Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“I went back inside. Nobody was interested. It’s Saturday on the res,” he replied.

“You didn’t see a suspicious vehicle in the parking lot?” I asked.

“I told you, I didn’t see anything. I wouldn’t have left her out here if I’d seen something. What are you trying to say to me?”

“I was just asking you a question, partner. Why would somebody take your girlfriend?”

I could see a thought working in his eyes. “The bartender inside said a couple of Indian guys left. Then he said the bus stopped outside.”

“Who were the Indian guys?”

“Just guys, feed growers. They drink here reg’lar. It’s not them.”

“Somebody got off the bus?”

“I asked the bartender that. He didn’t see nobody. He said it stops there sometimes to pick up people. They stand by the road, and the bus picks them up.”

I wasn’t getting anywhere with Troyce Nix. I flipped open my cell phone. No service. I went to the Camry and searched under the fenders for a magnetized key box. If one was there, I couldn’t find it.

“Come over here, Dave,” Clete said.

He was standing by the Camry. He pointed at the ground. There were fresh divots in it, funnel-shaped tracks like those of someone who had been wearing cowboy boots, someone who had been struggling. “Look over there,” he said.

Next to a set of fresh tire imprints were a half-dozen drops of blood on the gravel, each of them star-pointed around the edges. Clete squatted down and touched the blood with his ballpoint pen. “It’s still wet,” he said.

“What do you want to do?” I said.

“Why ask me?” he said.

“You’re the guy that bozo tried to light up.”

“You think we’re getting set up?” he said.

“No, but I think Jimmy Dale Greenwood was DOA before he ever got here. There’s no key under any of the Camry’s fenders. I have a feeling the Sweeney woman saw what happened, and the guys who grabbed Greenwood took her along with them.”

Clete opened his cell and started to punch in a number, then realized he didn’t have a signal. “I’m going to use the phone inside and call Alicia,” he said.

“Then what?” I said.

“In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“What about Troyce Nix?”

“That’s one dude we can do without.”

“He may not read it that way.”

“That’s his problem.”

We went inside the bar, and Clete used the pay phone to leave a message for Alicia Rosecrans. I used it to call Jamie Sue Wellstone’s cell, but she didn’t pick up. When we drove back onto the two-lane and headed toward the Swan Valley by way of Flathead Lake, Troyce Nix was standing in the middle of the parking lot, our dust drifting back across his hat.

FOR CANDACE SWEENEY, time was an odyssey in a wood-wheeled wagon down a broken road, each jolt forming another threadlike crack in a piece of bone here, a piece of connective tissue there. Even after her mouth and eyes and ankles were wrapped with duct tape, and her wrists fastened with plastic ligatures behind her, she knew her physical presence still represented a threat to the three men who had abducted her and Jimmy Dale Greenwood. Inside the rocking shell of the van, she could almost smell the self-centered fear that governed their lives and their immediate situation. And if she didn’t smell it, she could hear it in their conversation.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen, man. We were supposed to grab the guy and deliver the freight. In and out. Let that fucking geek handle the rest.”

“Why you looking at me? I didn’t do it.” It was the voice of the blond man.

“You didn’t do it? You let a dimwit broad with tats on her tits bust open your face. You don’t call that doing it?”