Swan Peak (53 page)

Jamie Sue Wellstone was weeping in the background, her arms clenched across her chest, her back shaking, as though she were standing inside a cold wind without a coat.

“Do you want to get down in the pit by yourself, Clete, or do you want our friend Harold to put you in there?” Sally Dio said. “No matter what you do, no matter what you say, the end result will be the same. You can put yourself in the ground, or Billy can shoot you in the legs, and he and Harold can do it for you. But you’re going into the ground, Clete, and you’re going into it alive. Then Jamie Sue and Dave are going to join you. Maybe you and Jamie Sue can have a chat, a last bit of pillow talk.”

“I guess that means we’ll never be pals. So how about we leave it at this?” Clete said. He gathered all the saliva and bile in his mouth and spit it full in Sally Dio’s face.

Dio recoiled. He lifted his shirt and wiped Clete’s spittle off his mutilated face. But before he could speak, his hired man Billy, who had dropped the empty magazine from the Mac-10 and replaced it with a fresh one, clutched his arm. “There’s somebody down the slope, Mr. Wellstone. I just saw him.”

“Nobody came up the road. Nobody could be there. You probably saw a bear,” Dio said.

“No sir, I saw a guy in a hat.”

“Get down there, Moo-Moo, and check it out,” Ridley Wellstone said to the other gunman.

“What do you want me to do with him, sir?”

“Bring him back or kill him.”

“Are you gonna be all right, sir?” the gunman asked.

“Yes, I’m fine. Do what I say.”

But Ridley Wellstone was not fine. The strain of standing up on his braces was taking its toll. His face was gray and deeply lined, his forearms starting to tremble slightly. “This is all on you, you incompetent idiot,” he said to Dio.

“If you and Sonny Click had let that college girl alone, none of this would have happened,” Dio replied. “You couldn’t wait to put your dick in a coed who worked as a janitor. Then you let her boyfriend shove you down the stairs. You destroyed everything we put together, Ridley.”

“You’re right, my friend. I let you and your degenerate family bring your graft and misery into our lives, and I was a colossal fool for thinking I could turn a piece of shit into a gentleman. In his way, my brother was an honorable man. He didn’t deserve to have his name soiled by a man such as yourself. My father wouldn’t have let you clean our toilet.”

Out in the darkness, I heard the man with the cut-down shotgun shout, “Down here. He’s down here.”

“Who’s down there?” Dio called out.

But there was no reply.

TROYCE NIX KNELT
behind a huge boulder shaped like the top half of a toadstool extending from the soft carpet of grassy earth that surrounded it; he was careful not to clink the aluminum bat against the stone. Down below, he could hear small waves sliding up on the rocks along the lakefront. Up the slope, the fir and pine trees pointed into the mist and glistened with moisture against the glow from the clearing. He could hear someone working his way down the incline a step at a time, trying to find safe purchase, his feet sliding on small rocks.

Whoever the man was, he had not been a combat soldier. Rather than zigzag through deep cover with the hillside solidly at his back, he had found a deer trail below the clearing and was following it in parallel fashion, so that his silhouette was backlit by the headlights of the Wellstone pickup truck.

But Troyce soon realized he had misjudged his adversary. The figure stooped over, temporarily disappearing from sight. Then Troyce heard a hard object knock against a tree behind him. He jerked his head around for an instant. When he looked back up the slope, the figure had not reappeared. The man had probably thrown a rock through the canopy, and Troyce had taken the bait.

The man up the slope was not using a flashlight, either, or trying to bang his way through the undergrowth or stay on the deer trail. He was somewhere immediately above Troyce, his eyes sufficiently adjusted to the darkness, occupying the high ground. Troyce hunkered down, one knee sinking into the velvetlike, damp earth, the coldness seeping through his trousers. He pulled his nine-millimeter from the back of his belt and clicked off the safety. But he also knew the minute he gave away his position, or gave away his identity, the Wellstones would immediately use Candace’s life to force his surrender, provided she was in the clearing.

That
was the problem. He didn’t know what he was dealing with. Was Candace somewhere else? What if he got smoked on the hillside in an effort to rescue a couple of rogue Louisiana flatfeet? Candace would probably be killed, never knowing that he had tried to save her. But that was the way his entire life had been: never knowing who his adversaries actually were, never understanding the rules, never trusting anyone or anything except his own primal instincts. Early on, he had learned that the world respected brute force and brute force alone, no matter what people claimed. They made a show of venerating saints and men and women of peace, but when they were against the wall, they wanted their enemies hosed down with a flamethrower.

A sour odor rose from his clothes, like the sick smell the glands give off after a long fever. His stomach still felt nauseated and his body weak, as though an intestinal infection had spread throughout his system. He shifted his position, but when he did, the tip of the metal bat scraped against the boulder. He froze, his heart racing. Up above him, he thought he heard a twig break.

“Who’s down there?” the voice of Leslie Wellstone called from the clearing.

But there was no answer. Troyce could hear his own breath wheezing in and out of his chest, and he hated every cigarette he had ever smoked.

Candace, Candace, Candace
, he thought.
I’m out here. I won’t let you down. Even if they put a bullet through my brain, I’ll be at your side
.

He swallowed, closed his eyes, and opened them again. Time to give the guy a taste of his own medicine, he told himself. Troyce pried up a large rock from the sod, hefting it in his palm like a shot put. On one knee, he threw it in an arc down the slope. The trajectory was perfect. It smacked the ground at least forty-five feet below him, then rolled end over end down the hill, creating a sound like a man running.

The man who had gone into hiding stood up from behind some scrub brush and began descending the slope, holding a cut-down shotgun in front of him, digging his shoes into the dirt to keep his balance, using his elbows to knock tree branches away from his eyes.

“Wrong choice, pilgrim,” Troyce said under his breath. He stepped out from behind the boulder and swung the aluminum bat with both hands, twisting his hips, whipping his arms and wrists and shoulders into it. The bat landed squarely across his pursuer’s face, flattening his nose, shattering bone, splattering his dark blue Hawaiian shirt with a spray of what looked like brain matter.

Troyce stared down at the figure at his feet. The man’s eyes looked back at him, glasslike and disjointed in their sockets.

Troyce scooped up the dead man’s shotgun and moved away into the brush in a simian crouch. Above him, Leslie Wellstone called out into the darkness, “Moo-Moo, is that you?”

No, Moo-Moo is taking a long nap
, Troyce thought.
And now it’s your turn, you freak
.

THE MAN WITH
the Mac-10 had put Clete and me on our knees. I wanted to believe that Troyce Nix could turn the situation around for us, or that Alicia Rosecrans would show up in a helicopter loaded with her FBI colleagues. I did not want to believe that this was how Clete and I would meet our end. But I knew of many instances when it had happened to better men than I: the two FBI agents who may have been executed on the Oglala reservation in South Dakota; the L.A. cops abducted out of the city and taken to an onion field outside Bakersfield; and closer to home, the three Lafayette cops who were killed by a shotgun at point-blank range when they tried to arrest a man getting off a Greyhound bus.

It can happen as quickly as a drunk driver swinging his car across the center stripe of the two-lane, crashing head-on into your grille. It usually comes when you least suspect it, often in the most innocuous of situations. I guess I had accepted all the aforementioned; I just didn’t want to buy it on my knees.

“Listen to me,” I said to Ridley Wellstone. “When Sal is done with us, you’ll be next.”

“Not true, Mr. Robicheaux. He needs me,” Wellstone replied. I started to speak, but he cut me off. “Don’t say any more. Don’t degrade yourself. I tried to reason with you. Fact is, I begged you to stay out of our affairs. You invited this fate into your life, sir. Accept it like a man.”

You arrogant bastard
, I thought.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

“Getting to my feet,” I said. That’s exactly what I was doing, rising from the ground, pushing myself erect, my knees popping, my hands no longer clasped behind my neck.

“Get down on the ground,” the man with the Mac-10 said.

“Sorry, partner. You’re going to have to haul a hundred and ninety pounds of dead meat to that hole if you want me in it,” I said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clete rising up beside me. “That makes two of us, asshole,” he said.

“Get up here, Moo-Moo,” Sally Dio shouted down the slope.

Again there was no answer, and Sal knew he had a problem on his hands. The man in the mask began walking toward us from the pit. “Give me the Mac. I’ll have all this cleaned up in two minutes,” he said, his words reverberating inside the plastic hollows of the mask.

“Harold?” said Jamie Sue. “Harold, is that you? My God, what are you doing?”

The man in the mask didn’t reply; instead, he seemed to hang his head slightly.

“Harold, look at me,” she said. “What are you doing? You were my friend. I trusted you. Leslie hired you because of me. I told him what a gentleman you are. You came to our revival. You can’t allow yourself to be part of this.”

“Shut up, Jamie Sue,” Dio said. “This guy has been snuffing Ridley’s enemies for years. How do you think those two Hollywood characters ended up dead? The porn producer had been indicted and was going to give up Ridley to a grand jury. So our friend Harold tuned him up and tuned him out at the rest stop.”

“You got a big mouth,” Harold said, turning his gaze on Dio.

“We’ll work this out later. Right now you get down that hillside and see where Billy is,” Dio said.

“I don’t take orders from you,” Harold said.

A breeze blew through the clearing, showering more pine needles into the electric glow, the air blooming again with a smell that was like lake water and schooled-up fish. Then I saw something I couldn’t believe, an image that was both incongruous and nonsensical: the top half of Jimmy Dale Greenwood rising from the pit, both of his hands gripped on a snub-nose thirty-eight revolver, strips of duct tape still hanging from his wrists. It took a moment for me to realize what had happened: The three men who had been machine-pistoled into the pit had been armed. Somehow Jimmy Dale had gotten loose and had taken a weapon off one of their bodies. He aimed the revolver straight out in front of him. I saw him close one eye and pull the trigger.

The report sounded like that of a starter gun at a track meet. The shot went wide and disappeared with a pinging sound down in the trees. Jimmy Dale pulled the trigger twice more, and Sally Dio’s left leg buckled under him, just like someone had kicked him behind the knee. Billy tried to swing his Mac-10 clear of Dio for a shot, but Clete Purcel was all over him, pinning his arms at his sides, picking him up and slamming him to the ground, kicking the gun from his hand, stomping the side of his head, picking him up again and driving his fist into his face.

I got Sally Dio’s nine-millimeter from his hand and aimed it at the man in the mask. Dio tried to fight with me, but his best blows were like those of a dried-out crustacean — weightless and empty, like Sal himself, a shell of a man whose strength existed only to the degree that he could inculcate fear in others. Oddly, the man in the mask showed no reaction that I could see, as though he was merely a witness to all the events taking place around him.

Clete was still hitting Billy, holding him down with one knee in his chest, hitting him so hard he had started to beg.

“Cletus, ease up,” I said.

“You’re right,” he said, getting to his feet, the Mac-10 in his right hand, his attention focused on the man in the mask, his finger curling inside the trigger guard.

“Don’t do it,” I said.

“He’s going to skate. The sicker they are, the easier they get off on an insanity plea,” he replied.

“That’s just the way it is. We’re not executioners, podna. Lower the piece.”

“No, I’m going to walk him into the woods. Call it Q-and-A time. Who knows how it might work out?” His green eyes were charged with adrenaline, his face slick with sweat, his cheeks as red as apples.

“We don’t give them power. We don’t become like them. Waxman will rot in a cage, and he’ll take Ridley Wellstone down with him. We’ll take two guys off the board instead of one. You want to do their time?”

“Good try,” Clete said.

“You always said it, the Bobbsey Twins are forever. Who am I going to drink Dr Pepper with?”

I saw hesitation in his movements, like an elephant in must suddenly becoming pacified, his size actually deflating, a suppressed grin on his mouth. “You can really rain on a parade, Dave.”

He made Harold Waxman take off his mask and lie down on the ground, then pulled Candace Sweeney and Jimmy Dale Greenwood out of the pit, brushing off their clothes for them as he did, maybe reassuring them in his clumsy fashion that the world was a better place than they had thought.

But in truth, I cannot tell you with any exactitude what happened inside that clearing during a midsummer electric storm west of Swan Lake, Montana. I know that the rain falls and the sun rises on evil men as well as on the good and just. I know that on that particular night we were spared a terrible fate. At the same time, men a theologian would probably term wicked were put out of business. Perhaps we even made a dent in the venal enterprises they represent.