Light of the World

Chapter 7

The rivers were blown out by the spring runoff and the constant rains, but Clete knew a creek high up on a logging road in the Bitterroots where there was a long stretch of white water that boiled over into the trees, then above it a chain of beaver dams and deep pools and undulating riffles sliding so clear over the gravel bed that you could count each pebble five feet below the surface. He had loaded his ice chest with beer and canned fruit juice and ham-and-onion sandwiches and had put it on the backseat and his waders and fly rod and fly vest and net and creel in the trunk. He had put on his canvas coat and porkpie hat and was ready to go. There was only one problem. He couldn’t get his mind off his daughter.

He went back into the cabin. “Come with me,” he said.

“I have things to take care of,” she said. She was sitting at the breakfast table, her food cold on her plate, her laptop open.

“What’s bothering you, kid?”

“Nothing.”

“I saw the Airweight under your pillow.”

“I have nightmares sometimes. It’s the way I am.”

“Did you meet a guy last night?”

“No.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“I just did.”

“Then what is it?”

“I have to work some things out.”

He took off his hat and sat down at the table. She closed the laptop. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what it is,” he said.

“I used some bad judgment.”

“With a guy?”

“Not the kind you’re thinking about.”

“Who or what are we talking about?” he said.

“I’ll handle it, Clete.”

He put a hand on her arm and saw her flinch. “I’m getting a bad feeling here,” he said.

“So butt out.”

“Is it those cops who wised off to you?”

“Stay out of it.”

“You went after them, didn’t you?”

“I acted like a fool. Everything that happened to me is my own fault.”

“What did they do to you?”

“I went to Bill Pepper’s house. I was going to tear him up. Then I saw a swing set in his yard and a basketball hoop over the porte cochere. When he opened the door, I saw pictures of him with his grandchildren on the wall. He pretended not to recognize me. He asked if I was a church lady.”

“A what?”

“He said this lady was going to enroll his granddaughter at Bible camp. He said he thought I was her. He’s a very convincing guy.”

Clete felt a shortness in his breath, a watery sensation in his heart. “Tell me what happened.”

“I think he put Rohypnol or maybe some sleeping pills in a glass of Pepsi he gave me.”

“Go on.”

“I don’t remember all of it. He put his hands on me first. Then he did some other things.”

Clete saw the blood go out of her cheeks, the blank stare in her eyes. “Get it all out at once,” he said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’re going to deal with this together.”

“He rubbed his penis on me. All over my skin. He kept saying things with his mouth close to my ear. I couldn’t keep his breath off my face.”

Clete felt his scalp tightening, his hands forming into fists on his knees under the table.

“He drove me to a place on the Blackfoot,” she said. “For a long time he let me think he was going to kill me. Then he cut my clothes off with a knife and poured whiskey and weed on me and rubbed it all over my body and left me to walk naked back to town. Two kids gave me a raincoat and took me to my truck.”

The whites of her eyes had turned pink, although she had not shed any tears. Clete had to cough into his hand before he spoke. “You’re not going to report him?”

“He scrubbed me with bleach. There’s no DNA on me. My clothes are gone. I have nothing to prove my story.”

“What were you doing on the Internet?”

“He told me he had terminal cancer. Some people I know in Miami hacked into his medical records. He was lying. I know what you’re thinking. I want you to stay out of it.”

“He’s going down.”

“I don’t let other people carry my water, especially you.”

“Because I wasn’t there to defend you when you were a kid?”

“It’s the other way around. You’ve been there for me in every way you could, and I’m not going to let you take my weight now.”

“You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, kid. You’ve made a documentary on music, and now you’re going to make one on the damage these shale-oil companies are doing. You can’t throw that away because of a bum like Pepper. Leave him to me.”

“That’s what you don’t understand, Clete. When a man molests a woman, he steals her identity. You don’t know who you are anymore. You feel like you don’t have an address or a mailbox or a name. You’re nothing.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“See what I mean? You don’t want to hear it. No man wants to know how painful it is. It’s like a stain you can’t wash out of your soul. I want to kill him, and I want to do it in pieces. I want him to suffer as much as possible.”

He picked up her hand. “I don’t blame you for not dime-ing him. He’s probably done it before and gotten away with it. The system chews up sexual assault victims. But I’m going to get him, and when I do, it will be for both of us.”

“I knew this was a mistake.”

“What is?”

“Telling you. You’re going to end up in prison.”

He started to speak, then gave it up and stroked her hair. His head had filled with images from her account that he knew would pursue him night and day, no matter where he went or how he tried to occupy himself. As he realized the magnitude of the theft that had been perpetrated on his daughter, he felt a sensation in his stomach that was like a flame punching a hole in a sheet of paper and spreading outward until it blackened everything it touched.

A squall had just blown through Hellgate Canyon into downtown Missoula when we reached the tree-shaded neighborhood by the river where Bill Pepper lived. The limbs of the maple trees were in full leaf and shaking in great wet clusters in the wind, raindrops spotting the sidewalks, the flower baskets on Pepper’s porch whipping back and forth. It was only five-thirty, but he had turned on the lights inside. I had to knock twice before I saw him appear from the kitchen, wearing a fedora, a leather jacket on his arm. He looked through the glass straight into my face, then unlocked the bolt and opened the door. “What is it?” he asked.

Fear comes in many forms, most often as a sense of apprehension that soon disappears. What I saw in the face of Bill Pepper bordered on the kind of fear I’ve seen only in the faces of the condemned, men who had to sit in a cell and listen to the beating of their heart while awaiting the sound of a steel door swinging open and footsteps walking down a poorly lighted corridor. I’m talking about a level of fear that turns the skin gray and leaves a man’s hair soggy with sweat and his palms so stiff and dry he can’t close them.

“I met with Love Younger this morning,” I said. “I need to confirm a couple of things he told me.”

“You’re meddling in an investigation where you have no jurisdiction,” Pepper said.

“That’s not the case. My daughter was almost killed by an unknown assailant who’s still out there. Younger says you found a sporting goods salesman who sold a hunter’s bow to a guy who may have murdered Angel Deer Heart. This is information we have a right to know. Why didn’t you share it with us?”

“I’m on my way out of town for the weekend. You can come to my office Monday if you want to talk.”

“You nervous about something?” Alafair said.

“I’m in a rush. What right do you have to come to my house? To talk to me like that?” As though emboldened by his own rhetoric, he stepped out on the porch. Even in the wind, I could smell the alcohol on his breath.

“Our request for information is a reasonable one, Detective Pepper,” I said. “I don’t understand why you’re upset.”

“I’m fine. I don’t know what you want or why you’re here. We’re still looking at Wyatt Dixon. To our knowledge, he’s the last person to see the girl alive.”

“We just ran into Dixon on the dirt road below Albert Hollister’s house,” I said. “He was on his way to see Gretchen Horowitz. He seemed perfectly relaxed talking to us. Does that sound like a guilty man to you?”

Pepper’s eyes looked from me to Alafair and back to me. “Are they cooking up something? Maybe claiming I abused Dixon?”

This time I didn’t respond. There was a tic below his left eye, a twitch by his mouth.

“Just tell us what you found out from the sporting goods salesman,” Alafair said. “What did the purchaser of the hunting bow look like?”

“Middle-aged. He paid with cash. It could be anybody,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

“That’s not what you told Love Younger,” Alafair said. “You told him the purchaser was wearing the kind of bracelet Dixon sold the Indian girl.”

“I’m leaving now. I don’t have time for this,” Pepper said.

“I think your boat left the dock a little early today,” I said.

“Say again?”

“You’re ninety proof, partner. I used to start at lunchtime, too, particularly when I was warming up for the weekend. By Saturday morning I’d glow in the dark.”

I saw a strange light come into his eyes, as though he had shifted gears inside his head and was no longer thinking about any of the things he had just said. “You’re from down there. You know how they do business,” he said.

“From down where? Who is they? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“It’s got to do with Albert Hollister and the girl. They think I’m involved. I’m out. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Sir, you’re not making any sense,” I said.

“Mr. Robicheaux?”

“What is it?”

He seemed to collect himself, like a man wanting a friend. “I’m sorry for what I did. They’ve got me figured out wrong. I think I’m gonna go back to Mobile. I always liked it there, living by the salt water and pole-fishing with the nigras at sunset. It’s a peaceful life there on the bay.”

Alafair and I stared at him. It was like watching a man disappear before our eyes. “Sorry you did what?” I asked.

“For my actions. I’d undo them if I could.”

“I think you need some help,” I said.

He closed the door just as the clouds broke and started to pour down, the raindrops hitting the rooftop and sidewalks as hard as hail. If there is a charnel house for souls, I believed Bill Pepper had just found it.

Albert was gone when we returned to the house. The rain had quit and the sky had turned into an ink wash, and Molly and I grilled steaks on the deck and took them inside and ate at the dining room table with Alafair and watched the moon rise above the Bitterroots. Albert came in later, holding a FedEx delivery, his face ruddy from the wind. “This is for Gretchen. It was by the garage,” he said. “Where is she?”

“At the cabin, I think,” I replied. “Alafair and I had a talk with one of the cops who was up at the cave. Bill Pepper. Do you know him?”

“No more than I know any of them.”

“He was half in the bag and scared about something. He said it had to do with you and somebody he called ‘the girl.’ ”

Albert shook his head. “Isn’t he the one who beat up the cowboy?”

“Yeah, he knocked Wyatt Dixon around.”

“Why spend time talking with a man like that?” Albert said. He set the FedEx box on the table. The return address was a geological lab in Austin, Texas.

After supper, Gretchen had gone into her bedroom and lain down on top of the covers, her arm across her eyes, then turned toward the wall and fallen asleep. Clete sat at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of him, and watched her sleep. He tried to think about the choices available to him. Have a quiet talk with the sheriff? Gretchen would end up shark meat. The sheriff would pull her jacket from Miami-Dade, and no credence would be given to anything she said. And the larger problem went way beyond Gretchen’s background. Again and again, victims of sexual assault were put on the stand and torn apart while the perpetrator either smirked at the defense table or shook his head in feigned disbelief. Rapes were downgraded to battery; child molesters were given probation. There was another problem, too. There was a sick culture in law enforcement, particularly among vice cops, and everyone knew it, Clete in particular: the corner-of-the-mouth jokes, the smug moral superiority, the collective rush in having set up a successful sex sting, the legal proximity to a sybaritic world where you could get laid in any way you wanted by just flipping out your badge.

For a vice detective with some loose time on his hands, after-hours New Orleans may not have been the Baths of Caracalla, but it was a pretty good surrogate.

In Clete’s opinion, the nation was still Puritan, at least when it came to the victimization of women. The temptress brought about her own downfall. The victim was the noun, the perpetrator an adverb. The moment Gretchen testified, she would be portrayed as a contract killer from Miami who had gone willingly to Bill Pepper’s home and entered into a tryst that ended in a lurid and inconsequential denouement on the Blackfoot River. She’d be lucky if she wasn’t charged with perjury.

Clete could see the curve of her hip and the tautness of her thighs and rump against the fabric of her jeans and her back rising and falling as she slept. She had begun a spartan health regimen in California and had lost twenty pounds by dieting and working out with weights and running four miles every morning on the beach in Santa Monica. The combination of her chestnut hair and violet-colored eyes and statuesque carriage made men turn and stare as she walked by. Even more intriguing, she seemed to take no notice of the attention they paid her, as though she were a polite but temporary visitor in their midst.

It was hard for Clete to separate the daughter he was looking at now from the woman who had been called Caruso in Little Havana. Blood splatter and the curse of Cain did not rinse easily from the hands or the soul. Anyone who believed otherwise knew nothing about the makeup of human beings, he thought. Aside from psychopaths, every person who killed another human being took on a burden he carried for the rest of his life. The daylight hours allowed you to concentrate on making money and buying food and clothes and worrying about your bald automobile tires. The nocturnal hours were a little different. The gargoyles that lived in the unconscious had their own agenda and were not interested in the ebb and flow of your daily life. When you were in bed by yourself at four A.M., you could hear them slip their tethers and begin production of a horror movie in which you were the star, except you had no control of the events that were about to take place. How did you deal with it? You could try reds, four fingers of Jack, or even Nytol. Except you usually mortgaged the next day for a few hours of drugged sleep. There was another way: You could drop a solitary round in the cylinder of your .38 and pull back the hammer and, with one soft squeeze of the trigger, put the problem out of your mind forever.

Somehow Gretchen had escaped the life she had fallen into. But after she had shown mercy and trust to a rogue cop who had ridiculed her in front of other men, he had repaid the favor by drugging and binding her and torturing her with his genitalia. How did you address a situation like that? Did you hand your girl over to the system and hope she wasn’t degraded again? Did you allow her to return to the criminal life she had freed herself from? Did you allow others to wad up her life like a piece of used Kleenex and throw it away?

What conclusion would any reasonable person come to?

Clete wrote a note on the back of an envelope and propped the envelope against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. Then he pulled a duffel bag from the closet and checked its contents: a cut-down twelve-gauge Remington pump, a box of double-aught bucks and pumpkin balls that he had hand-loaded, a .25-caliber semi-auto with acid-burned serial numbers, a push-button stiletto, latex gloves, plastic ligatures, a lead-weighted blackjack that could break a two-by-four in half, handcuffs, a set of lock picks, brass knuckles, a bottle of bleach, a slim jim, nylon fishing line, and duct tape.

Restraint, reason, working within the system?

Fuck that.

He carried the duffel bag outside and put it in the trunk of the Caddy and drove away.

The note on the table read:

One hour later, Gretchen woke and did not know where she was; nor, for the moment, did she remember the events that had occurred in the home of Bill Pepper or on the banks of the Blackfoot River. Then she realized the sleep was an illusion and the reality was the assault on her person committed by Bill Pepper. The touch of his hands and his genitalia seemed to cling to her skin like wet cobweb, and the more she rubbed her hands on herself, the more she seemed to re-create what he had done to her, as though she had become a surrogate for the man who assaulted her.

She walked to the kitchen table and read the note Clete had left. She set it down and stood for a long time under the lightbulb that hung directly over her head, trying to think of answers to her situation and his. Through the window, she saw a cinnamon cub come out of the trees on the hillside and work his way through the fence in the moonlight. Albert had sent a chain e-mail through the valley telling others that the cub had been separated from his mother and to be careful while driving down the dirt road. The cub pulled his hind foot loose from the fence, the smooth wire twanging on the posts, then disappeared into the tall grass, creating a path like a submarine gliding just below the surface of the ocean. When Gretchen stepped out on the gallery, the cub bounded across the creek and through the cottonwoods, his rump bouncing up and down in the moonlight.

Gretchen felt a tear in her eye as she watched the cub scramble under the rail fence on the far side of the pasture and head up the hill over rocks and snags into the darkness, the slag from an old geological slide rattling down the incline.

Bill Pepper had lied to her about everything except one item. He’d told the truth when he said he had thrown her tote bag in a tree by the side of the dirt road. What he had not told her was his motivation, which was probably to show his contempt for her possessions and to create a situation where he would continue to control her when she was forced to climb naked into a tree to recover what he had taken from her.

She removed her Airweight .38 from under her pillow and placed it in the bag, alongside the expandable baton and can of Mace, which were still in the bag when she plucked it out of the tree. Then she put on her scarf and her red nylon jacket, the same kind James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. As she drove slowly under the arch onto the road in her chopped-down pickup, the subdued power of the Merc engine vibrating through the floor stick into her palm, she thought she saw the cub moving through the trees and wondered if he would find safe harbor for the night.

Bill Pepper turned his van off the two-lane highway and descended a gravel road through a grove of birch trees to the edge of Swan Lake. The moon was above the mountains, turning the lake into an oxidized mirror filled with pools of both shadow and light, the dark green sweep of the weeds as thick and undulating as wheat below the surface. He got out of his van and glanced once over his shoulder at the highway, then entered the shingled cottage at the bottom of the incline and locked the door behind him.

Bill Pepper loved his cottage. It was snug and warm during the hunting season, and in summer it was a retreat from the city and the tourists who flocked to western Montana and clogged the highways with their campers and mobile homes. This night was different; the lake and the cottage provided little comfort for the problems that had beset him. A heart-pounding fear had followed him all the way from Missoula, fouling his blood and his thoughts and his vision and any hope of restoring his self-respect. For the first time in his life, Bill Pepper wondered if he was a coward.

Couldn’t he take the heat? He’d been a patrolman in South Central and Compton and what the Hispanics called East Los, and he’d taken sniper fire through his windshield on the Harbor Freeway. Pimps and dealers got off the streets when they saw him coming. Black hookers did lap dances for him in his cruiser. An unpopular Crip who had spent two years in isolation in Pelican Bay made fun of his accent and kept calling him Goober and “Bell Pepper wit’ the big belly” when Pepper tried to question him about an armed robbery. Bill smiled tolerantly and looked once over his shoulder and then smiled again just before he pinned the Crip’s head against a brick wall with a baton and spat in his face and broke his windpipe. The irony was that the street people and even members of the Eighth Street Crips started yelling at his cruiser from the sidewalks, “Hey, Mr. Bill, you de motherfuckin’ man!”

He set his Glock on the coffee table in the small living room and looked out at the vastness of the lake and the Swan Peaks rising like jagged tin in the south, and directly across from the cottage, a thickly wooded mountain that was black against a sky twinkling with stars. Just one week ago opportunities had been opening up for him right and left: He had money in the bank, a new van, and was reporting to one of the richest men in the United States. Then it all went south because of a girl named Gretchen Horowitz. An idle remark about her being butch, that’s all it was, and he got a shitload of grief dropped on his head. How about the uniformed deputy who wised off first? Why didn’t the girl go after him?

He had not turned on the lights in the cottage. He got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen and took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator, then sat back down and uncapped a pint of brandy and mixed it with milk in a jelly glass and drank it in the dark. The leafy canopy of the birch trees was swaying in the moonlight, the shadows sliding back and forth on his lawn and porch. If Bill Pepper had learned any lesson in life, it was that terrible events always had small beginnings. His father had befriended a Negro vagabond and lost his life. The Watts riot had begun not because of police beating an innocent person but because a crowd had gathered when a patrolman arrested a black taxi driver who was DWI. Within days National Guardsmen were firing .30-caliber machine guns into apartment buildings and eighty-one people were dead and flames were rising from a quarter of the city.

He could have squared the situation with the girl even after molesting her. But he’d found out today his troubles over her were just beginning. She was important to people for reasons he didn’t understand. Who was she, anyway? Why were these other people coming down on him? They acted like he knew everything about her. The truth was, he knew nothing about her. If he’d known anything about her, he would have left her alone.

How had he let her get under his skin? How could he explain that to others when he couldn’t explain it to himself? She was attractive, certainly. No, that wasn’t the right word. She was beautiful. Her eyes were mysterious and alluring and a little dangerous and at the same time vulnerable. She was a young girl buried inside a body that was every man’s wet dream. He knew his thoughts were sick, but he couldn’t help desiring her. No man could. He was only human. Maybe his feelings were even fatherly, he told himself.

She’s getting to you again, he thought. You know the real reason for your fascination with her. She’s not afraid. Not of you, not of anyone, not of anything, not even death at the hands of a man inserting a knife blade between her neck and collar, inches from her carotid.

He emptied his glass and filled it again, this time not bothering to stir it, drinking the brandy as fast as he could get it down. He thought he heard a tree limb break and fall into the yard. Or was that the deer coming down to drink from the lake? He had told that cop and his daughter from Louisiana that he wanted to go back to Mobile. That was still a possibility, wasn’t it? His fellow white officers at the LAPD had never understood Bill Pepper’s attitude toward people of color. He had no resentment toward them; he felt comfortable in their midst and didn’t blame them because a deranged colored vagabond had killed his father. The group he couldn’t abide was white trash like Wyatt Dixon, the kind of man who visited his odium on other Southerners, the kind of man who reminded Bill Pepper of the alleyway he lived on in Macon.

He lit a cigarette and poured more brandy in his glass and watched it swirl inside the milk. He drank the glass almost to the bottom, hoping he could stop the process taking place in his head. What did the drunks at A.A. meetings call it? Mind racing? That was it. Your head seemed to explode, like a basketball with barbed wire wrapped around it. Something even more serious was happening inside Bill Pepper’s head. The world as he knew it was ending, the filmstrip ripping loose from the reel and snapping in front of the projector’s light, throwing one disjointed image after another onto the screen.

Where had it all gone wrong? Secretly, he knew the answer to his question, and the problem was not the girl. Rich people did not care about people like Bill Pepper. To them, cops had the same status as yardmen. He had played the fool with Love Younger, trying to ingratiate himself, violating every protocol of his profession, believing that Younger would give him a job as a security expert or even make him a personal assistant. In fact, men like Love Younger wouldn’t take the time to spit in your mouth if you were dying of thirst.

The wind was picking up outside, cutting long V’s across the surface of the lake. Again he heard a sudden crack and a cascading sound like a limb snapping from the trunk of a birch and falling against the side of the cottage. He had never been this afraid, and worse, for the first time in his life, the booze wasn’t working. His fear ate right through it, the way a hot skillet vaporizes a drop of water. He looked at his hands. They were shaking.

Write it down, a voice said. If they get you, leave something behind that tells people you didn’t deserve this. Tell them you’re Bill Pepper and you were old-school at LAPD and you wronged the Horowitz girl but you’re sorry and you even told her you’d like to look after her. Yes, tell them, Bill Pepper. Don’t go silently into that good night.

Where had he heard that line? Then he remembered. It came from a black prostitute who worked as an independent on South Vernon Avenue. She had cooked her head with crystal meth but was fascinated with books he had never heard of. She used to ball him for free and whisper lines of poetry to him while she spread herself on his thighs in the back of his cruiser in an alleyway behind a Vietnamese grocery. What a thing to remember, here on a lake in western Montana at the close of day. He remembered her with tenderness rather than lust and wondered if she was still alive. Or maybe it was Bill Pepper who had fried his mush and not the black prostitute and none of this was real.

Using only a penlight, he sat at the kitchen table and wrote these words on top of a flattened paper bag: Some guys think I’m tight with the Horowitz girl at Albert Hollister’s ranch. I’m not. I’ve used up nine of the twenty-four hours they gave me. If you find this and not my body, they got me. I’m sorry for what I did to that girl. As far as the rest of it is concerned, fuck it.

He signed his name and under it wrote his LAPD badge number. Up on the two-lane, a car slowed and then accelerated, its headlights bouncing off the trees and the mountainside that bordered the far side of the asphalt. Bill Pepper went into the yard, his Glock hanging from his hand, the wind cold on his face, a stray raindrop or two striking his skin. Farther down the shore, lights were burning in a house close to the water. The glow reflected on the waves sliding under a dock where a red canoe was tied. The sight of the occupied house and the canoe bobbing in the chop and the waves sliding on the sand cheered Bill Pepper up and made him wonder if he hadn’t been too pessimistic, too hard on himself, too quick to write off the rest of life.

He turned in a full circle, his arms stretched out like a bird’s wings. There were no cars on the two-lane, no one hiding in the trees, no powerboat approaching from the far side of the lake. He went back inside and turned on the kitchen light to show his absence of fear, then started in on a plate of fried chicken and deviled eggs that had been in the refrigerator all week. It was cold and delicious, and he ate it hungrily with his fingers, washing it down with milk, his melancholia finally lifting, his eye on his spinning rod in the corner. It wasn’t too late to fling a red-and-white-striped Mepps in the water, he told himself. The rainbow were in close to shore, down in the weeds, hiding from the pike. They fed by the moon and, at this time of evening, would hit anything he threw at them, bending the rod’s tip to the surface, stripping line off the reel. Yes, he thought, to hell with the girl, to hell with the guys who thought he knew something he didn’t, and to hell with his own foolish behavior. A man had a right to catch trout at moonrise on a Friday night.

Then he heard a sound that shouldn’t have been there, a hand turning the front doorknob and then releasing it, the sole of a shoe scraping on the concrete step as the person stepped onto the grass and disappeared into the shadows.

Bill Pepper picked up the Glock and went out the back door. The wind was blowing harder, shredding leaves from the branches overhead, rocking the canoe with a metronomic beat against the dock. “Who’s out there?” he said.

There was no reply.

Bill Pepper walked around the side of the house into the front yard and shone his penlight on the lawn and concrete steps but could see no depressions in the grass or mud smears on the steps. He looked at the lights of the house down the shore and thought about knocking on the door, introducing himself, inviting everyone over for a drink. That would be the coward’s way. He walked down to the lakeside, constantly glancing back over his shoulder, his breath wheezing in his nose. Up the slope, by the corner of the cottage, he thought he saw a figure step from behind a tree and stare straight at him. He lifted the penlight into the darkness but could see nothing except a car passing on the two-lane and the bonelike whiteness of the birch trunks in the headlights. Calm down, he told himself. You’re going into the DTs, that’s all it is.

That’s all it is? a voice mocked him. The DTs were a minor consideration? He was that sick? Then he heard a loud thud, and this time he knew the sound was not a product of his imagination. It was heavy and solid, like a sack of grain smacking down on the roof. He lifted the beam of the penlight just as a cougar jumped from the cottage roof into a tree and, in one bound, sprang off a limb and landed on four feet in the yard.

The cougar must have been six feet from tail to nose. Its coat was yellow and gray, and white around the mouth and on the belly, a dark streak of fur running up the nose between the eyes. Its tail flipped as though discharging the tension in its body.

“This is my place. You’re trespassing,” Bill Pepper said.

The cougar seemed to slink away, then turned and walked in a figure eight. It stopped and looked at Bill Pepper again, sniffing at the air.

“Go back up the mountain where you belong. Go on, now. I don’t want to shoot you.”

The moon broke from behind a cloud, and Bill Pepper could see the muscular smoothness of the cougar’s neck and forequarters, the thickness of its feet, the ribs that looked stenciled above the sag of the belly. The cougar’s whiskers were as stiff as wire. It turned and ran along the shore, leaping over a creek that fed into the lake, the whiteness of its hindquarters showing under its tail in the moonlight.

Well, what do you know? Bill Pepper said to himself.

Except his satisfaction in standing up to the cougar was short-lived. He could not explain away the doorknob turning and the sole of somebody’s shoe scraping on the concrete step. And what about the figure he’d thought he saw among the trees? He walked to the front of the house and examined the ground and saw nothing that indicated anybody had been there in the last week except him.

“If anybody is out there, I’m yours for the asking,” he called out. “Come and get it. I’d love to have a tête-à-tête with you.”

The only sounds he heard were the wind and the husks of winter leaves tumbling across the cottage roof, perhaps a pinecone rolling down the incline. “I don’t care what you do to me,” he said. “Before I check out, I’ll paint the bushes.”

He waited in the silence, then went back in the house and clicked on all the lights, in control again, his forearms pumped. He was Bill Pepper, the scourge of East Los, the Bama Badass cruising South Central, a cigarette hanging in his mouth, the friend of street people from Adams Boulevard down to Hawthorne. He had been in the middle of the Rodney King riots and had carried a two-hundred-pound black woman out of a burning building on his back. He’d still have his badge if a queer-bait bicycle cop in West Venice hadn’t hung a second DWI on him. It wasn’t fair. None of it. The murder of his father, the loss of his home in Mobile, the shanty his mother and siblings had lived in on the backside of Macon. He wanted to smash his fist into the wall.

Standing at the kitchen table under the lightbulb, he drank the last of the brandy in the bottle and stuffed the Glock back in its holster and picked up his spinning rod and went out the back door. Someone in the house down the shore had turned on Rhapsody in Blue. The skies were clearing, the stars were out. It was a perfect night. Except for the fact that he hadn’t relieved himself in two hours and his bladder was bursting. He unzipped his trousers.

You joining ranks with the Wyatt Dixons of the world? a voice said. Why not get yourself some Copenhagen and a Styrofoam spit cup while you’re at it?

He returned to the house and walked through the kitchen and into the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom. In under a second, his universe turned upside down.

The bone-crunching pain that exploded in the back of his head could have come from a sap or a chunk of pipe with a bonnet on it or maybe someone touching a Taser to his scalp. It didn’t matter. He crashed against the wall, taking the telephone stand down with him, landing on his face, his nose bleeding. He wanted to crawl away, but his arms wouldn’t work properly. A figure that smelled like rain and leaves and body heat was pulling his wrists behind him, fitting handcuffs on them, squeezing the steel tongues tightly into the flesh.

“Who are you?” Bill Pepper said.

The figure released his wrists and walked through the cottage, clicking off all the lights. The hallway dropped into total darkness. The figure closed the door to the bathroom and the kitchen and then turned Bill Pepper over and looked down at him.

“Tell me what you want,” Bill Pepper said, straining to see the face. “Who sent you here? I can’t fix anything unless you tell me what you want.”

He heard a sound that made him think of metal snipping against metal. “No, please,” he said. “I haven’t done anything to deserve that. Please don’t do that. Listen to me. There’s no reason for this.”

He stared up at the face coming closer to his own, his viscera turning to water, the music of George Gershwin disappearing inside a voice he hardly recognized as his own.