Everything taking place around him no longer seemed his concern, because he knew he was about to die. The sensation was not as he had imagined it. He felt as though he were being drawn back through a tunnel, one that was translucent and pink and blue, a place he had been before. It was the birth canal, he was sure of that, and on the other end of it, he thought he could see a warm and lighted presence that should have been his birthright but had been denied him during his time on earth.
Then the face of a navy corpsman was looking into his. “Don’t go dinky-dow on me,” the corpsman said. “Hang on to your ass. We’re going for the ride of your life. Then you’re the fuck out of here, man. We’re talking about the Golden Gate in ’68. Just stay with me.”
The corpsman wiped Clete’s face and pulled loose his flak vest, then rolled him onto a poncho liner and dragged him like a human sled all the way to the bottom of the hill.
Clete lay on his back inside the swale and looked up at the stars. He could hear Gretchen shooting and smell the grass and the fertilizer in a flower bed and the cold that seemed to be blowing down from a snowfield high up in the mountains.
“We never made it back from over there,” he said. “We thought we did, but they body-bagged us and forgot to tell us about it. They stole our lives, Dave.”
Then he rolled on his side and vomited in the grass.
* * *
I wiped his mouth with my handkerchief and brushed the hair out of his eyes. “You can’t leave me, Clete,” I said.
“Who said I am?”
“You were talking out of your head,” I said. “Vietnam is yesterday’s box score. Forget Vietnam and everything that happened over there.”
“I was talking about ’Nam? I don’t think I was. I was having a dream, that’s all.”
“We have to go, partner. Can you make it?”
“Go where?”
“To hook up with Gretchen and Alf. We need to nail these guys as they come out of the orchard. We still have Surrette to deal with.”
He widened his eyes as though trying to bring the world back into focus. “Dave, I know I dropped at least three of those assholes. This is what you’re not hearing. There are a lot more of them than you think. I saw them coming through the grass.”
“There’s no grass out there, Clete. You’re losing it. Come on, get up!”
He pulled the AR-15 off my shoulder and tried to stand, then fell sideways, like a drunk. “I think I’m a couple of quarts down.”
“That’s okay. You’re doing fine,” I said. I got his arm over my shoulders again and hooked one hand under the back of his belt and pulled him up. “We’ve been in a lot worse shape than this.”
“When?”
I couldn’t think of the instance. We headed across the lawn into the shadow of the stone house. I could see Gretchen and Alafair coming toward us. In the background, the lake was green-black, the rocks in the shallows illuminated with a strange light that had no source, the wind blowing whitecaps onto the shore, each as defined as a brushstroke in an oil painting.
“Things are happening here that aren’t real, Dave,” Clete said. “It scares the hell out of me.”
“We don’t have anything to be afraid of,” I said.
I think he tried to laugh. I held him tighter, pulling up on his belt, my knees starting to fail.
* * *
Gretchen was holding the Mauser bolt-action with one hand across her shoulder. She grabbed Clete’s other arm. “Let’s get him into your truck,” she said.
“Screw that,” Clete said.
“Do what I tell you, big boy,” she said.
“We’re cut off, Dave,” Alafair said. “They’ve got a couple of vehicles parked across the drive.”
“Is there anybody in those sailboats?” I said.
“I couldn’t raise anyone. I went down there twice,” she said. “Somebody cut the phone line to the bar.”
“Surrette?” I said.
“I don’t know. What do you want to do?” she said.
“Did y’all see an orange pickup on the road, one with a camper in the bed?” I said.
“We saw some headlights stop on the road,” Gretchen said. “You think that’s Wyatt Dixon’s truck?”
“I guess he doesn’t own the only orange pickup in West Montana,” I said.
“We have too many hurt people here. We’ve got to get off the dime,” she said.
“We’re in a box,” I said. “That’s the long and short of it. Our advantage is that they have to come to us. We’ve also put a dent in their numbers.”
“How many of them are there?” Alafair asked.
“No more than a handful,” I said.
Clete was sitting on the bumper of Gretchen’s truck, bent forward, his head down. “Wrong,” he said without looking up.
“Clete saw more men than I did,” I said.
“Dave, look!” Alafair said, pointing up the slope.
I don’t know where they came from. I could see flashlights moving down the slope on either side of the property. I had no idea who they were or how they got there, if they worked for Caspian Younger or not. I was no longer sure that anything I saw was there.
“Give me the AR-15,” Clete said, his head on his chest. “I dropped my piece on the lawn.”
Gretchen squeezed my arm tightly, her face close to mine. “Time to bust some caps, Dave. We’ll figure all this out later,” she said. She picked up the AR-15 and left Clete the Mauser.
She was right. We were outnumbered, cut off from the highway, and flanked, with the lake at our back.
“Come on, Dave, call it,” Gretchen said.
I could see Molly and Albert and the two girls on the back steps of the house, and I could see Felicity Louviere sleeping in the front seat of Gretchen’s pickup. Clete could hardly move. Blood had run from his side all the way to the knee of his trousers. I felt at a total loss.
“Take it to them,” I said.
“Do what?” Alafair said.
“We go right down the middle,” I said. “If Caspian Younger wants a fight, let’s give it to him.”
By anyone’s reckoning, it was a foolish idea, perhaps one that had its origins in medieval romance or Henry V’s address to his troops before the siege at Agincourt. But there are times when the probability of death in your life is so great that you step across a line and no longer fear it. I believe that was what happened to us as we stood close by a glacial lake where dinosaurs and mastodons once fed and played among the buttercups and ice lilies.
We left Clete with Felicity Louviere and walked three abreast across the lawn, Alafair and Gretchen and I, each of us bearing down on Caspian Younger, who had just emerged with his men from the cherry orchard.
Like most cowards, he had not anticipated our response. He could have opened fire on us or ordered his men to do so, but he knew they were all watching him, expecting him to be more than the posturing figure who wore the quilted vest of the hunter and used the martial rhetoric of a drill instructor. He stood awkwardly in front of his men, the breeze tousling his hair. A blue-black revolver with white handles hung from his right hand. It was probably a collectible, the kind a publicity-oriented army officer with political aspirations might wear in a shoulder holster.
“Well, what do we have here?” he said.
“Keep working on it. You’ll figure it out,” I replied.
“Is this the defining moment for you and your little team, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“You tell me, Mr. Younger. You’re the guy who turned his wife over to the tender mercies of a sadist like Asa Surrette, the same man who murdered your daughter,” I said.
“Like always, you’ve got it wrong,” he said.
“He suffocated her with a plastic bag and ejaculated on her legs,” I said. “She was seventeen. Maybe she called out your name when she begged for help.”
His whiskers looked like dirty smudges on his cheeks and chin. His eyes shifted sideways when he saw that he was caught between allowing me t
o speak and ordering his men to shoot in order to stop me from revealing his failure as a father and husband and finally as a human being. I held the M-1 at port arms, the safety off; no matter how things played out, I was determined to spike his cannon before I went down.
“I get it,” he said. “This is your finest hour. The egalitarian philosopher delivering his grand speech to the multitudes. Unfortunately, the role doesn’t serve you well. We’ve researched every aspect of your life, Mr. Robicheaux. We have your psychiatric records, your pitiful statements about your dependency on your whore of a mother, your sexual history in Manila and Yokohama, the possibility of a homoerotic relationship with your fat friend, your constant whining about all the injustices visited on the miserable piece of swamp you grew up in. The fact that you take others to task for their mistakes has established new standards in hypocrisy.”
“The problem for you, Mr. Younger, is that after I’m dead and gone, you’ll still be you,” I said. “You’ll wake up every morning knowing that your half brother is Wyatt Dixon, and on his worst day, he could stuff you in a matchbox with his thumb. By the way, how’d a loser like you convince all these guys to work for you? Do they know you had your daughter killed so you could inherit her estate? If you’d do that to her, what will you do to them?”
“You’re looking at your executioner, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said. “Want to add anything to your final words?”
“Yeah, you’re going with me,” I said.
“No matter what happens, I’m instructing my men to enjoy themselves with Horowitz and your daughter one piece at a time. They’re going to be busy girls. Let that be your last thought, Mr. Robicheaux. I think we should get the festivities started now, so you can watch what you’ve wrought. I understand Horowitz has already pulled a train or two, so she might enjoy it.”
“Fuck you, you little pimp,” Alafair said.
“Copy that,” Gretchen said.
The three of us knew our time had run out, and our flippancy was a denial of the fate that awaited us. We’d rolled the dice and lost. So this is where it all ends, I thought. All our dreams and hopes become as naught, and evil men are allowed to hang their lanterns on our tombstones. What greater folly is there?
I swallowed and looked at the ground, then raised my head. I knew if I swung the muzzle of the M-1 in front of me and began squeezing off rounds, I might put a couple of serious holes in Caspian Younger. Chances were I would not. Too many weapons were pointed at me. I suspected I had about three or four seconds to live.
I saw an electrical flash in the clouds. It seemed to leap into the sky from a snowfield cupped between two mountains and ripple through the heavens all the way to the horizon. In that brief moment, I saw a figure standing atop the peaked roof of the work shed, like a human lightning rod waiting to be struck. I was too far away to make out his features, but I was sure I saw his starched-brim cowboy hat and wide shoulders and tapered hips and thighs stuffed into tight-fitting Wranglers.
I saw the rifle, too. It was a long-barrel lever-action repeater, and I guessed it was the 1892 Winchester with an elevator sight that Wyatt Dixon carried in the camper shell on the back of his truck.
The shooter fired only once. The round was likely soft-nosed, with a notched cross hammer-tapped into the lead for good measure. When it struck the back of Caspian Younger’s skull, it left a hole no bigger than the tip of your little finger but blew his forehead apart like an exploding watermelon. He fell forward into a spruce tree, stone dead, his throat catching in a fork, his knees striking the ground simultaneously.
The lightning died in the sky, and the roof of the shed receded into a blue-black darkness that seemed to be spreading from the lake across the entirety of the valley. The men who had been standing on either side of Caspian Younger moved away from his body, staring at it dumbly, glancing back at the orchard and the shed and the mountaintops, as jagged and sharp as scissored tin against the sky.
I tried to make out their faces. Were they mercenaries, adventurers, or jailhouse riffraff? They seemed to have no more depth or singularity than a computer-generated illusion. “We’ve got no grievance against you guys,” I said. “The way I see it, Younger got what he deserved. How about we call it square?”
No one moved or spoke.
“There’s another way to look at it,” I said. “That was probably Wyatt Dixon on the roof. If you’ve been around these parts, you know his reputation. Who needs grief with a dude like that? Wyatt gives insanity a bad name.”
I saw them start stepping back from us, like people withdrawing from a presence they truly fear, not because of their experience with it but because of an atavistic instinct that goes back before recorded time.
Then I realized my terrible mistake.
Surrette never left the house, I thought.
CLETE WAS STILL sitting on the bumper of the truck, nauseated, his head spinning from blood loss. He was looking at his feet and the shine of his blood on the tops of his loafers, his eyes half-lidded.
“Got you, fat boy,” a voice said.
Clete raised his eyes and looked straight ahead. He felt the muzzle of a handgun touch his ear. “Is that you, Boyd?” he asked.
“Surprised?”
“What happened to the light?” Clete asked.
“What light?”
“The northern lights or whatever it was. That’s you, huh, Jack? You’re still hanging around?”
“We never left, you idiot. We snookered you good.” He pushed the gun tighter into Clete’s ear. With the other hand, he picked up the Mauser bolt-action and hung it over his shoulder. “I’d say you’re in a lot of trouble.”
“Yep, that’s true,” Clete said.
“What do you think dying is gonna be like?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“You should have been a clown on one of those kid shows. You could be Captain Animal, an old pervert loitering around the kiddie park.”
“It’s a thought,” Clete said.
“You think I won’t pop you?”
“Not unless Surrette tells you to. You’re like me: You’ll always be a dirty cop, wherever you go. I’ve got a PI badge. You’ve got Surrette. For the rest of your life, you won’t take a dump without his permission.”
“I can leave him anytime I want.”
Clete turned his head slowly, trying to concentrate on Jack Boyd’s face. “If you do anything to Molly and Albert and the girls, I’m going to hurt you.”
“You’re going to hurt me?”
“Take it to the bank.”
“You’re a laugh a minute,” Boyd said.
“That’s me,” Clete replied.
Jack Boyd walked toward the front of the house, the German rifle slung upside down on his shoulder, his trousers tucked inside the tops of his hand-tooled boots. Involuntarily, Clete’s head fell on his chest, his eyes shutting, his shoulders slumping. For a moment, he thought he was going to fall on the grass. He forced himself to his feet and walked toward the back of Gretchen’s pickup, the stars burning coldly in a sky that looked like purple velvet. He reached inside the truck bed and felt along the sides until his fingers touched the tip of a steel chain.
* * *
The odor from behind me was unmistakable. I turned and looked into the face of Asa Surrette. He was wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle. “We finally meet,” he said. He touched the muzzle of the Bushmaster to the back of Alafair’s head. “Lay your weapons down, please.”
“Don’t do it, Dave,” Alafair said.
Surrette winked at me. “Humor me,” he said.
“You got it,” I said. I set the M-1 down on the grass. Gretchen lay her AR-15 down and pushed it away with her foot.
“Do as he says, Alafair,” I said.
She was carrying a cut-down Browning twelve-gauge that Gretchen had given her. She squatted slowly and placed it on the grass, then stood up. She gazed at Surrette a long time. “We saw what you did to Felicity,” she said
.
“It was what she wanted. Have you been publishing any more magazine articles?” he said.
“No, I published a novel. What about you?” she said. “Has Creative Artists or William Morris been trying to get in touch with you?”
“Oh, you’re good,” he said.
“I looked through the house. Where were you?” I said.
“In the attic. The one place you didn’t look.”
“Pretty slick,” I said. “Who are these guys?”
“You don’t know?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I’ll rephrase my question,” he said. “You’ve haven’t figured out yet who I am? You’re that slow on the uptake?”
“Your entire life has been characterized by mediocrity,” I said. “You got busted because you were stupid enough to believe the cops when they told you the floppy disk you sent them couldn’t be traced.”
His smile never wavered. He stepped closer to me. The odor that rose from his body made me choke. “Breathing problem?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve never been around anything like it.”
Jack Boyd came out of the darkness, carrying the Mauser upside down on its sling.
“Where’s Clete Purcel?” I said.
“Relaxing, I suppose,” Boyd said.
“You didn’t finish them?” Surrette said.
“You didn’t tell me to,” Boyd replied.
“I’ll deal with you in a minute,” Surrette said.
“What do you mean, you’ll deal with me?”
Surrette looked at me and Gretchen and Alafair. “Get on your knees,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said.
“I can put you there if you wish,” he said. “Have you ever seen someone shot through both kneecaps? Would Daddy like to see his daughter shot through her kneecaps? Tell me now.”
“Kiss my ass,” Alafair said.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I have something special in mind for you. I’m going to turn you into an artistic masterpiece. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see the notoriety that my artwork draws, even though you’ll be the centerpiece.”
“Look at me, Surrette,” I said.
“Look at you? Why should I? Do you think you can condescend to me and give me commands at a moment like this? You’re truly a foolish man, Mr. Robicheaux.”
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