Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

For a moment she thought she saw him inside a stand of willows, watching her, maybe sighting on her face or chest. She froze and slowly squatted down behind a beached cottonwood, lowering her face so that light did not shine directly on it.

When the wind blew through the willows, all of the shapes inside it moved except one.

“Your pal screwed you. You want to take his weight?” she said. “Bad deal, if you ask me.”

She walked farther along the embankment, rocks as heavy as petrified dinosaur eggs clacking under her feet. “My name is Gretchen Horowitz. I used to blow heads for a living. That means I’ve got a sheet, and I won’t be a credible witness against you. You can skate and say, ‘Adios, motherfuckers, I’ll be in Margaritaville.’ ”

There was no answer from the figure. She wiped the rainwater out of her eyes with her sleeve. “Listen to me,” she said. “You were probably trying to clip my old man, Clete Purcel. So you and your friend screwed up twice. Then your friend rat-fucked you on top of it. I can drive you to the ER. This is Montana. Gunfights are a family value here. Think it over.”

“I already did,” said a voice inside the willows. “I never saw a Hebe that didn’t try to work the angle.”

She knew the drill and didn’t want to be there for it. Fear and desperation always took them to a precipice where they gave up hope and pulled the rip cord and leaped into space. There were memories buried in her mind that were like film clips from a documentary no one should ever have to see. But the memories were hers, not someone else’s, and the characters were not from central casting. She saw herself on a boat off Islamorada on a blazing sunlit day, the ocean green and filled with patches of indigo, an Irish button man from the Jersey Shore aiming a harpoon gun at her breast. The scene shifted to Little Havana, where a gumball who’d raped the daughter of a Gambino underboss came out of a whorehouse closet shooting, wearing panties and a bra, his body covered with monkey hair. Odds were that either man would take her off at the neck. Instead, they both died with a look of disbelief she could never forget. Their prey had not only become their executioner; they had died at the hands of someone they’d always thought of as the weaker sex, a receptacle of their seed, to be used and discarded arbitrarily.

Unfortunately for her, all the weed and angel dust in Florida couldn’t change the fact that of her own volition, she had become employed by the worst people in America, including some who may have been involved with the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The man in work clothes came around the far side of the willows, knee-deep in the current, the lights from the vaudeville theater and the park across the river reflecting off the rapids behind him. His hair was black and thick and unwashed and hung in dirty strings around his face. His left hand was clenched on his cheek, pushing his lips out of shape, exposing his teeth. A dark fluid was leaking from below his rib cage, down his shirt and trouser leg. In his right hand, he held a small semi-auto, perhaps a .25 or .32. He was obviously weak from blood loss and probably had decided he would either see the sunrise from a plane window or with a DOA tag tied to his toe.

“You were stand-up. Your bud was a rat bastard,” she said. “Throw your piece in the water. You can go into wit pro. There’re all kinds of—”

He raised the semi-auto. “Chug this,” he said.

Maybe he fired, maybe he didn’t. She didn’t try to think it through. She was sure her first round hit him in the forehead, the second in the throat, the third in the chest. Maybe one went long or hit him in the arm. He went straight down, as they always did. Even while he slid into the current, the back of his shirt puffing with air, his head bobbing like an apple in the chop, she couldn’t stop pulling the trigger, the bullets dancing all over the water’s surface. In seconds the current or a cottonwood snag took him under, and all she could hear was the incessant humming of the river.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” she said under her breath.

Inside her head, she heard a cacophonous voice that sounded like it had risen from the bowels of a building through a heating duct: Hi, baby doll, it said. Welcome back to that old-time rock and roll. It’s so nice to have you back on board.

BY MONDAY MORNING Clete Purcel didn’t think much else could go wrong with his day. Not until he saw a hand-waxed, metallic-purple, chrome-plated Humvee coming up the road, splashing through the rain puddles, almost running over Albert’s border collie. The Humvee turned into the driveway and stopped by the pedestrian gate to the north pasture. A slight man wearing a Mexican vest and a flowery shirt with blown sleeves and a braided cloth belt and trousers stuffed inside hand-tooled, multicolored boots came through the gate with a self-satisfied expression while he eyeballed the pasture and the low-hanging clouds and the sunshine spangling on the wet trees, as though he owned whatever he walked on.

Clete stepped out on the porch, steam rising off the tin cup he held. “What can I do for you, Mr. Younger?” he said.

“Call me Caspian. Is that your restored Cadillac under the tarp?”

“Yeah, the ravens keep downloading on it. It’s a way of life with me.”

“Getting dumped on?”

“Yeah, think of me as a human Dumpster. What do you want?”

“Not much. I felt obligated to tell you you’re not the first.”

“First what?”

Caspian Younger gazed at the sheen on the fir and pine trees on the hillsides and the clouds dissolving like smoke as the day warmed. “I understand you worked for Sally Dio in Reno and Vegas.”

“I used to get comped at the Riviera. I stayed in the penthouse, right next to Frank Sinatra’s old suite. The greaseballs loved it there. It was the worst shithole on the Strip. You ever stay at the Riviera?”

“I never had the pleasure. You don’t like Vegas?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it that a hydrogen bomb and a lot of topsoil wouldn’t cure.”

“Did you enjoy yourself last night, Mr. Purcel?”

“Actually, I don’t remember much of what I did. I have blackouts, see? I wake up in the morning and don’t have a clue about where I was or who I was with.”

“Know where I met her?”

“Not interested.”