Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

The man on the ridge cupped his hands around his mouth. “You’re lucky, little girl,” he said. “I had a delightful experience planned for you and me.”

She stood erect and raised the Airweight with both hands, sighting on the silhouette, her chest heaving with exertion and the inhalation of smoke, her cheeks hot with tears. “Suck on this, you miserable fuck,” she said.

Even as she heard the solitary pop of the report and felt the recoil against her palms, she knew the angle was bad and the shot had gone wide and high. When she lowered the revolver, the figure was gone, probably down the other side of the ridge. She knelt next to the rabbit and stroked its head and ears. “I’m sorry, little guy,” she said. “You saved my life. If there’s a heaven, that’s where you’re going.”

She stayed with the rabbit until it died, then buried it and walked down the hill in the dark, a taste like ashes in her mouth.

AFTER HAVING HIS boot twisted off his foot in front of half of Montana, Kyle Schumacher decided he would ease out of the scut work for the Younger family for a few days and spend a little vacation time up on Flathead Lake, among the cherry orchards and sailboat slips and waterside saloons.

He wasn’t running away from anything. Kyle Schumacher had done hard time with badasses from East Los and blacks who were half cannibal. Kyle had never run from anybody. He just needed a little R & R to get his head together. What was wrong with that?

He had acquired a taste for tequila and Dos Equis when he was a heavy-equipment operator down in Calexico. That was just after he had finished a three-bit as a nonpaying guest of the California Graybar hotel chain. Unfortunately, he had acquired a taste for other things as well, coke and Afghan skunk and an occasional injection of China white between the toes, to be exact. The real high in Kyle’s life was geographic. Reno and Vegas were the playgrounds where the party never ended and lucre and sensuality were virtues, not vices. For Kyle, the light radiating upward from the casinos into a summer sky took on a peculiar theological overtone, a testimony to the possibility that modernity and self-indulgence might be a stay against the hand of death.

The only downside in his life was the conviction that followed him wherever he went. Registering in a new city as a sex offender was like undressing in the middle of a county courthouse. The alternative, not registering, was a ticket back to the slams. What was the old saw? You do the crime, you stack the time? What a laugh. When you went down on a sex beef, you did life, with a two-by-four kicked up your chubbies. So he’d signed on with the Youngers. It was a safe berth. What was wrong with that?

His favorite saloon and casino in the vicinity was on the north end of Flathead Lake, up in the high country, on the road to Whitefish, where the movie stars and the Eurotrash hung out. It wasn’t Vegas or Reno, but it had its moments, particularly when a sweet thing was still at the bar at closing time. He knocked back a shot of tequila and sucked on a salted lime and gazed through the saloon window at the immensity of the lake. It was twenty-four miles long, the biggest body of water west of the Mississippi, rimmed by mountains that were part of a glacial chain. This was the place he needed to be, a place where he could stop thinking about all the events that had happened in Missoula, events that were not of his manufacture and that he had been unfairly pulled into. Like the business with the boot. Did the PI take it to Wyatt Dixon? Kyle did not like to think about the prospect of dealing with Wyatt Dixon.

The clock on the wall said 1:46 A.M. The last time he looked, the clock said 11:14. What happened to the interlude? Maybe the clock was broken or the bartender had messed with it. “Hit me again,” he said.

“Yeah, but this is last call, Kyle,” the bartender said.

“So line ’em up. We can shoot the breeze while you shut down.”

“Can’t do it,” the bartender said. He tipped the spout on the tequila bottle into Kyle’s shot glass. “How about one on the house?”

“I look like I can’t buy my own drinks?” Kyle replied.

A couple went out the front door and started their automobile. The bartender began rinsing glasses in an aluminum sink. The interior of the saloon was paneled with lacquered yellow pine and seemed to exude a honeyed glow from the green-shaded lamps hung on the walls. The ambience created a sense of warmth and belonging that Kyle did not want to let go of.

“Give me a couple of Dos Equis to go,” Kyle said.

“You drank the last one.”

“Then give me any import you got.”

“You staying up here with that Mexican gal?”

“Who says I’m staying with anybody?”

“I thought you had a girlfriend up here.”

“I don’t remember saying that. Did somebody tell you that? Is this some kind of information center?”

“What do I know?” the bartender replied.

“That’s a good attitude.”

The bartender propped his arms on the bar and looked toward the front door and seemed to concentrate on what he should say next. His head resembled a white bowling ball with dents in it. A nest of blue veins was pulsing in one temple. He glanced at

his wristwatch. “I forgot. That clock is slow. Happy motoring.”

Kyle walked outside and got in his truck. The sky was as black as India ink and blanketed with stars, the cherry orchards on the shore and up the hillsides in full leaf, swelling with wind. Why should he be worried? No one knew where he was. He had told Caspian he might head down to Elko and shoot some craps and chill out. Caspian didn’t like it? Too bad. Kyle hadn’t signed on for that boot gig in front of all those people. Neither had he signed on for getting into a shit storm with a psychotic cowboy who had a body that looked like skin stretched on spring steel.

As he drove down the narrow two-lane toward the cottage on the hillside where the Mexican woman lived, he could not rid himself of the fear eating a hole in his stomach. He wanted to roll a fatty and get stoned and get laid and disappear inside a safe place where he didn’t have to think about Wyatt Dixon and all the other issues that came with working for the Youngers. Then it would be daylight and he could score some coke or hang out in a bar and sip drinks on the deck through the day and figure out an answer to his situation. He fished his stash out of the glove box and held it up to the light. There was only a thin band of seeds and stems at the bottom of the Ziploc. Great. He held the bag out the window and felt the wind rip it from his hand.

He felt under the seat for his .357 Mag and inadvertently touched the baton he always carried to iron out differences in traffic situations. He had forgotten about the baton. How dumb could he be? He shuddered at the thought of Dixon finding it under the seat and stuffing it down his throat as payback for the lick Kyle had laid on him. He rolled down the window and flung the baton into the darkness and heard a sound like glass breaking. This couldn’t be happening. Nobody’s luck was this bad.

He turned up the dirt road that led through five acres of cherry trees to a cottage where an overweight Mexican woman with two children waited for him, convinced he would keep his promise and marry her that summer and get her a green card.