James Burke - Swan Peak

“Nobody saw anything?” I said.

“I went back inside. Nobody was interested. It’s Saturday on the res,” he replied.

“You didn’t see a suspicious vehicle in the parking lot?” I asked.

“I told you, I didn’t see anything. I wouldn’t have left her out here if I’d seen something. What are you trying to say to me?”

“I was just asking you a question, partner. Why would somebody take your girlfriend?”

I could see a thought working in his eyes. “The bartender inside said a couple of Indian guys left. Then he said the bus stopped outside.”

“Who were the Indian guys?”

“Just guys, feed growers. They drink here reg’lar. It’s not them.”

“Somebody got off the bus?”

“I asked the bartender that. He didn’t see nobody. He said it stops there sometimes to pick up people. They stand by the road, and the bus picks them up.”

I wasn’t getting anywhere with Troyce Nix. I flipped open my cell phone. No service. I went to the Camry and searched under the fenders for a magnetized key box. If one was there, I couldn’t find it.

“Come over here, Dave,” Clete said.

He was standing by the Camry. He pointed at the ground. There were fresh divots in it, funnel-shaped tracks like those of someone who had been wearing cowboy boots, someone who had been struggling. “Look over there,” he said.

Next to a set of fresh tire imprints were a half-dozen drops of blood on the gravel, each of them star-pointed around the edges. Clete squatted down and touched the blood with his ballpoint pen. “It’s still wet,” he said.

“What do you want to do?” I said.

“Why ask me?” he said.

“You’re the guy that bozo tried to light up.”

“You think we’re getting set up?” he said.

“No, but I think Jimmy Dale Greenwood was DOA before he ever got here. There’s no key under any of the Camry’s fenders. I have a feeling the Sweeney woman saw what happened, and the guys who grabbed Greenwood took her along with them.”

Clete opened his cell and started to punch in a number, then realized he didn’t have a signal. “I’m going to use the phone inside and call Alicia,” he said.

“Then what?” I said.

“In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“What about Troyce Nix?”

“That’s one dude we can do without.”

“He may not read it that way.”

“That’s his problem.”

We went inside the bar, and Clete used the pay phone to leave a message for Alicia Rosecrans. I used it to call Jamie Sue Wellstone’s cell, but she didn’t pick up. When we drove back onto the two-lane and headed toward the Swan Valley by way of Flathead Lake, Troyce Nix was standing in the middle of the parking lot, our dust drifting back across his hat.

FOR CANDACE SWEENEY,time was an odyssey in a wood-wheeled wagon down a broken road, each jolt forming another threadlike crack in a piece of bone here, a piece of connective tissue there. Even after her mouth and eyes and ankles were wrapped with duct tape, and her wrists fastened with plastic ligatures behind her, she knew her physical presence still represented a threat to the three men who had abducted her and Jimmy Dale Greenwood. Inside the rocking shell of the van, she could almost smell the self-centered fear that governed their lives and their immediate situation. And if she didn’t smell it, she could hear it in their conversation.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen, man. We were supposed to grab the guy and deliver the freight. In and out. Let that fucking geek handle the rest.”

“Why you looking at me? I didn’t do it.” It was the voice of the blond man.

“You didn’t do it? You let a dimwit broad with tats on her tits bust open your face. You don’t call that doing it?”

“I told you this deal sucked from the start. You don’t take down somebody in broad daylight on Saturday afternoon behind a bar on the res,” the blond man replied.

“The key word there is ‘res,’ Layne. Committing a crime on a federal reservation isn’t the way it was supposed to be. The blood is on the rocks back there.”

“Listen, you guys, we stay with the plan,” a third voice said. “We deliver the guy. We were just giving him a ride, that’s all. Then he started fighting with us ’cause he’s on meth or something. We drop the guy off, and that’s the end of it.”

“What about the gash?”

“Same thing. She was with the guy. She attacked us. What the geek does with them ain’t our business. We’re just doing a job. Look, nobody saw what happened back there. Only one story comes out of this deal. You just heard the story. That’s the story. That’s what history is, right? History is the story that survives.”

“Yeah, but I got one more message for our girlfriend,” Layne said. “Hand it to me.”

“That’s sick, man.”

“Yeah? Take a look at my face.”

“Some might call it an improvement.” There was a long silence inside the van. “Okay, man, but I think you ought to get some help.”

Candace heard someone turn around in the front seat, as though handing something to the man named Layne. She had little doubt about what was coming next. The blond man had already beaten her with his fists after she had been put in the van, uttering the same insatiable grinding sound he had made earlier.

The Taser arced into her back with a level of penetration and pain that seemed to radiate out through her muscles like hundreds of yellow jackets stinging her simultaneously.

“How do you like it, girlie?” Layne said.

“Maybe you should team up with the geek,” the driver said.

“The gash asked for it. The geek don’t need a reason. Give me that box of Kleenex. I can’t stop bleeding.”

Somehow, perhaps because of the convulsion she had experienced on the floor of the van when the Taser struck her back, a piece of tape had loosened enough from one eye so she could see Jimmy Dale Greenwood lying next to her. He was bound hand and foot, just as she was, the tape wound so tightly around his eyes that she could see the outline of his skull against his skin. But his captors had used tape on his wrists instead of ligatures, and Candace could see him twisting his balled fists back and forth, stretching the elasticity of the tape with each movement.

“You want to stop at a drive-through for some eats?” the blond man said.

“What about them ?” the passenger in front said.

“I’ll throw a blanket over them.”

“We got food at the cabin. You two shut the fuck up,” the driver said.

CLETE FLOORED THECaddy up through Ravalli and Ronan, the Mission Mountains so high in the sky that the waterfalls at the top were still braided with ice. Then we were headed north along the shore of Flathead Lake, passing cherry stands and homes built of stone by the water and sailboats that had given up and were coming out of the rain. The Caddy shook as we went into the turns, drifting slightly in the slick, on one occasion sucking past an oncoming camper with perhaps only three inches to spare.

I opened my cell phone and saw that I had a signal. I punched in Jamie Wellstone’s number. She answered on the third ring.

“Ms. Wellstone, it’s Dave Robicheaux,” I said.

“Where’s Jimmy Dale?” she asked.

“We’re not sure. The Camry is still at the bar.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying. The Camry is at the bar but Jimmy Dale is not? Maybe he hasn’t arrived.”

“No, we think he’s been abducted. We think a woman by the name of Candace Sweeney may have been abducted with him.”

“What is she doing there?”

Perhaps trying to save your boyfriend’s life , I said to myself. “Does your husband own a camp, a cabin, a boathouse, a place only he goes to?”