Dark Paradise (57 page)

claimed was all wrong for him. Somehow, she looked pretty damn right in

that picture.

"Man can't own the land, you know," Chaske announced. "Man comes and

goes; the land will always be here. White men never figure that out. All

we own are our lives."

Everything he left unsaid pressed down on J.D.'s shoulders, forcing a

sigh out of him. He was too tired to argue philosophy, too exhausted to

defend the principles of tradition or try to impress Chaske with a white

man's code of honor and responsibility. There was no impressing Chaske;

he was above it all on his plane with the mystics.

"Damn pretty night," the old man said, pointing at the sky with a thrust

of his chin. "Look at all those stars."

He glanced at J.D., his small, dark eyes glowing with amusement. "Good

night for night owls."

Then he was gone and J.D. was left with the night and the stars all to

himself. Alone. The way he was meant to be, he told himself. Tough guy.

Didn't need anyone.

Never had.

You lying dog.

Townsend sat at his desk, oblivious of the swath of galaxy that

stretched across his windows like a sequined band of black velvet. He

was shaking. He was sick. His tongue felt like a bloated eel in his

mouth. He could barely breathe around it without gagging and choking.

His nose ran in a continuous stream of thin, salty mucus.

Tears leaked from his eyes, burning the lids raw. A drift of cocaine

glowed against the dark wood of the desk. He had lost track of how much

he had used and how much he had wasted, sweeping it into the leather

wastebasket as he sobbed. Amid the fine white powder lay a revolver.

It was a Colt Python .3S7. A six-shooter with a huge barrel.

Pathetically phallic, but then he was a pathetic man. Fifty-two years

old, a straight arrow trying to swing with the hip crowd, falling in

lust with a woman young enough to be his daughter. He had bought the gun

to impress Lucy. Lucy, his obsession, his demon. Everything had happened

because of her. She had led him down the yellow brick road to Oz and on

to hell.

Just that morning he had thought he might climb out of the pit. He

thought he might be able to salvage something of his life. Get free of

the slime, cleanse himself, start fresh. But no. Another of the leeches

had tried to hook on to him. He could never be free of it. Not now.

Especially not now.

The fat lawyer - Daggrepont - was dead. He hadn't meant to kill him. They

had stood on the riverbank, talking, birds singing above the rushing

sound of the water.

The sun shone down. The mountains thrust up around them as they stood in

the emerald velvet valley. All that beauty . . . and Daggrepont,

ugliness personified, a fat, grotesque pouch of greed, avarice shining

in his magnified eyes . . .

. . . Knew a little something about Lucy and him..... ought to be worth

a dollar or two..... not greedy, just wants his due for holding his

tongue.....

One minute he was just standing there, listening to the music of Montana

while that toad spewed poison and called it a "business arrangement,an

understanding between gentlemen." The next minute he'd had his hands

buried in the wattle of fat around Daggrepont's throat.

He had watched as if from outside his body, as if the hands choking the

man belonged to some anonymous third party.

Choking, choking, choking. Daggrepont's eyes rolling behind the thick

lenses of his glasses, his tongue thrusting out of his mouth as his

grotesque face flushed purple.

Townsend heard shouting, a long, loud roar that might have come tearing from

his own throat or been inside his own mind. He didn't know, couldn't

tell.

Some small shard of sanity pierced his brain, and his hands let go. He

thrust himself away from the lawyer, hurtled backward as if he were

being jet-propelled down a tunnel. But Daggrepont went on choking, eyes

rolling, tongue lolling. His face was the color of an eggplant.

Foam frothed out of his mouth and he fell onto the bank, his arms and

legs jerking wildly. Townsend stood watching, hallucinating that his

arms had stretched to nine feet long and his thumbs were still pressing

against the fat man's windpipe.

Daggrepont tried to stand. Couldn't control his body. Fell into the water

among a stand of cattails and rushes.

Run. His first thought had been to run. But as he sped in his Cherokee

toward his cabin, other thoughts shot across his mind in bright, hot

arcs. Evidence. There would be evidence. Tire tracks. There would be

tire tracks. And footprints. Marks on the dead man's throat.

Evidence hidden somewhere tying Lucy to Townsend to Daggrepont. There

would be no simple explanation to hide the truth this time. Even in this

wilderness a coroner would know the marks of strangulation.

It was over. There would be no redemption. No rebirth. The grime of this

life he had fallen into would never come off. It was like ink, like

grease, and every move he made, every thought he had, smeared it over

more of his soul. He was ruined, thanks to Evan Bryce and Lucy - the devil

and his familiar.

There was no turning back. The truth enveloped him like a cold black

shroud, like the big black night sky of Montana. A sky with no heaven

above it. As black as death. As black as Evan Bryce's heart.

With one trembling hand he lifted the receiver off the phone and punched

the button to speed dial Bryce's number. With the other he reached for

the Python.

The stars were like promises in the sky. Bright and distant.
 
Well out

of his reach.
 
Too far off to chase away the darkness.
 
Around him the

night was matte black, electrically charged. The hair on the back of his

neck and on his arms rose up like metal filings dancing beneath the

magnetism of the moon.

. . . Dancing beneath the moon. As the blonde danced down the slope. She

swayed from side to side, hair spilling in her wake. A wave of silk.

Moonlight silvering her skin, glowing in her eyes, glowing through her

wounds.

Del rolled back behind the tree and squeezed his eyes shut so hard that

color burst behind his lids, red and gold like the flash of rockets over

the rice paddies. He could feel the concussion of the blasts against his

skin. The smell of napalm and the putrid-sweet stench of burning,

rotting flesh seared his nostrils.

Then he opened his eyes and the 'Nam was gone. The breeze cooled the

sweat on his skin, filled his head with the scents of pine and damp

earth. The war was gone. He held his rifle against him like a lover and

brushed his lips against the oiled barrel. An absent kiss, a

superstitious reflex, as if the gun had chased away his ghosts.

A high, keening wail skated across his eardrums, like fingernails on a

chalkboard. The old ghosts were gone.

New ones took their place. The blonde danced through his nights like a

siren beckoning him to crash on the jagged rocks of madness. Panic rose

up in his throat and numbed the side of his face like a wash of

novocaine. She was there to steal his mind, to steal his land, to steal

his family. She ran with the tigers. She died and rose again.

A mythic creature.

He thought it might be his destiny, his quest, to kill her. To kill her

might redeem his honor, banish his shame, give him back his place in the

order of things.

Right all the wrongs.

Rolling back around against the bark of the tree, he brought the gun up

into place. Found the woman through the scope. Traced the cross hairs

over her chest like a benediction. Raised the barrel slightly to account

for drop. His finger kissed the trigger.

Kill her.

Kill her!

Save yourself!

Or chase yourself into madness.

What if the test was of control, of reason, of patience?

What if he failed?

The possibilities tumbled through his head like rocks in an avalanche.

He saw himself tumbling with them.

Riding shotgun down the avalanche. Being crushed by the brutal weight of

it. He didn't know what to do.

Kill her.

The blonde danced on. Taunting him, inviting him.

Oblivious of him. Whirling like a dervish. The dance of the dead. An

apparition in the night.

Kill her.

Kill yourself.

She turned to a blur in the glass. A kaleidoscope image shifting as he

watched. The battle within him wrung his heart like a wet rag, wrenching

out tears, squeezing out pain. Trembling, he let go of the trigger and

pointed the rifle to the sky, the stars lumping down at him through the

barrel of the scope. The bright lights of hope. Still out of reach.

Always out of reach.

JUdges don't go about shooting women. . . .

Marilee played the line through her head like a magic chant to ward off

danger as she wheeled her Honda in beside a mud-splattered black jeep

Cherokee. Townsend was the one who had brought Lucy to Montana. They had

been lovers. Drew thought he had been giving Lucy money or that Lucy had

been extorting money from him. That made him a key to the truth about

Lucy's death. Or a suspect in her murder. She tried not to dwell on the

latter as she climbed the steps to the front porch of the judge's

"cabin."

It was a log house on the same lines as Lucy's, only larger and with a

more expensive view. The back side faced Irish Peak, which was sparkling

as the sun poured down on the mountain's cone of snow. An extravagant

getaway from the pressures of the bench. Justice apparently had its

rewards. Or the Townsends past and present had been loaded from other

pursuits.

MacDonald Townsend was highly regarded in legal and political circles.

Marilee had met him once, had seen him from afar on numerous occasions.

If they ever made a movie about his life, they would cast Charlton

Heston in the lead role and tell him to play it as stiff as an

overstarched collar. It was difficult to reconcile that public image

with the image of him bending over a billiard table to help himself to a

little toot of classic coke. Of course, it was just as difficult to

envision the squeaky-clean, allAmerican public man whose wife was the

head of half the charities in Sacramento as the kind of man who would

climb into bed with Lucy and set the sheets on fire either. But he was.

The question was, what else might he be?

She rang the bell and waited, trying to formulate a conversational

strategy. Did you kill my friend seemed a tad blunt and more than a

little foolish. After all, what was to stop him from just popping her

one and dumping her body down a ravine someplace?
 
What she was really

after was hints, feelings, expressions to read. Something more to add to

the theory Sheriff Quinn didn't want to hear.

Inside the house a dog was barking. Marilee stepped up to one of the

side lights that flanked the door, cupped her hands around her eyes, and

pressed her nose to the glass.

A sleek-looking German shorthair was pouncing and bowing at an interior

door beyond the foyer and to the right of the living room. The dog

barked and scratched the door, seeming frantic to get inside the room.

Perhaps the door led to a bedroom and Townsend was auditioning

replacements for Lucy. Perhaps it was a study and Townsend was meeting

with a co-conspirator.

Paying off the hit man Sheffield had taken the rap for. A picture of Del

Rafferty flashed through her mind, and she shook it away. Del may have