James Burke - Light of the World

Then he heard a sound that shouldn’t have been there, a hand turning the front doorknob and then releasing it, the sole of a shoe scraping on the concrete step as the person stepped onto the grass and disappeared into the shadows.

Bill Pepper picked up the Glock and went out the back door. The wind was blowing harder, shredding leaves from the branches overhead, rocking the canoe with a metronomic beat against the dock. “Who’s out there?” he said.

There was no reply.

Bill Pepper walked around the side of the house into the front yard and shone his penlight on the lawn and concrete steps but could see no depressions in the grass or mud smears on the steps. He looked at the lights of the house down the shore and thought about knocking on the door, introducing himself, inviting everyone over for a drink. That would be the coward’s way. He walked down to the lakeside, constantly glancing back over his shoulder, his breath wheezing in his nose. Up the slope, by the corner of the cottage, he thought he saw a figure step from behind a tree and stare straight at him. He lifted the penlight into the darkness but could see nothing except a car passing on the two-lane and the bonelike whiteness of the birch trunks in the headlights. Calm down, he told himself. You’re going into the DTs, that’s all it is.

That’s all it is? a voice mocked him. The DTs were a minor consideration? He was that sick? Then he heard a loud thud, and this time he knew the sound was not a product of his imagination. It was heavy and solid, like a sack of grain smacking down on the roof. He lifted the beam of the penlight just as a cougar jumped from the cottage roof into a tree and, in one bound, sprang off a limb and landed on four feet in the yard.

The cougar must have been six feet from tail to nose. Its coat was yellow and gray, and white around the mouth and on the belly, a dark streak of fur running up the nose between the eyes. Its tail flipped as though discharging the tension in its body.

“This is my place. You’re trespassing,” Bill Pepper said.

The cougar seemed to slink away, then turned and walked in a figure eight. It stopped and looked at Bill Pepper again, sniffing at the air.

“Go back up the mountain where you belong. Go on, now. I don’t want to shoot you.”

The moon broke from behind a cloud, and Bill Pepper could see the muscular smoothness of the cougar’s neck and forequarters, the thickness of its feet, the ribs that looked stenciled above the sag of the belly. The cougar’s whiskers were as stiff as wire. It turned and ran along the shore, leaping over a creek that fed into the lake, the whiteness of its hindquarters showing under its tail in the moonlight.

Well, what do you know? Bill Pepper said to himself.

Except his satisfaction in standing up to the cougar was short-lived. He could not explain away the doorknob turning and the sole of somebody’s shoe scraping on the concrete step. And what about the figure he’d thought he saw among the trees? He walked to the front of the house and examined the ground and saw nothing that indicated anybody had been there in the last week except him.

“If anybody is out there, I’m yours for the asking,” he called out. “Come and get it. I’d love to have a tête-à-tête with you.”

The only sounds he heard were the wind and the husks of winter leaves tumbling across the cottage roof, perhaps a pinecone rolling down the incline. “I don’t care what you do to me,” he said. “Before I check out, I’ll paint the bushes.”

He waited in the silence, then went back in the house and clicked on all the lights, in control again, his forearms pumped. He was Bill Pepper, the scourge of East Los, the Bama Badass cruising South Central, a cigarette hanging in his mouth, the friend of street people from Adams Boulevard down to Hawthorne. He had been in the middle of the Rodney King riots and had carried a two-hundred-pound black woman out of a burning building on his back. He’d still have his badge if a queer-bait bicycle cop in West Venice hadn’t hung a second DWI on him. It wasn’t fair. None of it. The murder of his father, the loss of his home in Mobile, the shanty his mother and siblings had lived in on the backside of Macon. He wanted to smash his fist into the wall.

Standing at the kitchen table under the lightbulb, he drank the last of the brandy in the bottle and stuffed the Glock back in its holster and picked up his spinning rod and went out the back door. Someone in the house down the shore had turned on Rhapsody in Blue. The skies were clearing, the stars were out. It was a perfect night. Except for the fact that he hadn’t relieved himself in two hours and his bladder was bursting. He unzipped his trousers.

You joining ranks with the Wyatt Dixons of the world? a voice said. Why not get yourself some Copenhagen and a Styrofoam spit cup while you’re at it?

He returned to the house and walked through the kitchen and into the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom. In under a second, his universe turned upside down.

The bone-crunching pain that exploded in the back of his head could have come from a sap or a chunk of pipe with a bonnet on it or maybe someone touching a Taser to his scalp. It didn’t matter. He crashed against the wall, taking the telephone stand down with him, landing on his face, his nose bleeding. He wanted to crawl away, but his arms wouldn’t work properly. A figure that smelled like rain and leaves and body heat was pulling his wrists behind him, fitting handcuffs on them, squeezing the steel tongues tightly into the flesh.

“Who are you?” Bill Pepper said.

The figure released his wrists and walked through the cottage, clicking off all the lights. The hallway dropped into total darkness. The figure closed the door to the bathroom and the kitchen and then turned Bill Pepper over and looked down at him.

“Tell me what you want,” Bill Pepper said, straining to see the face. “Who sent you here? I can’t fix anything unless you tell me what you want.”

He heard a sound that made him think of metal snipping against metal. “No, please,” he said. “I haven’t done anything to deserve that. Please don’t do that. Listen to me. There’s no reason for this.”

He stared up at the face coming closer to his own, his viscera turning to water, the music of George Gershwin disappearing inside a voice he hardly recognized as his own.

The phone rang at six-fifteen Saturday morning. Everyone else was still asleep. I picked up the receiver and went out on the balcony and closed the door behind me. In the east, the light behind the mountains was cold and weak, hardly more than a flicker touching the bottom of the clouds. Gretchen’s hot rod was parked by the creek bed, the top white with frost. The Caddy was gone. “Hello,” I said.

“This is Sheriff Bisbee, Detective Robicheaux. I need to confirm some information. You know a man named Clete Purcel?”

“I’ve known him for forty years. He’s staying with us at Albert Hollister’s place.”

“Right now he’s staying in a jail cell in Big Fork. Do you know any reason why he’d be in the Swan Lake area?”

“Maybe he went fishing. He didn’t tell me. What’s he charged with?”

“He got stopped at a roadblock at twelve-fifteen this morning.”

“That’s not what I asked. Why are you calling me about a traffic stop in Lake County?”

“I didn’t say anything about a traffic stop. He was carrying a cut-down pump in his car. He also had burglar tools in his possession, along with latex gloves, a throw-down, a blackjack, plastic ligatures, brass knuckles, and a boxful of buckshot. I almost forgot. He had some nylon fishing line with a hoop tied on the end. The kind of rig home invaders stick through a window to turn the latch.”