Swan Peak

CHAPTER 28

AFTER THE CARGO van stopped, someone slid open the side door, and Candace felt a rush of cool air and mist in her face. Through the loose space in the tape, she saw a framed-up two-story building, half of it walled with logs. A yellow backhoe was parked in the trees, its lights on, a pile of dirt glistening by the steel bucket. A work-booted man in a rumpled black suit walked heavily across the clearing and grabbed Jimmy Dale Greenwood by the shirt and the back of his belt and dragged him across the ground to the edge of a pit. Then he used one foot to shove him over the edge.

The three men who had kidnapped and bound Candace were still inside the vehicle, smoking cigarettes, uncomfortable with what they were becoming witness to, trying to figure out a way to extricate themselves and still get paid by their employer.

“Put her in the house,” the driver said.

“What for?” Layne, the blond man, said.

“We don’t know what for. That’s the point,” the driver said. “Let’s put her in the house and get out of here. We delivered the Indian. That was our job. We didn’t see the rest of it. The girl brought herself here. It’s not on us.”

“What about el geeko?” Layne said.

“What about him?” the driver asked.

“We just gonna drive off?” Layne said.

Candace could hear the men in front turning around in their seats to visually confirm the naked fear they had heard in Layne’s question. The man in the front passenger seat said, “Yeah, just drive off. What, you worried about our friend’s feelings out there?”

“I’m for it if you guys are,” Layne said. “I was just saying…”

“Saying what?” the driver asked.

“That guy has got a long memory.”

Candace could hear no sound in the van except the drumming of the rain on the roof.

“Put her in the house, Layne,” the driver said.

“Me?” Layne said. “Put her in there yourself. I ain’t touching her.”

But their argument was moot. The man in the rumpled suit returned to the van and lifted Candace up like a bale of hay by the twine. He carried her to the edge of the pit and swung her out into space, where for a moment she saw the sheen of the fir and pine trees in the lights of the backhoe, just before she plummeted into the pit.

She thudded on top of another body, her bones jarring inside her. She thought she had landed on Jimmy Dale Greenwood, but he was lying against the wall of the pit, his face turned from her, his hands jerking furiously against the tape that was still cinched around his wrists. Then she realized a third person, someone she didn’t know, was in the pit with them.

The mist was drifting down into the excavation in the lights of the backhoe. The person she had landed on was a man. His face was staring straight into hers, and neither his eyes nor his mouth were taped. His hair was brown and shaggy, like dark straw piled on a scarecrow’s head. She was perhaps six inches from him, and she kept expecting him to blink, to send her a signal of some kind, to show recognition of their common humanity and plight, maybe even to give her a glimmer of hope.

Then she saw the dark hole in his hairline, and she realized his eyes hadn’t blinked, that his slack jaw and his parted mouth were not those of a man preparing to whisper a secret to her. Below one of his eyes was a chain of scar tissue, the socket recessed, mashed back into the skull. Where had she seen him?

At the Wellstones’ front gate, she told herself. They had killed their own security guard.

“We figure we’ll head on out,” she heard Layne say.

“No, you won’t,” the black-suited figure standing by the lip of the pit replied.

“Our work is done, bub,” Layne said.

“What’d you call me?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re saying I’m nothing?”

“No, I didn’t say that.”

“Then what did you say?”

“I called you ‘bub.’ It’s just a word.”

“Then you won’t mind taking it back.”

“So I take it back. It’s just a word. No offense meant.”

“Where’s that leave you now?”

“Say again?”

“It leaves you back where you started when you were telling me you’re about to head out. Is that where you are? You’re heading out?”

“Not necessarily.”

“That’s what I thought. What’s my name?”

“I don’t know your name.”

“So you thought that gave you the right to call me ‘bub’?… Don’t turn your back on me. What’s my name?”

“It’s ‘sir,’ if that’s what you want.”

“No, what’s my name?”

“It’s ‘sir.’”

“You’d better get out of the rain. You’re going to catch cold. Your nose is already running.”

The dirt under the dark-suited man’s boots sifted down on top of Candace’s head. She stared helplessly at Jimmy Dale Greenwood’s back. He had stretched the tape on his wrists to the point where he could get an index finger under the adhesive and start working it down over one thumb. High above her, she saw lightning flare inside the thunderheads, like a match igniting a pool of white gasoline.

CLETE AND I should have taken my pickup truck and not the Caddy. Most hillside roads in Montana were cut years ago by logging companies and left unseeded and at the mercy of the elements. With the passage of time, they had become potholed, eroded, strewn with rocks and boulders and sometimes fire-blackened trees that had washed out of the slopes. The Caddy bounced into a hole and went down on the transmission. When Clete tried to shift into reverse, we heard a sound like Coca-Cola bottles clanking and breaking inside a steel box. The Caddy would not budge in reverse and was high-centered and couldn’t get out of the hole by going forward.

Clete looked glumly through the windshield. The road wound higher and higher through the trees, with water rilling down the incline. We saw no sign of a structure of any kind, much less a lodge under construction.

“What a mess,” he said. “Maybe this isn’t even the right road.”

“When we first turned off, I thought I saw headlights behind us. Maybe it was Troyce Nix,” I said.

“If it’s Nix, he’s coming up the road on the braille system. There’re no headlights behind us.”

“I saw them, Clete.”

“Okay, you saw them. We shouldn’t have listened to Jamie Sue. This is three monkeys fucking a football.”

“Why don’t you get out of your bad mood?” I said.

“My bad mood? Look at my car. It’s probably impaled. The transmission is frozen in low. My paint job probably looks like a herd of cats used it for a scratching post.”

“We’ll get the jack out and bounce the car out of the hole. We’ll just keep bouncing it in a circle until we can point it back down the road.”

“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 rawness 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 laughed 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.

He cut his headlights when he entered the dirt road, then chose to continue on foot rather than risk blowing the edge he had accidentally gained on the Wellstone brothers. He parked his truck amid trees, locked the doors, and set out walking on the road, his nine-millimeter stuck in the back of his belt, his leather-sewn, lead-weighted blackjack in his pants pocket, an aluminum baseball bat gripped in his right hand.

When the Wellstones’ pickup had passed him out on the highway while he was standing in front of the café, he had recognized Ridley and Leslie inside, but he had not been sure who else was in the cab. He was convinced the agenda of the Wellstones was a simple one: They wanted revenge against Jimmy Dale Greenwood for the infidelity of Jamie Sue. Candace had blundered into the middle of the abduction, and the Wellstones’ hired goons had taken her along with Jimmy Dale to keep her from dropping the dime on their operation and preventing them from getting back to Leslie Wellstone with the freight.

Wellstone didn’t like being a cuckold. He wanted revenge, and he wanted his wife taught an object lesson. It wasn’t an unnatural reaction. But if the only issue were revenge, at least of a conventional kind – a thorough beating of the lover, a few broken bones, maybe – why hadn’t the goons simply given Candace a warning about keeping her mouth shut? Why hadn’t they dropped her off on the road somewhere, given her a few bucks, and said they were sorry, they were straightening out a breed who didn’t know how to keep his twanger in his Levi’s?

Because they planned to kill Jimmy Dale Greenwood, and they planned to kill the witness who could finger them for his abduction, Troyce thought. Something else was going down, too. The Wellstones were religious frauds, and their house was about to collapse on their heads. Maybe they were tidying up on a large scale, washing the blackboard clean and starting over. Or maybe a freak like Leslie Wellstone enjoyed hurting people. Troyce could not forget Wellstone’s instructions to his Hispanic housekeeper about the surfaces Candace had touched. Troyce wished he had settled the account right there in Wellstone’s living room.

Up ahead, he saw the Caddy owned by Clete Purcel. It had been abandoned at an odd angle in the middle of the road. An elevated jack and its stand lay in the mud by the front bumper. The doors of the Caddy were open, the keys still hanging in the ignition, the interior light manually set on “off.” Troyce looked in the glove box and under the seats for weapons but found none. He concluded that the interior of the vehicle had been rifled, which meant its occupants probably had not deserted the car of their own accord.

He walked over a knoll and saw headlights progressing slowly down the road and two figures walking inside the beams with their hands clasped behind their necks. He went deeper into the woods and kept walking parallel to the road, his bowels like water, his rectum constricting, his head as light as a helium-filled balloon. Ahead he could see other lights down in a depression or a clearing, and he thought he smelled diesel exhaust and heard the sound of a heavy machine idling, one without a muffler.

The wind gusted off the lake below and swept up through the timber, pattering raindrops on Troyce’s hat, the air blooming with a smell like fresh oxygen. He knelt down in the second growth, tilting his face toward the ground, freezing behind the trunk of a huge pine. A procession of people on foot, with the pickup behind them, wound its way up the road. Through the rain-beaded side window of the truck, Troyce thought he could make out the face of Jamie Sue Wellstone.

What was she doing here? he asked himself. Where was Candace? Where was Jimmy Dale? Had Troyce made a terrible mistake and followed the wrong vehicle and the wrong group of people? Was Candace somewhere else, depending on him, waiting helplessly for him to save her from the men who had stolen her out of the parking lot behind the bar? The possibility that he had screwed up and let her down when she needed him most made him almost insane with anger at himself. Was this punishment for what he had done to Cujo in Iraq? Was this punishment for what he had done to Jimmy Dale? He wanted to rush the Wellstone vehicle and tear both brothers apart and do as much damage as possible to their hired help as well.

No, “damage” wasn’t the word. As always, when Troyce felt a red balloon of anger blossom in his chest, he smelled an odor like stale sweat and machinist grease and gasoline soaked into coarse fabric. He felt a man’s whiskers on his face, a soiled hand unbuttoning his pants, a man’s labored whiskey breath working its way across his skin. In these moments Troyce knew why men could kill other men as easily as they did.

In his mind’s eye, he saw himself swinging the bat, doing amounts of bone-breaking injury to the Wellstones for which they would never find medical remedy.

CLETE AND I stared dumbly at the man in the mask. Ridley and Jamie Sue Wellstone and the man with the cut-down pump were climbing out of the purple pickup. The man with the cut-down pump was wiping his cheek on his sleeve. He wore a damp dark blue tropical shirt that looked like Kleenex wrapped on his muscular torso.

“Problem?” Leslie said to him.

“She slapped my face,” the man said. “She cut the skin with her nails.”

Leslie laughed. “Put it on my tab.”

“I don’t like a woman hitting me, Mr. Wellstone,” the gunman said.

“It could be worse. She could be your wife,” Leslie said.

“Let’s finish it,” Ridley said, propped on his braces, a flicker of pain in his expression from the ride down the potholed road.

“I think the Dio family clap has finally climbed from your dick up into your brain, Sal,” Clete said. “Look around you. You think all these people are going to forget what they see here?”

Leslie Wellstone walked toward Clete, a nine-millimeter hanging from his left hand. He was no longer smiling. I saw him whisper in Clete’s ear and then step back, his eyes glinting with whatever sliver of glass or ounce of poison he had managed to put inside Clete’s system.

“Why don’t you share it with me, Sal?” I said.

“I look like a dead Italian?” he said.

“Yeah, you’re Sally Dio,” I said. “Punks can read books and hire speech coaches, but you’re still the same punk who pretended he was a blues musician or whatever else was in style at the time. You’re a gutter rat, Sal. It’s in your genes.”

“Know what I was telling Clete, Dave? That both of you are about to be dead for a long time. But it’s going to come to you in pieces. Mr. Waxman over there loves his work. There are anonymous mounds all over this country that are silent tributes to his skill.”

“He’s the guy who killed Ridley Wellstone’s wife and stepdaughter, isn’t he?” I said.

“When you’re in the ground, you won’t be dead, Dave. You’ll be choking on dirt and trying to get it out of your eyes and ears and stop it from raining down on your chest. Just before everything goes black, maybe there’ll be a big illumination for you, and you can talk to all the other people he’s killed. You think that’s the way it’s going to come, Dave? That the earth will crush the light out of your eyes and in your last seconds you’ll realize there’s no mystery about life, that you’re just a sorry sack of worm food down there in the hole with all the other sacks of worm food?”

“Do what you’re going to do and be done. Listening to you is a real drag,” I said.

His eyes locked on mine, and for a second I saw his self-assurance slip, as though the ridiculing voice of his father, a gangster who had run all the vice along the Texas coast, was echoing in his memory. Then the glint of cruelty that defined the Sally Dio I had known on Flathead Lake years ago came back into his eyes. The tip of his tongue moved over his lips. “Watch closely.”

He walked to the three men who had been waiting inside the cargo van when we arrived. He rested his right hand – the one that resembled a shriveled monkey’s paw – on the shoulder of a blond man and looked at him. “The woman hit you in the face with a tire iron?” he said.

“I got careless, that’s all,” the blond man said.

“We can’t have broads doing that to us, can we? You want to do the honors?”

“Sir?”

“Want to pop her? I’m going to let Moo-Moo pop my wife if he wants to.”

“No sir, we were just doing a job, Mr. Wellstone.”

“No, no, when somebody hits you with a tire iron, it’s personal. Come over here, fellows. Jimmy Dale ruined another man’s marriage and deserves a special fate. The woman, however, is just a meddlesome pain in the neck. I think she should receive rough mercy, don’t you?”

The three men from the van followed Sally Dio to the edge of the pit and stared down inside it, looking at one another, looking again into the pit, unsure what they should say next. It was obvious none of them wanted to be there. It was also obvious they feared the man who called himself Leslie Wellstone and did not want to displease him.

Then Sally Dio turned around and said, “What?” He said it as though someone behind him had spoken to him. “Wait here a minute, fellows,” he said, and began walking toward his brother. As he did, he nodded to the man holding the Mac-10.

I had seen a Mac-10 at a weapons exhibition and had even held one in my hands. But I had never seen one fired. I had been told that a Mac-10 could discharge from one thousand to sixteen hundred rounds of forty-five-caliber ammunition per minute. It was difficult to imagine firepower of that magnitude in a weapon so compact it could be held and aimed like a handgun.

Billy opened up, the suppressor eating most of the sound of the discharge, the spent shell casings clinking and bouncing on the ground. In a brief instant, the three victims seemed to stare in disbelief at the reversal of their fortunes, their mouths dropping open, their palms rising defensively. Then their clothes erupted with red flowers, their faces and skulls bursting into a bloody mist. They jackknifed backward into the pit, and I heard them strike the earth heavily, and then it was over except for the sound of the last ejected shells tinkling on the dirt.

Jamie Sue Wellstone was weeping in the background, her arms clenched across her chest, her back shaking, as though she were standing inside a cold wind without a coat.

“Do you want to get down in the pit by yourself, Clete, or do you want our friend Harold to put you in there?” Sally Dio said. “No matter what you do, no matter what you say, the end result will be the same. You can put yourself in the ground, or Billy can shoot you in the legs, and he and Harold can do it for you. But you’re going into the ground, Clete, and you’re going into it alive. Then Jamie Sue and Dave are going to join you. Maybe you and Jamie Sue can have a chat, a last bit of pillow talk.”

“I guess that means we’ll never be pals. So how about we leave it at this?” Clete said. He gathered all the saliva and bile in his mouth and spit it full in Sally Dio’s face.

Dio recoiled. He lifted his shirt and wiped Clete’s spittle off his mutilated face. But before he could speak, his hired man Billy, who had dropped the empty magazine from the Mac-10 and replaced it with a fresh one, clutched his arm. “There’s somebody down the slope, Mr. Wellstone. I just saw him.”

“Nobody came up the road. Nobody could be there. You probably saw a bear,” Dio said.

“No sir, I saw a guy in a hat.”

“Get down there, Moo-Moo, and check it out,” Ridley Wellstone said to the other gunman.

“What do you want me to do with him, sir?”

“Bring him back or kill him.”

“Are you gonna be all right, sir?” the gunman asked.

“Yes, I’m fine. Do what I say.”

But Ridley Wellstone was not fine. The strain of standing up on his braces was taking its toll. His face was gray and deeply lined, his forearms starting to tremble slightly. “This is all on you, you incompetent idiot,” he said to Dio.

“If you and Sonny Click had let that college girl alone, none of this would have happened,” Dio replied. “You couldn’t wait to put your dick in a coed who worked as a janitor. Then you let her boyfriend shove you down the stairs. You destroyed everything we put together, Ridley.”

“You’re right, my friend. I let you and your degenerate family bring your graft and misery into our lives, and I was a colossal fool for thinking I could turn a piece of shit into a gentleman. In his way, my brother was an honorable man. He didn’t deserve to have his name soiled by a man such as yourself. My father wouldn’t have let you clean our toilet.”

Out in the darkness, I heard the man with the cut-down shotgun shout, “Down here. He’s down here.”

“Who’s down there?” Dio called out.

But there was no reply.

TROYCE NIX KNELT behind a huge boulder shaped like the top half of a toadstool extending from the soft carpet of grassy earth that surrounded it; he was careful not to clink the aluminum bat against the stone. Down below, he could hear small waves sliding up on the rocks along the lakefront. Up the slope, the fir and pine trees pointed into the mist and glistened with moisture against the glow from the clearing. He could hear someone working his way down the incline a step at a time, trying to find safe purchase, his feet sliding on small rocks.

Whoever the man was, he had not been a combat soldier. Rather than zigzag through deep cover with the hillside solidly at his back, he had found a deer trail below the clearing and was following it in parallel fashion, so that his silhouette was backlit by the headlights of the Wellstone pickup truck.

But Troyce soon realized he had misjudged his adversary. The figure stooped over, temporarily disappearing from sight. Then Troyce heard a hard object knock against a tree behind him. He jerked his head around for an instant. When he looked back up the slope, the figure had not reappeared. The man had probably thrown a rock through the canopy, and Troyce had taken the bait.

The man up the slope was not using a flashlight, either, or trying to bang his way through the undergrowth or stay on the deer trail. He was somewhere immediately above Troyce, his eyes sufficiently adjusted to the darkness, occupying the high ground. Troyce hunkered down, one knee sinking into the velvetlike, damp earth, the coldness seeping through his trousers. He pulled his nine-millimeter from the back of his belt and clicked off the safety. But he also knew the minute he gave away his position, or gave away his identity, the Wellstones would immediately use Candace’s life to force his surrender, provided she was in the clearing.

That was the problem. He didn’t know what he was dealing with. Was Candace somewhere else? What if he got smoked on the hillside in an effort to rescue a couple of rogue Louisiana flatfeet? Candace would probably be killed, never knowing that he had tried to save her. But that was the way his entire life had been: never knowing who his adversaries actually were, never understanding the rules, never trusting anyone or anything except his own primal instincts. Early on, he had learned that the world respected brute force and brute force alone, no matter what people claimed. They made a show of venerating saints and men and women of peace, but when they were against the wall, they wanted their enemies hosed down with a flamethrower.

A sour odor rose from his clothes, like the sick smell the glands give off after a long fever. His stomach still felt nauseated and his body weak, as though an intestinal infection had spread throughout his system. He shifted his position, but when he did, the tip of the metal bat scraped against the boulder. He froze, his heart racing. Up above him, he thought he heard a twig break.

“Who’s down there?” the voice of Leslie Wellstone called from the clearing.

But there was no answer. Troyce could hear his own breath wheezing in and out of his chest, and he hated every cigarette he had ever smoked.

Candace, Candace, Candace, he thought. I’m out here. I won’t let you down. Even if they put a bullet through my brain, I’ll be at your side.

He swallowed, closed his eyes, and opened them again. Time to give the guy a taste of his own medicine, he told himself. Troyce pried up a large rock from the sod, hefting it in his palm like a shot put. On one knee, he threw it in an arc down the slope. The trajectory was perfect. It smacked the ground at least forty-five feet below him, then rolled end over end down the hill, creating a sound like a man running.

The man who had gone into hiding stood up from behind some scrub brush and began descending the slope, holding a cut-down shotgun in front of him, digging his shoes into the dirt to keep his balance, using his elbows to knock tree branches away from his eyes.

“Wrong choice, pilgrim,” Troyce said under his breath. He stepped out from behind the boulder and swung the aluminum bat with both hands, twisting his hips, whipping his arms and wrists and shoulders into it. The bat landed squarely across his pursuer’s face, flattening his nose, shattering bone, splattering his dark blue Hawaiian shirt with a spray of what looked like brain matter.

Troyce stared down at the figure at his feet. The man’s eyes looked back at him, glasslike and disjointed in their sockets.

Troyce scooped up the dead man’s shotgun and moved away into the brush in a simian crouch. Above him, Leslie Wellstone called out into the darkness, “Moo-Moo, is that you?”

No, Moo-Moo is taking a long nap, Troyce thought. And now it’s your turn, you freak.

THE MAN WITH the Mac-10 had put Clete and me on our knees. I wanted to believe that Troyce Nix could turn the situation around for us, or that Alicia Rosecrans would show up in a helicopter loaded with her FBI colleagues. I did not want to believe that this was how Clete and I would meet our end. But I knew of many instances when it had happened to better men than I: the two FBI agents who may have been executed on the Oglala reservation in South Dakota; the L.A. cops abducted out of the city and taken to an onion field outside Bakersfield; and closer to home, the three Lafayette cops who were killed by a shotgun at point-blank range when they tried to arrest a man getting off a Greyhound bus.

It can happen as quickly as a drunk driver swinging his car across the center stripe of the two-lane, crashing head-on into your grille. It usually comes when you least suspect it, often in the most innocuous of situations. I guess I had accepted all the aforementioned; I just didn’t want to buy it on my knees.

“Listen to me,” I said to Ridley Wellstone. “When Sal is done with us, you’ll be next.”

“Not true, Mr. Robicheaux. He needs me,” Wellstone replied. I started to speak, but he cut me off. “Don’t say any more. Don’t degrade yourself. I tried to reason with you. Fact is, I begged you to stay out of our affairs. You invited this fate into your life, sir. Accept it like a man.”

You arrogant bastard, I thought.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

“Getting to my feet,” I said. That’s exactly what I was doing, rising from the ground, pushing myself erect, my knees popping, my hands no longer clasped behind my neck.

“Get down on the ground,” the man with the Mac-10 said.

“Sorry, partner. You’re going to have to haul a hundred and ninety pounds of dead meat to that hole if you want me in it,” I said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clete rising up beside me. “That makes two of us, asshole,” he said.

“Get up here, Moo-Moo,” Sally Dio shouted down the slope.

Again there was no answer, and Sal knew he had a problem on his hands. The man in the mask began walking toward us from the pit. “Give me the Mac. I’ll have all this cleaned up in two minutes,” he said, his words reverberating inside the plastic hollows of the mask.

“Harold?” said Jamie Sue. “Harold, is that you? My God, what are you doing?”

The man in the mask didn’t reply; instead, he seemed to hang his head slightly.

“Harold, look at me,” she said. “What are you doing? You were my friend. I trusted you. Leslie hired you because of me. I told him what a gentleman you are. You came to our revival. You can’t allow yourself to be part of this.”

“Shut up, Jamie Sue,” Dio said. “This guy has been snuffing Ridley’s enemies for years. How do you think those two Hollywood characters ended up dead? The porn producer had been indicted and was going to give up Ridley to a grand jury. So our friend Harold tuned him up and tuned him out at the rest stop.”

“You got a big mouth,” Harold said, turning his gaze on Dio.

“We’ll work this out later. Right now you get down that hillside and see where Billy is,” Dio said.

“I don’t take orders from you,” Harold said.

A breeze blew through the clearing, showering more pine needles into the electric glow, the air blooming again with a smell that was like lake water and schooled-up fish. Then I saw something I couldn’t believe, an image that was both incongruous and nonsensical: the top half of Jimmy Dale Greenwood rising from the pit, both of his hands gripped on a snub-nose thirty-eight revolver, strips of duct tape still hanging from his wrists. It took a moment for me to realize what had happened: The three men who had been machine-pistoled into the pit had been armed. Somehow Jimmy Dale had gotten loose and had taken a weapon off one of their bodies. He aimed the revolver straight out in front of him. I saw him close one eye and pull the trigger.

The report sounded like that of a starter gun at a track meet. The shot went wide and disappeared with a pinging sound down in the trees. Jimmy Dale pulled the trigger twice more, and Sally Dio’s left leg buckled under him, just like someone had kicked him behind the knee. Billy tried to swing his Mac-10 clear of Dio for a shot, but Clete Purcel was all over him, pinning his arms at his sides, picking him up and slamming him to the ground, kicking the gun from his hand, stomping the side of his head, picking him up again and driving his fist into his face.

I got Sally Dio’s nine-millimeter from his hand and aimed it at the man in the mask. Dio tried to fight with me, but his best blows were like those of a dried-out crustacean – weightless and empty, like Sal himself, a shell of a man whose strength existed only to the degree that he could inculcate fear in others. Oddly, the man in the mask showed no reaction that I could see, as though he was merely a witness to all the events taking place around him.

Clete was still hitting Billy, holding him down with one knee in his chest, hitting him so hard he had started to beg.

“Cletus, ease up,” I said.

“You’re right,” he said, getting to his feet, the Mac-10 in his right hand, his attention focused on the man in the mask, his finger curling inside the trigger guard.

“Don’t do it,” I said.

“He’s going to skate. The sicker they are, the easier they get off on an insanity plea,” he replied.

“That’s just the way it is. We’re not executioners, podna. Lower the piece.”

“No, I’m going to walk him into the woods. Call it Q-and-A time. Who knows how it might work out?” His green eyes were charged with adrenaline, his face slick with sweat, his cheeks as red as apples.

“We don’t give them power. We don’t become like them. Waxman will rot in a cage, and he’ll take Ridley Wellstone down with him. We’ll take two guys off the board instead of one. You want to do their time?”

“Good try,” Clete said.

“You always said it, the Bobbsey Twins are forever. Who am I going to drink Dr Pepper with?”

I saw hesitation in his movements, like an elephant in must suddenly becoming pacified, his size actually deflating, a suppressed grin on his mouth. “You can really rain on a parade, Dave.”

He made Harold Waxman take off his mask and lie down on the ground, then pulled Candace Sweeney and Jimmy Dale Greenwood out of the pit, brushing off their clothes for them as he did, maybe reassuring them in his clumsy fashion that the world was a better place than they had thought.

But in truth, I cannot tell you with any exactitude what happened inside that clearing during a midsummer electric storm west of Swan Lake, Montana. I know that the rain falls and the sun rises on evil men as well as on the good and just. I know that on that particular night we were spared a terrible fate. At the same time, men a theologian would probably term wicked were put out of business. Perhaps we even made a dent in the venal enterprises they represent.

But if there is a greater lesson in what occurred inside that clearing, it’s probably the simple fact that the real gladiators of the world are so humble in their origins and unremarkable in appearance that when we stand next to them in a grocery-store line, we never guess how brightly their souls can burn in the dark.

Or at least that’s the way it seems to me.