James Burke - Light of the World

“I’m stronger than you,” she said. “So is Alafair and so is Albert Hollister and so is my father. You murder children.”

The moon was high enough to light the tips of the trees, and she began to walk farther up the logging road, her eyes on the parklike slope of the hill. She thought she saw an animal running through the timber, just below the crest, its black fur threaded with silver. Its shoulders and forequarters were sinuous and heavily muscled, and it thudded solidly against the earth when it jumped over a broken tree, never interrupting its stride or momentum.

Was it the wolf Albert had seen? If it was, it had shown no interest in her. She put away her flashlight and turned in a circle, pointing the Airweight in front of her. The voice had gone from inside her head, if that was where it had come from. The only sounds she heard now were the wind coursing through the canopy and a pinecone or two toppling down the hillside.

Had she become delusional? Weren’t voices among the first indicators of schizophrenia? Or was her conscience taunting her? Was the Gretchen whom Albert spoke of nothing more than an invention, a cosmetic alter ego that allowed her to remain functional while she continued to shed the blood of others and take secret delight in it?

She turned and began to descend the hill. A pebble or tiny pinecone struck the brim of her hat. She looked back up the slope just as a second object, no larger than the first, struck her cheek.

Thirty yards up the hill, she saw the shape of a man on a deer trail. He was standing stock-still, like a jogger who had paused to rest in his ascent. She could not make out his face in the dark. She pulled her hat down on her brow and lowered her face so it would not reflect light, then began walking slowly up the road, to a place where a deer trail intersected it and she could climb to the crest without taking her eyes off the man, who had not moved.

She walked ten yards up the slope, breathing through her nose, trying to ignore the hammering of her heart. Then she heard rather than saw the figure break for higher ground, running hard, tree branches slashing against his body, a body that was flesh and blood and not that of a lamia or a specter.

She began running up the trail after him. He went around a corner and zigzagged through the trees, heading north, toward the far end of the valley, at the same time gaining elevation until he was almost to the crest of the ridge.

If he reached the top of the ridge, he would silhouette against the sky and she would have a clear shot at him. But what if the voice she had heard was imaginary? What if the running man was one of the homeless who sometimes wandered in from the two-lane?

The air was thinner and colder and suffused with smoke that hung in the trees and burned her lungs. The deer trail became serpentine, dropping through a gully and winding through brush as coarse as wire. He was standing at the head of the trail, looking back. Then she saw him break for the crest and stop again and turn and spread his arms against the sky, as though creating a mockery of a crucified man.

She ran faster, heedless of the sharp rocks and broken branches on the trail, her eyes locked on the man.

A snowshoe rabbit burst from the undergrowth and darted in front of her, triggering a spring-loaded saw-toothed steel bear trap that had been staked down with a chain and pin in the middle of the trail. The jaws of the trap sprang with such tension that the trap seemed to rise from the ground, virtually severing the rabbit’s hind legs. Gretchen was crying when she reached down and tried to free it from the trap.

The man on the ridge cupped his hands around his mouth. “You’re lucky, little girl,” he said. “I had a delightful experience planned for you and me.”

She stood erect and raised the Airweight with both hands, sighting on the silhouette, her chest heaving with exertion and the inhalation of smoke, her cheeks hot with tears. “Suck on this, you miserable fuck,” she said.

Even as she heard the solitary pop of the report and felt the recoil against her palms, she knew the angle was bad and the shot had gone wide and high. When she lowered the revolver, the figure was gone, probably down the other side of the ridge. She knelt next to the rabbit and stroked its head and ears. “I’m sorry, little guy,” she said. “You saved my life. If there’s a heaven, that’s where you’re going.”

She stayed with the rabbit until it died, then buried it and walked down the hill in the dark, a taste like ashes in her mouth.

After having his boot twisted off his foot in front of half of Montana, Kyle Schumacher decided he would ease out of the scut work for the Younger family for a few days and spend a little vacation time up on Flathead Lake, among the cherry orchards and sailboat slips and waterside saloons.

He wasn’t running away from anything. Kyle Schumacher had done hard time with badasses from East Los and blacks who were half cannibal. Kyle had never run from anybody. He just needed a little R & R to get his head together. What was wrong with that?

He had acquired a taste for tequila and Dos Equis when he was a heavy-equipment operator down in Calexico. That was just after he had finished a three-bit as a nonpaying guest of the California Graybar hotel chain. Unfortunately, he had acquired a taste for other things as well, coke and Afghan skunk and an occasional injection of China white between the toes, to be exact. The real high in Kyle’s life was geographic. Reno and Vegas were the playgrounds where the party never ended and lucre and sensuality were virtues, not vices. For Kyle, the light radiating upward from the casinos into a summer sky took on a peculiar theological overtone, a testimony to the possibility that modernity and self-indulgence might be a stay against the hand of death.

The only downside in his life was the conviction that followed him wherever he went. Registering in a new city as a sex offender was like undressing in the middle of a county courthouse. The alternative, not registering, was a ticket back to the slams. What was the old saw? You do the crime, you stack the time? What a laugh. When you went down on a sex beef, you did life, with a two-by-four kicked up your chubbies. So he’d signed on with the Youngers. It was a safe berth. What was wrong with that?

His favorite saloon and casino in the vicinity was on the north end of Flathead Lake, up in the high country, on the road to Whitefish, where the movie stars and the Eurotrash hung out. It wasn’t Vegas or Reno, but it had its moments, particularly when a sweet thing was still at the bar at closing time. He knocked back a shot of tequila and sucked on a salted lime and gazed through the saloon window at the immensity of the lake. It was twenty-four miles long, the biggest body of water west of the Mississippi, rimmed by mountains that were part of a glacial chain. This was the place he needed to be, a place where he could stop thinking about all the events that had happened in Missoula, events that were not of his manufacture and that he had been unfairly pulled into. Like the business with the boot. Did the PI take it to Wyatt Dixon? Kyle did not like to think about the prospect of dealing with Wyatt Dixon.

The clock on the wall said 1:46 A.M. The last time he looked, the clock said 11:14. What happened to the interlude? Maybe the clock was broken or the bartender had messed with it. “Hit me again,” he said.

“Yeah, but this is last call, Kyle,” the bartender said.

“So line ’em up. We can shoot the breeze while you shut down.”

“Can’t do it,” the bartender said. He tipped the spout on the tequila bottle into Kyle’s shot glass. “How about one on the house?”