Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux 3)

“Stay clear of Purcel.”

“You better tell that to the Dio family. I wouldn’t want Clete hunting me.”

“I don’t think these guys want advice from the DEA. It’s not a federal situation, anyway. Sometimes you get to sit back and watch the show.”

I went back to bed and slept until the sun came up bright in my eyes and I heard the Saturday morning sound of children roller-skating out on the sidewalk.

For one morning I didn’t want to think about my troubles, so when the lady next door gave me a venison roast, Alafair and I packed my rucksack for a picnic, took Dixie Lee with us, and drove down into the Bitterroot Valley to Kootenai Creek Canyon. The sky was cloudless, a hard ceramic blue from the Sapphire Mountains all the way across the valley to the jagged, snow-tipped ridges of the Bitterroots. We walked two miles up a U.S. Forest Service trail by the streambed, the water white and boiling over the rocks, the floor of the canyon thick with cottonwoods and ponderosa pine, the layered rock walls rising straight up into saddles of more pine and peaks that were as sharp as ragged tin. The air was cool and so heavy with the smell of mist from the rocks, wet fern, pine needles, layers of dead cottonwood leaves, logs that had rotted into humus, that it was almost like breathing opium.

We climbed down the incline of the streambed and started a fire in a circle of rocks. The stream flattened out here, and the current flowed smoothly over some large boulders and spread into a quiet pool by the bank, where we set out cans of pop in the gravel to cool. I had brought along an old refrigerator grill, and I set it on the rocks over the fire, cut the venison into strips, put them on the grill with potatoes wrapped in tinfoil, then sliced up a loaf of French bread. The grease from the venison dripped into the fire, hissed and smoked in the wind, and because the meat was so lean it curled and browned quickly in the heat and I had to push it to the edge of the grill.

After we ate, Dixie Lee and Alafair found a pile of rocks that was full of chipmunks, and while they threw bread crumbs down into the crevices I walked farther down the stream and sat by a pool whose surface was covered by a white, swirling eddy of froth and leaves and spangled sunlight. Through the cottonwoods on the other side of the stream I could see the steep, moss-streaked cliff walls rise up straight into the sky.

Then a strange thing happened, because she had never appeared to me during the waking day. But I saw her face in the water, saw the sunlight spinning in her hair.

Don’t give up, sailor, she said.

What?

You’ve had it worse. You always got out of it before.

When?

How about Vietnam?

I had the U.S. Army on my side.

Listen to the voices in the water and you’ll be all right. I promise. Bye-bye, baby love.

Can’t you stay a little longer?

But the wind blew the cottonwoods and the light went out of the water, and the pool turned to shadow and an empty pebble-and-sand bottom.

“Don’t be down here talking to yourself, son,” Dixie Lee said behind me. “You’ll give me cause to worry.”

I didn’t have to wait long to learn how Sally Dio would try to handle his new situation. He called me that evening at the house.

“I want a meet,” he said.

“What for?”

“We talk some stuff out.”

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Look, man, this is going to get straightened out. One way or another. Right now.”

“What have I got that you’re interested in?”

“I ain’t interested in anything you got. What’s the matter with you? You got impacted shit in your head or something?”

“I’m busy tonight. Plus, I don’t think I want to see you again, Sal.”

I could almost hear his exasperation and anger in the silence.

“Look, I’m making an effort,” he said. “I’m going the extra mile. I don’t have to do that. I can handle it other ways. But I’m treating you like a reasonable man.”

I deliberately waited a good five seconds.