Swan Peak Read online

  He balanced his can of soda on his forehead as he stared up at the sky. He placed his arms straight out at his sides and felt like he was floating through space, in control, beyond the grasp of men like Troyce Nix and Leslie Wellstone.

  Tomorrow he would hitch a ride into Arlee, on the Flathead res, and go to a bar where Jamie Sue had told him he would find a used Toyota with the keys in a magnetized box under the left fender. Then he would pick up her and Dale outside a department store in Kalispell at exactly seven P.M.

  It would all happen tomorrow. Alberta and British Columbia waited for the three of them, the chains of lakes through the Canadian Rockies like giant blue teardrops backdropped by mountains whose peaks rose through the clouds.

  The wind gusted off the lake, showering pine needles down on his face, and he felt the soda can tilt on his forehead. Before he could catch it, it fell on his chest, its contents pooling in the folds of his shirt.

  ON SATURDAY I woke in the early A.M. It was black outside, and the air was dense and humid, stained with the stench of a fire over in Idaho. I could hear the horses in the dark, clattering against the railed fence, a shoed hoof sparking on a flat rock.

  I didn’t want to think about fire in the hills or the fire that could have consumed Clete Purcel. I didn’t want to think about the events unfolding around us. But I did, and I got up from the bed while Molly was still in a deep slumber. I turned on the reading lamp in our small living room and pulled the magazine from my forty-five and cleaned and oiled all the parts and ran a bore brush through the barrel, then inserted a folded scrap of white paper in the chamber to reflect the lamp’s glow through the rifling, which was now clean and unnicked in appearance and spiraling with an oily light.

  One by one, I thumbed the rounds free from the magazine, tested the tension in the spring, and pressed each round down against the spring again, until the last round notched tight under the steel lip at the top of the magazine. I released the slide before I pushed the magazine into the butt of the gun so the chamber would remain empty, then I put the gun in its leather holster and snapped the strap across the hammer and set the holstered gun on the table and looked at it.

  My 1911-model army forty-five had never let me down. As a second lieutenant in Vietnam, I had carried one that was official-issue, and the one I brought home I had purchased from a Vietcong prostitute in Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley. For years I slept with a gun under my bed. So did Audie Murphy. He once said for every day on the firing line, you have to spend five days in the normal world before you can sleep again. Because he had been in combat for almost four years, he believed he had been condemned to twenty years of sleeplessness. His gambling addiction cost him two million dollars but did not purchase him one hour’s rest. He put a bed in his garage and spent his nights there because his wife could not sleep with an armed man wired for sounds that no one else could hear.

  All of that made perfect sense to me.

  I picked up the forty-five and rested it on my knee. It was heavy and cool in my hand, an old friend that represented power and control over one’s environment and the ability to call down lightning and fire on one’s enemies. Do not go gently into that good night, the poet said. Rage against your fate and protest it to death’s door. Don’t buy into the lie that the good die in bed, either. A dying man’s bed is stained with phlegm and urine and feces and the pus leaking from his sores. Doc Holliday coughed his lungs into a nun’s cupped hands, his guns hanging in a closet, his last sight of the earth a windswept Colorado plateau that could have been moonscape. I doubt that he would have recommended his fate to others.

  I touched my hand to my head. My skin seemed to be on fire. Heat lightning flared in the sky, and I heard horses’ hooves thudding across the pasture, muffled inside the grass. I wished the sounds were human, not those of animals. I wished my enemies were out there so I could lock down on them with iron sights and blow them all over the serviceberry trees. I wished Death himself would confront me and release me from his taunts and allow me to deal on equal terms with him. Like the fool in a medieval morality play, I wanted the rules of mortality rewritten for me.

  At sunup Molly and I went for breakfast in town. When we came back to the cabin, I had a message waiting on the machine from Helen Soileau. “Give me a call, Dave. I’m at home. I’m a little confused about what I’ve found on your bartender friend,” she said.

  I punched in her number. “You found out something about Waxman?” I said.

  “Dave?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You sound funny. You all right up there?”

  “Always.”

  “A guy by that name shows up in lots of places. If they’re all the same guy, he’s been a long-haul truck driver for the last ten years or so. He’s also worked as a heavy-equipment mechanic and a bartender and restaurant manager. The Waxman with that Social Security number doesn’t have a criminal or military history. An H. T. Waxman was a cop thirty years ago in Conroe, Texas. But I don’t know if that’s the same Waxman, because I couldn’t confirm the cop’s Social Security number.”

  “Your message said you’d found something you weren’t clear about.”

  “Waxman has long periods without an earnings history. That’s not completely unusual, but your guy seems to have licenses and skills that would give him more computer-generated visibility.”

  “Where was he a truck driver?”

  “He worked out of Sacramento, Seattle, and Denver. Wait a minute.” I heard her rustling pages, as though turning them on a legal pad. “He also drove for a grain company of some kind in Dumas, Texas. Where’s Dumas?”

  “In the Panhandle,” I said.

  “Your guy doesn’t fit a profile. The defectives always leave shit prints. But your guy has no jacket of any kind. What are you looking at him for?”

  “Conroe is forty-five minutes north of Houston. Funny he was around there at about the same time the Wellstones were.”

  “God forgive me, I have to ask you a question,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I love you, Pops, so don’t hold it against me.”

  “Say it.”

  “Did you have a slip? Are you back on the dirty boogie? Tell me the truth.”

  LYLE HOBBS WASN’T the brightest bulb in the box. He was a southern street rat and mean-spirited peckerwood descended from the kind of white people who, in an earlier time, had worked as paddy rollers and assistant overseers. But unlike his friend Quince, he had the ability to think and looked upon passion and anger and delusions about human fidelity as forms of self-indulgence that only the rich could afford.

  As a consequence, he had never stacked serious time. In short, he was a survivor. He was also what investigative cops call “a weak sister.” The latter is the frail link in the chain, the conscript looking over his shoulder at the fort, the sycophant trying to guess which way the political wind is about to blow. If there is only one life raft on board a ship, and if seawater is flooding up through the ruptured hull and waves are washing over the gunwales, you can bet that someone of Lyle Hobbs’s ilk will already have the life raft strapped on his back.

  He was driving an old Japanese car when he came up the dirt road, the windows down, the dust funneling back inside. He drove past the archway in front of Albert’s house and turned in to the lane that led to our cabin, his eyes switching from the rearview mirror to the side window, checking to see if his nemesis Clete Purcel was anywhere in sight.

  His shirt was open, and I could see the iridescent shine of sweat on his chest. His skin and eyebrows and hair were gray with dust, his eyes bright, as though he’d had a couple of hits of crystal. When he cut the engine, the sun was baking on his car, a cloud of grasshoppers swarming past his window. There were two suitcases in the backseat, one piled on top of the other, the two of them roped together.

  “What’s the haps, Lyle?” I said.

  He looked up at me, his mouth slightly open, his recessed eye somehow lower than the other. “I
didn’t sign on to take somebody else’s bounce. I do security. I chauffeur people’s automobiles. That’s all I do. Where’s Purcel?” he said.

  “Not here,” I lied.

  “I thought I saw his Caddy behind Albert Hollister’s house.”

  I glanced at my watch. “I’m kind of busy right now. What’s on your mind?”

  “Sorry to get in your space.”

  “I didn’t invite you here, bud. Take your bullshit someplace else.” I started to walk away.

  “I tried to get aholt of that Vietnamese woman.”

  “Alicia Rosecrans?”

  “Nobody would return my calls.”

  I kept walking toward the cabin. I heard him get out of the car and slam the door. When I turned around, I thought he was going to hit me.

  “I was there the morning that college boy gave it to Ridley Wellstone,” he said. “The kid was bent out of shape. He came there by himself. He didn’t use his head. Maybe it was pride, like before he went to the cops, he had to confront Mr. Wellstone and shame him for what he tried to do to the girl. It’s the kind of dumb thing a kid would do. That’s kids, right? But it was dumb. The kid’s parents ought to have taught him better. You don’t let your pride push you into situations you got to bluff your way out of.”

  “You want a drink of water? You look a little hot.”

  Lyle Hobbs glanced back at Albert’s house. Clete’s Caddy was parked in the shade. A large raven was standing on the convertible top, cawing at the trees. Hobbs touched at his mouth and widened his eyes, as though trying to see more clearly into the shade.

  “I could hear him talking loud in Mr. Wellstone’s office, all wired up, like he could deal with somebody like Mr. Wellstone on equal terms.”

  “Seymour Bell went to the Wellstones’ compound? That’s what you’re telling me?” I said.

  “Mr. Wellstone has an office upstairs. Bell went straight upstairs and told Mr. Wellstone he’d propositioned his girlfriend, what’s-her-name.”

  “Cindy Kershaw,” I said.

  “She worked as a janitor at the health club where he was getting therapy for his sciatica. Sonny Click tried to get it on with her. She came up to Swan Lake to tell Mr. Wellstone. Except he tried to put moves on her himself. When she didn’t go for it, he must have got a little rough, maybe feeling her up or something. Or at least that was what Bell was saying to him. Mr. Wellstone told him to file a report with the Sheriff’s Department, because he knew the kid didn’t have diddly-squat to support his story. That’s when Bell tried to one-up him.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “He told Mr. Wellstone the girl had a digital recorder in her purse, that she had turned it on and caught the whole thing, everything about the ministry and Click seducing young girls and Mr. Wellstone trying to get into Cindy’s pants. I heard a chair scraping. I think Mr. Wellstone must have gotten up and tried to push the kid out of his office. Except it didn’t work out that way. Bell said he was gonna dime Sonny Click and Mr. Wellstone and show them up for the frauds they were. Then he shoved Mr. Wellstone down the stairs. He looked like a pile of broken sticks at the bottom of the steps.”

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “The same day those kids got killed.”

  “Who did it to them, Hobbs?”

  “Not me. I drive people’s cars. That’s it. You tell that Asian cunt what I said.”

  “I think maybe you’re still working for Sally Dio. I think maybe Sally is still alive. One guy survived that air crash. It was Sal, wasn’t it? Where is he, Lyle?”

  “Sally always said you were stupid.”

  “Could be,” I said. I smiled at him, my thumbs hooked on the sides of my belt, my eyes roving over his face. “Just a footnote to all this. If you ever refer to a woman like that in my presence again, using that particular word, I’m going to pick up a ball-peen hammer and break out all your teeth.”

  I WALKED UP to the main house and told Clete of Hobbs’s visit. Then I got Alicia Rosecrans’s cell phone number from him and went back to the cabin and called her. I told her everything Hobbs had said, excluding the insult.

  “Where’s Hobbs now?” she asked.

  “Probably headed for Reno or Vegas.”

  “Seymour Bell told Ridley Wellstone he had recorded evidence against both him and Sonny Click? That the Kershaw girl had a digital recorder in her purse?”

  “That’s correct, at least according to Hobbs.”

  “But Bell was bluffing?”

  “That’s right,” I replied.

  “Ridley Wellstone couldn’t figure that out? Kershaw came from a poor family. She worked as a janitor to go to college. Where would she get money for a digital recorder? Those kids died for nothing.”

  “Yeah, they did,” I said.

  “I thought I had more objectivity about this case, but this really pisses me off. Hobbs wouldn’t say who abducted Bell and Kershaw?”

  “No. But Quince Whitley has got to be a player in this.”

  “How about the California couple? What’s the connection?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “That’s a long way from ‘don’t know,’ Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “Thirty-one years ago Ridley Wellstone’s stepdaughter was mixed up with a porn actor. She and her mother were both murdered. The murder remains unsolved.”

  “Where’s Clete?”

  “In his apartment, up at the main house.”

  “You guys stay out of this.”

  “I’d love to. Would you pass on your sentiments to the Wellstones?” I replied.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE PREVIOUS AFTERNOON, after Troyce had talked to the bartender at the nightclub, he had been silent all the way back to the cottage. Then he had left Candace by herself and gone away for three hours, claiming he had to get the truck serviced and to buy pike-fish tackle at Seeley Lake. This morning he had gotten up in the false dawn and had showered in cold water because the pilot had gone out on the tank; in the frigid temperature of the kitchen, without shoes or a shirt on, he had fixed breakfast for both of them but had left most of his uneaten on the plate. Minutes later, without explanation, he had driven off in the first pink touch of sunrise on the birch trees, leaving her a fifty-dollar bill to buy lunch in case he wasn’t back by noon.

  But he returned four hours later, a lump of cartilage working in his jaw, the armpits of his red shirt dark with sweat. He clenched his stomach, his face white around the mouth with discomfort.

  “You sick?” she said.

  “I got to go to the can,” he replied.

  Ten minutes later, he came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel, blowing out his breath. “I feel like I was poisoned. What’d I eat last night?”

  “What you always do – steak.”

  “Anyway, I’m okay now. Let’s pack it up,” he said.

  “We just got here.”

  “That’s right. We been here. So let’s go see some other place.”

  “Like where?”

  “Glacier Park, then all points west. Next stop, the Cascade Mountains. How would you like that?”

  “Where have you been, Troyce?”

  “Here and yon, taking care of this and that. Come on, gal, let’s head ’em up and move ’em out.”

  “Were you following that guy?”

  “Which guy?”

  “The bartender, the one that looks like he’s got strands of black wire combed across his head.”

  “I just been taking care of business, that’s all. You don’t take care of business, somebody will take care of it for you, and that don’t usually work out too good.”

  Fifteen minutes later, through the windshield of the truck, she watched the sun-spangled canopy of birches sweeping by overhead, the shadows of their leaves netting the dashboard and her skin and clothes, the ethereal blue-gray beauty of the lake and Swan Peak disappearing behind the truck. She looked at Troyce’s chiseled profile and cupped her hand on the point of his shoulder an
d tightened her fingers on the bone and muscle. But she didn’t speak, not at first, because she couldn’t find the vocabulary that would make Troyce understand her sense of apprehension.

  “You fixing to tell me something?” he asked.

  “No, because I haven’t figured it all out. When I do, I’ll tell you,” she replied.

  “How am I supposed to read that, Candace?”

  “I never had any understanding of the big mysteries and why things happen and why people get hurt and do the things they do to each other. I don’t think figuring it out comes with age, either. Otherwise we’d want to listen to old people. But we don’t, because most of them act selfish and childish and have to be tolerated and taken care of. I can’t even figure out us, much less anything that’s bigger than us.”

  His eyes crinkled at the corners as though he was either amused by her words or honestly trying to understand them. He blew his horn and swung around a truck on the two-lane, pressing the accelerator to the floor, barely getting back in before he hit the double yellow warning lines. “You’re too deep for the likes of me,” he said.

  “I made you a promise, but I’m not keeping it,” she said.

  “What promise?”

  “That I wouldn’t be here if you tried to hurt that man.”

  “You talking about Jimmy Dale Greenwood?”

  “I don’t want you to even use his name to me. Don’t say it. Don’t tell me why he’s so important to you, don’t tell me any of your lies. You make me resent myself, Troyce. That’s the worst thing somebody can do to somebody else.”

  He looked at her, the pickup drifting across the center stripe, his face clouding. “’Cause of a guy like that, you’d throw everything we got out the window?”

  She stared at the long tunnel of shadow and light and pines and fir trees and cottonwoods that seemed to be racing past the truck. She didn’t know if Troyce was being disingenuous or if he truly could not understand what she was saying to him. She rolled down the window and let the road’s trapped heat blow into her face, whipping her hair, stinging her skin with invisible pieces of grit.