James Burke - Swan Peak

“Who did it to them, Hobbs?”

“Not me. I drive people’s cars. That’s it. You tell that Asian cunt what I said.”

“I think maybe you’re still working for Sally Dio. I think maybe Sally is still alive. One guy survived that air crash. It was Sal, wasn’t it? Where is he, Lyle?”

“Sally always said you were stupid.”

“Could be,” I said. I smiled at him, my thumbs hooked on the sides of my belt, my eyes roving over his face. “Just a footnote to all this. If you ever refer to a woman like that in my presence again, using that particular word, I’m going to pick up a ball-peen hammer and break out all your teeth.”

I WALKED UPto the main house and told Clete of Hobbs’s visit. Then I got Alicia Rosecrans’s cell phone number from him and went back to the cabin and called her. I told her everything Hobbs had said, excluding the insult.

“Where’s Hobbs now?” she asked.

“Probably headed for Reno or Vegas.”

“Seymour Bell told Ridley Wellstone he had recorded evidence against both him and Sonny Click? That the Kershaw girl had a digital recorder in her purse?”

“That’s correct, at least according to Hobbs.”

“But Bell was bluffing?”

“That’s right,” I replied.

“Ridley Wellstone couldn’t figure that out? Kershaw came from a poor family. She worked as a janitor to go to college. Where would she get money for a digital recorder? Those kids died for nothing.”

“Yeah, they did,” I said.

“I thought I had more objectivity about this case, but this really pisses me off. Hobbs wouldn’t say who abducted Bell and Kershaw?”

“No. But Quince Whitley has got to be a player in this.”

“How about the California couple? What’s the connection?”

“I’m not sure.”

“That’s a long way from ‘don’t know,’ Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Thirty-one years ago Ridley Wellstone’s stepdaughter was mixed up with a porn actor. She and her mother were both murdered. The murder remains unsolved.”

“Where’s Clete?”

“In his apartment, up at the main house.”

“You guys stay out of this.”

“I’d love to. Would you pass on your sentiments to the Wellstones?” I replied.

THE PREVIOUS AFTERNOON,after Troyce had talked to the bartender at the nightclub, he had been silent all the way back to the cottage. Then he had left Candace by herself and gone away for three hours, claiming he had to get the truck serviced and to buy pike-fish tackle at Seeley Lake. This morning he had gotten up in the false dawn and had showered in cold water because the pilot had gone out on the tank; in the frigid temperature of the kitchen, without shoes or a shirt on, he had fixed breakfast for both of them but had left most of his uneaten on the plate. Minutes later, without explanation, he had driven off in the first pink touch of sunrise on the birch trees, leaving her a fifty-dollar bill to buy lunch in case he wasn’t back by noon.

But he returned four hours later, a lump of cartilage working in his jaw, the armpits of his red shirt dark with sweat. He clenched his stomach, his face white around the mouth with discomfort.

“You sick?” she said.

“I got to go to the can,” he replied.

Ten minutes later, he came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel, blowing out his breath. “I feel like I was poisoned. What’d I eat last night?”

“What you always do – steak.”

“Anyway, I’m okay now. Let’s pack it up,” he said.

“We just got here.”

“That’s right. We been here. So let’s go see some other place.”

“Like where?”

“Glacier Park, then all points west. Next stop, the Cascade Mountains. How would you like that?”

“Where have you been, Troyce?”

“Here and yon, taking care of this and that. Come on, gal, let’s head ’em up and move ’em out.”

“Were you following that guy?”

“Which guy?”

“The bartender, the one that looks like he’s got strands of black wire combed across his head.”

“I just been taking care of business, that’s all. You don’t take care of business, somebody will take care of it for you, and that don’t usually work out too good.”

Fifteen minutes later, through the windshield of the truck, she watched the sun-spangled canopy of birches sweeping by overhead, the shadows of their leaves netting the dashboard and her skin and clothes, the ethereal blue-gray beauty of the lake and Swan Peak disappearing behind the truck. She looked at Troyce’s chiseled profile and cupped her hand on the point of his shoulder and tightened her fingers on the bone and muscle. But she didn’t speak, not at first, because she couldn’t find the vocabulary that would make Troyce understand her sense of apprehension.

“You fixing to tell me something?” he asked.

“No, because I haven’t figured it all out. When I do, I’ll tell you,” she replied.

“How am I supposed to read that, Candace?”

“I never had any understanding of the big mysteries and why things happen and why people get hurt and do the things they do to each other. I don’t think figuring it out comes with age, either. Otherwise we’d want to listen to old people. But we don’t, because most of them act selfish and childish and have to be tolerated and taken care of. I can’t even figure out us, much less anything that’s bigger than us.”

His eyes crinkled at the corners as though he was either amused by her words or honestly trying to understand them. He blew his horn and swung around a truck on the two-lane, pressing the accelerator to the floor, barely getting back in before he hit the double yellow warning lines. “You’re too deep for the likes of me,” he said.

“I made you a promise, but I’m not keeping it,” she said.

“What promise?”

“That I wouldn’t be here if you tried to hurt that man.”

“You talking about Jimmy Dale Greenwood?”

“I don’t want you to even use his name to me. Don’t say it. Don’t tell me why he’s so important to you, don’t tell me any of your lies. You make me resent myself, Troyce. That’s the worst thing somebody can do to somebody else.”

He looked at her, the pickup drifting across the center stripe, his face clouding. “’Cause of a guy like that, you’d throw everything we got out the window?”

She stared at the long tunnel of shadow and light and pines and fir trees and cottonwoods that seemed to be racing past the truck. She didn’t know if Troyce was being disingenuous or if he truly could not understand what she was saying to him. She rolled down the window and let the road’s trapped heat blow into her face, whipping her hair, stinging her skin with invisible pieces of grit.

Her adolescent and adult life had been spent proving her lack of dependence on others – hustling as a street kid in Portland, body-blocking other women senseless on the roller-derby circuit, cooking at hunting lodges for corporate executives who made jokes about learning from the Indians, namely how to do it dog-style in the great outdoors, wheezing while they told their jokes, their faces flushed and porcine above their drinks.

But the truth about Candace’s relationship with the world was otherwise. The defining moment in her life, the passageway that forever changed her, one that was like an arc of dark light across the sky, was the day Smilin’ Jack left her behind and entered the Cascades, his head full of dreams about the mother lode buried somewhere inside the clouds, his whole body full of love and energy and physical courage, smelling of aftershave lotion and pipe tobacco and the Lifebuoy soap he bathed in, full of everything except concern for the little girl he had abandoned.