Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“What’s gapo?” Troyce said.

“Gorilla armpit odor,” she replied.

“Good night, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

“Good night,” I replied.

But they didn’t get far. Just outside the apron of light that fringed the tent, I saw Jamie Sue Wellstone’s driver buttonhole them. I walked up behind the three of them. Quince, the driver, was planted like a stump, his arms pumped, his hands opening and closing at his sides. “Don’t lie to me, boy,” he said. “I saw you pestering people as soon as you come in.”

“Boy?” Troyce said, smiling easily.

“You answer my question.”

“I didn’t hear you ask one.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“No sir, I wouldn’t do that.”

“Then state your goddamn business.”

“I work for a faith-based foundation in El Paso. I was trying to find a man who’s inherited a lot of money. But I ain’t had no luck in that.”

“The man on that photo you were showing around?”

“Could be.”

“Let’s see it.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“It is if you want your evening to go on in a reg’lar way.”

Troyce looked into the darkness, his forehead undisturbed by wrinkles or thought. He removed the toothpick from his mouth and looked at Candace rather than Quince. “I guess it cain’t hurt,” he said. He unbuttoned his shirt pocket and slipped the photo from it. The image on it had been cropped with scissors, snipped clean of the jailhouse location and numbers under it. “Seen that fellow around?”

Quince studied the photograph for a long time. Even in the shadows, I could see his scalp flex. “No,” he said.

Troyce smiled again, his eyes tolerant, faintly amused. “Sure about that?”

“I said it, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. You’ve been a good little fellow. If I get the chance to talk to your mistress up yonder on the stage, I’ll tell her that myself.”

Candace Sweeney and Troyce walked into the mist and ground fog, the vast silhouettes of the Mission Mountains stretched across the sky behind them.

Quince turned around, noticing me for the first time. “What are you looking at?” he asked.

“Not a whole lot,” I replied.

I walked to the end of the tent area and up the dirt road that ran by the Indian powwow grounds. A moment later, an SUV with Candace Sweeney behind the wheel and her friend Troyce in the passenger seat went past me, the taillights braking where the dirt road intersected with the state highway. I wrote down the plate number, then drove home in an electric storm that lit the Bitterroot River and the cottonwoods like pistol flares floating down from a forgotten war.

CHAPTER 10

CANDACE SWEENEY HAD never understood abstract concepts connected with death, geographical permanence, or what people called “planning for the future.” She associated those particular concerns with people who either lived in a different world from the one she knew about or who deluded themselves about the nature of reality. The kind of people who spent their time at garage sales, window-shopping at the mall, or watching the Business Channel. Like they were going to take any of that crap with them.

The future didn’t exist, right? So what was the point of trying to control what hasn’t happened? The same applied with relationships. People came and went in your life, just like people entered turnstiles and exited them on the other side. In and out, right? Why place your trust in anyone who was just passing through?

She didn’t remember her mother. Her father was nicknamed Smilin’ Jack. He claimed the mother had died of ovarian cancer up in British Columbia, where he had worked as a gypo logger and sometimes on commercial fishing boats. But others said Candace’s mother was a morphine addict and a prostitute who ran a brothel in Valdez. When Candace was thirteen, Smilin’ Jack left her with a cousin in Seattle and went into the Cascades to pan gold. He was never seen again. He didn’t abandon her. He wasn’t profligate or mean or selfish. He had simply walked off in the rain, just like he was entering a turnstile, and had been absorbed by the great green-gray mass of mountains east of Seattle.