James Burke - Swan Peak

Her eyes took on a sharper intensity at the implication in my question. “I know who they are,” she said. “You think my visit here has some connection to them?”

“I have no idea why you’re here. But I don’t believe it’s about Sally Dio. The feds didn’t care about him nineteen years ago. I don’t think they care about him now.”

Molly opened the front door. “Would you like to come in for coffee?” she asked.

Wrong time for southern protocol.

“That would be nice,” Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans said.

Inside the kitchen area of the cabin, Molly began setting pastry and cups and saucers on our breakfast table, which was spread with a red-and-white-checkerboard cloth. Alicia Rosecrans sat down and opened a notebook on the table. “You and Clete Purcel are now helping Sheriff Higgins in the investigation of the homicide that took place behind Albert Hollister’s house?”

“How’d you know that?”

“I reinterviewed some of the same people you and Purcel interviewed. You’re walking on the edges of meddling in a federal investigation, Mr. Robicheaux.”

Molly had been moving pots and pans around on the stove, but she stopped and turned off the propane on the burner. The only sound in the room was the wind blowing in the cottonwoods that shaded the cabin.

“I’m a police officer,” I said. “Any interviews I conducted were done with the consent of the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department. I think the question we’re not dealing with here is your involvement in the investigation of a local homicide. Why are the feds interested in the deaths of two college kids?”

“One of them was kidnapped.”

I wasn’t buying her answer. Since 9/11, the FBI had shifted its emphasis not only to the vast and attendant connotations of the word “terrorism” but to following thousands of Mideastern college students all over the United States. I doubted they had time or resources to worry about what appeared to be the random murder of two college students in Missoula, Montana.

“Dave, I completely forgot. I promised we’d take Albert’s cat to the vet’s office this morning,” Molly said.

Alicia Rosecrans closed her notebook and returned it to her purse. She folded her hands and stared out the window at the cottonwoods swelling with wind. Her features were as immobile as those in an oil painting, her eyes full of private thoughts.

“Ma’am?” I said, wondering if indeed she had accepted Molly’s invitation to leave.

“I think your friend is with the Wellstone woman this morning,” she said.

“Can you say that again?”

“I believe he’s about to get himself in a lot of trouble,” she said. “Thank you for your time. Thank you for preparing the coffee, too, Ms. Robicheaux.”

Then Alicia Rosecrans went out to her car and drove away. But I had a feeling we would be seeing a lot more of her.

“What was that?” Molly said.

“The feds have Jamie Sue Wellstone under surveillance. The question is why.”

TROYCE NIX’S HOSPITALwindow gave onto a terrace planted with mimosa and palm trees, bougainvillea, yellow bugle vine, crown of thorns, and Spanish daggers. In the early-morning hours and at sunset, the automatic sprinklers clicked on and misted the plants and created miniature rainbows above the terrace wall. But Troyce Nix was not interested in the beauty of a tropical garden or the baked hills across the river in Old Mexico or the millions of lights that seemed to come on at night along the dry floodplains of the Rio Grande. His favorite time of day was high noon, right after lunch, when the nurse turned on his morphine drip and the sky turned a blinding white and he found himself inside a vast desert somewhere west of the Pecos where neither God nor civilized man bothered to lay claim, where a solitary figure waited for him, both Troyce’s and the figure’s tracks finally braiding together amid sand dunes that were as tall as mountains.

In Troyce’s dream, the figure wore state-issue blues that were stiff with dried sweat and caked with salt under the armpits. His hair was blown with grit, his lips cracked from dehydration, his work boots split on his feet. The desert was devoid of shadows, even those of carrion birds. The only remnants of modern civilization that Troyce could see were the bodies of automobiles, half buried in the sand, the paint scoured from the metal. As Troyce approached the figure, the water in his canteen sloshing on his hip, he could feel a thickness growing in his loins. He felt his palms starting to tingle and the same sense of expectation that he always experienced just this side of orgasm. He heard sand rilling down the face of a dune, wind whistling through the glassless window of a Model T Ford. He heard the sound of water as he drank it from his canteen, his throat working steadily. He smelled the astringent, reassuring odor of his own manhood as he wiped his face on his shirtsleeve.

He could do and experience all these things because he was alive and growing stronger by the minute, in control of another’s fate, about to measure out justice and vengeance in any fashion he chose.

The figure dressed in state blues was terrified, his mouth opening silently with his fear.

Been thinking about me, Jimmy Dale?

A whole lot, boss. Real sorry about what happened back there. You got some water?

Look down at your pants.

Sir?

You just pissed your britches.

What you gonna do, boss?

Nothing.

Sir?

I’m gonna make you do it to yourself. I’m gonna make you do it to what you love. I’m just gonna watch.

I don’t understand.

You know what Chinamen call the death of a thousand cuts?

No sir.

It’ll be quite a ride.

That don’t sound good, boss.

You don’t know the half of it.

When Troyce Nix would wake from his dream, his throat would be parched, his phallus throbbing, his big, flat-plated chest damp with perspiration. When the male nurse came in to give him fresh ice water and to sponge-bathe him, Troyce would sometimes convince him to turn the drip back on. Then he would lie back in a sleepy pink haze, a sliver of ice on his tongue, mentally constructing his next encounter with Jimmy Dale Greenwood, the images for redress so stark he had to touch the male nurse on the back of the hand to keep his bearings.

But this afternoon was different. In the morning he would be leaving the hospital, perhaps unsteadily, his system laced with painkillers, but leaving nonetheless. The only problem now was the deputy sheriff sitting by his bed, a pencil pusher with soft hands and a pink egg-shaped face and carefully combed hair and breath that smelled of peppermint mouthwash. Unfortunately, the man’s mind-set did not go with his demeanor or appearance. His name was Rawlings, and he was the fourth investigative deputy to visit Troyce Nix’s bedside. He was also the most unrelenting.

“A few millimeters either way and any one of them body thrusts could have done you in,” he said. “I’d buy me a bunch of lottery tickets or go to the dog track. You ever go to the dog track?”

“No,” Troyce answered.

“So you figure it was a tramp hiding in your closet?” Rawlings said. “He was in your house and he hid in your closet when he heard your truck come up the road? That’s what you’re saying?”

“It’s not what I’m saying. It’s what happened,” Troyce said. His chest was crisscrossed with tape and gauze; he shifted himself on the bed to relieve a place where the bandages were binding under his heart.

“And Jimmy Dale Greenwood was digging postholes behind your house or cabin or whatever? Wasn’t no way it was him who hurt you? I mean, here on your statement it says you laid down to take a nap and this guy come out of the closet when you woke up. Wasn’t no way you just got confused about who attacked you?”