Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“Give Ridley a saddle, and he’ll be sitting on one of your horses,” the brother said. “That’s how he fixed up his back. Ridley goes from hell to breakfast and doesn’t stop for small talk.”

“I said get me up and

leave Mr. Robicheaux to his work.”

“How do you know my name?” I said.

Ridley Wellstone lifted his eyes to mine. “I know everything about you. You’ve killed over a half-dozen men.”

I felt my ears pop in the wind, or perhaps I heard a sound like a flag snapping on a metal pole. “Repeat that, please?”

He was breathing through his mouth; there were tiny flecks of spittle on his lips. “You’ve got blood splatter all over you,” he said. “Maybe you did it with a badge, but you’re a violent and dangerous man all the same. I don’t judge you for it. I just don’t want you dragging your grief into our lives.”

“What?” I said.

“I’ve known your kind all my life. Every one of you is a professional victim. If you had your way, we’d be studying Karl Marx instead of Thomas Jefferson. This whole country would be run by faggots and welfare recipients. A man of your experience and education knows this, but he’s at war with his own instincts. It’s nothing against you personal. I just want shut of you.”

I decided a little of the Wellstone family could go a long way.

CHAPTER 4

ONE MONTH EARLIER, on a piece of baked hardpan out in West Texas, within sight of the shimmering outline of the Van Horn Mountains, a convict by the name of Jimmy Dale Greenwood was finishing his second year on a three-to-five bit, all of it served in a contract prison, courtesy of a judge who didn’t like half-breeds in general and smart-ass hillbilly singers like Jimmy Dale in particular.

The contract prison was a squat blockhouse nightmare that, except for the parallel rows of electric fences topped with coils of razor wire surrounding the buildings, resembled a sewage plant more than a penal facility. Most of the work done by the inmates was meant to be punitive and not rehabilitative in nature. In fact, both inmates and prison personnel referred to the work as “the hard road.” The hard road came complete with mounted gunbulls, leather-cuff ankle restraints, and orange jumpsuits that rubbed the skin like sandpaper in winter and became portable ovens in summer.

The majority of the personnel were not deliberately cruel. But drought and wildfires and the loss of family farms weren’t of their making, and shepherding prison inmates on a tar-patch crew beat delivering Domino’s pizzas or clerking at the adult-video store on the interstate. The line “It’s your misfortune and none of my own,” from the classic trail drover’s lament, seemed an accurate summation of the Texas contract gunbull’s attitude toward his charges.

Most of the inmates in the contract prison were recidivists and didn’t question their fate or the power structure under which they lived. That meant they didn’t grab-ass, eyeball, complain about the food, dog it on the job, wise off to Hispanic guys with Gothic-letter tats, or sass the hacks. If you committed the crime, you stacked the time. Then one day you popped out on the other end of your jolt and got a lot of gone between you and West Texas. It was that simple. Or should have been.

Jimmy Dale went down ostensibly for grand theft, the arrest being made after he crashed the stolen vehicle he was driving at ninety an hour through a police barricade. In reality, the judge dropped the jailhouse on Jimmy Dale’s head because of an unprosecutable knife beef that had taken place outside a saloon off Interstate 10. Jimmy Dale never denied he drove the shank hilt-deep into the victim’s chest. Nor did he deny boosting the car. What was he supposed to do? he explained to the highway patrol. Hang around and hope the victim’s friends in the Sheriff’s Department didn’t use him for a piñata? The problem for the DA was the fact that the victim pulled the shank, not Jimmy Dale. Another problem was that the victim was a pimp who believed he had the right to beat up his whores in the parking lot. Also, his claim that Jimmy Dale had butted into his business would probably not flush with a jury made up of First Assembly and Church of Christ members. Last, the stabbing victim was the judge’s nephew, and the judge had indicated to the DA that he didn’t see any need for feeding the liberal media’s appetite for scandal.

After two years on the hard road, with a shot at early parole because of overcrowding in the system, Jimmy Dale had the bad luck to fall under the supervision of one Troyce Nix, a six-feet-five-inch gunbull who once confessed to his peers, “Nothing gives me more pleasure than watching a full-grown man piss his pants.”

Nix had another inclination, one that for years he had satisfied with rental videos or on the Internet or across the border in Mexico. His inclination had cost him two marriages and his career as an MP in the United States Army. He saw nothing unusual about his behavior, much less perverse. In a coupling of any kind, he was always the male, never the female; hence, he was not a homosexual. Anyone who doubted that fact, particularly his sexual partner, was given a lesson about the true nature of physical dominance.

You set your parameters, you drew your lines. When people crossed your lines, you slapped them into shape. What was wrong with that? Troyce had worked at the Abu Ghraib prison, thirty-two klicks west of Baghdad. When one of his current colleagues asked him what it was like, Troyce replied, “At least none of the graduates come back for seconds.”

“No, after y’all got finished with them, they was probably busy blowing the shit out of American soldiers with IEDs,” one of the other hacks said.

The hack who made the remark was fired three weeks later.

Troyce’s body was covered with reddish-blond hair that seemed to glow like a nimbus in the sunlight. On the hard road, he wore a white straw hat coned up on the sides, shades, and needle-nosed cowboy boots that a trusty spit-shined every night. His olive-green trousers and shirt, with red piping on the pockets, were always starched and pressed, his black gunbelt polished. With his military posture, his shirt tucked tightly into his belt, he was a fine-looking man, his face serene, his voice neutral in tone. In some instances, he was almost fatherly toward the inmates under his supervision.

Jimmy Dale Greenwood was a different matter. Other than his conviction for grand auto, Jimmy Dale came into the prison population without a sheet. More simply stated, he wasn’t a criminal by nature and didn’t belong there. Also, it was impossible to read his expression or to know what he was thinking. He had a way of making enigmatic remarks that seemed to float on the edges of provocation and insult.

“I hear you left pecker tracks in a lot of white women’s beds,” one of the gunbulls said to him.

“I reckon it beats writing your name on the washroom wall, boss,” Jimmy Dale replied.

The gunbull was going to put Jimmy Dale on the barrel that night. But Troyce Nix intervened and, at the close of the workday, told Jimmy Dale to climb up in the truck cab and ride back to the prison compound with him.

“I stink pretty bad, Cap’n,” Jimmy Dale said.

Troyce grinned at him from behind his shades, the gearstick knob throbbing in his palm. “You’ll stink a whole lot worse if you spend the night standing on the barrel and dribbling in your pants,” he said.

Troyce was silent as they drove toward the compound, the dust from the alkali flats drifting through the windows. Up ahead, another truck towed the trailer that contained the gunbulls’ horses. Jimmy Dale could see the horses’ rumps swaying back and forth with the motion of the trailer, desiccated pieces of manure blowing into the wind. Troyce pulled a cigarette from his pack with his mouth and lit it with the lighter from the dashboard. The smoke leaked from his mouth like damp cotton.

“If you was wanting to buy a used horse trailer, what would you look for first?” Troyce asked.