Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

y wife is the expert on flowers. What about you, Mr. Purcel? Does this awaken any memories in you?”

“Sorry, I’ve got a head cold,” Clete replied. He pointed at a leather jacket someone had used to cover a round object on the floor. “Is that the rest of him?”

“Yeah, it is,” the sheriff said. “I want both of you to see it.” He leaned over and picked up the leather jacket by one sleeve, pulling it loose from the blood that had congealed in Love Younger’s hair. “You guys had no idea Wyatt would do something like this? A man who evidently believed the Youngers sent rapists after his girlfriend?”

Clete nodded as though agreeing with a profound truth. “The VC did that sometimes,” he said. “A guy who was genuinely medevac in my recon group did it, too. By ‘medevac,’ I mean he was nuts, you dig? He rolled a head into a fire where we were cooking a pig. It scared the shit out of us. Then we all laughed. I didn’t take any pics, or I’d show you one.”

“I want both of you out of my sight,” the sheriff said.

Clete’s face looked poached in the artificial light, his green eyes neutral and unblinking, puffing air with one cheek and then the other, like a man gargling with mouthwash. The scar that ran through his eyebrow resembled a strip of welted rubber on a bicycle tire. “One of your guys just stepped in Younger’s blood,” he said. “Too bad Bill Pepper and Jack Boyd aren’t still on the job.”

Tell me Clete didn’t know how to do it.

WE DROVE THROUGH Missoula and into the Jocko Valley and onto the Salish Indian reservation. We passed under a pedestrian bridge that had been created out of stone and dirt and trees for big-game animals, and through the tangle of shrubbery and birch trees planted along the retaining wall, I could see the multipointed racks of half a dozen elk crossing right above us.

“One day you and I will come up here and stay at the campground on the Jocko and fish for a week, then head on up to British Columbia,” Clete said. “A guy was telling me you can take a dozen twenty-inch cutthroat trout a day on the Elk River. You don’t even have to rent a canoe. You can catch a dozen lunkers right off the bank.”

“That sounds great, Clete.”

“See, you drive into Fernie, and you’re into mountains even bigger than these. It’s like being in Switzerland, I guess. You could go to meetings. I could do a little roadwork and lighten up on the flack juice and get my weight down. We eighty-six all these bozos. What do you think?”

“Sure,” I said. “When we get things squared away here, I’ll talk it over with Molly.”

“Gretchen and Alf might want to go, too,” he said. “Canada is the country of the future. See, places like British Columbia and Alberta give you the chance to start your life over. They do things in a smart way up there.”

It would have served no purpose for me to mention the Canadian exploration for shale oil that was destroying whole mountain ranges. Clete had transported himself into a brighter tomorrow in order to avoid thinking about the things we had seen today. If we were lucky, we’d make the trip to Fernie one day, but I knew he would never stop drinking, nor stop eating large amounts of cream and butter and fried food. If we had another season or two to run, we would probably involve ourselves in the same situations we had seen today. If you’re wired a certain way, you’ll always be in motion, clicking to your own rhythm, all of it in four-four time, avoiding convention and predictability and control as you would a sickness, the whole world waiting for you like an enormous dance pavilion lit by colored lights and surrounded with palm trees. I’m not talking about the dirty boogie. The music of the spheres is right outside your bedroom window. It just comes packaged on a strange CD sometimes.

I checked in with Alafair on my cell phone. “Where are you, kid?” I said.

“What’s with the ‘kid’ stuff again?” she replied.

“That’s the way I always talk to my broads,” I said.

“Well, lose it, Pops,” she said. “We’re up by Yellow Bay. The lead on the amphibian plane isn’t much help. So far we’ve seen four of them, spread out all over the lake. There might be more north of us.”

“Don’t do anything else until we get up there, okay? Let’s meet in Polson and start over.”

“The clock is running out for those girls, Dave.”

The evening star was twinkling in the west. Even though their great bulk was dark with shadow, the Mission Mountains were lit on the tops by streaks of gold that probably reflected off the clouds after the sunset. The world was indeed a glorious place, well worth fighting for. But what kind of place was it for two innocent girls whose parents had been murdered and who were perhaps entombed in a basement, at the mercy of a monster, while the rest of the world passed them by?

“We’re on our way,” I said. “I love you, Little Squanto.”

That had been her nickname when she was a small child. It was borrowed from the Baby Squanto Indian books she had loved, and I seldom used it today. I closed the phone so as not to embarrass her any worse than I already had.

WE DROVE THROUGH Ronan and past the Salish Kootenai College and entered Polson, located at the southern tip of Flathead Lake. Alafair and Gretchen were waiting for us by the side of a Dairy Queen that had closed for the night. I could see the great blackness of the lake and a white amphibian moored by an island, rocking in the chop, the cherry trees on the slopes along the lakeshore alive with wind and the flicker of heat lightning. It was part of the chain of glaciers that had slid down into Montana aeons ago, scouring out lakes that contained mountain peaks a few feet under the hull of your boat, as though you were floating through the heavens rather than on top of a lake.

I mention these things for one reason: The setting did not seem coincidental. The topography was primeval. It had been the playground of dinosaurs and mastodons. Some archaeologists believed there had been people here who antedated the Indians, or at least the ones who migrated from Asia across the Bering Strait. Had we somehow allowed Asa Surrette to entice us into a backdrop containing a seminal story encoded in our collective unconscious? Was he hoping to rewrite the final act? The idea sounded fanciful. However, there was a nagging question: Why would a psychopath from Kansas name himself Geta unless he was acutely aware of the name’s historical implications and wanted to reach back in time and gather the sand from a Carthaginian arena and throw it in our faces?

Alafair and Gretchen got out of the chopped-down pickup and walked toward us when we pulled into the lot. “Molly is pissed,” Alafair said.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“You bagged out and left her,” she said.

“I told her where we were going.”

“That doesn’t cut it, Dave. She was getting her coat, and y’all drove off. She and Albert are on their way.”