Swan Peak Page 41

  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 mista
ke 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.