Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“I’ll check my calendar on that, Mackey. Tell Bee thanks for these free smokes.”

“Anytime,” Mackey said.

IT WAS HOT and bright, and there was a yellow cast in the clouds Friday morning when Jimmy Dale left the prison compound in the stake truck with Troyce Nix.

“See them cows bunching up in the arroyo?” Nix said. “Bet it’ll rain by noon.”

“Got to ask you something, boss. I heard you took away my good time.”

“You shouldn’t have got in Cap’n Rankin’s face.”

“I spent the night on the barrel for something I didn’t do, but I didn’t complain about it. You shouldn’t have taken away my good time.”

“Sounds like you got up with a hard-on this morning.” Nix pulled a cigarette out of a package on the dash and stuck it in his mouth. “What are we gonna do about that?”

“I want my good time back.”

“I bet you do, you little bitch.”

Nix didn’t speak the rest of the way into town. After they picked up fifty bags of crushed white rock for the trim along the walkway and gardens in front of the administration building, Nix drove to a diner and went inside and ate while Jimmy Dale sat in the truck. When Nix came out, he handed Jimmy Dale a paper bag and a cold can of soda and started the truck. “You didn’t think about taking off on me?”

“I just want my good time back,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Come Monday, I think you’ll be going back on the hard road. But that don’t change the relationship we got, you get my drift?”

They drove in silence to Nix’s camp, the land spreading with shadow, the temperature dropping, electricity leaking from the thunderclouds overhead. Jimmy Dale saw a solitary bolt of lightning strike the top of a distant mesa. It seemed to quiver there, as though it had sought out an animal and impaled it to the earth.

“You think we’re doing something illegal here, you working on my property?” Nix said.

“I thought about it.”

“You thought wrong. I’m a founding officer and stockholder in the corporation that owns this prison. That means my living quarters come with the package. Inmate maintenance here is just like inmate maintenance at the compound. If you was thinking about getting an ACLU lawyer—”

“I just want my good time back, boss.”

“You got a bad case of mono-brain,” Nix said.

He parked the truck by the windmill and told Jimmy Dale to get the posthole digger out of the toolshed. Then he went inside to use the bathroom. Just as the first raindrops struck the ground, Jimmy Dale heard the toilet flush. He twisted the posthole digger into the ground, busting through gravel and clay that had baked as hard as ceramic. He spread the wood handles to widen the hole. Then he cleaned the blades of the posthole digger in a bucket of water and started in again. The wind puffed the hackberry tree that shaded Nix’s house. The air was cool and rain-scented, and Jimmy Dale could hear the windmill’s blades ginning behind him. A bolt of lightning exploded on top of the cliff and startled him.

“When people is scared of lightning, it’s usually ’cause they grew up in a strict church,” Nix said. He was standing on the back porch, stripped to the waist, his yellow leather gloves pulled snugly on his hands. He had tucked his trousers inside his half-topped boots, as though he didn’t want to soil his trouser cuffs. He stepped off the porch onto the ground, the wind blowing his hair, his chest taut and dry-looking in the shadowy light, the limbs of the hackberry tree thrashing above his head. “You scared of lightning?”

“Not really. Fact is, I ain’t scared of a whole lot, boss.”

“Lay the posthole digger down.”

Jimmy Dale let it drop to the side, the handles clattering against the hardpan.

“I thought I was gonna go easy on you this time. But there’s something about you that really pisses me off. I just cain’t put my finger on it,” Nix said.

“People cain’t change what they are,” Jimmy Dale replied, unbuttoning his denim shirt with his left hand.

“It makes me want to lose all restraint and flat tear you apart. Can you relate to that?” Nix said.

“All I wanted was my good time back, boss.”

“Take off your britches. Or I can do it for you.”

“I don’t give a shit what you do, boss.”