Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

  He drove past the motel and pulled in behind a truck stop where he could watch Nix and his girlfriend getting out of their pickup.

  Okay, you found out where they’re at, he told himself. But you cain’t do anything sitting here except get yourself busted. Come back later, when they’re going to dinner or to a movie or to wherever in Montana psycho gunbulls and tattooed women hang out at. You don’t have to prove anything.

  He was lying and he knew it. He was scared of Troyce Nix, and he was scared of going back to the joint, and he was scared his friends outside of prison would learn what Troyce Nix had done to him. In fact, Jimmy Dale Greenwood wanted to chamber a round in the Remington, slide the muzzle over his teeth, and drive a hollow-point through the roof of his mouth into his own brain.

  Maybe he had always been a loser from the jump, he thought. Most of his life, he had lived within a few hours’ drive of Austin, the same place Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker and a dozen like them had started out. But Jimmy Dale had never made it to Austin, convincing himself that a real artist played shithole beer joints and didn’t compromise his music for commercial success. How about Mac Davis and Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings and Jimmy Dean? All of them had grown up within spitting distance of Lubbock, all of them poor and without much education, or at least as poor as Jimmy Dale’s family had been, but today their names were known all over the world.

  Jimmy Dale always told others that if you’re a rodeo man, “you ride it to the buzzer.” But in truth he had never ridden it to the buzzer and had set himself up to fail. One lesson you learned quickly in prison: Once inside, time stopped, and you didn’t have to make comparisons. Outside the walls or the fences topped with coils of razor wire, you had to keep score. Inside the system, the reflection you saw in a mirror was no problem. Everybody around you was a loser. The big score of the day was to get high on pruno or nutmeg and black coffee or have a punk free of AIDS delivered to your cell.

  Jimmy Dale could feel tears welling in his eyes. Screw Troyce Nix, he thought. I cain’t shoot the guy in the middle of town. It ain’t supposed to happen. I give it my best and I’m out and that’s it.

  He fired up his stolen car, a gush of oily smoke bursting from the exhaust pipe, and waited for a tractor-trailer to clear the diesel pumps so he could pull back on the two-lane. Then he saw Troyce Nix and his girlfriend emerge from their motel room and walk toward their pickup truck, chatting with each other, the sunlight warm on their faces.

  You gonna do Nix or let him do you? What’s it gonna be, waddie? a voice inside him said.

  Jimmy Dale hit his fist on the steering wheel. When Nix was in the traffic, Jimmy Dale pulled onto the two-lane, three cars behind Nix, hating all the forces that had made him the driven man he was.

  TROYCE AND CANDACE bought camping supplies and warmer clothes at Bob Wards, and groceries and gasoline at Costco, then drove through an underpass into North Missoula and parked their truck at a recreation area in a poor neighborhood where a chapter of Narcotics Anonymous was holding a five-fifteen meeting and a potluck supper.

  Troyce didn’t understand why Candace wasted her time with a bunch of addicts, since she didn’t use dope anymore or have any of the dependent characteristics that he associated with junkies. But live and let live, he thought, and carried a paper plate of fried chicken and potato salad to a lone table among maple trees behind the baseball diamond backstop. Through the wire screen, he could see the whole panorama of the park: worn base paths, the patches of yellow grass in the outfield, an empty swing set in the distance, houses along the street that had no fences between them, and gardens where vegetables grew rather than flowers.

  Most poor neighborhoods didn’t have fences, he thought. The porches had gliders on them and sometimes stuffed couches. On one corner there was a small grocery store with a neon bread ad in the window. An ancient brick firehouse, painted lead-gray, stood on another corner. Unlike in subdivision neighborhoods, sidewalks connected the houses. A kid was flying a kite emblazoned with the image of the comic-book hero Captain America, the kite stiffening in the wind, rising higher and higher into a perfect blue sky.

  How had he, Troyce Nix, ended up in both the Abu Ghraib prison and this working-class neighborhood in the northern Rockies? He was the same man and had the same hair, skin, eyes, bone, and sinew that had defined him in the mirror many years ago. How had he gone from the winter-green palm-dotted alluvial floodplains of the Rio Grande Valley to an Iraqi prison whose floors during the regime of Saddam Hussein had been stained by fluids that had become part of the stone and could not be scrubbed out? And from there to a contract jail where, in many ways, he had stacked time inside the machinations and perversity he had helped create and to which he had given legitimacy?

  Now, on a breezy, warm afternoon in a town that was ringed by mountains and traversed by three rivers, he was eating by himself at a picnic table carved with names and initials and hearts and arrows, like petroglyphs left by ancient people on a cave wall, while one hundred feet away a woman he had come to love sat among junkies, ex-prostitutes, and petty boosters, waving at him, her face full of joy and expectation, her faith and belief in him like that of a child.

  Beyond the baseball diamond, a gas-guzzler was parked in the shade, its paint pocked with blisters. Had he seen the same vehicle at Bob Wards or at Costco? There were shadows on the windshield, and Troyce could not tell if anyone was behind the steering wheel. A city groundskeeper was driving a mower along the swale, the discharge from the blades firing sideways against the parked vehicle, pinging the metal with chopped-up pinecones, blowing a cloud of dust and grass cuttings through the open window.

  Troyce bit into a drumstick and turned his attention back to the dancing kite emblazoned with the shield and winged helmet and masked face of Captain America. For some reason, backdropped by a blue sky, it seemed the most beautiful piece of art he had ever seen.

  THE GRINDING AND pinging sounds of the mower were like slivers of glass in Jimmy Dale’s ears. He waited until the driver had threaded his machine around a couple of trees and had turned onto the swale on the park’s far side, then he got into the backseat and slid the Remington pump from the duffel bag.

  Now he was in a perfect shooter’s position. His vehicle was inside dark shade, the rifle easily concealed below the level of the passenger window, his target lit by spangled sunlight on the other side of the ball diamond. By propping the rifle over the right front seat, he could fire at an angle out the passenger window, hiding the muzzle flash, perhaps even muffling the report. He could probably get off two shots before anyone realized what had happened.

  He pumped a round into the Remington’s chamber and sighted on Troyce Nix’s yellow-tinted aviator glasses. Even if he missed, the round would strike the side of a parked truck, so he was not endangering an innocent person. There was no excuse for not taking Nix out. He’d be doing Nix a favor, pocking one right through the lens, following it up for good measure with a second one in the forehead, putting him out of his perverted misery, maybe saving somebody else from being raped at another contract prison.

  Then a kid pulling a kite string ran across Jimmy Dale’s line of vision. The wind had dropped, and the kite was dipping precariously close to the tops of the maple trees that bordered the park. Jimmy Dale lowered the rifle, easing the hammer down on the firing pin with his thumb, and watched the kid coiling up his string, running backward, lifting the kite’s tail across the top branches of a maple. Jimmy Dale let out his breath and felt his heart slow and his pulse stop jumping in his neck, as though someone had declared a temporary truce in his war with Troyce Nix, just so everyone could watch a young boy save his kite from crashing into a treetop.

  Then the wind gusted across the baseball diamond, blowing a cloud of fine dust from the base paths, and the kite rattled against its stick frame again and rose steadily into the sky. Now the kid and his kite were safely out of the way, and Jimmy Dale’s view of his target was unobstructed, his choices clear. He ra
ised the rifle, thumbed back the hammer, and sighted on Troyce Nix’s face, his pulse beating in his throat.

  The mowing machine was headed down the swale toward Jimmy Dale’s vehicle, the engine roaring louder and louder, rocks splintering sideways off the blades. Jimmy Dale looked through the back window, the rifle balanced across the top of the passenger seat. The groundskeeper was turning the mower around, cutting a clean swath through blue fescue back toward the far curb. Jimmy Dale threw the rifle stock to his shoulder, put Nix’s mouth squarely in the steel notch on the rifle barrel, and slowly tightened his index finger on the trigger.

  I’m gonna blow your cranberries, Cap. This is for every guy you sodomized back at the joint. Hope you find a shady spot in the flames.

  Then something snapped inside his head, like a wound-up rubber band breaking behind his eyes. His breath exploded from his chest. He jerked his hand free of the trigger guard and jacked open the chamber, ejecting the unfired round on the car seat. Outside the car, the mowing machine scotched the top of a tree root into pulp.

  Once again, Jimmy Dale had failed. But this time he didn’t care. He wasn’t a killer, no matter what Troyce Nix or the world or the prison system had done to him. Then he realized all the sound had gone out of his ears. The entire park seemed empty of voices or birdsong or the rattle of a kite in the wind or the roar of a grass-cutting machine. He opened and closed his mouth as though he were inside the cabin of a plane losing pressure at high altitude.

  The problem was not with his hearing. The groundskeeper had hit the kill button on his machine and was staring through the back window of Jimmy Dale’s vehicle. “That man’s got a gun!” he shouted, his finger pointing frantically.

  Jimmy Dale piled into the front seat, fired up his stolen gas-guzzler, and left a cloud of blue smoke behind him.

  When Candace Sweeney got to Troyce Nix’s side, he was staring at the now empty street and the elevated interstate the street fed into.

  “It was him, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “That boy just don’t learn. He’s a real hardhead is what he is.”

  She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “We’re leaving tonight, though?” she said. “Right, Troyce? Nothing has changed.”

  “I think we might have to put things on hold a little bit,” he replied. He removed his shades and pinched his eyes, as he always did when he did not want her to see the thoughts he was thinking.

  CHAPTER 22

  THURSDAY MORNING I made an appointment to meet with Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans in the federal building on Broadway in Missoula. I had many things to say to her, or to ask her, some of it about Clete, some of it not. Unfortunately, because of my desire to protect Clete, my relationship with her had become adversarial when it should not have been. Regardless, I needed her help, and as a visitor to Montana with no legal authority in the state, I was taking on the role of a beggar inside the legal system. If she wanted to rub my face in it, now was her opportunity.

  When I entered her office, her hands were folded primly on her desk blotter, her lean face turned upward like a blade. The last time I had seen her, she had told me she would not forget that I had deceived her regarding my suspicions about J. D. Gribble’s identity and the fact that he was an interstate fugitive. The truth was, I could not forget her accusing me of duplicity.

  “Before you say anything, Mr. Robicheaux, please be aware that I’m speaking to you only because you’re an officer of the law in the state of Louisiana,” she said. “I’ve spoken to your sheriff, and she tells me you’re an honest man. But so far that hasn’t been my impression of either you or Clete Purcel. I don’t like being lied to.”

  I felt a wave of heat bloom in my chest. I started to speak, but she raised one finger. “No, it’s time for you to listen,” she said. “You and Clete Purcel seem to think you can decide what other people need to know or don’t need to know. Does that strike you as a bit arrogant?”

  “If you put it that way, I guess it does.”

  “If I put it that way?”

  “No, as you say, it’s arrogant,” I replied.

  “Why are you here?”

  “May I sit down?”

  Her face was tight and white around the mouth. I could see her nostrils dilating when she breathed. I sat down without waiting for her to give me permission. “What did you guys find out about the mask in Quince Whitley’s truck?”

  I could see the pause in her eyes, as if she was deciding whether or not she should continue our meeting. “It probably came from a store in Denver or Seattle or Salt Lake,” she said. “Actually, it could have come from anywhere. It’s no help. There were no prints on it at all, not even Whitley’s.”

  “But y’all are still looking at him for the attack on Clete?”

  “We know Whitley filled a two-gallon gas container at a convenience store near Swan Lake on the day of the attack. Whitley worked as a truck driver over the years. We can put him in the general area where a number of homicides remain unsolved, all of them similar in some way to the homicides we’re dealing with here. I think I’ve probably told you enough.”

  But I could tell she had not told me enough and that she was bothered in the same way I was about elements in the case that were not getting looked at squarely, for whatever reasons. “We’re talking about a lot more here than just the death of a possible serial killer, aren’t we?” I said.

  “I looked at the bodies of those two college kids in the morgue,” she said. “I don’t mind admitting I have nightmares about them. I think the day you can say you sleep well in this job is the day you should leave it. I think those kids had information or evidence of some kind that someone wanted from them. I don’t think the primary motivation for their deaths was simply sadistic, although that was clearly part of it.”

  I thought back upon the burglary of Seymour Bell’s house. “After Bell was killed, an intruder took a throwaway camera from his room. The camera was in full view. But the intruder tore up the whole house. So he was after something else as well,” I said.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “I think the Wellstones are big players in this. But I don’t know what a kid could have in his possession that could endanger people as powerful as they are.”

  Her eyes were glued on mine, fraught with both meaning and conflict. She had just lectured me on the arrogance of an individual deciding what others should or should not know. I believed she was caught inside her own admonition. Her stare broke, then she knitted her fingers and swallowed and looked at a place just to the right of my face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “When Sally Dio’s plane crashed into a mountainside, it exploded in a ball of flame. Everybody inside was badly burned. Some of the identification was speculative in nature. But maybe one man survived. The Indians found him and took him to a hospital in Kalispell. Then he disappeared.”

  “Who was he?”

  “We don’t know. But the Wellstones had ties with casino and hotel interests in Vegas and Reno. They’ve also been tied up with casinos on Indian reservations, particularly in your home state. Are you following my drift here, Mr. Robicheaux?”

  “Maybe.”

  “The Bureau has hit a giant dead end on this case. It’s not because we’re inept or corrupt or arrogant or any of the things our critics like to say about us. It’s because we spend most of our time following around foreign students who are thinking about math tests and getting laid and not hijacking airplanes so they can fly them into the administration building.”

  “You’re saying maybe Sally Dio survived the crash?”

  “No, I’m saying don’t ever lie to a federal agent again. Anything else on your mind?”

  “Yeah, Clete Purcel is outside in my truck. He’s the best cop I’ve ever known. He’s a recipient of two Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, and the Navy Cross. He also happens to have enormous affection and respect for you. Why don’t you give him a break?”

  AT A CERTAIN time in your life, you
think about death in a serious way, and you think about it often. You see your eyes and mouth impacted by dirt, your clothes a moldy receptacle for water leaking through the topsoil. You see a frozen mound backlit by a wintry sky, a plain of brown grass with tumbleweed bouncing across it. Inside the mound, if your ears could hear, they would tell you the shovel that raises you into light again will do so only for reasons of scientific curiosity.

  When you see these images in your sleep or experience them in your waking day, you know they do not represent a negotiable fate. The images are indeed your future, and no exception will be made for you.

  During these moments, when you try to push away these images from the edges of your vision, you have one urge only, and that is to somehow leave behind a gesture, a cipher carved on a rock, a good deed, some visible scratch on history that will tell others you were here and that you tried to make the world a better place.

  The great joke is that any wisdom most of us acquire can seldom be passed on to others. I suspect this reality is at the heart of most old people’s anger.

  What does this have to do with the murder of the two college kids and the attack on Clete and perhaps the murder of the Los Angeles tourists west of Missoula?

  Everything.

  Because anger is what I felt that afternoon when I looked at the television monitor attached to the StairMaster I was working out on in the health club on the Bitterroot highway. Reverend Sonny Click was evidently moving up in the world and had become the host of a televangelical daytime show featuring – guess who – the Reverend Sonny Click.

  The aggressiveness of his overture to the audience was as naked as it was meretricious. “Out there right now someone is debating whether they should send in that one-thousand-dollar seed-of-faith gift to our crusade. I can hear your thoughts, the fury of the debate raging inside your heart. ‘Is it worth it? Is this what God wants me to do?’ I’ll tell you what Our Lord has told me to tell you.”