Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“Maybe they have a shared

agenda.”

“Like what?” the sheriff said.

“If I knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. What do you want me to tell Gretchen Horowitz, Sheriff?”

I could hear him breathing against the receiver. “I want her to ID the body. I want her to look at the man she killed.”

“For what purpose?”

“Maybe it’s time she becomes accountable for some of her deeds.”

How about accountability from the society that produced her? I thought. “Clete and I will come with her to your office,” I said, and hung up.

I hoped I was through with Elvis Bisbee, at least for the day. I wasn’t. Five minutes later, he called back. “I didn’t tell you something. There was a stink in the abandoned truck,” he said. “It wasn’t motor oil or dried blood or decayed food or a creel of fish somebody left under the seat. The stink didn’t come from anything we could find.”

“I’m not tracking you, Sheriff.”

“It smelled like excrement. Like somebody had rubbed it into the upholstery. Except the lab tech couldn’t find any. This guy Asa Surrette has a hard-on about your daughter, so maybe you and your family are part of the problem. Frankly, I wish you and your daughter had stayed in Louisiana.”

“Yeah, and maybe you’re in the wrong line of work,” I said. This time I pulled the phone out of the jack.

AT FIVE-FIFTEEN A.M., Gretchen climbed inside the two-engine plane volunteered by a Sierra Club member and took off two minutes later from the Missoula airport, rising out of the predawn darkness into a breathtaking view of the mountaintops that surrounded the city, the streets below streaked with night-damp and car lights, the Clark Fork wending its way into the mystery and vastness of the American West. As the plane gained altitude and banked east toward the Grand Divide, she wondered if the pilot, a nice boy by the name of Percy Wolcott, had any idea who his passenger actually was, even though she had known him for several months. She wondered what his comfort level would be if he were privy to the thoughts and memories she could never free herself of. Would he be repelled? Would he be afraid?

He was good-looking, about twenty-five, with thick dark brown hair he had let grow long without affectation. He was a good pilot and soft-spoken and considerate. When they first met at a Sierra Club function in West Hollywood, she thought he was gay. When she decided he was heterosexual, she wondered why he didn’t try to put moves on her, since most men did. Then she decided he was like two or three boys she had known in Miami who were shy and private and respectful toward women and nothing like their peers, most of whom were visceral and loud and, when they got her in the backseat, had a way of moving her hand down to their nether regions.

What a drag, she thought, realizing she had been guilty of falling into the national obsession of classifying human beings in terms of their sexual behavior. Do Europeans and Brits do that? Nice to meet you, gay guy. Thank you, but I’m trans. How about you? You look like you might be hetero. Actually, I’m more of an across-the-board premature ejaculator, thank you very much.

At five thousand feet, they hit turbulence that shook the plane and caused Percy to look at her in a protective and reassuring way, and in that moment, in the gentleness of his expression, she knew that her great concern was not about bigotry and obsession and the limited thinking of others; it was her fear that her friend Percy would be horrified if he knew the history of Gretchen Horowitz, that his kind validation of her would be withdrawn.

In junior college she had read an autobiographical account written by a white man who was kidnapped as a child from a sod house in Oklahoma and raised among Comanche Indians. He grew up in the shadow of Quanah Parker and participated in atrocities that were the worst she had ever seen described on a printed page. The lines she remembered in particular were the elderly frontiersman’s depiction of himself as a white teenage boy, smeared with war paint and sweat and the dust of battle, a boy who, in the old man’s words, “thirsted to kill” and did things that were depraved and cruel beyond comprehension. When she read the descriptions, she realized she had found a kindred spirit, one who lived with thoughts and desires that might forever separate her from the rest of the human family.

Bill Pepper had robbed her in every way possible. He had lied to her and turned her charity into a sword he drove into her breast. He had drugged her and bound her and systematically degraded her and mocked her while he did it. Then he escaped into the Great Shade at the hands of another and now lay safe in a stainless steel drawer inside a refrigerated room that smelled of formaldehyde. Where do you put your bloodlust now? she asked herself.

Why did people give so much importance to drug and alcohol addiction? The day you gave up dope and booze was the day you got better. The day you gave up bloodlust was the day you allowed a succubus to devour the remnants of your self-respect.

“There’s coffee in a thermos and an egg sandwich in the canvas bag behind your seat,” Percy said.

“I’m fine,” she replied.

“I can get us into Canada today if you want,” he said.

“I’ve got too much footage on the shale operation. In some ways, it’s not effective.”

He glanced sideways at her, not understanding.

“The areas that are most damaged up there are already totally destroyed,” she said. “People don’t see what the area used to look like. They only see it after it’s been turned into a gravel pit. They’re also depressed by the fact they can’t do anything about it, so they don’t want to look at it or think about it anymore.”

“I bet you’re going to be famous one day,” he said.

“Why would I be famous?”

“Because you’re the real thing.”

“What’s the real thing?”

“You think the work you do is more important than you are,” he said. “Hang on. There’s some weather up ahead. Once we’re over Rogers Pass, we’ll be in the clear.”