Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

Nix shut the passenger door and started around the front of the vehicle. Then he touched his shirt pocket. The girl rolled down the window and stuck her head out. “What is it?” she said.

“Guess,” he said.

“I saw them on the table,” she said.

“I’ll be right back,” Nix said.

Quince couldn’t believe his luck. Nix was headed back inside the nightclub, and the girl with the muskmelon boobs had gotten out of the SUV and propped her ass against the headlight while she watched a Forest Service slurry bomber approach the airport.

The girl first, then Nix later, Quince thought. So Nix would have the opportunity to see what happened when you tried to dump on a Whitley.

THE MAN WHO called himself J. D. Gribble took a final hit off the roach clips being passed around the circle, hefted up his Dobro case, and said good night to his newly acquired friends.

“Come see me in the Palisades,” the actor said. “I really dig your voice. You sound like Ben Johnson. I could cast you in a minute.”

“Who’s Ben Johnson?” J.D. asked.

J.D.’s new friends grinned, pretty sure he was kidding. J.D. walked along the side of the nightclub into the main parking lot. He never did well with booze or weed, and he could not explain why he used either one. But use them he did. This evening he’d drunk four beers and smoked dope on top of them, and now the high he had experienced had been replaced by feelings of both corpulence and carnality, as though his metabolism had been systemically invaded by weevil worms. He paused and took a breath under a cone of light emanating from a pole above his head. The air was heavy and damp and stained with smoke from fires that were breaking out north of Seeley Lake. Then he proceeded toward Albert Hollister’s pickup truck, which he had borrowed for the evening. But something was happening on the periphery of his vision, something that was out of place or wrong or nonsensical, like a broken shard of memory that had tangled itself on the corner of his eye.

A man in a cowboy hat and western vest like a gunfighter would wear was walking toward an SUV. J.D. thought he had seen the same man outside the café on Swan Lake, sitting behind the wheel of Jamie Sue Wellstone’s Mercedes, waiting patiently for her to leave the saloon next door. Even in that innocuous setting, J.D. had made Jamie Sue’s driver as a violent man for hire. But why would he be here? Had Leslie Wellstone finally run J.D. to ground and sicced his dogs on him?

A girl was leaning against the front end of the SUV, watching a large plane descend through the valley toward the airport. Her back was turned to the man in the vest.

J.D. stepped out of the cone of light and let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The man in the vest held a brown pill bottle in his right hand and was unscrewing the cap as he walked. His trousers were tight on his hips, the bottoms tucked into his cowboy boots. A fat wallet on a chain protruded from his back pocket. The silk back of his vest glowed like dull tin when a pair of car lights flashed across it. He moved mechanically, his torso rigid, his stiff hat jiggling on his head. J.D. saw him hold the uncapped bottle away from his body, his fingers pinched hard against the glass, careful not to spill the contents on his skin. The girl heard the sound of feet on the gravel and turned around. She was smiling, as though she expected to see a friend.

MY CELL RANG at 9:21 P.M. “What’s your ten-twenty? There’s some weird shit going down,” Clete said.

“There’s been an accident on Brooks. What weird shit?” I said.

“Gribble and Whitley are both in the parking lot. So is Nix’s girl. Dave—”

The connection went dead.

QUINCE WHITLEY COULD smell the fumes rising from the bottle in his hand. He had wanted to bring a paper cup of water with him and throw it in the girl’s face before he hit her with the acid. His uncle the Klansman had told him sulfuric acid and water produced a devastating combination on human tissue, but there hadn’t been time to plan. Well, that’s just the way it was. No worry, though. Pitching the acid directly into her eyes would do the job, and it was doubtful that the girl would ever be identifying her attacker in a lineup.

She had been smiling when he approached her, but now she was staring at him curiously, not recognizing him, the smile starting to die on her mouth. It took all of Quince’s self-restraint not to tell her who he was before he stole her sight and destroyed her face.

“Hey, you! What the hell you doin’?” a voice called out.

Quince’s head jerked sideways, and he almost spilled the acid on himself. The musician he had seen on the bandstand was running at him, his guitar case swinging out in front of him, like a man trying to catch a train.

Do it now, Quince thought. Then drop the breed and bag ass. Do it, do it, do it.

He flung the acid at the girl’s face. But the breed lifted his guitar case in front of her, and the acid flattened against its top and foamed on the plastic and cardboard and filled the air with a stench like rotten eggs. Some of the splatter also landed on Quince’s hand and wrist and cheek, and the pain was like someone touching his skin with a soldering iron.

But his ordeal was not over. The

breed smashed him in the face with the end of the guitar case, knocking him backward onto the gravel. Quince tried to make sense out of what was happening to him. Only seconds earlier, he had been the “new” Quince Whitley, in control, dressed like a gunfighter, painted with magic, the giver of death. Now he lay in a parking lot, his skin burning, far from the place of his birth, a girl — no, a bitch — and a half-breed staring down at him, their faces dour with disgust and loathing, not because of what he had tried to do but because of what he was — a failure, unwanted in the womb, despised at birth, raised in a world where every day he had to prove he was better than a black person.

What does a Whitley do when he doesn’t have anything else to lose?

He could almost hear his uncle’s voice: “That one’s easy, boy. Leave hair on the walls.”

Quince got to his feet, pulling the twenty-five auto from the Velcro-strapped holster on his ankle. “Suck on this, all y’all, starting with you, sweetheart,” he said. He felt his finger tighten inside the trigger guard. He aimed carefully so the first round would take the girl in the mouth.

That was when Clete Purcel came out of nowhere and lifted his thirty-eight revolver with both hands and blew Quince Whitley’s skullcap and brains all over Troyce Nix’s windshield.

CHAPTER 19