James Burke - Light of the World

“Yes?”

“Know the worst thing about age? You start thinking you’ve seen it all, no different from the way you looked at the world when you were seventeen. All this started with me. I brought Surrette here.”

“You’re wrong about that. All this started when Surrette was born,” I said.

“Take care of yourself, boy. Take care of Clete, too,” he said.

There was finality in his voice that bothered me. Maybe it was resignation on his part. With the passage of time, we wish to feel we can find the answers to all our problems, but sometimes there are no answers. The minister and his wife had been murdered in their home a short distance from Albert’s ranch. The daughters were in the hands of a fiend. And there was nothing we could do about it. How do you resign yourself to a situation like that? The answer is, you don’t. You arm yourself with a World War II infantry weapon and a canvas bandolier stuffed with eight-round clips, at least one clip loaded with armor-piercing rounds, and drive up to an enormous alpine watershed in the hope that you can find a psychopath who had outwitted all of us, and by “us,” I mean every decent person who wants to see the earth scrubbed clean of men like Asa Surrette.

He had changed all of us. He had taken over our thinking processes, invaded our dreams, and set us against one another. His evil would live on long after he was gone. To dismiss him as a transitory aberration was a denial of reality. Surrette left his thumbprint on the soul in the same way that a stone can leave a bruise buried deep inside the soft tissue of your foot. In the meantime, all we could do was try to save others. In this instance, Felicity Louviere and the two girls from up the road. If I had to, I would knock on every door along the shore of Flathead Lake.

I slung the M-1 and the bandolier over my shoulder and was almost out the door when the kitchen phone rang again. Molly picked it up, then removed it from her ear and looked at me. “Guess who?” she said.

“Hello?” I said.

“You know where Sweathouse Creek is?” the sheriff said.

“West of Victor?”

“I want you and Purcel here. Now. Got it?”

“No, I don’t got it at all.”

“Some rock climbers called in the 911. I want you to see what they found.”

“Doesn’t Love Younger have a place up there?”

“Past tense. Either get your ass up here or I’ll have you charged as an accessory, Mr. Robicheaux. I give you my word on that,” he replied. “Tell Purcel the same. I’m sick of you guys.”

I truly wanted to abandon all restraint and tell him to go fuck himself, but he didn’t give me the chance.

I doubted we had incurred a level of legal jeopardy that would allow the sheriff to charge us as accessories in a crime, but Clete and I did as he asked and drove south on Highway 93 to the little tree-lined town of Victor, couched against a backdrop of jagged blue-gray mountains whose peaks stay veined with snow through most of the summer. It had been a long day for the sheriff, and I didn’t blame him for his exasperation. The investigative process taking place in front of Love Younger’s cabin was one that was altogether too familiar. Law enforcement agencies don’t prevent crimes; they arrive in their aftermath. In this instance, the aftermath was one that I think Love Younger never would have anticipated as his fate. Even though I did not like him, when I looked through the doorway, I silently said a prayer that his end had come more quickly than it probably had.

“Watch where you step,” the sheriff said. He glanced out the door. “You, too, Purcel. Get in here.”

“What’s the point in bringing us down here?” Clete said.

“You guys knew Dixon and the woman were on their way to do harm to Mr. Younger, but you didn’t inform us until I got ahold of you,” the sheriff said. He stepped aside to let a crime scene tech photograph the body on the floor. “How do you like it? Use your phone to take a picture if you like.”

“I think I’ll go sit in Dave’s truck. You mind?” Clete said.

“Is that a revolver under your coat?”

“It’s a thirty-eight special. Old-school,” Clete said, peeling back his jacket to expose his holster and shoulder rig.

“Do you have a concealed weapons permit?”

“I don’t remember,” Clete said. “With all respect, Sheriff, we didn’t have squat to do with this. You guys were chugging pud for Love Younger long before we came to Missoula. Don’t put your problems on us.”

“What did you say?” the sheriff asked.

“You got a weapon, Sheriff?” I asked. “Any forensics that put it on Wyatt Dixon?”

“Not yet,” he replied, his eyes leaving Clete’s face. “I think whoever did it sat in that stuffed chair over there and wiped the blood on that towel on the floor. I want you to smell something.”

“I don’t think we can be of any help here,” I replied.

“Just hold your water,” he said. He walked to the chair and pulled a fringed coverlet off the back and held it up to me. “The place smelled like a perfume factory when we got here. Take a whiff. Recognize it?”

“No,” I lied. “I don’t.”

“It smells like orange blossoms or magnolia to me,” he said. “My wife is the expert on flowers. What about you, Mr. Purcel? Does this awaken any memories in you?”

“Sorry, I’ve got a head cold,” Clete replied. He pointed at a leather jacket someone had used to cover a round object on the floor. “Is that the rest of him?”

“Yeah, it is,” the sheriff said. “I want both of you to see it.” He leaned over and picked up the leather jacket by one sleeve, pulling it loose from the blood that had congealed in Love Younger’s hair. “You guys had no idea Wyatt would do something like this? A man who evidently believed the Youngers sent rapists after his girlfriend?”

Clete nodded as though agreeing with a profound truth. “The VC did that sometimes,” he said. “A guy who was genuinely medevac in my recon group did it, too. By ‘medevac,’ I mean he was nuts, you dig? He rolled a head into a fire where we were cooking a pig. It scared the shit out of us. Then we all laughed. I didn’t take any pics, or I’d show you one.”

“I want both of you out of my sight,” the sheriff said.

Clete’s face looked poached in the artificial light, his green eyes neutral and unblinking, puffing air with one cheek and then the other, like a man gargling with mouthwash. The scar that ran through his eyebrow resembled a strip of welted rubber on a bicycle tire. “One of your guys just stepped in Younger’s blood,” he said. “Too bad Bill Pepper and Jack Boyd aren’t still on the job.”

Tell me Clete didn’t know how to do it.

We drove through Missoula and into the Jocko Valley and onto the Salish Indian reservation. We passed under a pedestrian bridge that had been created out of stone and dirt and trees for big-game animals, and through the tangle of shrubbery and birch trees planted along the retaining wall, I could see the multipointed racks of half a dozen elk crossing right above us.

“One day you and I will come up here and stay at the campground on the Jocko and fish for a week, then head on up to British Columbia,” Clete said. “A guy was telling me you can take a dozen twenty-inch cutthroat trout a day on the Elk River. You don’t even have to rent a canoe. You can catch a dozen lunkers right off the bank.”

“That sounds great, Clete.”

“See, you drive into Fernie, and you’re into mountains even bigger than these. It’s like being in Switzerland, I guess. You could go to meetings. I could do a little roadwork and lighten up on the flack juice and get my weight down. We eighty-six all these bozos. What do you think?”