James Burke - Swan Peak

It can happen as quickly as a drunk driver swinging his car across the center stripe of the two-lane, crashing head-on into your grille. It usually comes when you least suspect it, often in the most innocuous of situations. I guess I had accepted all the aforementioned; I just didn’t want to buy it on my knees.

“Listen to me,” I said to Ridley Wellstone. “When Sal is done with us, you’ll be next.”

“Not true, Mr. Robicheaux. He needs me,” Wellstone replied. I started to speak, but he cut me off. “Don’t say any more. Don’t degrade yourself. I tried to reason with you. Fact is, I begged you to stay out of our affairs. You invited this fate into your life, sir. Accept it like a man.”

You arrogant bastard , I thought.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

“Getting to my feet,” I said. That’s exactly what I was doing, rising from the ground, pushing myself erect, my knees popping, my hands no longer clasped behind my neck.

“Get down on the ground,” the man with the Mac-10 said.

“Sorry, partner. You’re going to have to haul a hundred and ninety pounds of dead meat to that hole if you want me in it,” I said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clete rising up beside me. “That makes two of us, asshole,” he said.

“Get up here, Moo-Moo,” Sally Dio shouted down the slope.

Again there was no answer, and Sal knew he had a problem on his hands. The man in the mask began walking toward us from the pit. “Give me the Mac. I’ll have all this cleaned up in two minutes,” he said, his words reverberating inside the plastic hollows of the mask.

“Harold?” said Jamie Sue. “Harold, is that you? My God, what are you doing?”

The man in the mask didn’t reply; instead, he seemed to hang his head slightly.

“Harold, look at me,” she said. “What are you doing? You were my friend. I trusted you. Leslie hired you because of me. I told him what a gentleman you are. You came to our revival. You can’t allow yourself to be part of this.”

“Shut up, Jamie Sue,” Dio said. “This guy has been snuffing Ridley’s enemies for years. How do you think those two Hollywood characters ended up dead? The porn producer had been indicted and was going to give up Ridley to a grand jury. So our friend Harold tuned him up and tuned him out at the rest stop.”

“You got a big mouth,” Harold said, turning his gaze on Dio.

“We’ll work this out later. Right now you get down that hillside and see where Billy is,” Dio said.

“I don’t take orders from you,” Harold said.

A breeze blew through the clearing, showering more pine needles into the electric glow, the air blooming again with a smell that was like lake water and schooled-up fish. Then I saw something I couldn’t believe, an image that was both incongruous and nonsensical: the top half of Jimmy Dale Greenwood rising from the pit, both of his hands gripped on a snub-nose thirty-eight revolver, strips of duct tape still hanging from his wrists. It took a moment for me to realize what had happened: The three men who had been machine-pistoled into the pit had been armed. Somehow Jimmy Dale had gotten loose and had taken a weapon off one of their bodies. He aimed the revolver straight out in front of him. I saw him close one eye and pull the trigger.

The report sounded like that of a starter gun at a track meet. The shot went wide and disappeared with a pinging sound down in the trees. Jimmy Dale pulled the trigger twice more, and Sally Dio’s left leg buckled under him, just like someone had kicked him behind the knee. Billy tried to swing his Mac-10 clear of Dio for a shot, but Clete Purcel was all over him, pinning his arms at his sides, picking him up and slamming him to the ground, kicking the gun from his hand, stomping the side of his head, picking him up again and driving his fist into his face.

I got Sally Dio’s nine-millimeter from his hand and aimed it at the man in the mask. Dio tried to fight with me, but his best blows were like those of a dried-out crustacean – weightless and empty, like Sal himself, a shell of a man whose strength existed only to the degree that he could inculcate fear in others. Oddly, the man in the mask showed no reaction that I could see, as though he was merely a witness to all the events taking place around him.

Clete was still hitting Billy, holding him down with one knee in his chest, hitting him so hard he had started to beg.

“Cletus, ease up,” I said.

“You’re right,” he said, getting to his feet, the Mac-10 in his right hand, his attention focused on the man in the mask, his finger curling inside the trigger guard.

“Don’t do it,” I said.

“He’s going to skate. The sicker they are, the easier they get off on an insanity plea,” he replied.

“That’s just the way it is. We’re not executioners, podna. Lower the piece.”

“No, I’m going to walk him into the woods. Call it Q-and-A time. Who knows how it might work out?” His green eyes were charged with adrenaline, his face slick with sweat, his cheeks as red as apples.

“We don’t give them power. We don’t become like them. Waxman will rot in a cage, and he’ll take Ridley Wellstone down with him. We’ll take two guys off the board instead of one. You want to do their time?”

“Good try,” Clete said.

“You always said it, the Bobbsey Twins are forever. Who am I going to drink Dr Pepper with?”

I saw hesitation in his movements, like an elephant in must suddenly becoming pacified, his size actually deflating, a suppressed grin on his mouth. “You can really rain on a parade, Dave.”

He made Harold Waxman take off his mask and lie down on the ground, then pulled Candace Sweeney and Jimmy Dale Greenwood out of the pit, brushing off their clothes for them as he did, maybe reassuring them in his clumsy fashion that the world was a better place than they had thought.

But in truth, I cannot tell you with any exactitude what happened inside that clearing during a midsummer electric storm west of Swan Lake, Montana. I know that the rain falls and the sun rises on evil men as well as on the good and just. I know that on that particular night we were spared a terrible fate. At the same time, men a theologian would probably term wicked were put out of business. Perhaps we even made a dent in the venal enterprises they represent.

But if there is a greater lesson in what occurred inside that clearing, it’s probably the simple fact that the real gladiators of the world are so humble in their origins and unremarkable in appearance that when we stand next to them in a grocery-store line, we never guess how brightly their souls can burn in the dark.

Or at least that’s the way it seems to me.

TROYCE NIX HADnever thought of himself as a liar, or at least not a very good liar. However, he discovered he was far more adept at it than he had thought, particularly after being interviewed by both the Missoula County and Lake County sheriffs and then a team of FBI agents.

The latter group questioned him on the shore of Swan Lake, directly below the clearing where the mass shooting had gone down, asking him to describe again, in detail, how Jimmy Dale Greenwood had drowned.

“It’s like I said. I chased him through the trees, but he just kept on hauling ass. He hit the water running and swum out about forty yards and then started fighting in the water and went down like a brick shithouse.”

“It was pitch dark. How could you see anything?” one agent asked.

“There was lightning flashing up in the clouds. I think he probably had a cramp or them goons busted him up inside. I seen his arms flailing around for just a minute, then he sunk under a bunch of bubbles. Throw some grappling hooks out there. He probably ain’t floated very far.”