Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“I kicked the shit out of him. He laughed at me,” he said.

“Who do you know in Vegas and Atlantic City?”

“Lowlifes and warmed-over greaseballs who wouldn’t piss on me if I was burning to death.”

“Dial them up.”

“Talking to those guys is like drinking out of a spittoon.”

I set down my iced tea and looked at it.

“He’s going to kill her, isn’t he?” Clete said.

I lowered my eyes and didn’t reply. The twist of lemon in my glass made me think of a yellow worm couched inside the ice, the canker inside the rose, the inalterable fact that you cannot hide from evil.

FELICITY LOUVIERE FOLLOWED the instructions and drove through the tiny settlement of Alberton. She exited not far from a railroad track and crossed the Clark Fork and continued up a dirt road into an unpopulated area of wooded hills and outcroppings of gray rock that resembled the knuckle bones of prehistoric animals. Rain clouds had moved across the sun, dropping the countryside into shadow. She turned on the car heater, even though the dashboard told her the temperature outside was sixty-seven degrees. When the odometer indicated she had traveled exactly four miles from the bridge, she pulled to a wide spot in the road, next to a hill that sloped up into lodgepole and ponderosa pine and black snags left over from an old burn.

She cut the engine and stepped out into the wind, her ears popping slightly with the gain in elevation. What’s that sound? She turned in a circle and saw no other vehicle but thought she heard the throaty rumble of twin exhausts, a sound she associated with 1950s films about hot rods, or one she’d heard in the parking lot at the health club.

She suspected that her caller was watching her through binoculars and that her wait would be a long one. The air smelled of night damp and the outcroppings of rock that seldom saw sunlight and were freckled with lichen.

He surprised her. No more than three minutes passed before she saw a figure inside the trees up on the hillside, just below a switchback logging road left over from the days of clear-cutting. He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and held it in the air. There was nothing histrionic in the gesture. He didn’t wave it; he simply held it, showing his control over the situation.

She walked to the front of the Audi and stared up the hill, the wind blowing her hair over her face. The figure turned and walked back in the shadows, then reemerged with a woman wearing shorts and a T-shirt; a drawstring bag had been pulled over her head, and her wrists were fastened behind her.

Felicity began walking up the hill, her eyes lowered, stepping carefully over the holes burrowed between the rocks by pocket gophers and badgers. The sun had disappeared from the sky entirely, and she felt as though a cold wind were blowing through her soul. Give me strength, give me strength, give me strength, a voice chanted in her head.

She heard the rumble of the twin exhausts again, echoing in a canyon, trailing away into the trees. She was forty yards from the man on the hill and could see his wide shoulders and the tropical shirt that he wore inside a cheap tan suit. He held his captive by the arm with his right hand and began cupping the fingers of his left, indicating that Felicity should keep walking toward him.

“You have to let her go first,” she said.

He stared at her without replying. Behind him, up on the logging road, Felicity could see a gray SUV, a spray of rust on one side. “I’ve done what you asked,” she said. “Release the young woman and I’ll go with you.”

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He walked the woman thirty feet away, upwind from where he had been standing. He eased her into a sitting position on top of a fallen tree trunk and returned. The bound woman was out of earshot. Still he did not speak. He turned up his palms as though they glowed with spiritual grace.

“She’s never heard your voice or seen your face?” Felicity said.

He shook his head, his grin in place.

“You’re Asa Surrette,” she said. “You’re older than your pictures, a little more coarse. Your hair is dyed, but you’re him.”

“Nice to meet you in person. Please get in my vehicle. I’m looking forward to our association.”

“You had all of this planned.”

“Of course.”

“Why do you want me?”

“I think we knew each other in another life. I knew it when I first saw you from afar. I could smell the heat in the sand and the ring of swords on copper shields. I could hear a crowd roaring. Sound familiar?”

“What you’re describing are the symptoms of schizophrenia.”

“Could be. But as Charles Dickens wrote, ‘It’s a mad, mad world, Master Copperfield.’ ” Then he seemed to hear the twin exhausts, too. “You didn’t try to get clever on me, did you?”

“If I’d wanted to do that, I would have called the FBI.”

“I suspect that’s true. Well, let’s leave Rhonda to find her way out of here and toggle on down the road.”