Swan Peak

CHAPTER 7

TROYCE NIX’S HOSPITAL window gave onto a terrace planted with mimosa and palm trees, bougainvillea, yellow bugle vine, crown of thorns, and Spanish daggers. In the early-morning hours and at sunset, the automatic sprinklers clicked on and misted the plants and created miniature rainbows above the terrace wall. But Troyce Nix was not interested in the beauty of a tropical garden or the baked hills across the river in Old Mexico or the millions of lights that seemed to come on at night along the dry floodplains of the Rio Grande. His favorite time of day was high noon, right after lunch, when the nurse turned on his morphine drip and the sky turned a blinding white and he found himself inside a vast desert somewhere west of the Pecos where neither God nor civilized man bothered to lay claim, where a solitary figure waited for him, both Troyce’s and the figure’s tracks finally braiding together amid sand dunes that were as tall as mountains.

In Troyce’s dream, the figure wore state-issue blues that were stiff with dried sweat and caked with salt under the armpits. His hair was blown with grit, his lips cracked from dehydration, his work boots split on his feet. The desert was devoid of shadows, even those of carrion birds. The only remnants of modern civilization that Troyce could see were the bodies of automobiles, half buried in the sand, the paint scoured from the metal. As Troyce approached the figure, the water in his canteen sloshing on his hip, he could feel a thickness growing in his loins. He felt his palms starting to tingle and the same sense of expectation that he always experienced just this side of orgasm. He heard sand rilling down the face of a dune, wind whistling through the glassless window of a Model T Ford. He heard the sound of water as he drank it from his canteen, his throat working steadily. He smelled the astringent, reassuring odor of his own manhood as he wiped his face on his shirtsleeve.

He could do and experience all these things because he was alive and growing stronger by the minute, in control of another’s fate, about to measure out justice and vengeance in any fashion he chose.

The figure dressed in state blues was terrified, his mouth opening silently with his fear.

Been thinking about me, Jimmy Dale?

A whole lot, boss. Real sorry about what happened back there. You got some water?

Look down at your pants.

Sir?

You just pissed your britches.

What you gonna do, boss?

Nothing.

Sir?

I’m gonna make you do it to yourself. I’m gonna make you do it to what you love. I’m just gonna watch.

I don’t understand.

You know what Chinamen call the death of a thousand cuts?

No sir.

It’ll be quite a ride.

That don’t sound good, boss.

You don’t know the half of it.

When Troyce Nix would wake from his dream, his throat would be parched, his phallus throbbing, his big, flat-plated chest damp with perspiration. When the male nurse came in to give him fresh ice water and to sponge-bathe him, Troyce would sometimes convince him to turn the drip back on. Then he would lie back in a sleepy pink haze, a sliver of ice on his tongue, mentally constructing his next encounter with Jimmy Dale Greenwood, the images for redress so stark he had to touch the male nurse on the back of the hand to keep his bearings.

But this afternoon was different. In the morning he would be leaving the hospital, perhaps unsteadily, his system laced with painkillers, but leaving nonetheless. The only problem now was the deputy sheriff sitting by his bed, a pencil pusher with soft hands and a pink egg-shaped face and carefully combed hair and breath that smelled of peppermint mouthwash. Unfortunately, the man’s mind-set did not go with his demeanor or appearance. His name was Rawlings, and he was the fourth investigative deputy to visit Troyce Nix’s bedside. He was also the most unrelenting.

“A few millimeters either way and any one of them body thrusts could have done you in,” he said. “I’d buy me a bunch of lottery tickets or go to the dog track. You ever go to the dog track?”

“No,” Troyce answered.

“So you figure it was a tramp hiding in your closet?” Rawlings said. “He was in your house and he hid in your closet when he heard your truck come up the road? That’s what you’re saying?”

“It’s not what I’m saying. It’s what happened,” Troyce said. His chest was crisscrossed with tape and gauze; he shifted himself on the bed to relieve a place where the bandages were binding under his heart.

“And Jimmy Dale Greenwood was digging postholes behind your house or cabin or whatever? Wasn’t no way it was him who hurt you? I mean, here on your statement it says you laid down to take a nap and this guy come out of the closet when you woke up. Wasn’t no way you just got confused about who attacked you?”

“I was fixing to make Greenwood a full trusty. I greased the way for his parole. Why would he attack me?”

“Maybe he was chewing on peyote buttons. I’ve seen Indians stick their hand in a fire when they were souped up on mescal. He might have been down on grand auto, but he also put a knife in a guy.”

“Jimmy Dale Greenwood stole my truck and took off on me when I was near bleeding to death. But it wasn’t him who cut me up. It was a white man, not a breed.”

“Trouble is, that shank your attacker busted off inside you was made from automotive window glass, the same kind that was in the shop where Greenwood worked. What would a tramp be doing with a prison-made shank?”

Troyce turned his head on the pillow and looked at Rawlings. The slash wound on his cheek had gone to the bone, and the connective tissue on one side of his face didn’t work properly. “You wouldn’t call me a liar, would you?”

Rawlings stared into space as though considering the question. He propped the heels of his hands on his thighs and returned Troyce’s stare. “I understand you’re checking out in the morning.”

“That’s right.”

“Going to be doing some traveling, seeing the country, that sort of thing?”

“I got me a little woman in Las Cruces.”

Rawlings nodded thoughtfully. He seemed to watch a fly crawling up the wall. Then he rose from his chair. He touched Troyce Nix on the thigh with his clipboard, through the sheet. “Take care of yourself, bub. Just one reminder, though.”

Troyce waited.

“The worst fate can befall a lawman is to end up stacking time with the same sonsofbitches we been riding herd on,” Rawlings said. “The thought of it makes something inside me shrivel up and die.”

THREE HOURS AFTER Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans’s visit to our cabin, Clete’s Caddy pulled into our yard. The top was up, the maroon finish gleaming with a fresh wax job. Clete got out and shut the door firmly and stared back down the road. The sun was above the mountain crests now, and Albert’s horses had moved into the shade of the cottonwoods along the creek. When the wind gusted through the trees on the hillsides, it made a sound exactly like rushing water. The sound made Clete look around him, as though he wasn’t sure where he was standing. I wondered if he had been drinking.

I told him about my conversation with Alicia Rosecrans. I also told him she believed he had been with Jamie Sue Wellstone that morning. But he seemed distracted, his eyes closing and opening as he sorted through my words.

“Run all that by me again,” he said.

“The feds probably have her under surveillance. They saw you with her at Flathead Lake. They probably saw you at the motel with her, too,” I said.

He rubbed the back of his neck, staring down the road in the direction he had just come from, his consternation growing.

“Where have you been, Clete?” I said.

“To the Express Lube in Missoula.”

“For three hours?”

“No, I picked up a tail. I think it was Lyle Hobbs. I tried to get him to follow me into the mall parking lot. He didn’t take the bait, but I saw the same car again in Lolo. Why would Hobbs be tailing me? Why have I got a pervert like that bird-dogging me?”

“Because Jamie Sue Wellstone’s husband is onto you. Because this is probably a way of life with them. Because she probably pumps everything in sight.”

“Is Molly inside?”

“So what? Molly is your friend, too. You think she likes seeing you swallow a razor blade?”

“Who died and made you God? Lay off me, Streak. Maybe Jamie Sue played me, but maybe not.”

“Don’t even go near thoughts like that. You know what an old fool is? A guy who starts acting like an old fool.”

I saw the injury in his face. My ears were ringing with my own words. I put my hand on his shoulder. It felt like boilerplate. “Take a walk with me,” I said.

“What for?”

“Humor me.”

“Humor you?”

“It’s about the kid who was murdered up on the hill.”

Clete was resistant and irritable, for which I couldn’t blame him. But finally he took a deep breath, and the heat went out of his face, and we walked along the road together like the old friends we were, the wind blowing cool up the valley, the snow atop Lolo Peak wet and bright against a flawless blue porcelain sky.

“I got to thinking about something Seymour Bell’s roommate told us. He said Seymour was both smart and tough. What if the little wood cross and the leather cord you found at the crime scene weren’t torn off the shooter by Seymour or vice versa?”

“Go on.”

“Joe Bim Higgins said there was only one print on the cross – Seymour’s. Higgins assumed the killer had gloves on and tore the cross from Seymour’s neck and flung it down the slope, probably in a rage. But what if Seymour broke the cord on the cross and threw it in the brush for us to find?”

“No, Higgins said there were cuff burns on Seymour’s wrists. If he was forced to ride in a car, his wrists would have been cuffed behind him. He couldn’t have gotten his hands on the cross.”

“Let’s go back up the mountain,” I said.

We walked up the switchback trail through dense stands of fir trees until we reached the crime scene. It was windy and bright when we came out of the shade into sunlight, and both of us were sweating heavily. Far below, we could see the state two-lane that led over Lolo Pass into Idaho, and a long silvery creek meandering through cottonwood trees, the same creek Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and the Indian woman Sacagawea had followed on their way to Oregon.

“What are we looking for?” Clete said.

“Think of it this way: Maybe the killer brought Seymour up here in order to send Albert a message. But what if the motivation was more complicated? What if the killer was after information of some kind?”

“Too much of this is speculative, Dave.”

“No, predators are always cowards. They don’t take chances with guys like Seymour Bell. They kill them outright.”

Clete bit on a hangnail and made a face. “You got a point.”

The crime scene’s forensic integrity had deteriorated dramatically since our first visit there. Deer and elk scat was everywhere. Tree branches were broken, and the soft layer of humus and pine needles was pocked with the hoofprints of large animals. A rotted larch trunk had snapped at ground level and crashed across the anvil-shaped rock that was stippled with Seymour Bell’s blood.

“Figure it this way,” I said. “The boy died within a few feet of that rock. The car tracks are about fifteen feet south of the rock. So everything that happened here probably took place within a circle that had a diameter of not more than twenty-five feet.”

“Yeah?” Clete said.

I walked to the edge of the slope where Clete had found the small wood cross and broken leather cord. What were you trying to tell us, kid? I thought.

“Take a look,” I said.

The rotted larch, shaggy with moss and decay, had cracked cleanly across its base and fallen in one piece, allowing sunlight to flood onto a fir tree next to it. At the bottom of the fir tree’s trunk were gashes in the bark. They were lateral and thin and overlapping, as though a dull metal surface had been jerked repeatedly against the smoothness of the bark. I knelt on one knee and touched them with my fingers. “The killer locked that kid’s wrists around the tree. Look at how the ground is churned up,” I said. “I think maybe he was tortured here.”

“But why would Bell throw away his cross?”

“Because he didn’t want his executioner to take it with him,” I said.

“Yeah, but why would a degenerate motherfucker like that want the kid’s cross? Unless the guy is into fetishism.”

I got to my feet, dusting grains of dirt off my hands. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Dave, if what Seymour’s roommate told us is true – I mean about Seymour being a fighter – maybe there’s another possibility we haven’t looked at.”

I waited for him to continue. In the distance, the wind was blowing the snowcap on Lolo Peak, powdering the sky with it, smudging the light.

“What if we’re not dealing with just one guy?” Clete said.

TROYCE NIX HAD flown into Spokane on pain pills and adrenaline, then had gone directly to a Toyota dealership and purchased a repossessed SUV. The vehicle had to be prepped before Troyce could drive it away, so he checked into a motel on I-90 east of the city and told the salesman to deliver his purchase when it was ready.

The motel was almost to the Idaho line, a leftover from an earlier time, constructed of pink stucco, set back in the deep shadows of cedar trees and fringed with purple neon. Next door was a steak house and saloon that featured live country music. Troyce ate a twenty-ounce porterhouse and sipped a Manhattan while he listened to the music from the bandstand. It wasn’t long before a fellow traveler caught his eye and nodded politely to him.

The fellow traveler looked western enough, in tight stonewashed jeans and a hand-tooled belt and a short-brim cattleman’s hat. But the clipped mustache hid a feminine mouth, and the wide shoulders inside the snap-button shirt couldn’t disguise the flaccidity of his upper arms. Nor was the fellow traveler shy about glancing back at Troyce from the bar, flexing his buttocks against his jeans.

He wasn’t quite Troyce’s type, but it had been a long time between drinks.

The next afternoon Troyce’s SUV was delivered to the motel. The only problem was that Troyce’s interlude with the fellow traveler had proved both exhausting and complicated in ways he hadn’t expected. As a result, his wounds ached, his pain pills and alcohol intake had collided in his nervous system, and he didn’t trust himself to drive. Fortunately, he met another pilgrim, this one a honky-tonk in-your-face piece of work by the name of Candace Sweeney.

She said she would drive him all the way to Missoula for fifty bucks and drinks and the cost of a bus ticket to Livingston, where she claimed she had a job cooking at a dude ranch. “It’s not a bad gig if you don’t mind rich old guys scoping your jugs every time you lean over the table,” she said.

It was twilight as they drove into the Idaho Panhandle and the mountains and lake country around Coeur d’Alene. In the glow of the dash, Troyce could see the tattoos of flowers on the tops of Candace Sweeney’s breasts, and the tiny pits in her cheeks, and the black shine in her hair, which she wore in bangs, giving her a little-girl look that didn’t fit anything she was saying.

“You’re a cop, aren’t you?” she said.

“What makes you say that?”

“I can always tell. Cops think behind their eyes. The ones on the make do, anyway.”

“I look like I’m on the make?”

“No, you just think a lot. You see the ambulance take that guy out of the motel this morning?”

“No.”

“Somebody knocked his teeth out with a blackjack. He wasn’t saying who. He works the saloon sometimes, mostly married men who haven’t figured out they’re fudge packers.”

“Too bad.”

“Occupational hazard when you’re selling your ass in a rawhide bar. He usually works hotels in Spokane or in Portland and Seattle. If you knew some of those sagebrush schmucks back there, you wouldn’t mess with them. They’ve got no idea what goes on in their own heads. If they did, they’d stick a gun in their mouths.”

“Never heard it put that way.”

The sun had gone below the mountains, and the lakes on either side of the road were dark and glazed with the lights from boathouses and sailboats, the water sliding up onto rocky shoals.

“I used to have a little junk problem – tar, mostly. I got busted on a possession charge in Portland. The court sent me to a twelve-step program. I thought most of it sucked, then one night I heard these women start talking about certain sexual problems they developed with their own kids, like, they wanted to molest them. Puke-o, right?

“I didn’t want to hear this shit, because I’d had a little boy myself that I gave up to Catholic Charities. Except the story these women told was a little bit too familiar, know what I mean, like yuck, they’re talking about me. They all said they were molested themselves when they were little, and they knew if they did it to their own kids, their kids would have the same kind of miserable lives they’d had. This one woman said the only way she could spare her little boy was to drown him in the bathtub.

“Don’t look at me like that. She didn’t do it. But here’s where it gets even worse. These women said that killing their kids was a way of looking out for them. Then they figured out that wasn’t the reason at all. They wanted to kill their kids because they thought the little girl inside them was a whore and had to pay the price for what she did, I mean causing all the trouble for the grown-up. How sick does it get? Like gag me out, double puke-o again.”

Troyce studied the side of Candace Sweeney’s face for a long time. “Why are you telling me this?”

She glanced at him, disconcerted. They were headed up the Fourth of July Pass now, the forests on either side of them carving out of the darkness in the headlights. “I wasn’t telling you anything. I was saying, you know, that-” Her words seized up in her throat. The muscles in one side of his face had been impaired by an incision of some kind, perhaps by a knife wound, and his expression looked disjointed, split in half, as though two different people shared his skin.

“You were saying what?” he asked.

“That whoever smacked around the bone-smoker back there probably hasn’t figured out why he does stuff like that. Like he’s a sick fuck. Like maybe I was, too. That’s just the way the world is. People don’t necessarily get to choose what or who they are.” She turned her eyes boldly on Troyce’s face.

“You’re pretty smart,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s why I’m a cook for CEO titty babies who get their dorks mixed up with their deer guns.”

Up ahead, the road was empty. Troyce twisted in the seat and looked through the back window. A car’s taillights were disappearing in the opposite direction. “Pull in to that rest stop,” he said.

“That’s not a very good place.”

“Why not?”

“They don’t clean it. It smells like a bear took a dump in it six months ago and forgot to flush the toilet.”

“That’s all right. Pull in.”

She parked the SUV by the public restroom, where an apron of electric light fell on the gravel and the roof of the vehicle and the giant log that separated the parking area from the sidewalk, all the things that should have looked normal and comforting but were now removed from the asphalt highway connecting Troyce Nix and Candace Sweeney to the rest of the world.

“You didn’t cut the engine,” he said.

“I was gonna listen to the radio,” she said.

He turned off the ignition for her, then rolled down his window on the electric motor. The air was sweet with the smell of the woods, and water was ticking out of the trees. “Say that last part again. That part about the woman hating the little girl still living inside her,” he said.

“I’m not into Jerry Springer. If you want to fuck me, I’ll give it some thought. But I was talking about myself, nobody else.”

“I want you to change my bandages. I’m leaking.”

“What happened to you?”

“Who cares? Tell me about that woman again, the one who was going to drown her kid.”

When she went into the back to retrieve the medical kit from under the seat, she saw a holstered, strapped-down nine-millimeter and a stitched leather-covered blackjack, the kind shaped like a large squash, the leaded end mounted on a spring and wood handle, one that could break bone and teeth and crush a person’s face into pulp. The points of fir trees extended into the sky all around her. Directly overhead, the constellations were colder and brighter than she had ever seen them. She opened the passenger door and looked blankly into Troyce Nix’s face.

“Do I end here?” she said.

“Little darlin’, the Lord broke the mold when He made you. Ain’t nothing gonna happen to you, at least not while I’m around.”

“Take off your shirt,” she said.