Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

  “Following the asshole you put on my tail,” Clete said. He looked at Jamie Sue and the little boy. “You have a kid?”

  “Yes, I do. Why do you ask?”

  “Why do I ask?”

  “You don’t look well,” she said. “Do you want to sit down?”

  “That’s not a good idea,” Ridley Wellstone said.

  The popping sound in Clete’s ears seemed to be gaining in intensity, like the thropping of helicopter blades. How dumb can one guy be? he asked himself.

  “We made restitution for your fishing gear. Now get out of here,” Wellstone said.

  People at the other picnic tables were staring, and Clete’s face felt tight and small in the wind. Again he thought he heard mechanical sounds from a distant war and smelled an odor like moldy clothes on his body and diesel fuel and mosquito repellent and mud that stank of stagnant water. For just a second he thought he felt the squish of trench foot inside his boot and saw the flicker of conical straw hats moving through elephant grass.

  He walked away from Jamie Sue’s picnic table, slightly off balance, his mouth dry, his forehead breaking a sweat. He passed Lyle Hobbs, who was still watching the teenage girls turning somersaults in the shade. Clete went into the restroom and washed his face for a long time. He dried his skin with a paper towel and looked in the metal reflector that served as a mirror. His face made him think of a pumpkin beaded with drops of water. Outside, he heard the music from an ice-cream truck. He thought of children playing in Audubon Park when he was a child in New Orleans. For a moment his heart was a kettle drum.

  Lyle Hobbs walked into the restroom and relieved himself in a urinal. He was wearing shades, breathing through his mouth as he urinated, shaking himself off with one hand. He zipped his fly, then wet his comb under the lavatory faucet and began combing his hair. He never glanced at Clete.

  “I catch you tailing me again, it’s going to play out a whole lot different,” Clete said.

  Hobbs flicked the water off his comb and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Mr. Wellstone came to town for his therapy. Nobody is tailing you, nobody is interested in you, Mr. Purcel. I cain’t abide a self-righteous man, particularly one that didn’t have a problem of conscience with putting his dick in another man’s wife. You’d better count your blessings you’re dealing with me and not Quince. Quince is mightily attached to the Wellstone family. Believe me when I say Quince is not a man you want mad at you.”

  “I saw you watching those young girls, you piece of shit.”

  Hobbs leaned toward the metal reflector, tilting up his nose, sucking in his lips. He plucked a hair from one nostril and dropped it in the basin. “Stay out of trouble,” he said.

  Hobbs walked out into the sunlight, his hair wet on his collar. Clete followed him, remaining in the shade, his heart still hammering. Hobbs was watching the teenage girls, who were now sitting on the grass under the maple trees, their knees pulled up in front of them. He bought a Popsicle from the ice-cream truck, opened his car door, and stood behind it, eating the Popsicle while he watched a girl not over fourteen climbing up on the jungle gym, her shirt sliding up on her hips.

  Clete could see the outline of Hobbs’s phallus against his trousers.

  Walk away, Clete told himself. You can’t change what’s happening here.

  Screw that, another voice said.

  “You need to take your johnson somewhere else, Lyle,” he said.

  Hobbs turned, the Popsicle half in his mouth. He bit into it, clearly savoring the melt in the back of his jaws, his eyes lighting with a thought. “Sally Dee said you blew your career and marriage with booze and weed and ten-dollar street cooze. He said he felt sorry for you, Mr. Purcel. He said your wife was a muff diver, and that’s why you were a gash hound and your colleagues at NOPD gave you a bad rap. That’s why he gave you a job at his casino.”

  Hobbs’s eyes remained fixed on the girl playing on the jungle gym, but Clete saw the indentation, the tug of a suppressed grin, at the corner of his mouth.

  “I have a feeling there’s paper on you somewhere,” Clete said.

  Hobbs dropped the empty Popsicle stick over the top of the car door into the gutter. He tilted his head inquisitively.

  “Defective guys like you have outstanding warrants – a skipped bond, failed court appearances, a PV of a kind that only idiots commit,” Clete said. “But what that means is I’m going to take you in and split the skip fee with whoever is looking for you. Lean against the vehicle and assume the position.”

  “Go blow yourself, Mr. Purcel,” Hobbs said.

  “I can’t tell you how happy that makes me, Lyle.”

  Clete clenched one hand on the back of Hobbs’s neck and slammed him against the side of the Honda. When Hobbs began to struggle, Clete swung him in a circle, flopping like a fish, and crashed him against the roof and against the hood. Hobbs’s shades shattered on the asphalt, and blood leaked from his nose. Then he tried to run. He got as far as the grille of the Honda before Clete grabbed him again and threw him against the far side of the hood, kicking his ankles apart, shoving his face down on the hot metal.

  The back of Hobbs’s neck felt oily and warm in Clete’s hand. The stench of deodorant layered over dry sweat rose from Hobbs’s armpits. His head reared from the metal, his buttocks striking Clete in the loins.

  Clete whirled him around and drove his fist into Hobbs’s face. The force of the blow lifted Hobbs into the air and dropped him between his shoulder blades on the point of the hood ornament. It should have stopped there, but the red lights flashing and the bells ringing at a train guard deep inside Clete’s head were of no value now. He realized what the popping sound in his ears had been. The stitches that held Clete Purcel together were coming loose one by one, and in the next thirty seconds he did things that were like pieces of liquid color breaking apart behind his eyes, dissolving and re-forming without sound or meaning. He thought he heard people screaming and a car horn blowing and the music from the megaphone on top of the ice-cream truck clotting with static. But none of these things deterred him. He felt his fists smashing into sinew and bone, the flat of his shoe coming down on the side of someone’s head and face. He saw an old man pleading with him to stop, to grant mercy to the figure on the asphalt.

  Then he was standing alone, as though under a glass bell, Hobbs at his feet, the children on the playground terrified by what they had just seen, the wind swelling the trees against a blue summer sky.

  Think, he told himself.

  He dropped to one knee, a handkerchief in his hand, and pulled a stiletto from a scabbard that was Velcro-strapped to his right ankle. He rubbed the surfaces of the handle clean, clicked open the blade, and wiped it clean, too. Then he pressed the handle into Hobbs’s palm and folded his fingers on it.

  In the background, he could hear sirens pealing down the street.

  ONE HOUR LATER, Clete was sitting on a bench by himself in a holding cell that contained no plumbing and smelled of disinfectant and stone. Down the corridor, someone was yelling without stop in a voice that reflected neither coherence nor meaning, as though the person were yelling simply to deliver an auditory message to himself about his state of affairs. When Clete closed his eyes, he kept seeing the faces of the children in the park, their disbelief at the level of savagery taking place before their eyes. Clete wondered if it was he who was the ogre and not Lyle Hobbs.

  The undersheriff who had cuffed Clete stood at the cell door, one hand behind his back. He was a pleasant-looking man, a bit overweight, more administrator than policeman, his face windburned, pale around the eyes where his sunglasses had been. “Hobbs is at St. Pat’s. Did you use his head for a paddleball?”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Clete said.

  “You told him you made him for a bail skip?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he came at you with a switchblade?”

  “I guess that sums it up.”

  “Where was he carrying the switchblade?”

 
Clete glanced again at the undersheriff. The undersheriff’s left hand was still concealed behind his hip. “It’s my fault. I got sloppy on the shakedown,” Clete said.

  The undersheriff held up a Ziploc bag with a black polybraid scabbard inside. “My deputy found this under Hobbs’s car. It’s the kind of rig some plainclothes cops or PIs use.”

  “Wonder what Lyle would be doing with that,” Clete said.

  “You’re lucky, Mr. Purcel. Hobbs has a couple of bench warrants on him. It’s minor-league stuff, but as a bond agent, you probably have a degree of legality on your side. Anyway, there’s a lady waiting for you by the front entrance.”

  “I’m sprung?”

  “For now,” the deputy said. “Be careful what you pray for.”

  Clete gave him a look.

  A few minutes later, Clete emerged from the courthouse and saw an Asian-American woman on the sidewalk, a black purse hanging from a leather strap on her shoulder, her expression almost clinical, her wire-framed glasses perched neatly on her nose. “I’m Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans, Mr. Purcel,” she said. “I’ll drive you to your car.”

  “You’re with Fart, Barf, and Itch?” he said.

  “I think you’re an intelligent man, regardless of what most people say about you. You can cooperate with us, or you can choose not to. You can also deal with the assault charge on your own. Do you want me to take you to your car?”

  Clete saw a four-door silver Dodge Stratus with a government plate on it parked by the curb. Alicia Rosecrans waited for him to reply, then started toward her car. “I appreciate the offer,” Clete said to her back. “I’ve always appreciated what you guys do.”

  But on his way to the university, he began to have second thoughts about accepting favors from Alicia Rosecrans. She made him think of a lab technician taking apart an insect with tweezers. She told him to open a manila folder on the seat. In it were a stack of photos, a copy of his discharge from the United States Marine Corps, and his medical records from the Veterans Administration.

  “You guys followed me and Jamie Sue Wellstone to a motel?” Clete said. He tried to sound incensed, but he felt a knot of shame in his throat.

  “No, we followed her. You inserted yourself into the situation on your own.”

  Inserted?

  “Why are y’all interested in my medical history?” he said.

  “Because we think you probably suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Because maybe there are people in the Bureau who don’t want to believe you murdered Sally Dio and his men. Maybe some people believe there were complexities involved that others don’t understand.”

  She kept her eyes straight ahead as she drove, her hands in the ten-two position on the steering wheel. Her face was free of blemishes, her profile both enigmatic and lovely to look at. Clete continued to stare at her, his frustration growing.

  “I never had post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. “I drank too much sometimes and smoked a little weed. But any trouble I got into wasn’t because of Vietnam. I dug it over there.”

  “Look at the photo taken at the homicide scene on I-90. There’s a man walking toward a compact car. If you look closely, you can make out a rectangular shape in his left hand. We think he’s the killer,” she said.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “There was a surveillance camera in the rest stop on the opposite side of the highway. Evidently it had been knocked off-center, and it caught the man in the white shirt in two or three frames. Unfortunately, it didn’t catch the license number on the compact. Does this man look familiar?”

  “No, it’s too grainy. He’s just a guy in a white shirt. Why are y’all investigating a local homicide?”

  “Because during the last five years, there have been killings on several interstates that bear similarities to the one outside Missoula. The victims were made to kneel or lie on their faces. They were executed at point-blank range. They were sexually abused and sometimes burned or mutilated. Look at the next photo. Do you know that man?”

  The eight-by-ten color blowup had been shot with a zoom lens in front of the saloon on Swan Lake. A tall ramrod-straight man wearing a short-brim Stetson hat and western-cut trousers and yellow-tinted aviator shades was looking directly at the lens. He had reddish-blond hair, and the sun on the lake seemed to create a nimbus around his body.

  “I’ve never seen him. Who is he?” Clete said.

  “We’re not sure. That’s why I asked you,” she said.

  “Why does the FBI have Jamie Sue under surveillance?” Clete said.

  Alicia Rosecrans turned a corner carefully, her turn indicator on; she glanced in the rearview mirror. “Look at the last photo in the folder,” she said. “Do you recognize that man?”

  Clete lifted up the eight-by-ten and studied it. “He’s a nice-looking guy. But I’ve never seen him before.”

  “Yes, you have, Mr. Purcel. That’s Leslie Wellstone, Jamie Sue’s husband, before he was burned in the Sudan.”

  Alicia Rosecrans didn’t speak the rest of the way to the university.

  CHAPTER 9

  CLETE HAD NOT called me from the jail, either out of shame or because he had thought he could elude a pending assault-and-battery beef by claiming he had feared for his life and acted in self-defense. Montana was still Montana, a culture where vegetarianism, gun control, and gay marriage would never flush. Nor would the belief ever die that a fight between two men was just that, a fight between two men.

  That afternoon I went down to Albert’s house to talk to Clete. He was already half in the bag, but not because of Lyle Hobbs.

  “Why’d that agent show me the photo of Jamie Sue’s husband before he was burned up?” he asked. “She wants to cluster-fuck my head?”

  All of his windows were open. The weather had taken a dramatic turn, and the valley was covered with shadow, the air cold and dry-smelling, snow flurries already blowing off the top of the ridge.

  “They’re not interested in Jamie Sue Wellstone,” I said. “They’re after her husband or brother-in-law. But I don’t know what for.”

  “These murders?”

  “Whatever it is, they’re not going to tell us. I don’t think they’re sharing information with Joe Bim Higgins, either.” I told Clete I’d been deputized by Higgins.

  “What about me?”

  “You weren’t here when he called,” I said.

  “Cut it out, Streak.” He was spooning vanilla ice cream into a glass and pouring whiskey on top of it. “And stop giving me that look. Get yourself a Dr Pepper out of the refrigerator and don’t give me that look.”

  “I don’t want a Dr Pepper.”

  “Of course you don’t. You want a-”

  “Say it.”

  “Go to a meeting. I’ve got my own problems. I feel like I’ve got broken glass in my head. I porked the wife of a guy who had his face burned off. What kind of bastard would do something like that?”

  “You’re the best guy I ever knew, Cletus.”

  “Save the douche water for somebody else.”

  He drank the mixture of Beam and ice cream down to the bottom of the glass, his brow furrowed, his green eyes as hard as marbles.

  TROYCE NIX HAD no trouble finding the location of Jamie Sue Wellstone’s home in the Swan River country. The problem was access to it. An even greater problem was access to Jamie Sue.

  He sat in the café that adjoined the saloon on Swan Lake and ate a steak and a load of french fries and drank a cup of coffee while he looked at the snow drifting over the trees and descending like ash on the lake.

  “It always snows here in June?” he said to the waitress.

  “Sometimes in July,” she replied. “You the fellow who was asking about Ms. Wellstone?”

  “I used to be a fan of her music. I heard she lived here’bouts. That’s the only reason I was asking.”

  The waitress was a big, red-headed, pink-complected woman who wore oceanic amounts of perfume. “People around here like her. She�
�s rich, but she don’t act it. Harold said if you wanted information about her to ask him.”

  “Who’s Harold?”

  “The daytime bartender. He was gone when you were here before.”

  Troyce’s eyes seemed to lose interest in the subject. He dropped coins in the jukebox, had another cup of coffee, and used the restroom. When he sat back down on the stool, he felt the bandages on his chest bind against his wounds. He removed a black-and-white booking-room photo from his shirt pocket and laid it on the counter. He pushed it toward her with one finger. “You ever see this guy around here?”

  She leaned over and looked at the photo without picking it up, idly touching the hair on the back of her head. “Not really.”

  “What’s ‘not really’ mean?” Troyce asked.

  The waitress took a barrette out of her pocket and worked it into the back of her hair. “You a Texas Ranger?”

  “Why you think I’m from Texas?”

  “You know, the accent and all. Besides, it’s printed on the bottom of this guy’s picture.”

  “You’re pretty smart,” Troyce said.

  “I’d remember him if he’d been in here.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because he’s almost as good-looking as you.”

  Troyce slipped the photo back in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap. “What time you get off?”

  “Late,” she said. “I got night blindness, too. That’s how come Harold drives me home. And if he don’t, my husband does.”

  Troyce left her a three-dollar tip and took his coffee cup and saucer into the saloon and sat at the bar. Through the back windows, he could see the surface of the lake wrinkling in the wind and the steel-gray enormity of Swan Peak disappearing inside the snow. “Ms. Wellstone been in?” he said.

  The bartender picked up a pencil and pad and set it in front of him. “You want to leave a message, I’ll make sure she gets it.”

  “You’re Harold?”

  “What’s your business here, pal?”

  “This guy.” Troyce put the mug shot of Jimmy Dale Greenwood in front of him.