Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“What do you think the geek has got planned?” the blond man said.

“Show some respect, Layne,” the man in the front passenger seat said.

Through the crack in the tape, Candace saw him gesture at her and Jimmy Dale.

AT THE NORTHERN end of Flathead Lake, in the town called Bigfork, Clete turned east and drove through a break in the mountains. Just before we reached a bridge at the Swan River, we saw the dirt road that accessed the peninsula on the west side of Swan Lake. The sun had broken through the rain clouds in the west and was the reddish-yellow of an egg yolk. But another front was moving toward us, a separate weather system, this one ugly and mean. It was gray and swirling with rain, pelting the lake, and when we drove onto the dirt road, the trees on either side of us were already bending in the wind, shredding cascades of pine needles across the windshield. The light had almost disappeared inside the timber, and the front end of the Caddy was bouncing hard in the potholes, patterning the windshield with more mud than the wipers could clean off.

“I feel like I’m sitting on sandbags in a six-by, waiting for Sir Charles to pop one through my windshield,” Clete said. A downed limb broke in half under a front tire and clanged against the oil pan. “My transmission’s not up to this. Check your cell.”

“What for?” I said.

“To call Alicia again. I think we might be firing in the well. I think Jamie Sue might have given us a bum lead. My engine is about to come off the mounts.”

“She didn’t exactly give us a lead.”

“Want to explain that?”

“I asked if her husband had a private place where he went. This is the only place she could think of.”

“That’s it?” he said.

“That’s it.”

“I thought I had obsessions. You know what your problem is? You’re like those biblical fundamentalists. They believe if one part of the Bible is not literally correct, the rest of it is no good, either. Except with you, it’s people. You got to prove everybody is on the square, or the whole human race is no good.”

“Pretty sharp thinking, Clete. Except it’s not me who couldn’t keep his johnson in his pants when he met Jamie Sue Wellstone.”

He laughed, looking at me sideways, the Caddy dipping into a huge hole, shuddering the frame, throwing both of us against our seat straps. “What was I supposed to do? Hurt her feelings?”

“Don’t ever go into analysis,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Your psychiatrist will shoot himself.”

But he was smiling at me, not listening, not caring what I said one way or another, indifferent to all the minutiae that had gone into the ebb and flow of our lives, remembering only the bond we had shared over the decades, the wounds we had suffered and survived together, the flags under which we had fought and the causes we had served, many of which were no longer considered of import by others.

“We painted our names on the wall, didn’t we?” he said.

“You’d better believe it, Cletus,” I replied.

I looked through the back window and thought I saw headlights glimmering in the trees. Then they disappeared. The rain swept westward across the timber, bending the canopy, channeling serpentine rivulets in the road.

We were high enough that I could make out lights on the far side of Swan Lake, like beacons inside ocean fog. I suspected the lights came from the nightclub on the shore, but I couldn’t be sure. I thought of the photograph of Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill mounted on the wall behind the club’s bar, and I wondered why such criminals beckoned to us from the past, why they were able to lay such a strong romantic claim upon us. Was it because secretly we wanted to emulate them, to possess their power, to burn that brightly inside the mist, incandescent as they pursued all the trappings of the American dream, just as we did? Was it because the art deco world of 1940s Hollywood and the sweet sewer it represented were as much a part of our culture as the graves of Shiloh?

Clete rolled down his window halfway, and the rain blew inside. “Listen,” he said.

“What?” I said, waking from my reverie.

“I thought I heard a piece of heavy equipment working. You hear it?”

“No,” I replied.

“Maybe I’m going nuts. I still hear that motherfucker who tried to set fire to me.”

I rolled down my window and looked at our headlight beams bouncing off the tree trunks, but I could not see anything unusual or hear any sound except the wind sharking through the canopy and a solitary peal of thunder across the sky.

JAMIE SUE COULD not understand her own thoughts. She had stayed in the barn, her cell phone in her jeans, grooming the horses, listening to the rip of thunder across the skies and the rain mixed with hail that was clattering on the barn’s metal roof. Leslie or one of the servants carrying out his orders had removed all the vehicle keys from the hooks in the mudroom. His and Ridley’s security personnel had tripled in number in the last week, men who dressed neatly and were barbered and clean-shaved and were deferential but, she guessed, also more professionally criminal than either Quince Whitley or Lyle Hobbs. In retrospect, Lyle seemed like an amateur, perhaps another Judas for sale, blowing the compound with whiskey on his breath and a tic in his eyes like that of a crystal addict, but by comparison, a bumbling amateur.