James Burke - Light of the World

Before he could continue his litany of grief, his engine backfired with enough force to blow out the muffler. Then the engine died, and all the warning icons lit up on his dashboard. When he pulled to the side of the road, he was surrounded by trees that had been planted to shield the house below from view. Polson was ten miles away, and the wind was cold and blowing at over twenty knots.

He looked in the rearview mirror and saw a truck approaching from the north, its high beams on. Was it a pickup with a camper shell inserted in the bed? An orange pickup, like Wyatt Dixon’s? No, it was a wrecker. He could see the boom and winch mounted on the rear. What a break, he told himself.

He got out on the asphalt and began waving his arms. The driver of the wrecker slowed and hit his emergency flashers and eased onto the shoulder. Kyle heard him open his door and step out of the cab, forgetting to click off his high beams. “Hey, I’m about to go blind here,” Kyle said.

“Sorry,” the driver said. He dimmed the lights. “I have to back around to hook you up. You want to go to the dealership in Polson?”

Kyle closed his eyes and saw red circles that seemed to have been burned onto the backs of the lids. “Yeah, that would be great,” he said. “You just cruising by?”

The driver of the wrecker had wide shoulders and wore a rumpled suit and a baseball cap and tennis shoes. He seemed to be smiling. “I work irregular hours,” he said.

“I’d like to get to a motel and get some sleep. Can we get on the road?”

“You got to sign a form. Step back here, if you would.”

“Can we do that in town? It’s cold out there. I don’t have a coat. I also have tomato sauce all over me. I’m not having the best day of my life.”

“You have to sign a release before I hook you up. It’s for the insurance company.” The driver took a clipboard off the seat of the wrecker and handed it to Kyle, along with a pen from his shirt pocket. “Right there on the bottom line,” he said.

Kyle coughed, deep down in his throat. “What’s that smell?”

“I ran over a hog north of Big Fork.”

“It must have been rolling in shit before you hit it. You wear a suit when you work?”

“I went from vespers straight to the job and didn’t have time to change. I’m a minister, too.”

Was this the mystery man? “You didn’t happen to visit Rosa Segovia earlier, did you?”

“Don’t know the lady. Please sign.”

Kyle scribbled his name on the form and handed back the clipboard.

“Thanks,” the driver said. “Take your keys out of the ignition. Company rules again. People leave the ignition on and sometimes start electrical fires.”

Kyle began walking back to his truck. In the headlights of the wrecker, he noticed a bib of white granules at the bottom of the flap that covered the cap on his gas tank. As he rubbed his fingers on the granules, he heard a brief rattling sound behind him, like a hard wooden object scraping against a steel surface. He turned around just as the driver swung a sawed-off pool cue into the side of his head, knocking him to one knee in the middle of the road. The driver hit him again, this time across the back of the head. He was on all fours like a dog, unable to speak, blood leaking down the side of his face.

“Get up,” the driver said. “That’s it, you can do it. Let’s walk behind my truck and get rigged up, then we’ll be toggling on down the road.”

Why are you doing this? Kyle wanted to say. But the words wouldn’t come. The driver had done something to his throat or his voice box, and the words dissolved into paste and ran over his lip and down his chin. His wrists were fastened behind him with ligatures of some kind, and a looped steel cable had been dropped over his head and fitted around his neck. He heard the driver stripping cable off the spool, putting more slack in it. Don’t do this, Kyle wanted to say.

“I know all your thoughts,” the driver said. “They won’t help you. Nothing will. When you die, you won’t know why. You’ve lived your life for no purpose, and you’ll be mourned by no one. Those will be your last thoughts. Then all breath and light will leave your body, and you’ll descend into a black hole with no memory of ever having lived.”

The driver kicked Kyle’s feet out from under him. Kyle struck the road’s surface with his face. He could taste the blood in his mouth and smell the tar and oil and even the day’s heat in the asphalt. His concerns about the cold wind had disappeared. He wanted to remain where he was for the rest of his life.

The driver got in the wrecker and drove away, accelerating gradually until he was doing sixty, gliding into the curves as his cargo swung from side to side on the asphalt, caroming off tree trunks and road signs like a surfboard out of control.

Sheriff Elvis Bisbee called me at three-thirty P.M. Tuesday. “We’ve got Wyatt Dixon in custody,” he said. “He’s not under arrest, so he hasn’t been Mirandized. He says he’ll talk to us but only if you’re here.”

“Why me?”

“Ask him.”

“Why’d you bring him in?”

“Call it littering.”

“Is that some kind of insider joke?”

“Not if your name is Kyle Schumacher. His body parts were scattered for two miles along the Eastside Highway next to Flathead Lake. Come on down and I’ll show you a few photos. We’re at the jail.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Me and Detective Boyd.”

“Can I bring Clete Purcel?”

“Are you serious?”

Forty-five minutes later, I parked in front of the old courthouse in downtown Missoula. Wyatt Dixon was being held in a holding cell on the second floor. Elvis Bisbee and Jack Boyd walked with me to the cell. Dixon was sitting on a wood bench against the wall, asleep, his chin on his chest. He was wearing a T-shirt that showed Geronimo and three other Apaches, each holding a rifle. The inscription read: HOMELAND SECURITY — FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492.

The detective unlocked the cell and kicked the toe of Dixon’s boot. “Wake up,” he said.

Dixon lifted his head. “You caught me on my sore foot, Detective,” he said. “Is it dinnertime yet?”

“Mr. Robicheaux is here,” the sheriff said.

“Howdy-doody,” Dixon said.

“Why’d you want me here, Wyatt?” I said.

“Because you’re a believer, and they ain’t.”

“A believer in what?” I said.

“What’s out there,” he said. “You might be a college man, but me and you see the world the same way. You know what’s behind all this trouble, and it ain’t a bunch of lamebrains that work for Love Younger.”

“You’ve got a couple of strikes against you, Wyatt,” I said. “You had a grievance against Kyle Schumacher. Second, he was dragged to death.”

“It ain’t no skin off my ass.”

Boyd looked at me. “See, he’s a comedian. He’s always thinking. Isn’t that right, comedian?”

“You told me your cell partner in Texas chain-drug a man down a road,” I said.

“Yeah, I did tell you that, didn’t I? That probably wasn’t too smart.”

“Detective Boyd also showed you a mug shot of Schumacher in a photo lineup,” I said. “The next thing we know, Schumacher is dead.”

“Detective Boyd not only showed me a photo, he gave me Schumacher’s name. Up until that time, I’d never heard of him.”

“You’re lying,” Boyd said.

“What reason would I have to lie?”

“Because you were out to get the guys who jumped you and your girlfriend, and you have no alibi,” Boyd said.

“I slept on Miss Bertha’s couch last night. I wasn’t nowhere near Flathead Lake.”

“Why didn’t you say that?” the sheriff asked.