Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

He lit a cigarette and poured more brandy in his glass and watched it swirl inside the milk. He drank the glass almost to the bottom, hoping he could stop the process taking place in his head. What did the drunks at A.A. meetings call it? Mind racing? That was it. Your head seemed to explode, like a basketball with barbed wire wrapped around it. Something even more serious was happening inside Bill Pepper’s head. The world as he knew it was ending, the filmstrip ripping loose from the reel and snapping in front of the projector’s light, throwing one disjointed image after another onto the screen.

Where had it all gone wrong? Secretly, he knew the answer to his question, and the problem was not the girl. Rich people did not care about people like Bill Pepper. To them, cops had the same status as yardmen. He had played the fool with Love Younger, trying to ingratiate himself, violating every protocol of his profession, believing that Younger would give him a job as a security expert or even make him a personal assistant. In fact, men like Love Younger wouldn’t take the time to spit in your mouth if you were dying of thirst.

The wind was picking up outside, cutting long V’s across the surface of the lake. Again he heard a sudden crack and a cascading sound like a limb snapping from the trunk of a birch and falling against the side of the cottage. He had never been this afraid, and worse, for the first time in his life, the booze wasn’t working. His fear ate right through it, the way a hot skillet vaporizes a drop of water. He looked at his hands. They were shaking.

Write it down, a voice said. If they get you, leave something behind that tells people you didn’t deserve this. Tell them you’re Bill Pepper and you were old-school at LAPD and you wronged the Horowitz girl but you’re sorry and you even told her you’d like to look after her. Yes, tell them, Bill Pepper. Don’t go silently into that good night.

Where had he heard that line? Then he remembered. It came from a black prostitute who worked as an independent on South Vernon Avenue. She had cooked her head with crystal meth but was fascinated with books he had never heard of. She used to ball him for free and whisper lines of poetry to him while she spread herself on his thighs in the back of his cruiser in an alleyway behind a Vietnamese grocery. What a thing to remember, here on a lake in western Montana at the close of day. He remembered her with tenderness rather than lust and wondered if she was still alive. Or maybe it was Bill Pepper who had fried his mush and not the black prostitute and none of this was real.

Using only a penlight, he sat at the kitchen table and wrote these words on top of a flattened paper bag: Some guys think I’m tight with the Horowitz girl at Albert Hollister’s ranch. I’m not. I’ve used up nine of the twenty-four hours they gave me. If you find this and not my body, they got me. I’m sorry for what I did to that girl. As far as the rest of it is concerned, fuck it.

He signed his name and under it wrote his LAPD badge number. Up on the two-lane, a car slowed and then accelerated, its headlights bouncing off the trees and the mountainside that bordered the far side of the asphalt. Bill Pepper went into the yard, his Glock hanging from his hand, the wind cold on his face, a stray raindrop or two striking his skin. Farther down the shore, lights were burning in a house close to the water. The glow reflected on the waves sliding under a dock where a red canoe was tied. The sight of the occupied house and the canoe bobbing in the chop and the waves sliding on the sand cheered Bill Pepper up and made him wonder if he hadn’t been too pessimistic, too hard on himself, too quick to write off the rest of life.

He turned in a full circle, his arms stretched out like a bird’s wings. There were no cars on the two-lane, no one hiding in the trees, no powerboat approaching from the far side of the lake. He went back inside and turned on the kitchen light to show his absence of fear, then started in on a plate of fried chicken and deviled eggs that had been in the refrigerator all week. It was cold and delicious, and he ate it hungrily with his fingers, washing it down with milk, his melancholia finally lifting, his eye on his spinning rod in the corner. It wasn’t too late to fling a red-and-white-striped Mepps in the water, he told himself. The rainbow were in close to shore, down in the weeds, hiding from the pike. They fed by the moon and, at this time of evening, would hit anything he threw at them, bending the rod’s tip to the surface, stripping line off the reel. Yes, he thought, to hell with the girl, to hell with the guys who thought he knew something he didn’t, and to hell with his own foolish behavior. A man had a right to catch trout at moonrise on a Friday night.

Then he heard a sound that shouldn’t have been there, a hand turning the front doorknob and then releasing it, the sole of a shoe scraping on the concrete step as the person stepped onto the grass and disappeared into the shadows.

Bill Pepper picked up the Glock and went out the back door. The wind was blowing harder, shredding leaves from the branches overhead, rocking the canoe with a metronomic beat against the dock. “Who’s out there?” he said.

There was no reply.

Bill Pepper walked around the side of the house into the front yard and shone his penlight on the lawn and concrete steps but could see no depressions in the grass or mud smears on the steps. He looked at the lights of the house down the shore and thought about knocking on the door, introducing himself, inviting everyone over for a drink. That would be the coward’s way. He walked down to the lakeside, constantly glancing back over his shoulder, his breath wheezing in his nose. Up the slope, by the corner of the cottage, he thought he saw a figure step from behind a tree and stare straight at him. He lifted the penlight into the darkness but could see nothing except a car passing on the two-lane and the bonelike whiteness of the birch trunks in the headlights. Calm down, he told himself. You’re going into the DTs, that’s all it is.

That’s all it is? a voice mocked him. The DTs were a minor consideration? He was that sick? Then he heard a loud thud, and this time he knew the sound was not a product of his imagination. It was heavy and solid, like a sack of grain smacking down on the roof. He lifted the beam of the penlight just as a cougar jumped from the cottage roof into a tree and, in one bound, sprang off a limb a

nd landed on four feet in the yard.

The cougar must have been six feet from tail to nose. Its coat was yellow and gray, and white around the mouth and on the belly, a dark streak of fur running up the nose between the eyes. Its tail flipped as though discharging the tension in its body.

“This is my place. You’re trespassing,” Bill Pepper said.

The cougar seemed to slink away, then turned and walked in a figure eight. It stopped and looked at Bill Pepper again, sniffing at the air.

“Go back up the mountain where you belong. Go on, now. I don’t want to shoot you.”

The moon broke from behind a cloud, and Bill Pepper could see the muscular smoothness of the cougar’s neck and forequarters, the thickness of its feet, the ribs that looked stenciled above the sag of the belly. The cougar’s whiskers were as stiff as wire. It turned and ran along the shore, leaping over a creek that fed into the lake, the whiteness of its hindquarters showing under its tail in the moonlight.

Well, what do you know? Bill Pepper said to himself.

Except his satisfaction in standing up to the cougar was short-lived. He could not explain away the doorknob turning and the sole of somebody’s shoe scraping on the concrete step. And what about the figure he’d thought he saw among the trees? He walked to the front of the house and examined the ground and saw nothing that indicated anybody had been there in the last week except him.

“If anybody is out there, I’m yours for the asking,” he called out. “Come and get it. I’d love to have a tête-à-tête with you.”

The only sounds he heard were the wind and the husks of winter leaves tumbling across the cottage roof, perhaps a pinecone rolling down the incline. “I don’t care what you do to me,” he said. “Before I check out, I’ll paint the bushes.”

He waited in the silence, then went back in the house and clicked on all the lights, in control again, his forearms pumped. He was Bill Pepper, the scourge of East Los, the Bama Badass cruising South Central, a cigarette hanging in his mouth, the friend of street people from Adams Boulevard down to Hawthorne. He had been in the middle of the Rodney King riots and had carried a two-hundred-pound black woman out of a burning building on his back. He’d still have his badge if a queer-bait bicycle cop in West Venice hadn’t hung a second DWI on him. It wasn’t fair. None of it. The murder of his father, the loss of his home in Mobile, the shanty his mother and siblings had lived in on the backside of Macon. He wanted to smash his fist into the wall.

Standing at the kitchen table under the lightbulb, he drank the last of the brandy in the bottle and stuffed the Glock back in its holster and picked up his spinning rod and went out the back door. Someone in the house down the shore had turned on Rhapsody in Blue. The skies were clearing, the stars were out. It was a perfect night. Except for the fact that he hadn’t relieved himself in two hours and his bladder was bursting. He unzipped his trousers.

You joining ranks with the Wyatt Dixons of the world? a voice said. Why not get yourself some Copenhagen and a Styrofoam spit cup while you’re at it?

He returned to the house and walked through the kitchen and into the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom. In under a second, his universe turned upside down.

The bone-crunching pain that exploded in the back of his head could have come from a sap or a chunk of pipe with a bonnet on it or maybe someone touching a Taser to his scalp. It didn’t matter. He crashed against the wall, taking the telephone stand down with him, landing on his face, his nose bleeding. He wanted to crawl away, but his arms wouldn’t work properly. A figure that smelled like rain and leaves and body heat was pulling his wrists behind him, fitting handcuffs on them, squeezing the steel tongues tightly into the flesh.

“Who are you?” Bill Pepper said.

The figure released his wrists and walked through the cottage, clicking off all the lights. The hallway dropped into total darkness. The figure closed the door to the bathroom and the kitchen and then turned Bill Pepper over and looked down at him.