Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“Semper Fi,” Clete said, finishing the whiskey in his shot glass, sweat glistening on the tips of his hair.

He went into the restroom and came back out, looking directly at the bikers and the woman in the Harley T-shirt. They appeared to have lost interest in him. When he returned to the bar, a college boy and his girlfriend were standing on either side of his stool, trying to catch the bartender’s attention. “Sorry, we didn’t know you were sitting here,” the boy said.

“Forget it. You guys have one on me. I think I fried my mush,” Clete said, and put a five-dollar bill on the bar.

He walked outside, slightly off balance, the wind suddenly cool and fresh in his face, the stars arching across a black sky. He didn’t bother to see if Gribble was still in the camper’s shell; he didn’t care if Gribble was there or not. He opened the driver’s door to Albert’s truck, pulling the keys out of his pocket, and bent over to get in. That was when he saw a shadow break across the corner of his vision.

The blow was as hard as a blow can be before a person loses consciousness. The weapon itself seemed to come out of the sky, whistling as it whipped across the back of Clete’s skull. Inside a secluded place where Clete often lived, he knew he had been hit with a blackjack, one that had been manufactured in the classic design of a lead weight sewn inside an elongated sheath, mounted on a spring, balanced perfectly on a leather-woven grip that allowed the assailant to deliver a crushing, even fatal, blow with little effort.

Clete crashed across the seat and fell into a heap on the opposite side of the cab. With his blood running from his scalp into his collar, he felt himself being driven to a place and a final act that he had avoided for years — in Irish Channel street rumbles and on night trails strung with toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds and in firefights with the death squads in El Salvador and up against the Mob in Reno and during Katrina when the levees collapsed and he had watched his first and only love, the Great Whore of Babylon, drown under the waves.

CHAPTER 13

FOR AN INDETERMINATE period Clete lay in the bottom of a dark well that was filled with memories and sensations that he thought he’d forgotten long ago. He saw himself stripping away a brick wall in an old house on Tchoupitoulas, where a corpse dancing with maggots had been entombed. He saw himself prying open the trunk of a car inside which a mobster had been locked before it was driven into Lake Pontchartrain. He felt his weight bounce tight inside a parachute harness when he was in Force Recon, the breath whooshing from his chest, his steel pot razoring down on his nose.

He wanted to get out of the dark well, away from memories that somehow were associated with confinement and suffocation and bondage. Where was he? Why wouldn’t light enter his eyes when he opened them? All he could remember was the blow against the back of his head and tumbling into a great blackness that seemed to have no bottom.

When Clete actually awoke, to the degree that he knew he was still alive, he realized his eyes were wrapped with tape, his wrists locked behind a tree trunk with ligatures. He could smell pine needles on the forest floor and hear the wind blowing through the canopy. Above him, perhaps up a slope, he heard a heavy machine clanking and grinding over rocks and rough ground, then a sound like a steel bucket thudding into the earth, scraping up dirt and small boulders, unloading it all in a rasping downpour from a steel bucket.

The ground was hard under Clete’s buttocks, the bark of the tree cutting into his back. He pulled against the ligatures, then tried to get to his feet, but the circumference of the trunk was such that he couldn’t negotiate enough space to push himself into an upright position. His immobility was like that of a man prematurely sealed inside a coffin.

He scraped the tape back and forth against the tree bark, hoping to pull it loose from his eyes. But his abductor had wrapped it several times around Clete’s head, winding it tightly into the scalp and hair and the bloody wound where Clete had been hit with the blackjack. Then it had been wound around the eye sockets and eyebrows, molding the layers so that they probably could not be removed except with scissors or a knife. Clete pushed his heels into the dirt and tried to bend the tree backward against its root system, but to no avail. Up above, the earth-grader or bulldozer or whatever it was continued to grind and clank and dump large loads of dirt in a pile, the stench of burnt diesel drifting off its smokestack.

Why was somebody excavating on the hillside? What was he digging?

A grave, Clete thought. Or a place to bury someone alive. He could feel sweat breaking on his forehead. “Who the hell are you?” he said.

But his words were lost in the engine’s roar and the scrape of steel against dirt and rock. He tried to think. Was it the bikers from the club? Were they twisted on meth? Would they take a barroom beef this far?

It was possible. They nailed women’s hands to trees. If he could work one wrist loose. If he only had a weapon. His twenty-five auto, his switchblade, even a can of Mace. Why had he messed with those guys?

But he knew the answer. Clete had spent a lifetime wading across the wrong Rubicon, provoking the skells and meltdowns, defying authority, ridiculing convention and normalcy. Women loved him for his vulnerability, and each one of them thought she was the cure for the great hole inside him that he tried to fill with food and booze and the adrenaline high that he got from dismantling his own life. But one by one they had all abandoned him, just as his father had, and Clete had immediately gone back on the dirty boogie, once more postponing the day he would round a corner and enter a street where all the windows were painted over and there was no sign of a living person.

The operator of the heavy machine cut the engine. In the silence, Clete heard someone drop to the ground and walk toward him. The footsteps stopped, and Clete realized his abductor was standing above him, perhaps savoring the moment, perhaps positioning himself to inflict injury that Clete could not anticipate or protect himself from.

“Whatever you’re going to do, just do it,” Clete said. “But you’d better punch my whole ticket, because I’m going to hunt you down and—”

Before Clete could complete his sentence, the abductor crouched next to him and made a shushing noise, as though speaking to a troubled child. Clete turned toward the abductor, his scalp drawing tight, waiting for the blow or the instrument of torment to violate his body. He jerked at the ligatures on his wrists. “You motherfucker,” he said.

He heard the abductor click open the top of a cigarette lighter and rotate the emery wheel with his thumb. The abductor lit a cigarette and drew in on it, the paper crisping audibly as the ash grew hotter. Clete felt the exhaled smoke separate across his nose and mouth.

“Fuck you,” Clete said, his big heart thumping in his chest.

The abductor made no response and continued to blow his cigarette smoke on Clete’s cheek and neck.

“Dave Robicheaux leaves hair on the walls, bub. Ole Streak is a mean motor scooter. You don’t put the glide on the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said, the words starting to break nonsensically from his mouth. “Streak dumped a guy’s whole brainpan in a toilet once. That’s no jive, Jack. Think of me when you eat a forty-five hollow-point.”

The abductor got to his feet, dropped his cigarette into the pine needles, and ground it under the sole of his shoe.

“Who are you? Tell me who you are and why you’re doing this,” Clete said.

Instead of a reply, Clete heard liquid sloshing inside a container and the pop of a plug being pulled from an airtight spout on the container. A second later, gasoline rained down on his head, soaking his hair, burning the wound inside the tape around his eyes, drenching his shirt and skin, pooling in his lap. The abductor even pulled off Clete’s shoes and soaked his feet and socks and drew the line of delivery up and down his legs.

“You sonofabitch, you cowardly piece of shit,” Clete said, his voice cracking for the first time.

The abductor began to pile twigs and decayed tree branches and pinecones and handfuls of pine needles on Clete’s head and torso and legs, whistling a tune, journeying back into the underbrush to gather more fuel for his enterprise. Clete struggled again against the ligatures, then tried to stretch his body forward so he could work one foot under a haunch and raise himself erect. All his efforts were futile, and he felt a sense of remorse and irrevocable loss he had not experienced since his fifteenth birthday, when he had torn the hands off a windup clock his father had given him.

He couldn’t stop the tap