Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “I wouldn’t know what he looks like. What the hell is this?”

  “What would you do if a great amount of money came into your hands?” Younger asked.

  “I’d ask what the trade-off was, ’cause ain’t nothing comes free. Second of all, I’d probably say kiss my ass, ’cause I ain’t interested in what other people own.”

  “Then you’re a rare man.”

  “You didn’t answer my question about Jack Shit.”

  “A man named Clete Purcel attacked him.”

  “You let Louisiana Fats knock you around?” Wyatt said to Boyd.

  “Listen to me, son,” Younger said.

  “Take your goddamn hand off me. Don’t be calling me ‘son’ again, either.”

  “The fates have not been kind to you. I want to correct that if I can. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  “No, I got no idea. I’m getting pretty tired of it, too. How come you always got guys like this around? People that’s been inside or belong there?”

  “I try to give other men a second chance. Pap, why did he beat you? Why did he have such animus toward you?”

  “Ani-what?”

  “You’re part Shawnee Indian, boy. It’s in your profile. Your people were trash, but you’re a warrior. Look at my hands, look at yours. Those are hands that could break down a brick wall. How do you think you ended up the man you are? You think your genes came from your worthless father or your whore of a mother? Was it the nigger in the woodpile?”

  “You get the fuck away from me, old man,” Wyatt said.

  He threw his cotton candy and Bertha’s tater pig in a garbage barrel and walked behind the bucking chutes, a sound like fireworks popping in his head. He squatted in the sawdust and began buckling on his spurs.

  “You’re not up, Wyatt,” a cowboy said.

  “Hell I ain’t.”

  “I’m just doing my job.”

  Wyatt lifted his eyes to the cowboy’s face. “Do I got to say it again?”

  He climbed on top of the chute while his horse was loaded, then eased down on its back, hooking his left palm through the braided suitcase handle on the bucking rig. Like most rough stock, the horse was almost feral, walleyed, jerking up its head, its body quivering with fear and rage at the confines of the chute, knocking against the wood sides, trying to kick itself free of the flank strap.

  Wyatt fixed his hat and steadied himself. “Outside!” he said.

  He was once again borne aloft, his legs up, his body springing backward almost to the croup, the rowels of his spurs slashing down, the twelve hundred pounds of gelding thudding so hard into the sod that Wyatt thought his sphincter had been broken and he was about to urinate into his athletic supporter. He’d drawn Buster’s Boogie, a hot-wired gelding that had crippled a rider for life at the Russian River Rodeo in California. Buster’s Boogie sunfished twice, then corkscrewed and twisted sideways unexpectedly, all within three seconds. Wyatt saw the grandstand begin rotating around him, then the bucking chutes, then the Ferris wheel, then the greased faces of the clowns by the rubber barrel, as though he were stationary and the entire world, even the stars embroidered on the pink sky, had all become part of a giant Tilt-A-Whirl that had gone out of control and was doing things that had never happened to him before.

  He felt the gelding explode under him with renewed energy, prying Wyatt’s clamped legs loose from its sides, flinging him high in the air, his shoulders and back still hunched in a rider’s position, the suitcase handle slipping beyond his reach, the ground suddenly coming up like a fist, the blat of the eight-second buzzer coming too late, almost like a pent-up mockery that had never been allowed to express itself.

  He heard the thud when he struck the sod, then all sound went out of his head, as though he had been plunged deep underwater, his lungs collapsing like punctured balloons, his eardrums about to burst. He saw the pickup rider coming hard toward him, swinging down from the stirrup, a paramedic running with a first-aid bag, the crowd rising in unison, their faces filled with pity and sorrow.

  I’m all right, he wanted to say. I just got the wind knocked out of me. There ain’t no problem down here. Just let me get on my feet. Anybody seen my hat? Why y’all looking at me like that? Have I done gone and messed myself?

  His shirt was wet. He clutched it in his fingers and pulled it loose from his belt and saw the starlike wound where his championship silver buckle had punched a hole in his stomach, releasing a fluid that felt more like water than blood.

  Then he saw Bertha Phelps running toward him, her breasts bouncing inside her oversize dress, her body haloed by the electric lights and humidity and dust and desiccated manure in the arena. He wanted to ask her if someone had just played a terrible joke on him. The kind Pap might play, if he were still alive and full of meanness, ready to work mischief in the world in any fashion he could.

  ASA SURRETTE CALLED again at noon on Saturday and told her where to park her car. “I’ll be watching you,” he said. “If everything meets my approval, you’ll be given a sign.”

  “I need to see the girl,” Felicity said.

  “You will. She’ll be glad to see you. She hasn’t seen a human face in some time.”

  “What do you mean?” Felicity asked.

  “You’re a foolish woman,” he replied.

  She was sitting on the edge of her bed. She closed her eyes, shutting out the light from the French doors, and tried to think. What was he saying? “She hasn’t seen your face?”

  “She hasn’t heard my voice, either. At least not since somebody came in the back door of her little house up by Lookout Pass. What do you think of that?”

  “I’m not interested in your games.”

  “You have a strange way of showing it,” he replied. “I have reservations about you. You wouldn’t try to trick me, would you?”

  “Why did you kill my daughter?”

  “Who says I did? From what I’ve read, it’s an unsolved crime.”

  “Tell me where to go or I’ll hang up.”

  “You know where the Alberton Gorge is?” he said. “Get off at the Cyr exit. Cross the river and go four miles north on the dirt road, then wait.”

  After he broke the connection, she called Clete Purcel and got his voice mail. “Clete, I’m not sure if I’ll ever see you again,” she said. “There’s a good chance you’ll never know what became of me. I want you to know that none of this is your fault. I also want to apologize to Gretchen for stealing her cell phone. You’re a lovely man. I wish we had met years ago in New Orleans. It’s not really such a bad place. We could have had great fun there.”

  She stood up from the bedside, her palms dry and stiff, the skin around her fingernails split and painful whenever she touched a hard surface. In the silence, she could hear the pine needles sifting across the roof in the wind, scattering in the sunlight onto the balcony. The house seemed to swell with the wind, the joists and walls creaking in the silence. She had no idea where Caspian was. Maybe he was drunk; maybe he was with his father. Her footsteps were as loud as a pendulum knocking inside a wood clock as she walked down the stairs and into Love’s den. She opened one of the toolboxes on his worktable and lifted out a leather punch that he used sometimes when he made a holster for one of his antique revolvers. It was sharp at the tip and mounted on a T-shaped wood handle. She lifted her dress and taped it inside her thigh, then walked outside and got in her Audi and drove away. The sun had passed its high point, and the shadows of the poplars that lined the road looked as sharp-edged as spear points on the asphalt.

  AT 1:48 P.M. Clete came up to the main house. I was sitting on the deck by myself, Albert’s potted petunias in full bloom all around me. It was a fine day, the kind that, at a certain age, you do not let go of easily. When I looked at Clete’s face, I knew that whatever plans I’d had for the afternoon were about to change. He played Felicity’s message. “She knows where Surrette is,” he said. “She’s going to meet him.”

  “That’s hard to
believe.”

  “You don’t know her. She loved her daughter. She thinks she closed her eyes to what her husband was doing.”

  “Maybe she plans to kill Surrette.”

  “That’s not like her. Surrette has outsmarted us, Dave. He’ll kill Felicity and the waitress, too.”

  “I don’t think that’s the way it’s going down. He has something else planned. I think he’ll let the waitress go.”

  “Why?”

  “To show his power. He decides who lives and who dies. He also proves he’s not governed by compulsion. Look, Clete, Felicity Louviere may be suicidal. She’s going to let Surrette do it for her.”

  “She’s risking her life to help somebody else. Why don’t you show a little respect?”

  I had been drinking a glass of iced tea with a twist of lemon. I wished I had not come to Montana. I wished I had the authority and power and latitude that my badge in Louisiana gave me. I also wished I had the option of operating under a black flag and going after Surrette with a chain saw.

  “I’m trying to figure out what we can do,” I said. “I think we should contact the sheriff or the feds.”

  “They’re not going to believe us. We’re on our own.”

  “We should start with Caspian Younger.”

  “I kicked the shit out of him. He laughed at me,” he said.

  “Who do you know in Vegas and Atlantic City?”

  “Lowlifes and warmed-over greaseballs who wouldn’t piss on me if I was burning to death.”

  “Dial them up.”

  “Talking to those guys is like drinking out of a spittoon.”

  I set down my iced tea and looked at it.

  “He’s going to kill her, isn’t he?” Clete said.

  I lowered my eyes and didn’t reply. The twist of lemon in my glass made me think of a yellow worm couched inside the ice, the canker inside the rose, the inalterable fact that you cannot hide from evil.

  FELICITY LOUVIERE FOLLOWED the instructions and drove through the tiny settlement of Alberton. She exited not far from a railroad track and crossed the Clark Fork and continued up a dirt road into an unpopulated area of wooded hills and outcroppings of gray rock that resembled the knuckle bones of prehistoric animals. Rain clouds had moved across the sun, dropping the countryside into shadow. She turned on the car heater, even though the dashboard told her the temperature outside was sixty-seven degrees. When the odometer indicated she had traveled exactly four miles from the bridge, she pulled to a wide spot in the road, next to a hill that sloped up into lodgepole and ponderosa pine and black snags left over from an old burn.

  She cut the engine and stepped out into the wind, her ears popping slightly with the gain in elevation. What’s that sound? She turned in a circle and saw no other vehicle but thought she heard the throaty rumble of twin exhausts, a sound she associated with 1950s films about hot rods, or one she’d heard in the parking lot at the health club.

  She suspected that her caller was watching her through binoculars and that her wait would be a long one. The air smelled of night damp and the outcroppings of rock that seldom saw sunlight and were freckled with lichen.

  He surprised her. No more than three minutes passed before she saw a figure inside the trees up on the hillside, just below a switchback logging road left over from the days of clear-cutting. He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and held it in the air. There was nothing histrionic in the gesture. He didn’t wave it; he simply held it, showing his control over the situation.

  She walked to the front of the Audi and stared up the hill, the wind blowing her hair over her face. The figure turned and walked back in the shadows, then reemerged with a woman wearing shorts and a T-shirt; a drawstring bag had been pulled over her head, and her wrists were fastened behind her.

  Felicity began walking up the hill, her eyes lowered, stepping carefully over the holes burrowed between the rocks by pocket gophers and badgers. The sun had disappeared from the sky entirely, and she felt as though a cold wind were blowing through her soul. Give me strength, give me strength, give me strength, a voice chanted in her head.

  She heard the rumble of the twin exhausts again, echoing in a canyon, trailing away into the trees. She was forty yards from the man on the hill and could see his wide shoulders and the tropical shirt that he wore inside a cheap tan suit. He held his captive by the arm with his right hand and began cupping the fingers of his left, indicating that Felicity should keep walking toward him.

  “You have to let her go first,” she said.

  He stared at her without replying. Behind him, up on the logging road, Felicity could see a gray SUV, a spray of rust on one side. “I’ve done what you asked,” she said. “Release the young woman and I’ll go with you.”

  A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He walked the woman thirty feet away, upwind from where he had been standing. He eased her into a sitting position on top of a fallen tree trunk and returned. The bound woman was out of earshot. Still he did not speak. He turned up his palms as though they glowed with spiritual grace.

  “She’s never heard your voice or seen your face?” Felicity said.

  He shook his head, his grin in place.

  “You’re Asa Surrette,” she said. “You’re older than your pictures, a little more coarse. Your hair is dyed, but you’re him.”

  “Nice to meet you in person. Please get in my vehicle. I’m looking forward to our association.”

  “You had all of this planned.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why do you want me?”

  “I think we knew each other in another life. I knew it when I first saw you from afar. I could smell the heat in the sand and the ring of swords on copper shields. I could hear a crowd roaring. Sound familiar?”

  “What you’re describing are the symptoms of schizophrenia.”

  “Could be. But as Charles Dickens wrote, ‘It’s a mad, mad world, Master Copperfield.’ ” Then he seemed to hear the twin exhausts, too. “You didn’t try to get clever on me, did you?”

  “If I’d wanted to do that, I would have called the FBI.”

  “I suspect that’s true. Well, let’s leave Rhonda to find her way out of here and toggle on down the road.”

  “I have to use the bathroom.”

  “You are a strange duck, aren’t you?”

  “Do you mind turning around?”

  “You’re cute,” he said.

  She kept her eyes on his, her expression flat.

  “Go ahead. I’ll just step up here a little ways,” he said.

  She squatted in the leaves and pine needles, her back to him, her dress spread. She reached between her legs and pulled Love Younger’s leather punch from the tape on her thigh.

  “Finished?” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied, standing erect.

  He extended his hand, leaning forward, his eyes merry. “You’re very pretty. A nice little package.”

  She let him take her left hand in his. “Is the place we’re going very far?” she asked.

  “What do you care? I’ve got you, you little whore.”

  “Asa?”

  “What do you want?” he replied.

  “Here’s something for you,” she said.

  The T-shaped handle of the leather punch was snugged tightly against her palm when she drove it into his face, the point sinking cleanly through his cheek, her knuckles touching his skin. When she pulled the shaft free, his eyes were popping, and blood was spurting from his mouth. On the edge of her vision, she saw the waitress trying to walk downhill, the cloth bag still over her head. Felicity drove the leather punch at his throat.

  He knocked it aside and struck her with his fist. The blow exploded against her eyebrow and the bridge of her nose, tearing something loose inside her, blurring the trees. As she rolled down the slope, she could smell the drowsy odor of leaves and pine needles and the raw damp ground, and she wanted to crawl inside a cocoon and remain there in the coolness of the afternoon and the swayi
ng of the trees for the rest of her life, secure in the knowledge that she had done all she could and her ordeal was over.

  That was when he lifted her to her knees, his clothes exuding an eye-watering fecal stench, the bloody drool from his mouth matting in her hair. She blacked out as he dragged her up the slope toward his vehicle, hardly aware of the grinding sounds that issued from his throat or the fingers that sank like talons into her skin.

  GRETCHEN HOROWITZ HAD followed Felicity’s Audi from Missoula and lost sight of it after taking the exit by the Alberton Gorge. She made a wrong choice at a fork and ended up in a blind canyon, then had to retrace her route, and only through dumb luck did she see the Audi a hundred yards away, parked in a bare spot by the side of the road.

  Wherever she traveled, she kept several weapons in a long steel box welded to the floor behind the seat, one of which was a scoped K-98 German Mauser. She left the truck in a grove of pine trees, the rifle slung on her shoulder, and crossed the dirt road and worked her way uphill until she caught sight of Felicity Louviere standing below a switchback. Felicity was looking up at a figure who stood in the shadows. Gretchen unslung the rifle and dropped to one knee behind a boulder, gazing through the telescopic lens at the bizarre scene on the hillside.

  A bound woman with a cloth bag over her head was sitting on a log, wearing only a T-shirt and shorts, her knees skinned. Gretchen moved the lens from the bound woman to Felicity. She unlocked the bolt on the Mauser and slid it back, then eased an eight-millimeter soft-nosed round into the chamber, locking down the bolt soundlessly with the heel of her hand.

  The K-98 had never failed her. It was amazingly light for its size and era, deadly accurate at long range, even with iron sights, the bolt action as fluid and smooth as water. She had no doubt that the third person was Asa Surrette. But the light was bad, his outline dissolving into the shadows when Gretchen tried to lock him inside the crosshairs of the scope.

  Then he stepped forward, extending his hand. His unshaved cheeks and the prune-line furrows in his throat and his boxlike head came into focus inside the lens. She took a breath, releasing it slowly, her finger tightening inside the trigger guard. In under a half second, the eight-millimeter round would strike home with almost no trajectory, coring through the brow, flattening inside the brain, cutting his motors, extinguishing all light from his eyes, before he ever heard the report echoing through the hills.