Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“He doesn’t need one. He’s psychotic.”

“I don’t buy that.”

“She was on to something. It’s got to do with oil, with Dixie Lee, maybe with dope. I don’t know. She believed in spirits. She thought they told her things. Then yesterday she saw Sal chopping up lines for Dixie Lee and a couple of the Tahoe broads, and she told him he was a fucking cancer, that one day his kind were going to be driven into holes in the earth. Can you dig that? Holes in the earth.”

“Where are the Dios now?”

“They said they were going to a play up in Bigfork.”

“Have you heard Sally Dio say anything about a guy named Charlie?”

“Charlie? No. Who is he?”

“A hit man out of Vegas.”

“Wait a minute, they picked up a guy at the airport in Missoula last night. I thought he was just another one of Sal’s buttwipes. I offered to drive in and get him, but Sal said I needed a night off.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see him.”

The clouds over the lake were silver where the moon had broken through, and the water below was black and glazed with light.

“I’m going to call the cops now, then I’m taking off,” I said. “I don’t want my name in it, all right?”

“Whatever you say.” Then he said, “You’re pretty cool. A cool operator. You always were. Nobody shakes ole Streak’s cookie bag. They could strike matches on your soul and not make you flinch.”

I didn’t answer him. I walked out into the misting rain and the broken moonlight and drove my pickup truck back down the lakefront road toward Polson. The cherry trees in the orchards were dripping with rainwater in my headlights. The wooded hills were dark, and down on the beach I could see a white line of foam sliding up on the sand. With the windows up I was sweating inside the cab. I passed a neon-lit bar, a boat dock strung with light bulbs, a wind-sheltered cove where the pines grew right down to the water’s edge, a clapboard cottage where people were having a party and somebody was still barbecuing in the darkness of the porch. Then I turned east of Polson, at the foot of the lake, and headed for the Jocko Valley, and I knew that I would be all right. But suddenly the clouds closed over the moon again, the sky became as black as scorched metal, and a hard wind blew out of the ice-capped Missions. A curtain of driving rain swept across meadow, irrigation canal, slough, poplar windbreak, and willow-lined stream. Lightning leapt from the crest of the Missions to the black vault of sky overhead, thunder rolled out of the canyons, and hailstones the size of dimes clattered on my truck like tack hammers.

I pulled to the side of the road, sweat boiling off my face, my windows thick with steam. The truck shook violently in the wind. My knuckles were round and white on the steering wheel. I felt my teeth grinding, felt the truck’s metal joints creak and strain, the tailgate tremble and reverberate against the hooked chain; then a shudder went through me that made my mouth drop open, as though someone had clapped me on both ears

with the flats of his hands. When I closed my eyes I thought I saw a copper-colored stream beaten with raindrops, and in it a brown trout with a torn mouth and blood roaring in clouds from its gills.

The next morning I walked down to the old brick church next to Alafair’s school. The sun was brilliant in the bowl of blue sky above the valley. High up on one of the mountains above Hellgate Canyon, I could see horses grazing in the new grass and lupine below the timber, and the trees along the river were dark green from the rain. The current looked deep and cold between the sunbaked boulders that protruded from the water’s surface. Someone had planted a garden by the side door of the church, and yellow roses and spearmint bloomed against the red-brick wall. I went inside, crossed myself at the holy water fount, and knelt in a pew close to the altar. Like almost all Catholic churches, this one smelled like stone and water, incense, and burning wax. I think that fact is no accident inside a Catholic church. I think perhaps the catacombs, where the early Christians celebrated mass, smelled the same way.

I prayed for Darlene, for Alafair, my father and brother, and finally for myself. A muscular, blond-headed priest in black trousers, scuffed cowboy boots, and a T-shirt came out of the sacristy and began removing the flower vases from the altar. I walked to the communion rail, introduced myself, and asked if he would hear my confession.

“Let’s go out into the garden,” he said.

Between the church and the rectory was a sunny enclosure of lawn and flower beds, stone benches, bird feeders, and a small greenhouse. The priest and I sat next to one another on a bench, and I told him about my relationship with Darlene and finally about her death. While I talked he flipped small pieces of dirt at the leaves of a potted caladium. When I finished he was silent a moment; then he said, “I’m not quite sure what you’re confessing to. Do you feel that you used this woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think you contributed to her death?”

“I don’t think so. But I’m not sure.”

“I think that something else is troubling you, something that we’re not quite talking about.”

I told him about Annie, the shotgun blasts that leapt in the darkness of our bedroom, the sheet drenched with her blood, the coldness of her fingers when I put them in my mouth. I could hear him breathing next to me. When I looked up at him I saw him swallow.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It won’t go away, Father. I don’t believe it ever will.”

He picked up another piece of hard dirt off the grass and started to flip it at the plant, then dropped it from his hand.

“I feel inadequate in trying to advise you,” he said. “But I think you’re a good man and you’re doing yourself an unnecessary injury. You were lonely when you met the Indian lady. You obviously cared for her. Sometimes maybe it’s a vanity to judge ourselves. Did you ever think of it that way? You make your statement in front of God, then you let Him be the measure of right and wrong in your life. And I don’t believe you caused your wife’s death. Sometimes when that kind of evil comes into our lives, we can’t explain it, so we blame it on God or ourselves. In both cases we’re wrong. Maybe it’s time you let yourself out of prison.”