Light of the World dr-20

by James Lee Burke

  Before he could continue his litany of grief, his engine backfired with enough force to blow out the muffler. Then the engine died, and all the warning icons lit up on his dashboard. When he pulled to the side of the road, he was surrounded by trees that had been planted to shield the house below from view. Polson was ten miles away, and the wind was cold and blowing at over twenty knots.

  He looked in the rearview mirror and saw a truck approaching from the north, its high beams on. Was it a pickup with a camper shell inserted in the bed? An orange pickup, like Wyatt Dixon’s? No, it was a wrecker. He could see the boom and winch mounted on the rear. What a break, he told himself.

  He got out on the asphalt and began waving his arms. The driver of the wrecker slowed and hit his emergency flashers and eased onto the shoulder. Kyle heard him open his door and step out of the cab, forgetting to click off his high beams. “Hey, I’m about to go blind here,” Kyle said.

  “Sorry,” the driver said. He dimmed the lights. “I have to back around to hook you up. You want to go to the dealership in Polson?”

  Kyle closed his eyes and saw red circles that seemed to have been burned onto the backs of the lids. “Yeah, that would be great,” he said. “You just cruising by?”

  The driver of the wrecker had wide shoulders and wore a rumpled suit and a baseball cap and tennis shoes. He seemed to be smiling. “I work irregular hours,” he said.

  “I’d like to get to a motel and get some sleep. Can we get on the road?”

  “You got to sign a form. Step back here, if you would.”

  “Can we do that in town? It’s cold out there. I don’t have a coat. I also have tomato sauce all over me. I’m not having the best day of my life.”

  “You have to sign a release before I hook you up. It’s for the insurance company.” The driver took a clipboard off the seat of the wrecker and handed it to Kyle, along with a pen from his shirt pocket. “Right there on the bottom line,” he said.

  Kyle coughed, deep down in his throat. “What’s that smell?”

  “I ran over a hog north of Big Fork.”

  “It must have been rolling in shit before you hit it. You wear a suit when you work?”

  “I went from vespers straight to the job and didn’t have time to change. I’m a minister, too.”

  Was this the mystery man? “You didn’t happen to visit Rosa Segovia earlier, did you?”

  “Don’t know the lady. Please sign.”

  Kyle scribbled his name on the form and handed back the clipboard.

  “Thanks,” the driver said. “Take your keys out of the ignition. Company rules again. People leave the ignition on and sometimes start electrical fires.”

  Kyle began walking back to his truck. In the headlights of the wrecker, he noticed a bib of white granules at the bottom of the flap that covered the cap on his gas tank. As he rubbed his fingers on the granules, he heard a brief rattling sound behind him, like a hard wooden object scraping against a steel surface. He turned around just as the driver swung a sawed-off pool cue into the side of his head, knocking him to one knee in the middle of the road. The driver hit him again, this time across the back of the head. He was on all fours like a dog, unable to speak, blood leaking down the side of his face.

  “Get up,” the driver said. “That’s it, you can do it. Let’s walk behind my truck and get rigged up, then we’ll be toggling on down the road.”

  Why are you doing this? Kyle wanted to say. But the words wouldn’t come. The driver had done something to his throat or his voice box, and the words dissolved into paste and ran over his lip and down his chin. His wrists were fastened behind him with ligatures of some kind, and a looped steel cable had been dropped over his head and fitted around his neck. He heard the driver stripping cable off the spool, putting more slack in it. Don’t do this, Kyle wanted to say.

  “I know all your thoughts,” the driver said. “They won’t help you. Nothing will. When you die, you won’t know why. You’ve lived your life for no purpose, and you’ll be mourned by no one. Those will be your last thoughts. Then all breath and light will leave your body, and you’ll descend into a black hole with no memory of ever having lived.”

  The driver kicked Kyle’s feet out from under him. Kyle struck the road’s surface with his face. He could taste the blood in his mouth and smell the tar and oil and even the day’s heat in the asphalt. His concerns about the cold wind had disappeared. He wanted to remain where he was for the rest of his life.

  The driver got in the wrecker and drove away, accelerating gradually until he was doing sixty, gliding into the curves as his cargo swung from side to side on the asphalt, caroming off tree trunks and road signs like a surfboard out of control.

  * * *

  Sheriff Elvis Bisbee called me at three-thirty P.M. Tuesday. “We’ve got Wyatt Dixon in custody,” he said. “He’s not under arrest, so he hasn’t been Mirandized. He says he’ll talk to us but only if you’re here.”

  “Why me?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Why’d you bring him in?”

  “Call it littering.”

  “Is that some kind of insider joke?”

  “Not if your name is Kyle Schumacher. His body parts were scattered for two miles along the Eastside Highway next to Flathead Lake. Come on down and I’ll show you a few photos. We’re at the jail.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Me and Detective Boyd.”

  “Can I bring Clete Purcel?”

  “Are you serious?”

  Forty-five minutes later, I parked in front of the old courthouse in downtown Missoula. Wyatt Dixon was being held in a holding cell on the second floor. Elvis Bisbee and Jack Boyd walked with me to the cell. Dixon was sitting on a wood bench against the wall, asleep, his chin on his chest. He was wearing a T-shirt that showed Geronimo and three other Apaches, each holding a rifle. The inscription read: HOMELAND SECURITY — FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492.

  The detective unlocked the cell and kicked the toe of Dixon’s boot. “Wake up,” he said.

  Dixon lifted his head. “You caught me on my sore foot, Detective,” he said. “Is it dinnertime yet?”

  “Mr. Robicheaux is here,” the sheriff said.

  “Howdy-doody,” Dixon said.

  “Why’d you want me here, Wyatt?” I said.

  “Because you’re a believer, and they ain’t.”

  “A believer in what?” I said.

  “What’s out there,” he said. “You might be a college man, but me and you see the world the same way. You know what’s behind all this trouble, and it ain’t a bunch of lamebrains that work for Love Younger.”

  “You’ve got a couple of strikes against you, Wyatt,” I said. “You had a grievance against Kyle Schumacher. Second, he was dragged to death.”

  “It ain’t no skin off my ass.”

  Boyd looked at me. “See, he’s a comedian. He’s always thinking. Isn’t that right, comedian?”

  “You told me your cell partner in Texas chain-drug a man down a road,” I said.

  “Yeah, I did tell you that, didn’t I? That probably wasn’t too smart.”

  “Detective Boyd also showed you a mug shot of Schumacher in a photo lineup,” I said. “The next thing we know, Schumacher is dead.”

  “Detective Boyd not only showed me a photo, he gave me Schumacher’s name. Up until that time, I’d never heard of him.”

  “You’re lying,” Boyd said.

  “What reason would I have to lie?”

  “Because you were out to get the guys who jumped you and your girlfriend, and you have no alibi,” Boyd said.

  “I slept on Miss Bertha’s couch last night. I wasn’t nowhere near Flathead Lake.”

  “Why didn’t you say that?” the sheriff asked.

  “Because Detective Boyd wants me back in the pen or wants me to go after the Youngers. It’s one or the other. I ain’t sure which.”

  “Is Detective Boyd part of a conspiracy?” the sheriff asked.

&n
bsp; “He thinks I had something to do with cutting up Bill Pepper. How come y’all don’t have no leads on that waitress that was abducted up by Lookout Pass? The man who drug Schumacher down the Eastside Highway is the same man who grabbed the waitress. Ask Mr. Robicheaux.”

  The sheriff and the detective looked at me. “In my opinion, it’s Asa Surrette,” I said.

  “You know that?” Boyd said.

  “No,” I replied. “The pattern is his. The agenda is his. But I cannot say with certainty that the perpetrator is Asa Surrette. I was expressing an opinion.”

  “Why don’t you call up the sheriff in Mineral County?” Boyd said.

  “I don’t have any authority here. My concern is my daughter. Her name seems to get lost in the mix.”

  “We’re sorry about that,” Boyd said. “Two men who worked for Love Younger are dead, but we’ll drop everything and get back on your daughter’s case. Let’s see. She thinks somebody shot an arrow at her? That’s some earthshaking shit, Robicheaux.”

  “Are we done here?” I said to the sheriff.

  “No. Walk outside with me,” he replied.

  “What do you want me to do, Sheriff?” Boyd said.

  “Go to my office and stay there.”

  “Sir?” Boyd said.

  The sheriff and I went through the side door of the building onto the courthouse lawn. The flowers were blooming in the gardens along the walkways, the maples darkening with shadow against the western sun. “What is Surrette going to do next?” he asked.

  “Cause as much injury and suffering as possible.”

  “You think the waitress is alive?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Surrette doesn’t take chances. And he’s afraid of his victims.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “All serial killers are cowards. They want their victims to remain terrified. They don’t want their victims to see the frightened child living inside them.”

  “Where’s the Horowitz woman?” he said.

  “At Albert Hollister’s place.”

  “No matter how this shakes out, I think she should move on.”

  “Somebody tried to bait her into a spring-loaded bear trap.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “That’s why she didn’t report it,” I said.

  “Dixon called you a believer,” the sheriff said. “What did he mean?”

  “Who knows what goes on in the mind of a guy like that?”

  “I think you do. I think you and he are of one mind. That’s what bothers me about you,” he said.

  I drove back to Lolo. The sky was blue and ribbed with strips of pink cloud above the mountain peaks in the west, but I couldn’t get my mind off the abducted waitress. If she was dead, Asa Surrette would be seeking a new victim soon. He had tried and failed with Gretchen. Would Alafair be next? I couldn’t bear thinking about it.

  Chapter 24

  The morning after Gretchen’s life had been saved by the snowshoe rabbit, she climbed to the top of the ridge and tried to track the man who had mocked and almost killed her. She found broken branches in the undergrowth, skid marks where he probably slid down a trail, and the muddy print of a hiking shoe on a flat rock. Down below, she could see the fenced pasture that Wyatt Dixon rented for his horses. To the south, toward the two-lane that led over Lolo Pass, she could find no sign that anyone had passed through the foliage or rock slides or the damp areas where springs leaked out of the hillside. To the north, there was an escarpment that only a desperate person would try to scale. Where had the man on the ridge gone?

  There was another possibility: What if he hadn’t gone anywhere? Maybe he had doubled back on his trail and was hiding in the woods in another cave. There were only two or three houses north of Albert’s ranch, all of them located in a natural cul-de-sac formed by cliffs and steep-sided hills that no one would try to climb in the dark.

  She decided to retrace her own tracks and start her search all over again. She began by returning to the place where she had almost been caught in the saw-toothed jaws of the bear trap. The trap and the chain and the steel pin that had anchored it were gone.

  She turned in a circle and stared at the dust floating in the shafts of sunlight that shone through the canopy. “You out there, bubba?” she called out. “You had plenty to say last night! Let’s have a chat!”

  She heard her voice echo off the hillside.

  “You’re not going to let a woman run you off, are you?”

  Nothing.

  Now it was Tuesday, and she had no evidence to prove that anyone had tried to maim or kill her on the hillside behind Albert’s house. That afternoon, she packed her gym bag and drove to the health club on the highway between Lolo and Missoula, unaware that she was about to face her oldest nemesis, namely, her fear that disobeying her instincts and placing her trust in others would lead invariably to betrayal and manipulation.

  * * *

  She dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a sports bra and running shoes and a Marine Corps utility cap and did three miles on the indoor track, up on the second floor. Then she went into an alcove on the edge of the track and slipped on a pair of gloves with dowels inside them and started in on the heavy bag, hitting it so hard, it bounced on the suspension chain and swung into the wall. After every fourth blow, she twisted her body and delivered a kick to the bag that made such a loud whap that people running on the track turned and stared, almost in alarm.

  She pulled off her gloves and wiped her face and neck with a sweat towel, then loaded an audiobook into her iPod and went to work on the speed bag. She started out hitting doubles, two blows with one fist, two blows with the other. After fifteen minutes, she switched to singles, creating a bicycle-like motion, allowing one fist to follow the other without interruption, the bag thundering off the rebound board. All the while, she counted her strokes under her breath, making bare-knuckle contact with the leather sixty times in forty seconds. The bag looked like a black blur thudding off the board.

  She went to the water fountain and took a long drink and walked back to the alcove just as a runner came around the bend in the track. The runner was a short woman with very pale skin and black moles on her shoulders. Her hair was thick and sweaty and held a dark luster and streaks of brown. Her face was heated from running, her breath coming short in her chest. She slowed to a stop when she recognized Gretchen. “How do you do?” she said.

  Gretchen removed her earbuds and paused her iPod. “I’m fine, Ms. Louviere,” she said.

  “I could hear you hitting that bag all the way on the other side of the track. I didn’t know it was you.”

  “I come here a couple of days a week,” Gretchen said. To occupy her hands, she rubbed her knuckles and the skinned places along her palms. Down below, she could see a heavyset man named Tim who had been crippled and whose speech had been permanently impaired in a motorcycle accident. He was known for his personal courage and his determination to be self-reliant. He was wheeling himself slowly across the basketball court.

  “Would you like to go downstairs and have a glass of iced tea with me?” Felicity asked.

  “I have to be somewhere.”

  “I don’t blame you for not liking me, Ms. Horowitz. I do blame you for not giving me a chance.”

  “Chance to do what?”

  “Perhaps to explain some things. To apologize.”

  “People are what they do, not what they say.”

  “I see.”

  “You’re married, Ms. Louviere. That fact won’t go away. My father wakes up every morning with his head in a vise.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Gretchen tapped the speed bag with the flat of her fist and watched it swing back and forth on the swivel. “I’d better get back to my workout.”

  “What are you listening to?”

  “The Big Sky, by A. B. Guthrie.”

  “That’s a grand book.”

  Gretchen tapped again on the bag, hitti
ng it in a slow rhythm on the second rebound. “Did you see Shane?”

  “With Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur and Van Heflin.”

  “Guthrie wrote the screenplay. It’s supposed to be the best western ever made. Except it’s not a western, it’s a Judeo-Greek tragedy. Shane doesn’t have a last or first name. He’s just Shane. He comes out of nowhere and never explains his origins. In the last scene, he disappears into a chain of mountains you can hardly see. Brandon deWilde played the little boy who runs after him and keeps shouting Shane’s name because he knows the Messiah has gone away. Nobody ever forgets that scene. I wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night.”

  “Where did you learn all this?”

  “At the movie theater. You know why the cattle barons in the film hate Shane? It’s because he doesn’t want or need what they have.”

  Felicity’s eyes went away from Gretchen’s. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “No, not at all. How did you know Jean Arthur and Van Heflin costarred with Alan Ladd?”

  “I was a ticket taker at an art theater.”

  “I’m doing my second documentary. My first one made Sundance. I think I might get enough financing from France to do a period film, an adaptation of a novel about Shiloh.”

  “Why go to France for financing?”

  “American producers are afraid to risk their money on historical pieces. Did you see Cold Mountain? It was one of the best films ever made about the Civil War, but it bombed. The rest of the world is fascinated with American history. We’re not.” Gretchen tapped the bag. “I’ve got to get back to my workout.”

  “You’re an interesting woman, Ms. Horowitz.”

  “Who played the role of Jack Wilson, the hired gun?” Gretchen asked.

  “Jack Palance,” Felicity said.

  “How about Stonewall Torrey, the guy he kills?”