Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

The line went dead.

THE PREVIOUS NIGHT Jimmy Dale had abandoned the boosted car up by Ravalli, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, and buried the hot plates in a hillside and hitched a ride to a ranch a short distance from the Jocko River. The ranch was owned by a Salish shaman who was married to an aging hippie white woman. The couple sold jewelry on the powwow circuit and belonged to that group of non-ethnically defined gypsies who still wander the West and somehow manage to live inside its past rather than its present. Jimmy Dale slept in their barn that night without ever notifying them he was there, and in the morning they welcomed him into their clapboard house as though it was perfectly natural for someone to knock on their back door at five-thirty A.M.

Their water came from an overflowing cistern elevated on stilts behind the house. Most of their vegetables came from a half-acre garden whose wire fence was strung with aluminum-foil pie plates and tin cans to keep out the deer. The barn was a two-story desiccated shell, the faded red planks glowing magically when the early sun broke through the cracks. The house and the wide gallery were buried amid poplar, willow, and apple trees. The valley where the house was located was a long alluvial slit among greenish-brown mountains on which there were no other structures. The entire valley, as far as the eye could see, was unmarked by human activity, except for the two-lane state road and a train track on which a freight went through every evening at seven o’clock. In the false dawn, just before the stars faded over the hills, just before the breeze stopped blowing in the cottonwoods along the river, Jimmy Dale believed he was standing on a stretch of America that hadn’t changed in seventy-five years.

He showered and shaved in the couple’s bathroom and put on fresh underwear and socks and clean blue jeans and a purple-and-white-checked cowboy shirt with puffed sleeves and red stars brocaded on the shoulders. Then he and the couple ate a breakfast of pork chops and fried eggs and talked about an upcoming rodeo in Reno, one in Calgary, the big dance down in Vegas, and a half-dozen powwows strung across the Southwest.

His hosts were kind and gentle people and spoke with him as though the three of them shared the same future. But in truth, they knew his future was not theirs and perhaps not anyone else’s except Jimmy Dale’s. The shaman was an overweight, jolly man who wore his hair in pigtails and clearly did not like to speak of harsh realities in front of his wife, who still believed the year was 1968 and the flower children had never ceased dancing on the edges of San Francisco Bay.

“You need some money, Jimmy Dale?” the shaman asked.

“No, I been working pretty reg’lar. I just needed a place to sleep and freshen up before I get on my way,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Where might that be?” the shaman asked.

“You know me, just a rolling stone.”

“I ever tell you I spent two years in Deer Lodge when I was a kid?” the shaman said.

“Wasn’t aware of that,” Jimmy Dale said.

“Always swore they’d never get me again.”

“Yeah, them jailhouses ain’t no fun.”

“A man can develop certain attitudes about jail. It’s either the worst thing in life or it’s not. I’d hate to go back, but I’d probably let them do it to me if they wanted. What about you?”

“I don’t study on it.”

“I guess that’s a good way to be.”

“Is there cutthroat and rainbow in that stream out there?” Jimmy Dale asked.

“It’s full of them,” the shaman said. “Come back and we’ll throw a worm in. Make sure you come back, Jimmy Dale.”

“Yessirree,” he replied.

Two hours later, Jimmy Dale had hitched a ride on a flatbed truck boomed down with big bales of green hay, and was riding north up the side of Flathead Lake, past cherry orchards and expanses of shimmering blue water so vast they could easily be mistaken for part of the Pacific Ocean. The Swan Valley was to the east, just over the mountain, and soon he would have to make choices that would place him in immediate jeopardy. The Wellstones’ hirelings would have no qualms about killing him if they were ordered to do so, and if the cops got their hands on him again, he would be on his way back to Texas, where he would get an extra five years for running and probably another twenty for the attempted murder of Troyce Nix, all of it to be served under mounted gunbulls at Huntsville prison.

The shaman had asked Jimmy Dale his thoughts on a man returning to jail. No, that wasn’t correct. He had asked Jimmy Dale his thoughts on an Indian going back to jail. When Jimmy Dale said he had given the question no study, he had answered truthfully. For him, the question had never been up for debate. Before he’d do time again, he’d eat a Gatling gun.

CHAPTER 24

TROYCE TOLD CANDACE they were moving their “situation,” as he called it, up to the Swa

n, where he’d worked out an arrangement with some people who owned time-share units on the shores of the lake. The cottages had been built of stone and gray-painted shingles during the Depression, on thirty-six acres that sloped down through birch trees to a shoreline that offered a magnificent view of Swan Peak. In the hottest days of summer, the thirty-six acres were always cool and breezy inside the shade of the birch trees, and guests played tennis on a court stained by leaves that had stayed wet and gold under winter snow.

It was a grand place to vacation, and that its grandeur had in part been created by impoverished craftsmen hired by people with Midas levels of wealth seemed of little significance today. But Candace could not keep her mind on the loveliness of the setting or its arcane history or Troyce’s endless conversation about pike fishing and the fact that this was a glacial lake and right beneath the water’s surface were the peaks of mountains that could slice the bottom out of an aluminum boat.

“Will you shut up?” she said as they pulled into the shale driveway of the cottage he had rented.

“You shouldn’t ought to talk to me like that,” he said, cutting the engine.

“You shouldn’t ought to lie.”

“Lie about what?”

“Why we’re here, why you’re set on ruining all our plans.”