Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “Gretchen is a little girl in a woman’s body. I owe her. She’s my kid. She’ll always be my kid.”

  Felicity lifted her hand and placed it on top of the table just as their food arrived. Clete stared out at the street, his jaw tightening.

  “What is it?” Felicity said.

  “My Caddy just went by. There it goes, down by the red light.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “There’s a pickup behind it. Stay here. I’ll be right back.” Clete went through the bar and out the front door and looked at the parking lot. The Caddy was gone. He went back inside the bar. “Did you see a maroon Caddy convertible pull out of the lot?” he asked the bartender.

  “Yeah. A guy at the bar did, too.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “A guy went out the door without paying for his drinks and sandwich. I went outside after him. He got in his truck and took off after the convertible.”

  “What kind of truck?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You get the tag?”

  “The guy said he was from Kansas. He made a crack at a girl who was in here. I didn’t get the tag number.”

  “Which girl?”

  “Good-looking, wearing jeans, long legs. That’s the crack he made. He said she had long legs. He had a face kind of like a shoe box.”

  “Did he use a name?”

  The bartender thought for a moment. “I heard him coming on to a college girl. He told her his name was Toto. What kind of name is that?”

  GRETCHEN TURNED OFF the brick-paved street by the tracks and drove aimlessly through the downtown area, unable to sort out her thoughts, her palms dry and stiff and hard to close around the steering wheel, her anger and depression like a stone in her chest. She passed the Wilma Theater and crossed the Higgins Street Bridge. Raindrops and hail were clicking on the convertible’s top; down below she could see a park and a carousel and the Clark Fork boiling over the boulders along the riverbank, the flooded willows bending almost to the waterline. On the other side of the bridge, she turned onto an unlit street down by the river, the same neighborhood of brick bungalows and early-twentieth-century apartment buildings where Bill Pepper had lived.

  A pickup truck that had been behind her on the bridge kept going and disappeared from her rearview mirror as soon as she turned off Higgins. She parked under a maple tree and cut the engine and dialed Alafair’s number on her cell phone. “Have a drink with me at Jaker’s,” she said.

  “Are you there now?” Alafair said.

  “No, I’m down by the river. I’m sorry for all those things I said to you. I feel really bad, Alafair.”

  “It’s not your fault. I was lecturing you.”

  “You always know how to handle things in an intelligent way. I don’t. Sometimes I wish I were you.”

  “Is Clete all right?”

  “He’s with the Louviere woman. Maybe I should go back there. At least return his car.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s time to disengage and let Clete solve his own problems. Remember the story of Tom Sawyer’s fence? The best way to get people to do something is to tell them they can’t.”

  “You always make me feel good, Alafair.”

  “See you at Jaker’s. And stop worrying about everything. Leave a message on Clete’s cell and tell him where we are.”

  Gretchen closed her phone and cracked the window, letting in the cold air and the smell of the trees and the river. The windshield was filmed with ice crystals, a streetlamp glowing like a yellow diamond inside the maples. She started the engine and glanced in her outside mirror. A pickup truck turned out of a side street and approached the Caddy from behind, the driver slowing. In the mirror she could see two silhouettes in the front seat. Was that the same truck she had seen earlier?

  She pulled open her tote bag and rested her hand on the checkered grips of the fourteen-round Beretta. The truck passed, its high beams bouncing off the trunks of the trees, lighting the bottom of the canopy. At the end of the block, it made a wide U-turn and headed toward her again, its headlights almost blinding her.

  She released her safety belt and slipped the Beretta from her bag and lowered the window all the way. Though the driver’s window in the truck was down, she could not make out his face. Then she saw him lift a nickel-plated snub-nosed revolver into full view and point it at her. The first round shattered the outside mirror, and the second one pocked a hole in the windshield and blew glass on her skin. She had already thrown herself sideways on the seat and popped the door handle on the passenger side. She slid off the edge of the seat onto the swale and pushed the door shut, which turned off the interior light. She positioned herself on one knee, the Beretta in her right hand, and waited. On the far side of the Caddy, she heard the truck turn around and head toward her again.

  She stood up and walked into the middle of the street and extended the Beretta in front of her with both arms, her feet fifteen inches apart. The driver hesitated, windshield wipers beating furiously, milky vapor rising from the hood’s surface. The passenger was attempting to work himself partway out the window to get a clear shot. She clicked off the butterfly safety and thumbed back the hammer. The driver of the pickup floored the accelerator, and the truck leaped forward and roared straight at her. Gretchen began shooting, each crack of the nine-millimeter like a splinter of glass in her right eardrum. The sleet pelted her head and stung her eyes, but she kept pulling the trigger, both feet anchored to the asphalt, the brass hulls ejecting into the darkness.

  She could hear the rounds punching through the radiator and whanging off the hood and toppling through the windshield. She tried to count the rounds but couldn’t keep track. One thing she was certain about: Anyone inside that truck was having a bad night.

  The driver ducked down as the truck veered out of control and passed her. For just a second, in the glow of the dashboard, she saw the passenger leaning forward, staring straight at her. His cheekbone was shattered, and he was trying to hold it in place with his left hand; the blood from his wound had welled through his fingers and was running down his wrist.

  She turned with the truck and began firing again. At least one round went through the back window; another hit the tailgate. She let off two more rounds, hoping to punch a hole in the gas tank. Instead, one round must have ricocheted off the asphalt and popped the left front tire, bringing it instantly down on the rim, the truck skidding against the curb. Gretchen looked down at her Beretta. The slide was locked open on an empty chamber.

  She opened the driver’s door of the Caddy and leaned over the seat and retrieved a backup magazine from her bag. The driver of the pickup shoved the transmission into reverse and backed into the center of the street, burning rubber, smoke rising from the rear tires. She jammed the loaded magazine into the Beretta’s frame and released the slide, chambering a round. The driver of the pickup shifted out of reverse and gave the engine all it had, the fan screeching, the radiator bleeding antifreeze, sparks gushing off the left front wheel rim, the flattened tire slicing into strips.

  Gretchen didn’t have a clear shot. The angle could carry it into a yard or porch or housefront. How much time had passed since the driver had fired the first round? Probably under two minutes, long enough for someone to call in a shots-fired. As the pickup wobbled down the middle of the street, Gretchen repositioned herself and lifted the Beretta so the sight was just below the rear window. Then she saw a car turn down the far end of the block, putting itself directly in her line of fire.

  She lowered her weapon. Her ears felt like they were stuffed with damp cotton. She swallowed and tried to clear her ear canals with no success.

  The driver of the pickup wasn’t finished. Steering with one hand, he opened the passenger door and shoved his friend out on the street. The man was short and compact and dressed in heavy jeans and work boots and a long-sleeved cotton shirt. He landed on his side, hard, then strugg
led to his feet and lumbered down an embankment toward the river. He was holding his face with one hand, as though he had a toothache, his sleeve sodden with blood. The pickup went through the intersection at the end of the block, the bare rim clanging like a garbage can rolling down a rock road.

  How much time had gone by? Three minutes, maybe three and a half, she thought. Response time would be at least ten minutes. That was just a guess. She followed the wounded man down to the water’s edge. The river was blown out and full of leaves and twigs and foam and running dangerously high and fast through boulders that usually lay exposed in dry sand. Plus, the river was making a relentless humming sound, similar to a sewing machine’s.

  “Give it up, buddy,” she called out.

  For a moment she thought she saw him inside a stand of willows, watching her, maybe sighting on her face or chest. She froze and slowly squatted down behind a beached cottonwood, lowering her face so that light did not shine directly on it.

  When the wind blew through the willows, all of the shapes inside it moved except one.

  “Your pal screwed you. You want to take his weight?” she said. “Bad deal, if you ask me.”

  She walked farther along the embankment, rocks as heavy as petrified dinosaur eggs clacking under her feet. “My name is Gretchen Horowitz. I used to blow heads for a living. That means I’ve got a sheet, and I won’t be a credible witness against you. You can skate and say, ‘Adios, motherfuckers, I’ll be in Margaritaville.’ ”

  There was no answer from the figure. She wiped the rainwater out of her eyes with her sleeve. “Listen to me,” she said. “You were probably trying to clip my old man, Clete Purcel. So you and your friend screwed up twice. Then your friend rat-fucked you on top of it. I can drive you to the ER. This is Montana. Gunfights are a family value here. Think it over.”

  “I already did,” said a voice inside the willows. “I never saw a Hebe that didn’t try to work the angle.”

  She knew the drill and didn’t want to be there for it. Fear and desperation always took them to a precipice where they gave up hope and pulled the rip cord and leaped into space. There were memories buried in her mind that were like film clips from a documentary no one should ever have to see. But the memories were hers, not someone else’s, and the characters were not from central casting. She saw herself on a boat off Islamorada on a blazing sunlit day, the ocean green and filled with patches of indigo, an Irish button man from the Jersey Shore aiming a harpoon gun at her breast. The scene shifted to Little Havana, where a gumball who’d raped the daughter of a Gambino underboss came out of a whorehouse closet shooting, wearing panties and a bra, his body covered with monkey hair. Odds were that either man would take her off at the neck. Instead, they both died with a look of disbelief she could never forget. Their prey had not only become their executioner; they had died at the hands of someone they’d always thought of as the weaker sex, a receptacle of their seed, to be used and discarded arbitrarily.

  Unfortunately for her, all the weed and angel dust in Florida couldn’t change the fact that of her own volition, she had become employed by the worst people in America, including some who may have been involved with the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  The man in work clothes came around the far side of the willows, knee-deep in the current, the lights from the vaudeville theater and the park across the river reflecting off the rapids behind him. His hair was black and thick and unwashed and hung in dirty strings around his face. His left hand was clenched on his cheek, pushing his lips out of shape, exposing his teeth. A dark fluid was leaking from below his rib cage, down his shirt and trouser leg. In his right hand, he held a small semi-auto, perhaps a .25 or .32. He was obviously weak from blood loss and probably had decided he would either see the sunrise from a plane window or with a DOA tag tied to his toe.

  “You were stand-up. Your bud was a rat bastard,” she said. “Throw your piece in the water. You can go into wit pro. There’re all kinds of—”

  He raised the semi-auto. “Chug this,” he said.

  Maybe he fired, maybe he didn’t. She didn’t try to think it through. She was sure her first round hit him in the forehead, the second in the throat, the third in the chest. Maybe one went long or hit him in the arm. He went straight down, as they always did. Even while he slid into the current, the back of his shirt puffing with air, his head bobbing like an apple in the chop, she couldn’t stop pulling the trigger, the bullets dancing all over the water’s surface. In seconds the current or a cottonwood snag took him under, and all she could hear was the incessant humming of the river.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” she said under her breath.

  Inside her head, she heard a cacophonous voice that sounded like it had risen from the bowels of a building through a heating duct: Hi, baby doll, it said. Welcome back to that old-time rock and roll. It’s so nice to have you back on board.

  BY MONDAY MORNING Clete Purcel didn’t think much else could go wrong with his day. Not until he saw a hand-waxed, metallic-purple, chrome-plated Humvee coming up the road, splashing through the rain puddles, almost running over Albert’s border collie. The Humvee turned into the driveway and stopped by the pedestrian gate to the north pasture. A slight man wearing a Mexican vest and a flowery shirt with blown sleeves and a braided cloth belt and trousers stuffed inside hand-tooled, multicolored boots came through the gate with a self-satisfied expression while he eyeballed the pasture and the low-hanging clouds and the sunshine spangling on the wet trees, as though he owned whatever he walked on.

  Clete stepped out on the porch, steam rising off the tin cup he held. “What can I do for you, Mr. Younger?” he said.

  “Call me Caspian. Is that your restored Cadillac under the tarp?”

  “Yeah, the ravens keep downloading on it. It’s a way of life with me.”

  “Getting dumped on?”

  “Yeah, think of me as a human Dumpster. What do you want?”

  “Not much. I felt obligated to tell you you’re not the first.”

  “First what?”

  Caspian Younger gazed at the sheen on the fir and pine trees on the hillsides and the clouds dissolving like smoke as the day warmed. “I understand you worked for Sally Dio in Reno and Vegas.”

  “I used to get comped at the Riviera. I stayed in the penthouse, right next to Frank Sinatra’s old suite. The greaseballs loved it there. It was the worst shithole on the Strip. You ever stay at the Riviera?”

  “I never had the pleasure. You don’t like Vegas?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it that a hydrogen bomb and a lot of topsoil wouldn’t cure.”

  “Did you enjoy yourself last night, Mr. Purcel?”

  “Actually, I don’t remember much of what I did. I have blackouts, see? I wake up in the morning and don’t have a clue about where I was or who I was with.”

  “Know where I met her?”

  “Not interested.”

  “She was a ticket taker in an art theater in Metairie. I thought she was the cutest thing I had ever seen. She looked like a little teenage girl with a woman’s jugs. You ever see skin like that on a woman? Or didn’t you notice?”

  “I met your wife in town to talk about the death of your adopted daughter. We had a drink in a bar and went to the Depot and ordered a dinner we never ate. In the meantime, your family keeps showing up in our lives. I don’t see y’all as the offended party.”

  “She’ll fuck your brains out and throw the rest of your body parts on the roadside. She fucked the governor of Louisiana right before he went to prison. The poor schmuck probably never figured out why she balled him. She collects stuffed heads. Hey, nobody complains. Felicity can have four orgasms in one night.”

  “If you want to talk about your wife like that, it’s your business. I don’t want to hear it, Mr. Younger.”

  “I’m a realist. I knew what she was when I married her. You go out with another guy’s wife, but you’re offended by profanity?”

  Take a chance, Clete tho
ught. “You know that dude who was following me and Miss Felicity around?”

  “Which ‘dude’?”

  “Driving a pickup, Kansas plates, rectangular face, maybe, what’s the gen on this guy?”

  “The ‘gen’?”

  “Yeah, the background. You know this guy?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know what bothers me most about your visit here, Mr. Younger? You haven’t made one mention of your daughter. Your wife wants to hire me to help find your daughter’s killer, but you show no curiosity at all about what I might know. You don’t show any rage, either. Most fathers who lose a daughter to a predator don’t want the guy cooled out. They want to feed him into an airplane propeller.”

  “I didn’t raise the subject, Mr. Purcel, because I don’t think you know anything. I think you’re a rotund, self-deluded fellow who will bed another man’s wife and pretend he’s part of a noir tradition he learned about from watching too many movies. We checked you out. Wherever you go, you have the reputation of a court jester with dunce cap and bells, an alcoholic idiot who can’t keep his flagpole in his pants.”

  “We were talking about your lack of anger or desire for revenge or even justice.”

  “Anger is the stuff of theater. Revenge is a science, my friend. Stay away from my wife. The first time wasn’t altogether your fault. The second time won’t be nice.”

  Clete felt his hands close and open involuntarily at his sides. “I guess you’re not a listener,” he said.

  “And you look like you had a hard night,” Caspian said. He reached out with his fingernail and ticked the lipstick smear on Clete’s shirt. “I hope it’s worth it. When she gets rid of a cop—and there have been other cops before you—he’s usually ready to eat his gun. Can you see yourself eating your gun over a broad? Hey, I like this place. You get to stay here rent-free?”

  CLETE WENT BACK inside the cabin, his blood pressure throbbing in his wrists, a taste like copper pennies in his mouth. Gretchen had just gotten up. “Did you know you have lipstick on your shirt?” she said.