Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“If I don’t deal with Jimmy Dale now, I’ll have to deal with him when we get our café. It ain’t me what’s writing up the itinerary. He’s gonna come for Ms. Wellstone, and I’m gonna be waiting for him. Maybe they done took off already, but at least I can say I give it my best.”

“I believe what she said. Jimmy Dale doesn’t want to hurt you, Troyce. If he did, he would have pulled the trigger in the park. He stopped Quince Whitley from throwing acid on me. But that doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?”

“Of course it does.”

“But not enough. You know why? Because you won’t face up to what’s driving you. You did something awful to Jimmy Dale to make him cut you up the way he did.”

“How about what he done? Like open my face when I was unarmed and bust off a shank in my chest?”

“What did you do to him?”

Troyce’s hands rested on the bottom of the steering wheel. All she could see was the side of his face, but in his right eye was an intensity that she could compare only with a bee trapped inside a glass. “I had certain kinds of sexual problems for a long time, least till I met you. When I try to sort them out in my head, I always think back on Cujo and the towel we wrapped around his face and the water we poured from a bucket into his nose and mouth. There was gasoline in the water, and when I think of Cujo and the towel and the water breaking across his face, I can smell gasoline, just like I could smell it on them men that raped me when I was little.

“Out in the desert, after we killed him and everybody was drinking beer and smoking dope, I could hear these vultures up in the sky. Their sounds was just like the gurgling sounds Cujo made before he died. Other people might hear mockingbirds in the morning, but I hear them vultures.”

She stared out the passenger window at the lake. An elderly man was showing a little boy, probably his grandson, how to spin-cast off the end of the dock. The water looked blue and deep and cold, and in his concentration, the little boy seemed about to fall in, until the elderly man steadied him and pulled him back by the hand.

“You hurt Jimmy Dale Greenwood because of your own guilt, Troyce. Till you own up on that, it’s gonna keep eating on you, just like a tumor growing inside your chest. It’ll squeeze everything good out of you till one day none of the good man I know will be left.”

She went inside the cottage with her suitcase and began unpacking in the bedroom, throwing her things onto shelves, not bothering to pick them up when they fell on the floor.

“Maybe I got another reason for being up here,” Troyce said from the doorway. “Maybe you don’t know the whole story about everything.”

“I’m not the one hurting all our plans just so he can get even for something he caused to happen.”

“When we went up to talk to the Wellstones? When I left my shades inside and had to go back inside for them?” he said.

“What about it?”

“The door was still partly open, so I went in the living room and got my shades without knocking. Leslie Wellstone was telling the Spanish woman to wipe down everything you touched in the bathroom and to put all the tissues and cleaning towels in a bag along with the cleaning gloves and burn them in the incinerator. He’s a cripple man, or I would have twisted that ugly head of his off the stem and stuck it on a pike.”

Candace thought she would not be vulnerable to Troyce’s recreation of Leslie Wellstone’s insult, but the images Troyce’s words conjured up in her imagination caused the blood to drain from her cheeks and her eyes to water. She jerked open a dresser drawer, dumped the rest of her clothes on the bedspread, and began sorting out her underthings, unsure exactly what she was doing.

“Who cares what Leslie Wellstone said?” she said impotently. “Besides, what does that have to do with Jimmy Dale Greenwood?”

“Maybe that fellow Quince Whitley wasn’t after you with a bottle of acid just ’cause I give him a beating in a convenience-store restroom. Maybe he had permission from Leslie Wellstone to do that. Or Leslie Wellstone’s wife, the one who’s telling you to leave Jimmy Dale alone. A guy like Whitley don’t use the toilet less’n somebody gives him permission.”

“I think that’s crap,” she replied.

“Maybe it is. But that Wellstone woman ain’t no good. She dumped Jimmy Dale when he went to jail, and now she’s using him to escape that freak she married. Bet you as soon as they’re in Canada, she’ll get shut of Jimmy Dale again and find another hard-up rich guy who cain’t keep his big-boy in his britches.”

Candace shoved the rest of her garments in a dresser drawer and now had no other place to put her hands except the back pockets of her jeans.

“Are you trying to say something?” Troyce asked.

“Yeah, I guess I am. I just didn’t think I could.”

“What are you trying to tell me, little darlin’?”

“That if you hurt that guy, that Indian, Jimmy Dale Greenwood, I swear to God I won’t be around anymore,” she replied.

CLETE PURCEL DROVE his Caddy down to our cabin and got out and looked at its maroon finish reflectively. He removed a soft cloth from the glove box and wiped dust off one fender, wetting a finger and touching a spot on the chrome molding around the headlight. But his attention did not seem concentrated on his vehicle.

I stepped out on the porch. The sun was shining through the trees on the mountaintop, and Clete had to squint to look at me.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“Alicia told me the feds and the Sheriff’s Department found a box of Halloween masks in Sonny Click’s basement,” he replied. “They all look just like the one they found in Quince Whitley’s truck. They also found a photo in a scrapbook at Click’s place. It shows a bunch of college-age kids wearing the masks at a party two years ago. Alicia said the DNA inside the mask from Whitley’s truck isn’t from Whitley.”