Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

I rounded a bend in the road and slowed to a walk in the shade of cottonwoods, my skin cool and glazed with sweat, my heart steady, my breath coming easy in my lungs. The wind was ruffling through the canopy, the sky an immaculate translucent blue, as bright and flawless as silk. I didn’t want to think any more about serial killers, about violent men and cupidity and the manipulation for political ends of uneducated and poor people whose religion was expropriated and used to hurt them. I only wanted to disconnect from the world as it is, or at least as I have come to know it.

Just when I had convinced myself that it was possible to live inside the moment, that neither the past nor the future should be allowed to lay claim to it, I saw an SUV headed toward me, a tall man in a pearl-gray western hat in the passenger seat, a woman driving.

The woman lifted a hand in recognition as they passed, then continued up the road and turned in to Albert’s driveway. The man wore a grin at the corner of his mouth, a bit like John Wayne.

ALBERT HOLLISTER KEPT his office on the main floor of his home, with a view that looked out on his barn and northern pasture and an arroyo behind the house. His bookshelves extended from the floor to the ceiling. The shelves by his writing desk were littered with Indian arrowheads and pottery shards, fifty-eight-caliber minié balls, a milk-glass doorknob from the bathroom of Boss Tweed, switchblade and trench knives, a tomahawk, nineteenth-century telegraph transformers, an IWW button, goatskin wine bags from Pamplona, and a deactivated World War II hand grenade. The office also contained a glass case for his published books and short stories and another case for his guns, which included an M16, a twelve-gauge pump, an ’03 Springfield, a ’94 lever-action Winchester, and a half-dozen sidearms.

When the couple parked the SUV by the side door, Albert was writing a short story in longhand, his thoughts deep inside the Texas City disaster of 1947. In his mind, he saw a mushroom cloud of smoke and flame rise from the Monsanto chemical plant, generating heat so great that the water in the harbor boiled. He saw liquid flame rain down in umbrella fashion on an oil field, setting off wellheads and natural-gas storage tanks like strings of firecrackers. Then the man and woman from the SUV knocked on the French doors, peering at him through the glass, the man shading the glare with one hand so he could see more clearly into Albert’s office. When Albert didn’t rise from his writing desk, the man tapped a knuckle on the glass.

“What do you want?” Albert said, getting up and opening the door.

“My name is Troyce Nix,” the man said. “We’re looking for a man by the name of Jimmy Dale Greenwood.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Albert said.

“Can we come in a minute?” the man asked.

“What for?”

“I just told you,” Nix said.

“It’s obvious I’m busy.”

“It’s important, Mr. Hollister.”

Albert hesitated, glancing at the woman, looking back at the man, the western clothes, the grainy skin, the long sideburns, the mirrored sunglasses protruding from his shirt pocket. The man’s physical stature and his posture and manner conjured up memories in Albert that were like someone scratching a match across his stomach lining. Deal with it now, not later. Don’t let a guy like this get behind you, he heard a voice say inside his head.

“Go around front,” he said, and closed the door. A moment later, he let Nix and the woman into the living room, both of them a bit awed by the elevated view of the Bitterroot Mountains, massive and blue-green and strung with clouds.

“You got you a nice place,” Nix said.

“Who sent you out here?” Albert said.

“I’m looking for this man here,” Nix replied, handing a photograph to Albert, ignoring the question.

“What makes you think I know him?” Albert said, not looking at the photo.

“Folks here’bouts say you help out guys on the drift or people that’s down and out.”

“The bottom of this photograph has been cut off,” Albert said.

“Have you seen Greenwood? He’s a breed. Wiry guy with a soft voice.”

“Why is the bottom of this picture cut off?”

“It had more information on it than people need to see. I just want to know where the man is at and talk with him.”

“I don’t know him,” Albert said, returning the mug shot to Troyce Nix.

“You didn’t look at it.”

“I don’t have to. I don’t know anybody named Jimmy Dale Greenwood.”

“You want to know what he did?”

“It’s not my business.”

“I guess we disturbed you in your work. Sorry about that,” Nix said.