LATE THE NEXT afternoon, Candace Sweeney dressed by the bed while Troyce was showering. Through the open door, she could see his used bandages in the wastebasket. They were dry, unspotted by blood, and had been that way for three days. For the first time she began to believe that Troyce would heal in both body and spirit and that an opportunity was at hand for the two of them to simply step through a door into a life that would have no connection to their pasts.
“You believe in karma?” she said through the door.
He turned off the water and began drying himself on top of the bath mat. His body was pink from the shower heat, the hard contours of his chest and ribs and the flatness of his stomach a study in power and masculinity, his wounds like black zippers on his skin.
“Karma is for people looking for excuses, if you ask me,” he said.
“There’s different kinds of karma,” Candace said. “It’s like people’s lives are supposed to intersect, but not because that’s their fate. The intersection is the place where they make the choice that results in their fate. See?”
“No.”
“It means a certain kind of fate doesn’t have to be ours. It means there are people we’re destined to meet. It’s them that lets us choose the door we’re supposed to walk through.”
“Where’d you get all this stuff?” he said, smiling, wiping at his hair with the towel.
“From a guy who used to smoke dope with us in Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland.”
“You’re cute,” he said.
“You don’t take me seriously sometimes, Troyce.”
“Always,” he said, placing a towel on the bedspread, then sitting down nude next to her. He put his arm around her shoulders. “You’ve got the prettiest-shaped face of any woman I ever knowed. I love your tattoos, too. Not many women look good tattooed, but you do.”
She placed her hand on his thigh. She could smell the clean odor of his hair and feel the heat his skin gave off. “We could just go away. Pack it up and start all over,” she said.
“Where?”
“Washington or Oregon. We could open a café in the Cascades for tourists and loggers. I’m a good cook, Troyce. I know everything there is about food service. The key to a café’s success is having a good cook and making sure your suppliers aren’t cheating you. You’d be good at managing a café. You ever been to the Cascades?”
“I don’t see that happening right now.”
She thought a long time before she spoke again. “Troyce?”
“What is it, you little honey bunny?”
“You’re in over your head.”
“Not to my mind, I ain’t.”
“Messing with rich people like the Wellstones? Think you’re gonna come up here and write the rules with people like that?”
“You ain’t got to tell me about the likes of the Wellstones. I knowed their kind all my life.”
“Your wounds are healing up now. Isn’t that a sign?”
“Of what?”
“Those choices I was talking about. The fate that’s waiting for us if we’ll just reach out and take it.”
“The choice right now is what kind of steak we’re gonna order at that club up yonder.”
He patted her on the back, then slipped on his boxer shorts and began combing his hair in front of the mirror.
“You want me to put on fresh bandages for you?” she asked, her face blank now, all of her arguments used up.
“Don’t worry about them rich people. They ain’t interested in folks like us. We ain’t got nothing they want,” Troyce said.
“We went to their house. We told them we know their business. You told them you beat up one of their employees. They won’t forget it,” she said.
He stopped combing his hair and looked at her reflection in the mirror.
Ten minutes later, when they were about to leave, someone with a heavy fist knocked hard on the door. Candace peeked through the window curtain. A man with sandy blond hair and a scar that ran through one eyebrow waited in front of the door. He wore a porkpie hat and a Hawaiian shirt that was almost bursting at the shoulders. A semi passed on the road, and the man turned and watched it disappear around a bend. The back of his neck was oily and pockmarked. His whole body seemed to be supercharged by energies that it could barely contain.
“Who is it?” Troyce said to Candace.
“A guy who looks like a cop or a bill collector,” she replied.
“Let him in. It’s been a dull day,” Troyce said.
CLETE PURCEL OPENED his badge holder when he entered the room and introduced himself. The room smelled of aftershave and hair tonic. “Albert Hollister gave me the name of your motel,” he said. “He says you’re interested in finding a guy by the name of Jimmy Dale Greenwood. An Indian, I think.”
“More like a breed,” Troyce said. “Know where he’s at?”
“Can’t say I do. You know who Ridley and Leslie Wellstone are?”
Clete saw the young woman’s eyes shift onto Nix’s face.
“I know they’re probably the richest people in the state of Texas,” Nix replied.
Clete studied Nix’s expression. It was relaxed and confident, even good-natured. Clete said, “Somebody tried to light me up, Mr. Nix. Problem is, I got no idea who. But one way or another-”
“Light you up?” the woman said.
“A man in a mask sapped me with a blackjack and tied me to a tree and poured gasoline on me and tried to burn me alive. I don’t know who this dude is, but one way or another, I think he’s involved with the Wellstones. You have any opinion on that, Mr. Nix?”
“Not really. Jimmy Dale Greenwood is a fugitive from the law. He escaped while in the custody of a contract prison which I’m a founding officer of. He was also the boyfriend of Jamie Sue Wellstone, formerly Jamie Sue Stapleton. Does that clear things up for you, Mr. Purcel?”
“There’re people who think you kicked the shit out of a guy by the name of Quince Whitley. Why would you do a thing like that, Mr. Nix?”
“Troyce hasn’t done anything wrong,” the woman said. “I think you need to spend more time at Weight Watchers and quit bothering people who haven’t bothered you.”
Clete saw Nix suppress a laugh. The woman was three feet from Clete, her thumbs hooked in her back pockets, her chin and her boobs pointed at him. She wore a Mexican blouse and black jeans and had a small Irish mouth and bangs like a little girl’s.
“I had a friend run Quince Whitley’s sheet,” Clete said to Nix. “Guess what. He doesn’t have one. Does it seem reasonable to you that a dude like that wouldn’t have a sheet?”
“I’m not interested in this fellow you’re talking about,” Nix replied.
“You should be. I made a couple of calls to the county in Mississippi where he grew up. Quince put out a girl’s eye with a BB gun when he was ten. A retired sheriff told me he thought Quince and two of his friends dropped a log from a railroad overpass through the windshield of an automobile. They almost killed the driver, a black man from Memphis. But the log and any prints on it disappeared the same night. Quince’s uncle was in charge of the investigation. The uncle was also an officer in the Ku Klux Klan. That’s why Quince doesn’t have a sheet. Are you going to bother my friend Mr. Hollister again?”
“I couldn’t care less about your friend, Mr. Purcel. Second of all, I don’t think that’s why you’re here. You’ve got a bug up your ass about either the Wellstone family or Jimmy Dale Greenwood. Which is it, or is it both?”
“Two college kids were abducted from the hillside behind the university and murdered. One of them wore a wood cross. It was of a kind that kids in the Wellstone ministry program are given. Then a California couple who had been drinking in a saloon on Swan Lake with Jamie Sue Wellstone were murdered in a rest stop on the interstate west of Missoula. The woman was set on fire in the toilet stall. I think the guy who committed these murders is the same guy who tried to turn me into a candle. If I find out you’re holding back on me, Mr. Nix, you and I will be shooting the breeze again.”
“Listen, lard ass, nobody invited you here,” the woman said. “Go to a blubber farm or get your stomach stapled. Just go somewhere else. Think about changing your brand of deodorant while you’re at it.”
Clete gave Nix and his girlfriend a long look. Nix was laughing under his breath while the girlfriend stared up into Clete’s face with what seemed to be barely restrained outrage. Except Clete was convinced her emotions were manufactured.
“Thanks for your time. Welcome to Montana. It’s a real tolerant place,” Clete said.
He went outside into the twilight and got into his Caddy. He let out his breath and started the engine, revving it up senselessly. What had he accomplished? he asked himself. Nothing, except perhaps to indicate to Troyce Nix that Nix had gotten close to finding Jimmy Dale Greenwood, also known as J. D. Gribble. Clete shifted the transmission into reverse. The convertible top was down and the air was cool, the hills along the winding two-lane road already purple with shadow. Just as he began to back onto the asphalt, he heard footsteps on the gravel.
Troyce Nix’s girlfriend cupped both of her hands on top of the passenger door. Her eyes were glistening. “Were you saying this guy Quince Whitley might be the one who killed all those people?” she asked.
“Ask your bozo boyfriend,” Clete said, and gunned the Caddy onto the highway.
As he sped away, the young woman grew smaller in his rearview mirror, his dust drifting back into her face. Way to go, Purcel, he thought. Next time out, beat up on a cerebral palsy victim.
THE SUNSET HAD died on the far side of the mountain when Candace Sweeney and Troyce Nix pulled into the club up the road from their motel. The bottom of the valley was dark with shadow, but the sky overhead was still blue, tinged with the pink afterglow of the sun, the moon as thin as a wafer over the mountains that jutted straight up from the south banks of the Clark Fork River. The day was cooling rapidly, the eastern sky starting to grow dark, like the color of a bruise. Candace could smell smoke blowing from a fire up in the Swans. The smell seemed to hang in the air, to wrap itself around her skin and seep into her lungs. She wondered if it was an omen.
“It’s too early in the season for fires,” she said. “June is always wet. There’re no serious fires here till August.”
“Well, they’re not burning here,” Troyce said, walking beside her toward the club’s entrance.
“You ever been to Portland or Vancouver?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“You’d like it out there, the fishing and outdoors and all. It’s green all year round, like down south. Like Miami, except with rain and cool weather.”
He was still wearing his shades, even though the sun had set. He pulled them off and slipped them in a leather case. He pinched the bridge of his nose and blinked. “We can check it out,” he said. “In the meantime, ain’t nobody running us off. That ain’t our way.”
She didn’t pursue it.
The inside of the club was crowded, the country band located on the far side of the dance floor, the tables filled with people who were drinking pitcher beer and eating fried chicken and pork-chop sandwiches and steaks ordered from the truck-stop café that adjoined the main building. Candace and Troyce had to take a table by the entrance, one that gave them a poor view of the bandstand and dance floor. Troyce kept trying to get the waiter’s eye.
“This is gonna take all night. I’ll get a pitcher from the bar and order direct from next door,” he said, getting up from his chair. “Don’t run off with no movie stars.”
“What movie stars?” she said, looking up at him.
“Look yonder at the end of the bar.”
A man with rugged good looks was buying a round for a half-dozen people who were gathered around him, much like candle moths hovering around a flame inside a glass chimney.
“He’s in that new western,” Candace said.
“And he was looking at you, darlin’. Tell him you’re taken.”
“That’s silly,” she said.
But after Troyce left, she realized the actor was looking at her with a faint smile while he pretended to listen to the conversation going on around him. He set his glass down and approached her table. She studied the tops of her hands. When she looked up again the actor was standing two feet from her, his fingers resting on the back of Troyce’s empty chair.
“I wondered if you and your friend would like to join us,” he said.
“We just ordered dinner,” she replied.
“After you eat, come over to the bar for a drink.”
He was of medium height but extremely handsome in the way that some men can be handsome without trying, his dark hair freshly barbered, his skin clear, his dress shirt and gray slacks loose on his athletic frame.
“Thank you, but we just came here to eat.” She glanced toward the doorway that led into the truck stop. “We’re probably not staying long.”
“You ought to. They got a great band. There’s a guy sitting in with them who’s really good.”
“Thanks for the invitation. We’re just going to eat.”
“You ever do any film work?”
“No. I don’t know anything about it.”
“I’d like to talk to you about it. Your friend, too. He’s got an unusual face. Was he in an accident of some kind?”
“I’m a cook. Listen, I love your movies, but you’re talking to the wrong person.” She tried to smile. She looked toward the entrance to the truck stop again. “I think my friend is coming back with our food.”
“It’s nice meeting you,” the actor said. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Candace. Excuse me, I got to go to the restroom.”
“Where do you live?”
“In a motel up the road. No, I’m kidding. Troyce and me own half of Beverly Hills. We eat in dumps like this for kicks.”
“If you change your mind, Candace, we’ll be at the bar. I’m not hitting on you. I meant what I said.”
When Candace returned from the restroom, her heart was still pounding. Troyce was sitting at the table, a foaming pitcher and two glasses in front of him.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” he said.
“About what?”
“That guy had his eye on you.”
“He wanted to invite us for a drink. He said maybe both of us could work in films. I think he was just being a nice guy, that’s all.”
“Yeah?” he said, grinning. “What’d you tell him?”
“That we were having dinner. You’re not gonna do anything, are you?”
“You know better than that,” he said playfully. “I ordered your steak medium well done, with a baked potato and double melted butter and a salad with buttermilk dressing. That’s what you wanted, right?”
But she realized she didn’t know better than that. In his dreams, Troyce traveled to places she could never enter, and he saw things and heard sounds inside closed rooms that she refused to let herself think about. When she watched the news about a distant war where American soldiers trudged through biscuit-colored villages blown with flies and garbage, she tried to imagine Troyce as one of them, brave, uncomplaining, his uniform stiff with salt, his skin gray with dust, like a Roman legionnaire coming out of a sandstorm. But all she could think of was Troyce in a closed room while a man with a towel wrapped around his face was being drowned.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the actor take a mixed drink from the bartender and place it in the hand of a windburned, dark-featured man who wore jeans and a denim jacket and whose unshaved face was the same as that of the man in the jailhouse photo that Troyce carried in his billfold. Her beer glass trembled in her hand.
“That fellow eyeballing you again?” Troyce said.
“No,” she said, taking his wrist, keeping his eyes on hers. “Troyce, let’s go over to the Cascades. We can stop for the night in Coeur d’Alene and go on in the morning. I’ll show you the place where we can start up our café. We can have a good life there.”
“I declare if you’re not a puzzle,” he replied.
WITHOUT TROYCE NIX’S ever noticing, a diesel-powered fire-engine-red pickup truck with oversize tires and headlights that sparkled had followed him from the motel to the club. Now the driver of the pickup sat in the cab in the parking lot, gazing through the windshield at the front of the club, wondering about his next move. The driver was wearing neatly pressed navy blue work pants and a wide belt with a big chrome buckle and a magenta shirt that changed colors in the light. He also wore a black vest, with a silk back, like a nineteenth-century gunfighter or a riverboat gambler might wear. He had shaved and gotten a haircut that afternoon and had showered and washed his hair. He had put on a Resistol hat and a new pair of Acme pointy-toed boots. Looking at himself in the mirror before he left his garage apartment on the Wellstone estate, he hardly recognized his reflection. He had drawn all his money out of the bank and had put eight one-hundred-dollar bills in his wallet, clipped by a chain onto his belt. He had also dropped a clasp knife with a hooked blade for cutting thick twine into his trouser pocket.
Somehow, in surrendering himself to the deeds he was about to commit, Quince Whitley had discovered he possessed a persona he had never thought would be his, namely that of a Mississippi farm boy who had become the debonair scourge of God. That thought caused a surge in his blood that was like his first time with a black girl, way back when it was exciting, back before he stopped keeping count.
“Getting your ashes hauled tonight?” Lyle Hobbs had asked him.
Quince had just finished combing his hair. He blew the dandruff out of the comb’s leather case and slipped the comb inside. “That’s one way to put it. Except the lady doesn’t necessarily know what’s on her dance card yet,” Quince had said.
In the silence, Lyle had seemed to look at Quince in a different light.
Now Quince sat tapping his hands on the steering wheel, staring whimsically at the split-log facade of the club and the strings of tiny white lights that framed the windows and the dark shadow of the mountain that lifted into the sky just beyond the rear of the building. He could hear the music of a country band, a clatter of dishware, and a balloon of voices when a door opened and closed. He could play the situation several ways, but he knew Quince Whitley’s time had come around at last, and all the people who had hurt him, including that burned freak and his wife up at Swan Lake, were going to get their buckwheats. You just don’t dump on a Whitley, bubba, whether it’s in Mississippi or Montana or Blow Me, North Dakota.
He removed a twenty-five-caliber automatic from under the dashboard and Velcro-strapped it to his right ankle. From under the seat he removed a small brown plastic-capped bottle of sulfuric acid, wrapped it carefully in a handkerchief, and slipped it into his pants pocket. Then he walked around behind the club and entered through the back door so he could sit in a dark area where the bar curved into the wall and watch the band and the dancers on the floor and the people eating at the tables in the front of the building.
TROYCE WAS ENJOYING his T-bone, forking meat and french fries into his mouth with his left hand. He drank from his beer and winked at Candace. “Don’t be worrying, little darlin’. People like us is forever,” he said.
“You’re willful and hardheaded, Troyce.”
“If you don’t find your enemies, your enemies will find you.”
“My father’s nickname was Smilin’ Jack. He had impractical dreams. He thought he was gonna find gold in the Cascades,” she said.
“Yeah?” Troyce said, not understanding.
“I don’t know if he found his gold or not. If he did, he probably died doing it. He never came out of the mountains. But he believed in his dreams.”
“Your meaning is I don’t?”
“You don’t know how to dream. You’re caught up in a mission. You’re like a bat trying to find its hole in the daylight.”
“Wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”
“You break my heart,” she said.
He crossed his knife and fork on his plate and rested his hands on the table. “I thought you wanted to come here,” he said. “What the hell is going on?”
She stared at nothing, her face wan.
“I bet your old man was a good guy,” Troyce said. “It’s too bad he went away. But everybody gets hurt. Life’s a sonofabitch, then you die. In the meantime, you don’t let people run you over.”
She thought about leaving and walking back to the motel. But if she did that, eventually she would have to tell Troyce why – namely that she had recognized the man he had come to Montana to find. “The food is real good. I’m glad we came here,” she said. “After we eat, I’d like to go back to the motel, though. I’m not feeling too good.”
He picked up his knife and fork and began eating again. A few minutes later, up on the bandstand, the dark-skinned man in jeans and a denim jacket sat down in a straight-back chair and placed a Dobro across his thighs. Another musician lowered a microphone so it would pick up the notes from the Dobro’s resonator. The man in the denim jacket slipped three steel picks on his left hand and slid a chrome-plated bar along the guitar’s neck, the resonator picking up the steel hum of the strings, a sustained tremolo like the vibration in the blade of a saw. The band and the man in the denim jacket began to play in earnest. Troyce kept eating, seemingly unmindful of the music, his face empty.
Then he looked up from his plate and smiled. “What’s the name of that piece?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“It’s a Bob Wills number, ain’t it?” he said.
“I don’t know, Troyce,” she replied.
“‘Cimarron,’ that’s what it is,” he said.
“I got to go to the restroom. I really don’t feel good.”
But Troyce had spent a lifetime reading lies in other people’s faces. “Did that actor upset you? Tell me the truth. I’m not gonna hurt him. You got my word. But tell me what’s going on here.”
“I got the headspins, that’s all. I don’t know what it is.”
She got up unsteadily from the table and walked between the dance floor and the groups of people drinking at the bar. The actor was facing the bar, talking to his friends. When he saw her approach, he stepped away from them into her path. “Decide to join us?” he said.
“Tell the guy playing the bottle-neck guitar that Troyce Nix is here. Tell him to get his ass out the back door,” Candace said.
“That’s J. D. Gribble. He’s a quiet, gentle guy. I think you’ve got him mistaken for somebody else.”
“I don’t know his name. If you like your friend, take him somewhere else, you hear me?” she said.
“What’d he do?”
“You asked if Troyce was in an accident. The accident was the guy up there on the bandstand.”
The actor raised his eyebrows and set his drink on the bar. His cheeks were slightly sunken, his jaw well defined, his eyes clear as he looked at her. “I’d like to help,” he said. “But it’s not my business.”
She walked away, not surprised by the actor’s unwillingness to involve himself in the plight of another, but oddly depressed just the same. When she returned from the restroom, the actor was still looking at her. “I did it,” he said.
“Did what?”
“What you said. I did it. But I don’t think J.D. could hear me over the noise. He was toking on a jay earlier. I tried. What’s your last name?”
“Why?”
“You’re fucking beautiful is why.”
“It’s my tattoos and the pits in my skin that turn men on,” she replied.
When she sat back down with Troyce, he was looking at her strangely. “Were you talking with that actor again?”
“He said I was beautiful.”
“He’s got good judgment.”
“My stomach’s not right. I’d like to go back to the motel,” she said.
“You’re jerking me around about something. I just don’t know what it is,” he replied.
“You ever hear of Looney Larry Lewis?”
“No.”
“He was a black roller-derby star in Miami. He told me I was the only girl he ever met who was as crazy as he was. He meant it as a compliment. I can’t finish my food.”
Troyce put down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair. He wiped his mouth with a paper towel and dropped the towel on the table. “I’ll get a box,” he said.
CLETE PURCEL CALLED me on his cell phone just after nine P.M. I had not seen him all day. Since he had become involved with Special Agent Rosecrans, which in Clete’s case meant in the sack and in trouble, I had seen less and less of him.
“I’m in the parking lot of a joint on the two-lane in East Missoula. I could use some backup,” he said.
“What’s the deal?” I asked.
“I interviewed this prison guard Troyce Nix and his girlfriend at their motel, then decided to follow them later, just to see what might develop. So I ended up at this juke joint where-”
“Why are you following Nix?”
“Because both he and his girlfriend are hinky.”
“In what way?”
“The guy who tried to fry me had a mask on. I don’t think it was because he’s seen too many chain-saw movies. I think his face is deformed, like Nix’s or the sheriff’s or Leslie Wellstone’s.”
“We’ve talked about this before.”
“Quince Whitley is here, too.”
“Where?”
“At the juke joint. Are you listening to anything I say?”
“Anything else going on?”
“Yeah, J. D. Gribble is up on the bandstand. How’s that for a perfecta? Jesus-”
“What?”
“I’m outside. Gribble just came out the back door with this actor and some other people. What’s that actor’s name, the guy in that new western? They’re smoking dope.”
QUINCE WHITLEY WAS getting sick of watching this collection of Hollywood characters down the bar from him. Who were they, anyway? They all thought their shit was chocolate ice cream, but probably not one of them had ever heard of Tammy Wynette or Marty Stuart or knew they came from Mississippi, or knew that Marty Stuart was from Neshoba County, where those civil rights workers got killed back in the 1960s, because that racial crap was all they cared about, not the fact that a celebrity like Elvis grew up in Tupelo. One guy had even been hitting on Troyce Nix’s punch, keeping his eyes level with hers, like he wasn’t aware of her tattooed bongos sticking out of the top of her blouse. For just a second Quince entertained a fantasy in which he was a movie director, orchestrating the deaths of Nix, the girl, and the actor, turning the three of them into a bloody swatch across a camera lens. Now, that would be a movie worth seeing, he thought.
From his bar stool in the shadows, he had a wide view of the building’s interior, with enough people between him and Nix and the girl so they wouldn’t take particular notice of him. Also, he realized that his new persona – clean-shaved, immaculately dressed, his sideburns trimmed, the Resistol low on his brow – was not cosmetic. Quince had become somebody else, on his own, no longer taking orders from the Wellstones. He was the captain of his soul, with the power to arbitrarily decide whom he would leave his mark on.
“See that couple eating at the table by the door?” he said to the bartender.
“What about them?” the bartender said, looking at Quince, not the doorway.
“Send them some Champale or a beer and a shot or whatever they’re drinking. Just don’t tell them who sent it over.”
“Somebody’s birthday?” the bartender asked.
“Something like that.”
“I’m a mixologist. Talk to the table waiter.”
“I should have known that. I can see this is an uptown joint,” Quince said.
The band had taken a break, and the actor who had been scoping out Nix’s girl was going in and out of the back door with one of the guitar players, a guy who looked familiar for some reason. The guitar player had put his Dobro in a case and carried it outside with him; he was evidently through playing for the evening. He looked like a Mexican or an Indian. Where had Quince seen him? Was he the guy the Wellstones were looking for, the one who had been putting the wood to Jamie Sue down in Texas? No, it couldn’t be. Not unless the guy had a death wish or wanted to go back to prison.
Whenever the back door opened and closed, Quince could smell an odor like leaves and damp moss burning on a winter day. Those Hollywood douche bags were smoking dope in full view in a state that still officially employed a hangman. What a bunch of idiots, he thought. Then he glanced toward the front of the building. Troyce Nix was boxing up his girlfriend’s food, preparing to leave.
Quince swallowed the rest of his beer and went out the back door, ignoring the dope smokers and the breed with the guitar case. How was Quince going to play it with Nix and the girl? Answer: any way he felt like it. The “new” Quince was in control, dealing the play, doing what he wanted to his victims, every moment of their fate in his hands. His victims didn’t have any kick coming, either. The girl had dissed him at the gas pump up in the Swan, and Nix had attacked him without provocation in the can, smashing his head into the rubber machine, breaking his mouth and bridge apart on the rim of the bowl. Maybe he should take down Nix and the girl in an isolated place where he could make each of them watch the fate of the other. The thought made his colon constrict and his genitalia hum like a nest of bees. This was a payback he was going to savor.
The question was one of method and how to make it hurt as long as possible. He stood at the corner of the building and watched Nix and the girl emerge from the front door and walk toward their SUV. The mountainsides were black with shadow, the trees hardly distinguishable, the sky purple, Venus twinkling in the west. Quince watched Nix open the passenger door for his girl, then hand her the boxed remnants of her supper.
Take both Nix and the girl down at once? Or pop Nix with the twenty-five and get the girl into the truck?
Bad idea. Gunfire would draw witnesses. Quince’s concept of revenge did not include doing time in Deer Lodge. The challenge was to get Nix out of the way so he could mess up the girl proper. He wondered how Nix would like her without a nose or with eyes that had been burned out of their sockets.
Nix shut the passenger door and started around the front of the vehicle. Then he touched his shirt pocket. The girl rolled down the window and stuck her head out. “What is it?” she said.
“Guess,” he said.
“I saw them on the table,” she said.
“I’ll be right back,” Nix said.
Quince couldn’t believe his luck. Nix was headed back inside the nightclub, and the girl with the muskmelon boobs had gotten out of the SUV and propped her ass against the headlight while she watched a Forest Service slurry bomber approach the airport.
The girl first, then Nix later, Quince thought. So Nix would have the opportunity to see what happened when you tried to dump on a Whitley.
THE MAN WHO called himself J. D. Gribble took a final hit off the roach clips being passed around the circle, hefted up his Dobro case, and said good night to his newly acquired friends.
“Come see me in the Palisades,” the actor said. “I really dig your voice. You sound like Ben Johnson. I could cast you in a minute.”
“Who’s Ben Johnson?” J.D. asked.
J.D.’s new friends grinned, pretty sure he was kidding. J.D. walked along the side of the nightclub into the main parking lot. He never did well with booze or weed, and he could not explain why he used either one. But use them he did. This evening he’d drunk four beers and smoked dope on top of them, and now the high he had experienced had been replaced by feelings of both corpulence and carnality, as though his metabolism had been systemically invaded by weevil worms. He paused and took a breath under a cone of light emanating from a pole above his head. The air was heavy and damp and stained with smoke from fires that were breaking out north of Seeley Lake. Then he proceeded toward Albert Hollister’s pickup truck, which he had borrowed for the evening. But something was happening on the periphery of his vision, something that was out of place or wrong or nonsensical, like a broken shard of memory that had tangled itself on the corner of his eye.
A man in a cowboy hat and western vest like a gunfighter would wear was walking toward an SUV. J.D. thought he had seen the same man outside the café on Swan Lake, sitting behind the wheel of Jamie Sue Wellstone’s Mercedes, waiting patiently for her to leave the saloon next door. Even in that innocuous setting, J.D. had made Jamie Sue’s driver as a violent man for hire. But why would he be here? Had Leslie Wellstone finally run J.D. to ground and sicced his dogs on him?
A girl was leaning against the front end of the SUV, watching a large plane descend through the valley toward the airport. Her back was turned to the man in the vest.
J.D. stepped out of the cone of light and let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The man in the vest held a brown pill bottle in his right hand and was unscrewing the cap as he walked. His trousers were tight on his hips, the bottoms tucked into his cowboy boots. A fat wallet on a chain protruded from his back pocket. The silk back of his vest glowed like dull tin when a pair of car lights flashed across it. He moved mechanically, his torso rigid, his stiff hat jiggling on his head. J.D. saw him hold the uncapped bottle away from his body, his fingers pinched hard against the glass, careful not to spill the contents on his skin. The girl heard the sound of feet on the gravel and turned around. She was smiling, as though she expected to see a friend.
MY CELL RANG at 9:21 P.M. “What’s your ten-twenty? There’s some weird shit going down,” Clete said.
“There’s been an accident on Brooks. What weird shit?” I said.
“Gribble and Whitley are both in the parking lot. So is Nix’s girl. Dave-”
The connection went dead.
QUINCE WHITLEY COULD smell the fumes rising from the bottle in his hand. He had wanted to bring a paper cup of water with him and throw it in the girl’s face before he hit her with the acid. His uncle the Klansman had told him sulfuric acid and water produced a devastating combination on human tissue, but there hadn’t been time to plan. Well, that’s just the way it was. No worry, though. Pitching the acid directly into her eyes would do the job, and it was doubtful that the girl would ever be identifying her attacker in a lineup.
She had been smiling when he approached her, but now she was staring at him curiously, not recognizing him, the smile starting to die on her mouth. It took all of Quince’s self-restraint not to tell her who he was before he stole her sight and destroyed her face.
“Hey, you! What the hell you doin’?” a voice called out.
Quince’s head jerked sideways, and he almost spilled the acid on himself. The musician he had seen on the bandstand was running at him, his guitar case swinging out in front of him, like a man trying to catch a train.
Do it now, Quince thought. Then drop the breed and bag ass. Do it, do it, do it.
He flung the acid at the girl’s face. But the breed lifted his guitar case in front of her, and the acid flattened against its top and foamed on the plastic and cardboard and filled the air with a stench like rotten eggs. Some of the splatter also landed on Quince’s hand and wrist and cheek, and the pain was like someone touching his skin with a soldering iron.
But his ordeal was not over. The breed smashed him in the face with the end of the guitar case, knocking him backward onto the gravel. Quince tried to make sense out of what was happening to him. Only seconds earlier, he had been the “new” Quince Whitley, in control, dressed like a gunfighter, painted with magic, the giver of death. Now he lay in a parking lot, his skin burning, far from the place of his birth, a girl – no, a bitch – and a half-breed staring down at him, their faces dour with disgust and loathing, not because of what he had tried to do but because of what he was – a failure, unwanted in the womb, despised at birth, raised in a world where every day he had to prove he was better than a black person.
What does a Whitley do when he doesn’t have anything else to lose?
He could almost hear his uncle’s voice: “That one’s easy, boy. Leave hair on the walls.”
Quince got to his feet, pulling the twenty-five auto from the Velcro-strapped holster on his ankle. “Suck on this, all y’all, starting with you, sweetheart,” he said. He felt his finger tighten inside the trigger guard. He aimed carefully so the first round would take the girl in the mouth.
That was when Clete Purcel came out of nowhere and lifted his thirty-eight revolver with both hands and blew Quince Whitley’s skullcap and brains all over Troyce Nix’s windshield.