Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“Nothing, really. People up here don’t like them. Them gyppo loggers will rip their ass if they get the chance.”

“Who’s that leave?”

He sipped off his whiskey, chased it with beer, and looked out at the lake. His face was composed and his green eyes were distant with either thought or perhaps no thought at all.

“Come on, partner, who could really mess up Mapes’s plans?”

“The Indians,” he said finally. “Star wants to drill on the Blackfeet Reservation. It shouldn’t be a problem, because in 1896 the Indians sold all their mineral rights to the government. But there’re some young guys, AIM guys, that are smart, that are talking about a suit.”

“The American Indian Movement?”

“Yeah, that’s them. They can tie everything up in court, say the treaty was a rip-off or the reservation is a religious area or some other bullshit. It can cost everybody a lot of money.”

“You know some of these guys?”

“No, I always stayed away from them. Some of them been in federal pens. You ever know a con with a political message up his butt? I celled with a black guy like that. Sonofabitch couldn’t read and was always talking about Karl Marx.”

“Give me one name, Dixie.”

“I don’t know any. I’m telling you the truth. They don’t like white people, at least white oil people. Who needs the grief?”

I left him at the bar and drove back toward Missoula. In the Jocko Valley I watched a rain shower move out from between two tall white peaks in the Mission Mountains, then spread across the sky, darken the sun, and march across the meadows, the clumped herds of Angus, the red barns and log ranch houses and clapboard cottages, the poplar windbreaks, the willow-lined river itself, and finally the smooth green hills that rose into another mountain range on the opposite side of the valley. Splinters of lightning danced on the ridges, and the sky above the timberline roiled with torn black clouds. Then I drove over the tip of the valley and out of the rain and into the sunshine on the Clark Fork as though I had slipped from one piece of geographical climate into another.

I picked up Alafair at the baby-sitter’s, next door to the rectory, then took her to an ice cream parlor by the river for a cone. There was a big white M on the mountain behind the university, and we could see figures climbing up to it on a zigzag trail. The side of the mountain was green with new grass, and above the M ponderosa pine grew through the saddle on the mountain and over the crest into the next valley. Alafair looked small at the marble-topped table, licking her cone, her feet not touching the floor. Her red tennis shoes and the knees of her jeans were spotted with grass stains.

“Were they nice to you at school?” I said.

“Sure.” Then she thought for a moment. “Dave?”

“Yes.”

“The teacher says I talk like a Cajun. How come she say that?”

“I can’t imagine,” I said.

We drove back to the house, and I used my new phone to call Dan Nygurski at the DEA in Great Falls. At first he didn’t know where I was calling from, then I heard his interest sharpen when I told him I was in Montana.

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

“I’m in some trouble.”

“I know about your trouble. I don’t think you’re going to make it any better by messing around up here in Montana.”

“What do you mean, you know about it?”

“I got feedback from our office in Lafayette. Vidrine and Mapes worked with Dixie Pugh, and Pugh lives with Sally Dio. It’s like keeping track of a daisy chain of moral imbeciles. You shouldn’t have gotten involved, Robicheaux.”

I couldn’t resist it.

“I was at Sally Dio’s today,” I said.

“I think that’s dumb, if you’re asking my opinion.”

“You know who Cletus Purcel is?”

“Yeah, he was your old homicide partner. I heard he blew away a witness. It looks like he found his own level.”

“He told me Dio is called the Duck because he wears ducktails, but I think he left something out of the story.”