Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

She drifted off to sleep as the plane bounced under her, the rain spidering and flattening on the glass. When she awoke, they had just popped out of the clouds, and she saw the sharp gray peaks of mountains directly below her. They made her think of sharks clustered inside a giant saltwater pool with no bottom. “Who was that guy this morning?” Percy said.

“Which guy?”

“The one who dropped you at the airport.”

“There wasn’t any guy. I drove myself. My pickup is parked in the lot.”

“There was an older man in the waiting room. I thought maybe he was your father, the way he was looking at you.”

“No,” she said. “My father is probably still asleep at Albert Hollister’s ranch. What did he look like?”

“Long face, high forehead. I don’t remember. Can you get the thermos for me?”

“Think hard, Percy.”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember. Just a guy, about fifty-five or so. Older guys never look at you?”

“I scare them away.”

“You? That’s a laugh.”

“You said I was the real thing. That’s kind of you, but you’re assigning me a virtue I don’t have. I love movies. I’ve loved them all my life. I never knew why until I read an interview with Dennis Hopper. He grew up poor in a little place outside Dodge City, Kansas. All he remembered of Dodge City was the heat and the smell of the feeder lots. Every Saturday he went to town with his grandmother and sold eggs. She gave him part of the egg money to go to a cowboy movie. Hopper said the movie theater became the real world and Dodge City became the imaginary one. When he was in his teens, he went out to Hollywood. His first role was in Rebel Without a Cause, with James Dean. His second movie was Giant, with James Dean again. Not bad, huh?”

“People like you.”

“What?”

“The Sierra Club people like you.” Percy leaned forward, seeming to stare at a point beyond the starboard wing. “Check out the Cessna at three o’clock.”

“What about it?”

“He’s been with us awhile

. Is anybody following you around?” His eyes crinkled.

“Maybe I upset a few people in Florida and Louisiana.”

“You’ll never make the cut as a villain, Gretchen. Here comes the Cessna. I didn’t tell you I used to drop fire retardant for the United States Forest Service. Let’s go down on the deck and see if he wants to stay with us.”

They had just flown through clouds above a mountain peak into sunlight and wide vistas of patchwork wheat and cattle land. Percy took the twin-engine down the mountain’s slope like a solitary leaf gliding on the wind, the plane’s shadow racing across the tips of the trees. Gretchen felt as though she were dropping through an elevator shaft. Percy leveled out at the base of the mountain and began to gain altitude again, the engines straining, a barn and a white ranch house couched inside poplar trees miniaturizing as Gretchen looked out the window. “Where’d that red Cessna go?” Percy said.

“I don’t know. Just don’t do that again,” she said.

“Everything’s cool,” he replied. He touched a religious medal that hung from a chain on his instrument panel. “What can go wrong when you have Saint Christopher with you?”

“I don’t find your attitude reassuring,” she said.

They flew along the edges of the Grand Divide and Glacier National Park, where the flat plains seemed to collide with the mountains. On the western end of the Blackfoot Reservation, Gretchen saw several test wells, one close to the border of the park. The plane climbed higher into the mountains and made a wide turn over Marias Pass. She could see snow packed inside the trees on the crests and the slopes, and deep down in the canyon, an emerald river that wound through boulders that were as big as houses.

She pulled open her window. “Get down as close as you can,” she said.

“What are you doing?”

“Filming. That’s why we’re here.”

“You want to fly through that canyon?”

“You’ve got to do something for kicks.”