Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“Sal, you were a pretentious douche bag twenty years ago, and you’re a pretentious douche bag now. In the joint, you were a sissy and a cunt. Your old man sent you out to Reno because you couldn’t even run one of his whorehouses on your own. After your plane crashed, a couple of your ex-punches told me you were a needle dick your skanks la

ughed at behind your back.”

“You want me to shut him up?” the man with the Mac asked.

“Mr. Purcel is a frightened man, Billy. Frightened people talk a lot.”

“The guy you’re working for is a cheap punk from Galveston by the name of Sally Dio,” Clete said to the man with the Mac. “He ran the skim for his family out in Vegas and Reno. He’ll rat-fuck his friends, and he’ll rat-fuck you. He used to put on speed-bag gloves and hang up his hookers on doorframes and beat them unconscious. Don’t believe me? Ask him.”

The man with the Mac was looking strangely at Leslie Wellstone.

“Something wrong, Billy?” Wellstone said.

“Yeah, why we putting up with this guy?”

“Because we’re kind to those who have Charon’s boat waiting for them,” Wellstone said.

Billy looked confused. Wellstone’s smile sent ice water through my veins.

We topped the rise in the road and walked down the other side into a clearing that was lit by the lights on a backhoe, a battery-powered lantern on the ground, and the headlights of a cargo van. In the background were a partially completed log building and a machine for planing the bark off logs. Three men I had never seen were sitting inside the van, the sliding door open wide.

A man in a black suit was standing between the van and an open pit. He wore a full-face mask whose plastic contortions imitated the expression of the screaming man in the famous painting by Edvard Munch. His suit was spotted with gray mud that had dried in crusted patterns like tailed amphibians. He wore a denim shirt that was buttoned at the throat, and heavy lace-up steel-toed work boots. He was pulling on a pair of rawhide gloves, his eyes staring at us from behind the mask.

“I want you to meet an old friend, Clete,” Leslie Wellstone said.

TROYCE NIX HAD gotten caught behind several cars as he had followed the Caddy up the lakeside highway, finally losing sight of it south of Bigfork. At Bigfork he had swung off the two-lane highway and crossed the bridge over the Swan River. When he had not seen the Caddy anywhere around the Swan Lake area, he had reversed his direction and retraced his route back across the bridge, his frustration and anger and helplessness growing by the minute. Then, standing in front of a café, wondering what he should do next, he saw the Wellstone pickup truck roar past him and turn onto the dirt road that accessed the peninsula on the west side of Swan Lake. He jumped in his truck and followed.

He cut his headlights when he entered the dirt road, then chose to continue on foot rather than risk blowing the edge he had accidentally gained on the Wellstone brothers. He parked his truck amid trees, locked the doors, and set out walking on the road, his nine-millimeter stuck in the back of his belt, his leather-sewn, lead-weighted blackjack in his pants pocket, an aluminum baseball bat gripped in his right hand.

When the Wellstones’ pickup had passed him out on the highway while he was standing in front of the café, he had recognized Ridley and Leslie inside, but he had not been sure who else was in the cab. He was convinced the agenda of the Wellstones was a simple one: They wanted revenge against Jimmy Dale Greenwood for the infidelity of Jamie Sue. Candace had blundered into the middle of the abduction, and the Wellstones’ hired goons had taken her along with Jimmy Dale to keep her from dropping the dime on their operation and preventing them from getting back to Leslie Wellstone with the freight.

Wellstone didn’t like being a cuckold. He wanted revenge, and he wanted his wife taught an object lesson. It wasn’t an unnatural reaction. But if the only issue were revenge, at least of a conventional kind — a thorough beating of the lover, a few broken bones, maybe — why hadn’t the goons simply given Candace a warning about keeping her mouth shut? Why hadn’t they dropped her off on the road somewhere, given her a few bucks, and said they were sorry, they were straightening out a breed who didn’t know how to keep his twanger in his Levi’s?

Because they planned to kill Jimmy Dale Greenwood, and they planned to kill the witness who could finger them for his abduction, Troyce thought. Something else was going down, too. The Wellstones were religious frauds, and their house was about to collapse on their heads. Maybe they were tidying up on a large scale, washing the blackboard clean and starting over. Or maybe a freak like Leslie Wellstone enjoyed hurting people. Troyce could not forget Wellstone’s instructions to his Hispanic housekeeper about the surfaces Candace had touched. Troyce wished he had settled the account right there in Wellstone’s living room.

Up ahead, he saw the Caddy owned by Clete Purcel. It had been abandoned at an odd angle in the middle of the road. An elevated jack and its stand lay in the mud by the front bumper. The doors of the Caddy were open, the keys still hanging in the ignition, the interior light manually set on “off.” Troyce looked in the glove box and under the seats for weapons but found none. He concluded that the interior of the vehicle had been rifled, which meant its occupants probably had not deserted the car of their own accord.

He walked over a knoll and saw headlights progressing slowly down the road and two figures walking inside the beams with their hands clasped behind their necks. He went deeper into the woods and kept walking parallel to the road, his bowels like water, his rectum constricting, his head as light as a helium-filled balloon. Ahead he could see other lights down in a depression or a clearing, and he thought he smelled diesel exhaust and heard the sound of a heavy machine idling, one without a muffler.

The wind gusted off the lake below and swept up through the timber, pattering raindrops on Troyce’s hat, the air blooming with a smell like fresh oxygen. He knelt down in the second growth, tilting his face toward the ground, freezing behind the trunk of a huge pine. A procession of people on foot, with the pickup behind them, wound its way up the road. Through the rain-beaded side window of the truck, Troyce thought he could make out the face of Jamie Sue Wellstone.

What was she doing here? he asked himself. Where was Candace? Where was Jimmy Dale? Had Troyce made a terrible mistake and followed the wrong vehicle and the wrong group of people? Was Candace somewhere else, depending on him, waiting helplessly for him to save her from the men who had stolen her out of the parking lot behind the bar? The possibility that he had screwed up and let her down when she needed him most made him almost insane with anger at himself. Was this punishment for what he had done to Cujo in Iraq? Was this punishment for what he had done to Jimmy Dale? He wanted to rush the Wellstone vehicle and tear both brothers apart and do as much damage as possible to their hired help as well.

No, “damage” wasn’t the word. As always, when Troyce felt a red balloon of anger blossom in his chest, he smelled an odor like stale sweat and machinist grease and gasoline soaked into coarse fabric. He felt a man’s whiskers on his face, a soiled hand unbuttoning his pants, a man’s labored whiskey breath working its way across his skin. In these moments Troyce knew why men could kill other men as easily as they did.

In his mind’s eye, he saw himself swinging the bat, doing amounts of bone-breaking injury to the Wellstones for which they would never find medical remedy.

CLETE AND I stared dumbly at the man in the mask. Ridley and Jamie Sue Wellstone and the man with the cut-down pump were climbing out of the purple pickup. The man with the cut-down pump was wiping his cheek on his sleeve. He wore a damp dark blue tropical shirt that looked like Kleenex wrapped on his muscular torso.

“Problem?” Leslie said to him.

“She slapped my face,” the man said. “She cut the skin with her nails.”

Leslie laughed. “Put it on my tab.”

“I don’t like a woman hitting me, Mr. Wellstone,” the gunman said.

“It could be worse. She could be your wife,” Leslie said.