James Burke - Light of the World

Clete returned to the table without incident. “How about we eat up and go somewhere else?” I said.

“I need another drink. How about you, Felicity?” Clete said.

“I wouldn’t mind,” she said.

“We can get a drink down the road,” I said.

“You worry too much, Streak,” Clete said.

I felt like getting back into my truck and leaving them to their own devices. Felicity looked at my face. “He’s right. We should go, Clete,” she said.

Clete paid the check, and the three of us walked outside together. “Sorry I got you out here for no reason,” Clete said.

“Maybe they were going to pop you in the lot. Maybe my being here discouraged them.”

It was apparent that Clete had already moved on. “We thought we’d take a drive farther down in the valley, maybe talk some things out,” he said.

Back on the horizontal bop, I thought. But it was Clete’s gig, and I needed to leave it alone. “See y’all around,” I said.

They left Felicity’s Audi in the parking lot and drove down to the four-lane in the Caddy and turned south toward Stevensville. Behind me, I heard the front door of the restaurant open and the voice of Caspian Younger talking to Jack Boyd. Neither looked in my direction. They got into Younger’s vehicle and drove away. They, too, turned south, not back toward Missoula.

I followed Younger and Boyd farther down into the Bitterroot Valley. Outside Stevensville, they passed a semi and gave it the gas and left me stuck behind a slow car blocking the left lane. When I was able to pass, their vehicle was nowhere in sight. I made a U-turn and headed back in the opposite direction. Then I saw a filling station and convenience store by the Stevensville exit and Clete’s Caddy parked at one of the pumps. Caspian Younger had pulled into the parking area on the side of the store. I swung my truck off the four-lane.

Everyone in law enforcement is aware of the following lesson: You don’t get nailed in a firefight with the bad guys. The bad guys usually give it up when they’re confronted with an assault team made up of former SEALs and marines and paratroopers. When you go up against a barricaded suspect — usually a mental case who’s determined to write his name on the wall with his own blood or the blood of his hostages — the bad guy gets isolated and gassed, and if that doesn’t work, he gets hosed.

When a police officer is killed, it’s usually in the most innocuous of circumstances, such as a noise complaint. The responding officer walks up some rickety back stairs attached to a tenement, where a man and his wife, both of them drunk, are fighting in the kitchen. Maybe the officer is at the end of his watch, tired, resigned to ennui, careless, his cautionary instincts dulled by fatigue. Before he can even speak, the husband stumbles out on the porch in his undershirt and fires a gun point-blank into the officer’s face.

Here’s another scenario, the kind you can’t foresee or do anything about. A taillight up ahead is flickering on and off. The problem is probably a loose wire or bulb, something that can be fixed in ten minutes at a truck stop. You protect and serve in a state that permits people to own and drive motor vehicles whose windows are smoked the color of charcoal. Maybe the same state allows the driver to carry a loaded handgun in the glove box or under the seat. The officer approaches the driver’s door with no knowledge of who or what is waiting for him inside the vehicle. Emotionally, it’s like stepping out on a high wire while blindfolded. An incautious moment, a slip in judgment, a mistaken extension of trust, that’s all it takes. You’re not in Shitsville. You’re dead.

Clete had gotten out of the Caddy and inserted the gas nozzle in his tank, the blue fluorescence of the lighting overhead shining on his car and the concrete pad. Felicity was sitting in the passenger seat, looking straight ahead. Caspian and Jack Boyd walked toward Clete, Caspian in front, his jaw hooked like a barracuda’s.

“You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said.

“About what?” Clete said.

“Putting your dick where it doesn’t belong.”

Clete looked down at his fly. “No, it’s right where it’s supposed to be.”

I parked by the air pump and stepped out on the concrete. I saw Jack Boyd look back at me, then at Caspian and Clete. I started walking toward the rear of the Caddy, unarmed and certain that Clete was about to be shot. The gas pump had done an automatic shutoff, but Clete squeezed the trigger on the handle and restarted the flow, glancing at the stars above the mountains, his face serene.

“You think you’re a comedian?” Caspian said. “You hump a broad who’s thirty years younger than you, and you think you’re hot shit? Adultery is a virtue in New Orleans? That’s what you think?”

“It’s time for you guys to beat feet,” Clete replied.

“Look at me.”

“I am. Remember the guy in the Charles Atlas ads? The ninety-pound weakling who was always getting sand kicked in his face? I look at you and think about that ad from forty years ago. It’s a nostalgic moment.”

“You’re a fun guy. I like you. I can see why she likes you, too,” Caspian said. “But dildos are dildos. I hope it’s been worth it.”

Clete removed the nozzle from the tank and began to screw the gas cap back on the funnel, his expression flat, his eyes neutral. One of the fluorescent tubes above the gas island had shorted and started buzzing, like a wasp trapped inside a crawl space. Caspian leaned forward, within six inches of Clete’s ear, and spat on him.

Clete finished screwing the cap back on the gas tank, his green eyes as dispassionate as marbles. He pulled two paper towels from a dispenser and wiped the spittle from his cheek and ear and hair and dropped the towels into a trash barrel. Felicity opened the passenger door on the Caddy and stepped outside. “Can’t you leave us alone, Caspian?” she said. “You’ve gotten everything you wanted. Why do you want to go on hurting people?”

Caspian grinned at Clete. “Did you go downtown with her?” he said. “I have a feeling that’s one reason she’s kept you around. The bigger they are, the easier they are to control.”

“You guys win,” Clete said.

“Win what?” Caspian asked.

“You guys have got your way. Y’all are a whole lot smarter than me. What can I do?”

“Sorry, I don’t understand Sanskrit,” Caspian said.

“Really?” Clete said. “See how this translates.” He kicked Jack Boyd so hard in the groin that his face turned beet-red, then eggplant, as he went down on his knees, both hands clenched to his privates, his mouth locking open with pain that was so intense, no sound came out of his throat.

The roundhouse that caught Caspian lifted him into the air and sent him crashing into the side of the Caddy. Clete turned his attention back to Jack Boyd and kicked him in the face and stomped his head with the sole of his loafer, breaking his lips and nose and teeth. When Caspian tried to get up, Clete grabbed him by the back of the shirt and drove his face down on the Caddy’s fin, then whipped his head into a gas pump again and again, finally flinging him to the concrete.

He wasn’t finished. He ripped a small automatic from Boyd’s clip-on holster and released the magazine and threw it into the darkness, then ejected the round in the chamber and threw the gun on the roof of the convenience store. “Where’s your drop, asshole?” he said.

Boyd was trying to sit erect, coughing teeth and blood on his shirt.

“Clete, stop it! Please!” Felicity said. “Please don’t hit them anymore!”

“See this?” Clete said to Felicity, jerking up Boyd’s trouser leg. “It’s called a throw-down. He was going to pop me. Maybe you, too.”