriage. Minutes later, the van climbed a steep hill and came down the other side, then turned left onto a rocky track pocked with holes and probably strewn with desiccated tree branches and twigs that snapped and splintered up into the frame.

Bill Pepper hit the brakes, tossing her against the back of his seat. When he cut the engine, she could hear the rain pattering on the roof and see the wind flattening the drops of water on the back windows. She could not remember a time in her life when the smallest of details about the natural world had seemed so important to her. Pepper continued to smoke his cigarette, leaning forward to get a better look at the heavens, like a sailor or a fisherman trying to anticipate a squall. “I like it out here,” he said, staring straight ahead.

When she tried to speak, her voice box felt stuffed with cotton.

“My daddy used to take my little sister and me fishing for speckled trout south of Mobile Bay,” he said. “When the rain would first dimple the water, they’d start to school up. You could smell them, just like when they’re spawning.”

He rolled down his window halfway and flicked his cigarette into the darkness. A balloon of yellow electricity flared and raced through the clouds overhead and disappeared without sound beyond the hills on the far side of the Blackfoot. “You brought this on your own self. You know that, don’t you?” he said.

“My father is—” she began.

“Yeah, I know. Your father is going to punch my ticket. So why didn’t you send him after me instead of coming to my door with Mace and an ASP in your bag?”

“Clete Purcel is my father.”

“It doesn’t matter who he is. It’s just you and me now. You came to my house to do me harm. If you do me injury, you do injury to my grandchildren, and I won’t put up with that.”

He got out of the van and walked to the back and opened the doors, the rain spotting his hat and leather jacket. He stepped on the back bumper and climbed inside and closed the doors behind him. He reached in his pocket and removed a small flashlight and turned it on and set it on the floor. “A vice cop in Broward County told me you pulled a train for the Florida Outlaws.”

“He lied to you.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because he knew it was what you wanted to hear.”

“You look like a biker girl. Except I think you have a high IQ.”

His weight shifted, and she heard him remove something from his pocket. Then she heard the snap of a metallic mechanism locking into place. He fitted his left hand on her upper arm. “This same vice cop said maybe you did a couple of hits for the Mob. Was he lying then?”

“Anything I ever did was because I wanted to.”

He moved his hand up the nape of her neck and slipped his fingers into her hair. “Do you think those things I did to you back there were bad? Or did you enjoy them a little?”

She craned her head and, in the corner of her eye, saw the dull-colored blade of the clasp knife and the long sliver of brightness along the bottom edge where it had been honed on a whetstone.

She straightened her arms and shoulders and closed and opened her eyes as a doll might, a pain growing in her right shoulder, her nerve endings coming alive.

“Opposites attract sometimes,” he said. “I can be good to a woman and love her like a father or a husband.”

She stared at the side paneling of the van and, in her mind, went to a private place where long ago she had learned to shut down her sensory system and remove herself from hands that reached down out of the dark and touched her in ways that no human being should ever be touched.

“You’re an attractive girl,” he said. “I may go to work for a very wealthy man. I could take care of you. Are you listening?”

“My father will get you. If he doesn’t, I will.”

“I wouldn’t be talking like that. This could be your last night on earth.”

“I’ll get you anyway. I’ll come back. I’d rather die than have your hands on me.”

She saw his thumb slip higher on the handle of the knife, establishing a firmer grip.

“You stink and have dandruff in your hair. You’re everything a woman loathes,” she said. “Even whores don’t want to fuck a man like you.”

“You’re starting to make me angry, Gretchen.”

She felt his callused fingertips go inside her shirt and move along her collarbone and settle on her carotid. He teased his thumbnail under her jaw and around her ear and spread his hand in the center of her back, pressing the heel into the muscles. “I could have been a lot harder on you,” he said.

“Kill me.”

“You really mean that?”

“Fuck you, asshole,” she said, her hatred and level of helplessness so intense she could hardly say the words.

She heard him snapping on a pair of latex gloves; then he ran the blade of his knife down the back of her shirt and through her bra strap and through the back of her jeans and her panties. He tore the clothes off her body, even pulling off her suede boots and her socks. He opened a bottle of bleach and soaked a wad of paper towels and scrubbed her hair and skin with it, then climbed out of the van and fitted his hands under her arms and dragged her over the bumper onto the ground.

She lay in the mud, the rain falling in her face, while he went to the front of the van and removed a paper sack from behind the seat. He took out a half pint of whiskey and a Ziploc bag of weed and splashed the whiskey in her mouth and on her face and bare breasts and over her hair, then forced weed past her lips and teeth and rubbed it into her hands and forearms and ears and nose, his chest laboring from the exertion.

He gathered up her clothes and boots and stuck them in the sack, then inserted the knife under the ligatures and sliced them loose from her wrists. “I threw your tote bag in the trees about three miles back. Write this off as a learning experience. For me it’s over, in case you ever want to let bygones be bygones. Nobody is gonna believe you, Gretchen. People like me. I’m a good guy. You’re shit on a stick.”

He got in the van and started the engine and drove past her with the window down, lighting another cigarette, the rain slashing across the taillights.

She walked a mile and a half up the road, her skin prickling with cold, her hair matted and dripping with water and dirt and twigs. A Jeep passed her and turned in to the trees at the peak of a hill. A boy and a girl got out and stared at her. A red nylon tent with a lantern hissing inside it stood in a grove of cedar trees. Below the hill, Gretchen could see the riffle on the river gliding between giant boulders, like a long streak of black oil shining in the moonlight.

“Jesus Christ, lady, are you okay?” the boy said.

She tried to cover her breasts with her arms and discovered that nothing she could do or say would explain or change her situation or undo the damage that had been done to her, not now, not ever. The greatest injury of all was the knowledge that her own merciful tendencies had allowed this to happen.