James Burke - Swan Peak

“Leslie’s here, inside the house.”

“Would you answer the question, please?”

“I’m trying to think. No, he doesn’t have a place like that. Where are you? Where is Clete? Put him on.”

My sympathies with Jamie Sue Wellstone’s problems were quickly dissipating. “Has anyone called your house in the last hour?”

“How would I know that? I’m outside in the barn. I’m afraid to go inside my own house. Why are you asking about callers?”

That she had used the possessive pronoun in mentioning the Wellstone manor did not strike me as insignificant.

“If some men working for your husband or his brother kidnapped Jimmy Dale, I’d assume they’d pass on the information to their employer,” I said.

“Just after the turn from Bigfork, there’s a dirt road that leads into a peninsula. Leslie and Ridley are building a lodge way back in the timber. You can barely see it from Swan Lake.”

“What’s at the lodge?” I asked.

“It’s not really a lodge. It’s just in progress.”

“What’s there, Ms. Wellstone?”

“Nothing, just a bunch of debarked logs and a backhoe and stuff like that,” she replied. “Harold Waxman was helping with the foundation for the garage. He used to be a heavy-equipment operator.”

“If we get lost, I’ll call you back,” I said. I closed my cell phone and set it on my thigh, waiting for Clete to ask what Jamie Sue Wellstone had said. Instead, he was staring intently into the rearview mirror.

I looked through the back window but couldn’t see anything.

“It’s Troyce Nix,” Clete said. “He just melted back into the traffic. If I ever get out of this, I’m buying a charter fishing boat in Baja. Let all these people drown in their own shit. You’re looking at the new marlin king of the Pacific Coast.”

He grinned at me like an albino ape, his porkpie hat pulled down tightly on his brow. Then he went into a slick bend on the road, high above the water, never easing up on the gas, a truck horn blaring past us from the opposite direction.

CANDACE SWEENEY FELTthe cargo van slow and make a sharp turn off the asphalt onto a rough road pocked with divots that slammed the van down on its springs, rocking her hard against Jimmy Dale Greenwood. For the last few miles, the abductors had grown tired of their own conversation and all the banality that seemed to constitute their frame of reference. But when the van began bouncing down the dirt road, they came alive again, irritably, blaming one another for their bad luck that day, complaining about the road and the lousy food they had to eat and someone they referred to as “the geek.”

She assumed the geek was Leslie Wellstone.

The one who complained most was her blond tormentor. “Look, man, maybe I should have finessed her better back there on the res, but I’m like y’all, we shouldn’t be here for the main gig. There’s no percentage in it. We’re security guys. We fly back to Houston and forget everything that happened here. Do you know how much you can make working Arab security at the Ritz-Carlton? I worked the penthouse at the Ritz out by River Oaks. A whole bunch of Bedouins took up the entire floor. The old guys were wearing striped robes and floppy pink slippers with bunny ears on them. They cooked in their rooms and were always taking showers and asking for more soap, like they’d bathed in camel shit most of their lives.”

For the first time, all three men laughed. So the blond man, encouraged, continued his monologue. “A couple of the young guys wanted to see some tits and ass, so I took them to this skin joint on Richmond. This one broad had a pair of jugs that could knock your eyeballs out of their sockets. She not only had big knockers, she had a voice that had the two Bedouins creaming in their Calvin Kleins. One of them asked if he could buy her and take her back to Dubai or whatever sand trap his family is in charge of. I go, ‘You can’t buy women in this country.’ He goes, ‘Why not? I bought a Kentucky racehorse. This one on the stage has a tattoo on her rear end. My horse doesn’t. The horse doesn’t shit in the house, either. The woman does. Which is the more dignified creature?’”

The three laughed uproariously, so hard the driver lost his concentration and hit a pothole that bounced Candace into the air.

“Here’s the rest of it,” the blond man said. “You know who the broad was?”

“Your mother?” the driver said.

“Jamie Sue Wellstone. Except that wasn’t her name then. Small world, huh? I saw her sing later. Same broad, still selling the same tits. I wonder if Mr. Wellstone knows her history.”

Candace realized the men had not been referring to Leslie Wellstone when they had mentioned the geek. That thought filled her with a new fear, one that made her insides turn to water. In her mind’s eye, she saw a faceless silhouette, a black-suited, humped, and spiritually deformed creature whose existence was confined to nightmares and who was supposed to disappear at first light. When the van hit another pothole – this time with such violence that the frame actually slammed into the ground – she was jolted once more into the air. A moan broke from her throat, muffling against the tape.

“What’s going on back there?” the driver asked.

“Nothing,” the blond man said.

“No more rough stuff,” the driver said. “It ain’t our way. We dump ’em, and then this place is a memory.”

“What if Mr. Wellstone says different?” the blond man said.

“This state injects,” the driver said. “We didn’t sign on to ride the needle for fraternity guys who can’t manage their poontang. We eighty-six the sticks, and we’re down and outbound for Houston-town. Twenty-four hours from now, we’re gonna be drinking margaritas and eating Mexican food at Pappasito’s.”

“What do you think the geek has got planned?” the blond man said.

“Show some respect, Layne,” the man in the front passenger seat said.

Through the crack in the tape, Candace saw him gesture at her and Jimmy Dale.

AT THE NORTHERNend of Flathead Lake, in the town called Bigfork, Clete turned east and drove through a break in the mountains. Just before we reached a bridge at the Swan River, we saw the dirt road that accessed the peninsula on the west side of Swan Lake. The sun had broken through the rain clouds in the west and was the reddish-yellow of an egg yolk. But another front was moving toward us, a separate weather system, this one ugly and mean. It was gray and swirling with rain, pelting the lake, and when we drove onto the dirt road, the trees on either side of us were already bending in the wind, shredding cascades of pine needles across the windshield. The light had almost disappeared inside the timber, and the front end of the Caddy was bouncing hard in the potholes, patterning the windshield with more mud than the wipers could clean off.

“I feel like I’m sitting on sandbags in a six-by, waiting for Sir Charles to pop one through my windshield,” Clete said. A downed limb broke in half under a front tire and clanged against the oil pan. “My transmission’s not up to this. Check your cell.”

“What for?” I said.

“To call Alicia again. I think we might be firing in the well. I think Jamie Sue might have given us a bum lead. My engine is about to come off the mounts.”

“She didn’t exactly give us a lead.”

“Want to explain that?”

“I asked if her husband had a private place where he went. This is the only place she could think of.”

“That’s it?” he said.

“That’s it.”

“I thought I had obsessions. You know what your problem is? You’re like those biblical fundamentalists. They believe if one part of the Bible is not literally correct, the rest of it is no good, either. Except with you, it’s people. You got to prove everybody is on the square, or the whole human race is no good.”