James Burke - Swan Peak

Up ahead, he saw the Caddy owned by Clete Purcel. It had been abandoned at an odd angle in the middle of the road. An elevated jack and its stand lay in the mud by the front bumper. The doors of the Caddy were open, the keys still hanging in the ignition, the interior light manually set on “off.” Troyce looked in the glove box and under the seats for weapons but found none. He concluded that the interior of the vehicle had been rifled, which meant its occupants probably had not deserted the car of their own accord.

He walked over a knoll and saw headlights progressing slowly down the road and two figures walking inside the beams with their hands clasped behind their necks. He went deeper into the woods and kept walking parallel to the road, his bowels like water, his rectum constricting, his head as light as a helium-filled balloon. Ahead he could see other lights down in a depression or a clearing, and he thought he smelled diesel exhaust and heard the sound of a heavy machine idling, one without a muffler.

The wind gusted off the lake below and swept up through the timber, pattering raindrops on Troyce’s hat, the air blooming with a smell like fresh oxygen. He knelt down in the second growth, tilting his face toward the ground, freezing behind the trunk of a huge pine. A procession of people on foot, with the pickup behind them, wound its way up the road. Through the rain-beaded side window of the truck, Troyce thought he could make out the face of Jamie Sue Wellstone.

What was she doing here? he asked himself. Where was Candace? Where was Jimmy Dale? Had Troyce made a terrible mistake and followed the wrong vehicle and the wrong group of people? Was Candace somewhere else, depending on him, waiting helplessly for him to save her from the men who had stolen her out of the parking lot behind the bar? The possibility that he had screwed up and let her down when she needed him most made him almost insane with anger at himself. Was this punishment for what he had done to Cujo in Iraq? Was this punishment for what he had done to Jimmy Dale? He wanted to rush the Wellstone vehicle and tear both brothers apart and do as much damage as possible to their hired help as well.

No, “damage” wasn’t the word. As always, when Troyce felt a red balloon of anger blossom in his chest, he smelled an odor like stale sweat and machinist grease and gasoline soaked into coarse fabric. He felt a man’s whiskers on his face, a soiled hand unbuttoning his pants, a man’s labored whiskey breath working its way across his skin. In these moments Troyce knew why men could kill other men as easily as they did.

In his mind’s eye, he saw himself swinging the bat, doing amounts of bone-breaking injury to the Wellstones for which they would never find medical remedy.

CLETE AND Istared dumbly at the man in the mask. Ridley and Jamie Sue Wellstone and the man with the cut-down pump were climbing out of the purple pickup. The man with the cut-down pump was wiping his cheek on his sleeve. He wore a damp dark blue tropical shirt that looked like Kleenex wrapped on his muscular torso.

“Problem?” Leslie said to him.

“She slapped my face,” the man said. “She cut the skin with her nails.”

Leslie laughed. “Put it on my tab.”

“I don’t like a woman hitting me, Mr. Wellstone,” the gunman said.

“It could be worse. She could be your wife,” Leslie said.

“Let’s finish it,” Ridley said, propped on his braces, a flicker of pain in his expression from the ride down the potholed road.

“I think the Dio family clap has finally climbed from your dick up into your brain, Sal,” Clete said. “Look around you. You think all these people are going to forget what they see here?”

Leslie Wellstone walked toward Clete, a nine-millimeter hanging from his left hand. He was no longer smiling. I saw him whisper in Clete’s ear and then step back, his eyes glinting with whatever sliver of glass or ounce of poison he had managed to put inside Clete’s system.

“Why don’t you share it with me, Sal?” I said.

“I look like a dead Italian?” he said.

“Yeah, you’re Sally Dio,” I said. “Punks can read books and hire speech coaches, but you’re still the same punk who pretended he was a blues musician or whatever else was in style at the time. You’re a gutter rat, Sal. It’s in your genes.”

“Know what I was telling Clete, Dave? That both of you are about to be dead for a long time. But it’s going to come to you in pieces. Mr. Waxman over there loves his work. There are anonymous mounds all over this country that are silent tributes to his skill.”

“He’s the guy who killed Ridley Wellstone’s wife and stepdaughter, isn’t he?” I said.

“When you’re in the ground, you won’t be dead, Dave. You’ll be choking on dirt and trying to get it out of your eyes and ears and stop it from raining down on your chest. Just before everything goes black, maybe there’ll be a big illumination for you, and you can talk to all the other people he’s killed. You think that’s the way it’s going to come, Dave? That the earth will crush the light out of your eyes and in your last seconds you’ll realize there’s no mystery about life, that you’re just a sorry sack of worm food down there in the hole with all the other sacks of worm food?”

“Do what you’re going to do and be done. Listening to you is a real drag,” I said.

His eyes locked on mine, and for a second I saw his self-assurance slip, as though the ridiculing voice of his father, a gangster who had run all the vice along the Texas coast, was echoing in his memory. Then the glint of cruelty that defined the Sally Dio I had known on Flathead Lake years ago came back into his eyes. The tip of his tongue moved over his lips. “Watch closely.”

He walked to the three men who had been waiting inside the cargo van when we arrived. He rested his right hand – the one that resembled a shriveled monkey’s paw – on the shoulder of a blond man and looked at him. “The woman hit you in the face with a tire iron?” he said.

“I got careless, that’s all,” the blond man said.

“We can’t have broads doing that to us, can we? You want to do the honors?”

“Sir?”

“Want to pop her? I’m going to let Moo-Moo pop my wife if he wants to.”

“No sir, we were just doing a job, Mr. Wellstone.”

“No, no, when somebody hits you with a tire iron, it’s personal. Come over here, fellows. Jimmy Dale ruined another man’s marriage and deserves a special fate. The woman, however, is just a meddlesome pain in the neck. I think she should receive rough mercy, don’t you?”

The three men from the van followed Sally Dio to the edge of the pit and stared down inside it, looking at one another, looking again into the pit, unsure what they should say next. It was obvious none of them wanted to be there. It was also obvious they feared the man who called himself Leslie Wellstone and did not want to displease him.

Then Sally Dio turned around and said, “What?” He said it as though someone behind him had spoken to him. “Wait here a minute, fellows,” he said, and began walking toward his brother. As he did, he nodded to the man holding the Mac-10.

I had seen a Mac-10 at a weapons exhibition and had even held one in my hands. But I had never seen one fired. I had been told that a Mac-10 could discharge from one thousand to sixteen hundred rounds of forty-five-caliber ammunition per minute. It was difficult to imagine firepower of that magnitude in a weapon so compact it could be held and aimed like a handgun.

Billy opened up, the suppressor eating most of the sound of the discharge, the spent shell casings clinking and bouncing on the ground. In a brief instant, the three victims seemed to stare in disbelief at the reversal of their fortunes, their mouths dropping open, their palms rising defensively. Then their clothes erupted with red flowers, their faces and skulls bursting into a bloody mist. They jackknifed backward into the pit, and I heard them strike the earth heavily, and then it was over except for the sound of the last ejected shells tinkling on the dirt.