Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

I drove to Bob Ward’s Sporting Goods, a mountaineering and tackle-and-gun store I had heard about even in Louisiana, and used my MasterCard to buy a .38 revolver, a box of rounds and a cutaway holster for it, a secondhand twelve-gauge shotgun, and a box of double-aught buckshot. Back home I carried the tool chest from my truck into the kitchen, slipped the top shelf out of the cupboard, and tacked the .38 holster to its bottom. I replaced the shelf, loaded five rounds into the revolver, set the hammer on the empty chamber, slipped the revolver into the holster, and snapped the leather strap across the base of the hammer.

Then I took a hacksaw from the tool chest, lay the shotgun on the back-porch step, placed my knee hard against the stock, and sawed through the ventilated rib sight and both barrels ten inches above the chambers. I broke open the breech, looked through the barrels at the clean, oily whorls of light, plopped two double-aughts in the chambers, snapped the breech shut, set the safety, and put the shotgun on the top shelf of the closet in the front hallway.

With the .45 in the bedroom, there would now be no place in the house where I would not have almost immediate access to a weapon. It wasn’t a panacea, but it was all I had. I could have spent time regretting that I had bounced Sally Dio’s head off his van in front of his friends, but if he was involved with Harry Mapes or Star Drilling Company, and I believed he was, it would have been only a matter of time before I had trouble with the Dio family, anyway.

I was still tired from yesterday’s drive over the Divide. No, it went deeper than that. I was tired of pursuing a course that seemed to have no resolution, of walking about in what seemed to be a waking nightmare, of feeling that I deserved all this, that somehow I had asked for it, that it was inevitable that I ride in a wood cart like a condemned seventeenth-century criminal, creaking over the cobbled street through the mob toward the elevated platform where a hooded man waited with wheel and iron bar.

I put on my gym shorts, running shoes, and a cutoff sweatshirt, and ran four miles along the river. It was a cloudless day, the sky hard and blue, and the pines high up on the mountains seemed to tremble with light. In the south the Bitterroots were as sharp and etched against the sky as if they had been cut out with a razor blade. The spring runoff of melted snow was starting to abate in the river, and great round boulders that had been covered by the current only two days ago were now exposed and hot-looking in the sun, the skeletal remains of hellgrammites welded to their sides. I ran all the way to the university district, thumped across the river on an abandoned railroad bridge, and looked down below at a fisherman horsing a rainbow out of the current onto the gravel. The riverbank was lined with cottonwoods and willows, and the wind blew out of Hellgate Canyon and flattened the new leaves so that the trees looked like they had changed, in a flick of the eye, to a pale green against the brown rush of water.

When I turned into my block my body was running with sweat, and I could feel the sun’s heat deep in my skin. I did fifty push-ups off the back steps, fifty stomach crunches, one hundred leg lifts, and twenty-five chin-ups on the iron stanchion that supported the clothesline, while my neighbor’s orange cat watched me from the garage roof. Then I sat quietly in the grass, my forearms on my knees, breathing the sweet smell of the clove

r, my heartbeat as regular and strong and temporarily as confident as it had been twenty years before.

The moon was down that night, somewhere beyond the black outline of the Bitterroots, and dry lightning leapt whitely between the clouds over the mountains. I could smell electricity and impending rain through the screen door, and the trees along the street were dark and shaking in the wind. At nine o’clock the phone rang.

“Hello,” I said.

“Can you come up here, Dave?” The line was heavy with static.

“Clete?”

“I need you up here, man. Real bad.”

“What is it?”

“Darlene… Fuck, man. She’s dead.”

CHAPTER

8

The regular baby-sitter wasn’t home. I found Tess Regan’s number in the telephone book, called her, then took Alafair over to her house.

An hour and a half later I drove up the dirt lane to Clete’s small redwood house on Flathead Lake. All the lights were on. It was raining, and the lake was black in the background, and I could see the rain blowing in the light from the windows. Farther up the dirt lane, past the electronic gate, the Dio house was dark. I knocked on Clete’s front door; when no one answered, I went inside.

I heard a toilet flush somewhere in back, then he walked out of the bedroom with a wet towel held to his mouth. His face looked bloodless, the skin as tight as a lampshade. His tie was pulled loose, and his white shirt was wet down the front. He sat down at the table by the sliding glass doors and drank noisily out of a coffee cup, his whole hand wrapped around the cup to keep it from shaking. On the table were a carton of milk and a fifth of Cutty Sark. He drew in deeply on a Camel and held the smoke down as though he were taking a hit off a reefer. His breath jerked in his chest when he let the smoke out. Out on the lake a lighted, anchored sailboat pitched in the troughs.

He rubbed the towel on his mouth again, then on the back of his thick neck.

“I can’t keep anything down. I think I got a peptic ulcer,” he said.

“Where is she?”

“In the main bathroom.” He looked up at me with his poached face and swallowed.

“Get yourself together.”

“I came back from Missoula, she was like that. I can’t take this shit.”

But I wasn’t listening to him. I walked down the hall to the bathroom. When I looked inside I had to clasp one hand on the doorjamb. The safety razor lay on the tile floor, glued thickly to the surface with her blood. She was nude and had slipped down in the tub on her side so that only half her face floated above the soapy red water. There was a deep incision across the inside of both forearms.

Oh Lord God, I thought, and had to take a deep breath and look away.

She had bled until she was almost white. I sat on the edge of the tub and touched her soft, wet hair with my fingertips. It felt like wet feathers.

Written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror were the words:

C,