James Burke - Swan Peak

“It leaves you back where you started when you were telling me you’re about to head out. Is that where you are? You’re heading out?”

“Not necessarily.”

“That’s what I thought. What’s my name?”

“I don’t know your name.”

“So you thought that gave you the right to call me ‘bub’?… Don’t turn your back on me. What’s my name?”

“It’s ‘sir,’ if that’s what you want.”

“No, what’s my name?”

“It’s ‘sir.’”

“You’d better get out of the rain. You’re going to catch cold. Your nose is already running.”

The dirt under the dark-suited man’s boots sifted down on top of Candace’s head. She stared helplessly at Jimmy Dale Greenwood’s back. He had stretched the tape on his wrists to the point where he could get an index finger under the adhesive and start working it down over one thumb. High above her, she saw lightning flare inside the thunderheads, like a match igniting a pool of white gasoline.

CLETE AND Ishould have taken my pickup truck and not the Caddy. Most hillside roads in Montana were cut years ago by logging companies and left unseeded and at the mercy of the elements. With the passage of time, they had become potholed, eroded, strewn with rocks and boulders and sometimes fire-blackened trees that had washed out of the slopes. The Caddy bounced into a hole and went down on the transmission. When Clete tried to shift into reverse, we heard a sound like Coca-Cola bottles clanking and breaking inside a steel box. The Caddy would not budge in reverse and was high-centered and couldn’t get out of the hole by going forward.

Clete looked glumly through the windshield. The road wound higher and higher through the trees, with water rilling down the incline. We saw no sign of a structure of any kind, much less a lodge under construction.

“What a mess,” he said. “Maybe this isn’t even the right road.”

“When we first turned off, I thought I saw headlights behind us. Maybe it was Troyce Nix,” I said.

“If it’s Nix, he’s coming up the road on the braille system. There’re no headlights behind us.”

“I saw them, Clete.”

“Okay, you saw them. We shouldn’t have listened to Jamie Sue. This is three monkeys fucking a football.”

“Why don’t you get out of your bad mood?” I said.

“My bad mood? Look at my car. It’s probably impaled. The transmission is frozen in low. My paint job probably looks like a herd of cats used it for a scratching post.”

“We’ll get the jack out and bounce the car out of the hole. We’ll just keep bouncing it in a circle until we can point it back down the road.”

“What about Greenwood and the Sweeney woman?”

“We’ll walk to the top of the mountain. That’s all we can do. It’s my fault, Cletus. I don’t see any other tire tracks. I think it’s a bum lead.”

“No, the tracks could be washed out. Let’s bounce it out of the hole and go all the way up with the car. If we’re on the right road, there should be enough space by the lodge to drive the Caddy in a circle so we can head back down.”

We got the jack out of the trunk, fitted it under the frame, and raised the Caddy high enough so that when we pushed it off the jack, it fell sideways, partially clear of the hole the wheel had sunk into. We repeated the process three times, filling in the hole each time with rocks and mud and rotted timber that was as soft as old cork. Our clothes were soaked with rainwater and splattered with mud. Clete’s porkpie hat looked like a wilted blue flower on his head.

“What are you grinning at?” I asked.

“Us.”

“What for?”

“Broads and booze, that’s what has always gotten us in trouble. Every time. I can’t think of one exception.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said.

The Caddy’s engine was still running, and the headlights were on. I could see the whiteness of Clete’s teeth and his chest shaking while he laughed without sound. This time he was not going to reply to the ridiculous nature of my denial.

“Look down the road,” I said, my hand slowing on the jack handle.

“What?”

“Headlights,” I said.

Clete raised up so he could see beyond the length of the Caddy. “It’s Troyce Nix,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“It’s a blue Ford pickup with an extended cab. It’s Nix. What’s the Jewish expression? ‘A good deed by a Cossack is still a good deed’?” he said. “I didn’t think I’d ever be glad to see a dickhead like that.”

No, it’s not blue. It’s purple , I thought. I remember thinking that distinctly. But the jack was starting to slip, the Caddy yawing inward on it, back toward the deepest part of the hole, the steel shaft arching slightly with the tension. I forgot about the color of the truck. “Clete, get away from the jack,” I said.

But typical of Clete, he didn’t listen. He went around behind me and dug one foot into the mud and shoved his shoulder against the fender, pushing the Caddy’s weight back against the jack. “Come on, pump it, big mon. One more bounce and we’re out.”

He was right. I ratcheted up the jack three more notches, then we pushed the Caddy sideways until it teetered briefly and fell clear of the hole. Clete’s face was happy and beaded with raindrops in the headlights. He stared into the high beams of the pickup, blinking against the glare. Inside the sound of the wind and the rain in the trees, I thought I heard a sound I’d heard before, one that didn’t fit the place and the situation. It was a rhythmic clanking and thudding sound, accompanied by labored breathing – a thudding clank, a hard breath, another thudding clank.

I rose to my feet. My forty-five was on the car seat, and Clete’s thirty-eight was on the dash. Ridley Wellstone worked his aluminum braces over a rut in the road and stood by the passenger door of the Caddy, his arms held stiffly inside the metal half-moon guides of his braces. He wore a Stetson that had long since lost its shape to rainwater and sweat. He even looked handsome and patriarchal in it, rain running in strings off the brim and dissolving in the wind, his face craggy like that of a trail boss in a western painting.

“You fellows having a little car trouble?” he asked.

I shielded my eyes from the glare of the pickup’s high beams. Behind Ridley Wellstone was a man I didn’t know. He was holding a Mac-10 with a suppressor attached to it. Leslie Wellstone opened the door of the pickup, turning on the inside light. Behind the rain-beaded glass in the extended cab, I saw a third man and the pinched and resentful face of Jamie Sue Wellstone with an expression on it that had more to do with resignation than with fear.

“We’ve already informed the FBI of where we are,” I said.

“Then why are you here? Why aren’t you having a drink somewhere, watching the light show in the sky, minding your own business?” Ridley said.

“Use your head, sir. You can’t airbrush all of us off the planet,” I said.

“Perhaps you’re right. Then again, perhaps you’re not,” Ridley said. “You did this to yourself, Mr. Robicheaux. I have a feeling most people who know you have long considered your fate a foregone conclusion.”

“Don’t talk to these cocksuckers, Dave,” Clete said. “They wouldn’t be out here if they weren’t scared shitless.”

“You’re wrong about that, Clete,” Leslie Wellstone said.

“Where do you get off calling me by my first name?” Clete said, already knowing the answer.

“Excuse me, Mr. Purcel,” Leslie Wellstone said. “I forgot what a civilized individual you are. Do you mind walking ahead of us, Mr. Purcel? It’s not far. Just over a couple of rises and you’ll see a happy gathering. You’ll be joining up with them. You’ll like it.”