THERE HAD BEEN a three-car pileup on Evaro Hill, the narrow pass that leads up to the plateau on which the Jocko Valley is geologically located, and vacationer traffic had been backed up to the interstate. Clete had tried to work his way through a number of cars, then had clamped an emergency flasher on the dash – one he was not legally empowered to use – and had swung out on the shoulder and driven over the pass onto the Flathead reservation.
When we arrived at the bar, the first person we saw was Troyce Nix, wandering in the rear of the parking area, looking in all directions, raindrops spotting his hat. Clete pulled up abreast of him, rolling down the window. “What’s going on?” he said.
“She’s gone,” Nix replied.
“Who’s gone?” Clete said.
“Candace is. I went inside to use the restroom, and I come out, and she was gone,” Nix said.
“What are you all doing here?” Clete said.
“Looking for Jimmy Dale Greenwood.”
“How’d you know Greenwood was going to be here?” Clete said.
“I followed the bartender from Swan Lake, a guy by the name of Harold Waxman. What are y’all doing here?”
“Same thing you are. Start over again,” Clete said.
But Troyce Nix wasn’t faring too well. He wandered about in a daze, staring at the tire marks next to the white Camry, staring at the two-lane road that led through the valley and up a rise into mountains that seemed stacked higher and higher against the western sun. I got out of the Caddy and placed my hand on his shoulder. When he turned and looked at me, I could see a sense of loss and bewilderment in his eyes that I did not associate with a man of his size and physical strength.
“Nobody saw anything?” I said.
“I went back inside. Nobody was interested. It’s Saturday on the res,” he replied.
“You didn’t see a suspicious vehicle in the parking lot?” I asked.
“I told you, I didn’t see anything. I wouldn’t have left her out here if I’d seen something. What are you trying to say to me?”
“I was just asking you a question, partner. Why would somebody take your girlfriend?”
I could see a thought working in his eyes. “The bartender inside said a couple of Indian guys left. Then he said the bus stopped outside.”
“Who were the Indian guys?”
“Just guys, feed growers. They drink here reg’lar. It’s not them.”
“Somebody got off the bus?”
“I asked the bartender that. He didn’t see nobody. He said it stops there sometimes to pick up people. They stand by the road, and the bus picks them up.”
I wasn’t getting anywhere with Troyce Nix. I flipped open my cell phone. No service. I went to the Camry and searched under the fenders for a magnetized key box. If one was there, I couldn’t find it.
“Come over here, Dave,” Clete said.
He was standing by the Camry. He pointed at the ground. There were fresh divots in it, funnel-shaped tracks like those of someone who had been wearing cowboy boots, someone who had been struggling. “Look over there,” he said.
Next to a set of fresh tire imprints were a half-dozen drops of blood on the gravel, each of them star-pointed around the edges. Clete squatted down and touched the blood with his ballpoint pen. “It’s still wet,” he said.
“What do you want to do?” I said.
“Why ask me?” he said.
“You’re the guy that bozo tried to light up.”
“You think we’re getting set up?” he said.
“No, but I think Jimmy Dale Greenwood was DOA before he ever got here. There’s no key under any of the Camry’s fenders. I have a feeling the Sweeney woman saw what happened, and the guys who grabbed Greenwood took her along with them.”
Clete opened his cell and started to punch in a number, then realized he didn’t have a signal. “I’m going to use the phone inside and call Alicia,” he said.
“Then what?” I said.
“In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“What about Troyce Nix?”
“That’s one dude we can do without.”
“He may not read it that way.”
“That’s his problem.”
We went inside the bar, and Clete used the pay phone to leave a message for Alicia Rosecrans. I used it to call Jamie Sue Wellstone’s cell, but she didn’t pick up. When we drove back onto the two-lane and headed toward the Swan Valley by way of Flathead Lake, Troyce Nix was standing in the middle of the parking lot, our dust drifting back across his hat.
FOR CANDACE SWEENEY, time was an odyssey in a wood-wheeled wagon down a broken road, each jolt forming another threadlike crack in a piece of bone here, a piece of connective tissue there. Even after her mouth and eyes and ankles were wrapped with duct tape, and her wrists fastened with plastic ligatures behind her, she knew her physical presence still represented a threat to the three men who had abducted her and Jimmy Dale Greenwood. Inside the rocking shell of the van, she could almost smell the self-centered fear that governed their lives and their immediate situation. And if she didn’t smell it, she could hear it in their conversation.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen, man. We were supposed to grab the guy and deliver the freight. In and out. Let that fucking geek handle the rest.”
“Why you looking at me? I didn’t do it.” It was the voice of the blond man.
“You didn’t do it? You let a dimwit broad with tats on her tits bust open your face. You don’t call that doing it?”
“I told you this deal sucked from the start. You don’t take down somebody in broad daylight on Saturday afternoon behind a bar on the res,” the blond man replied.
“The key word there is ‘res,’ Layne. Committing a crime on a federal reservation isn’t the way it was supposed to be. The blood is on the rocks back there.”
“Listen, you guys, we stay with the plan,” a third voice said. “We deliver the guy. We were just giving him a ride, that’s all. Then he started fighting with us ’cause he’s on meth or something. We drop the guy off, and that’s the end of it.”
“What about the gash?”
“Same thing. She was with the guy. She attacked us. What the geek does with them ain’t our business. We’re just doing a job. Look, nobody saw what happened back there. Only one story comes out of this deal. You just heard the story. That’s the story. That’s what history is, right? History is the story that survives.”
“Yeah, but I got one more message for our girlfriend,” Layne said. “Hand it to me.”
“That’s sick, man.”
“Yeah? Take a look at my face.”
“Some might call it an improvement.” There was a long silence inside the van. “Okay, man, but I think you ought to get some help.”
Candace heard someone turn around in the front seat, as though handing something to the man named Layne. She had little doubt about what was coming next. The blond man had already beaten her with his fists after she had been put in the van, uttering the same insatiable grinding sound he had made earlier.
The Taser arced into her back with a level of penetration and pain that seemed to radiate out through her muscles like hundreds of yellow jackets stinging her simultaneously.
“How do you like it, girlie?” Layne said.
“Maybe you should team up with the geek,” the driver said.
“The gash asked for it. The geek don’t need a reason. Give me that box of Kleenex. I can’t stop bleeding.”
Somehow, perhaps because of the convulsion she had experienced on the floor of the van when the Taser struck her back, a piece of tape had loosened enough from one eye so she could see Jimmy Dale Greenwood lying next to her. He was bound hand and foot, just as she was, the tape wound so tightly around his eyes that she could see the outline of his skull against his skin. But his captors had used tape on his wrists instead of ligatures, and Candace could see him twisting his balled fists back and forth, stretching the elasticity of the tape with each movement.
“You want to stop at a drive-through for some eats?” the blond man said.
“What about them?” the passenger in front said.
“I’ll throw a blanket over them.”
“We got food at the cabin. You two shut the fuck up,” the driver said.
CLETE FLOORED THE Caddy up through Ravalli and Ronan, the Mission Mountains so high in the sky that the waterfalls at the top were still braided with ice. Then we were headed north along the shore of Flathead Lake, passing cherry stands and homes built of stone by the water and sailboats that had given up and were coming out of the rain. The Caddy shook as we went into the turns, drifting slightly in the slick, on one occasion sucking past an oncoming camper with perhaps only three inches to spare.
I opened my cell phone and saw that I had a signal. I punched in Jamie Wellstone’s number. She answered on the third ring.
“Ms. Wellstone, it’s Dave Robicheaux,” I said.
“Where’s Jimmy Dale?” she asked.
“We’re not sure. The Camry is still at the bar.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying. The Camry is at the bar but Jimmy Dale is not? Maybe he hasn’t arrived.”
“No, we think he’s been abducted. We think a woman by the name of Candace Sweeney may have been abducted with him.”
“What is she doing there?”
Perhaps trying to save your boyfriend’s life, I said to myself. “Does your husband own a camp, a cabin, a boathouse, a place only he goes to?”
“Leslie’s here, inside the house.”
“Would you answer the question, please?”
“I’m trying to think. No, he doesn’t have a place like that. Where are you? Where is Clete? Put him on.”
My sympathies with Jamie Sue Wellstone’s problems were quickly dissipating. “Has anyone called your house in the last hour?”
“How would I know that? I’m outside in the barn. I’m afraid to go inside my own house. Why are you asking about callers?”
That she had used the possessive pronoun in mentioning the Wellstone manor did not strike me as insignificant.
“If some men working for your husband or his brother kidnapped Jimmy Dale, I’d assume they’d pass on the information to their employer,” I said.
“Just after the turn from Bigfork, there’s a dirt road that leads into a peninsula. Leslie and Ridley are building a lodge way back in the timber. You can barely see it from Swan Lake.”
“What’s at the lodge?” I asked.
“It’s not really a lodge. It’s just in progress.”
“What’s there, Ms. Wellstone?”
“Nothing, just a bunch of debarked logs and a backhoe and stuff like that,” she replied. “Harold Waxman was helping with the foundation for the garage. He used to be a heavy-equipment operator.”
“If we get lost, I’ll call you back,” I said. I closed my cell phone and set it on my thigh, waiting for Clete to ask what Jamie Sue Wellstone had said. Instead, he was staring intently into the rearview mirror.
I looked through the back window but couldn’t see anything.
“It’s Troyce Nix,” Clete said. “He just melted back into the traffic. If I ever get out of this, I’m buying a charter fishing boat in Baja. Let all these people drown in their own shit. You’re looking at the new marlin king of the Pacific Coast.”
He grinned at me like an albino ape, his porkpie hat pulled down tightly on his brow. Then he went into a slick bend on the road, high above the water, never easing up on the gas, a truck horn blaring past us from the opposite direction.
CANDACE SWEENEY FELT the cargo van slow and make a sharp turn off the asphalt onto a rough road pocked with divots that slammed the van down on its springs, rocking her hard against Jimmy Dale Greenwood. For the last few miles, the abductors had grown tired of their own conversation and all the banality that seemed to constitute their frame of reference. But when the van began bouncing down the dirt road, they came alive again, irritably, blaming one another for their bad luck that day, complaining about the road and the lousy food they had to eat and someone they referred to as “the geek.”
She assumed the geek was Leslie Wellstone.
The one who complained most was her blond tormentor. “Look, man, maybe I should have finessed her better back there on the res, but I’m like y’all, we shouldn’t be here for the main gig. There’s no percentage in it. We’re security guys. We fly back to Houston and forget everything that happened here. Do you know how much you can make working Arab security at the Ritz-Carlton? I worked the penthouse at the Ritz out by River Oaks. A whole bunch of Bedouins took up the entire floor. The old guys were wearing striped robes and floppy pink slippers with bunny ears on them. They cooked in their rooms and were always taking showers and asking for more soap, like they’d bathed in camel shit most of their lives.”
For the first time, all three men laughed. So the blond man, encouraged, continued his monologue. “A couple of the young guys wanted to see some tits and ass, so I took them to this skin joint on Richmond. This one broad had a pair of jugs that could knock your eyeballs out of their sockets. She not only had big knockers, she had a voice that had the two Bedouins creaming in their Calvin Kleins. One of them asked if he could buy her and take her back to Dubai or whatever sand trap his family is in charge of. I go, ‘You can’t buy women in this country.’ He goes, ‘Why not? I bought a Kentucky racehorse. This one on the stage has a tattoo on her rear end. My horse doesn’t. The horse doesn’t shit in the house, either. The woman does. Which is the more dignified creature?’”
The three laughed uproariously, so hard the driver lost his concentration and hit a pothole that bounced Candace into the air.
“Here’s the rest of it,” the blond man said. “You know who the broad was?”
“Your mother?” the driver said.
“Jamie Sue Wellstone. Except that wasn’t her name then. Small world, huh? I saw her sing later. Same broad, still selling the same tits. I wonder if Mr. Wellstone knows her history.”
Candace realized the men had not been referring to Leslie Wellstone when they had mentioned the geek. That thought filled her with a new fear, one that made her insides turn to water. In her mind’s eye, she saw a faceless silhouette, a black-suited, humped, and spiritually deformed creature whose existence was confined to nightmares and who was supposed to disappear at first light. When the van hit another pothole – this time with such violence that the frame actually slammed into the ground – she was jolted once more into the air. A moan broke from her throat, muffling against the tape.
“What’s going on back there?” the driver asked.
“Nothing,” the blond man said.
“No more rough stuff,” the driver said. “It ain’t our way. We dump ’em, and then this place is a memory.”
“What if Mr. Wellstone says different?” the blond man said.
“This state injects,” the driver said. “We didn’t sign on to ride the needle for fraternity guys who can’t manage their poontang. We eighty-six the sticks, and we’re down and outbound for Houston-town. Twenty-four hours from now, we’re gonna be drinking margaritas and eating Mexican food at Pappasito’s.”
“What do you think the geek has got planned?” the blond man said.
“Show some respect, Layne,” the man in the front passenger seat said.
Through the crack in the tape, Candace saw him gesture at her and Jimmy Dale.
AT THE NORTHERN end of Flathead Lake, in the town called Bigfork, Clete turned east and drove through a break in the mountains. Just before we reached a bridge at the Swan River, we saw the dirt road that accessed the peninsula on the west side of Swan Lake. The sun had broken through the rain clouds in the west and was the reddish-yellow of an egg yolk. But another front was moving toward us, a separate weather system, this one ugly and mean. It was gray and swirling with rain, pelting the lake, and when we drove onto the dirt road, the trees on either side of us were already bending in the wind, shredding cascades of pine needles across the windshield. The light had almost disappeared inside the timber, and the front end of the Caddy was bouncing hard in the potholes, patterning the windshield with more mud than the wipers could clean off.
“I feel like I’m sitting on sandbags in a six-by, waiting for Sir Charles to pop one through my windshield,” Clete said. A downed limb broke in half under a front tire and clanged against the oil pan. “My transmission’s not up to this. Check your cell.”
“What for?” I said.
“To call Alicia again. I think we might be firing in the well. I think Jamie Sue might have given us a bum lead. My engine is about to come off the mounts.”
“She didn’t exactly give us a lead.”
“Want to explain that?”
“I asked if her husband had a private place where he went. This is the only place she could think of.”
“That’s it?” he said.
“That’s it.”
“I thought I had obsessions. You know what your problem is? You’re like those biblical fundamentalists. They believe if one part of the Bible is not literally correct, the rest of it is no good, either. Except with you, it’s people. You got to prove everybody is on the square, or the whole human race is no good.”
“Pretty sharp thinking, Clete. Except it’s not me who couldn’t keep his johnson in his pants when he met Jamie Sue Wellstone.”
He laughed, looking at me sideways, the Caddy dipping into a huge hole, shuddering the frame, throwing both of us against our seat straps. “What was I supposed to do? Hurt her feelings?”
“Don’t ever go into analysis,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Your psychiatrist will shoot himself.”
But he was smiling at me, not listening, not caring what I said one way or another, indifferent to all the minutiae that had gone into the ebb and flow of our lives, remembering only the bond we had shared over the decades, the wounds we had suffered and survived together, the flags under which we had fought and the causes we had served, many of which were no longer considered of import by others.
“We painted our names on the wall, didn’t we?” he said.
“You’d better believe it, Cletus,” I replied.
I looked through the back window and thought I saw headlights glimmering in the trees. Then they disappeared. The rain swept westward across the timber, bending the canopy, channeling serpentine rivulets in the road.
We were high enough that I could make out lights on the far side of Swan Lake, like beacons inside ocean fog. I suspected the lights came from the nightclub on the shore, but I couldn’t be sure. I thought of the photograph of Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill mounted on the wall behind the club’s bar, and I wondered why such criminals beckoned to us from the past, why they were able to lay such a strong romantic claim upon us. Was it because secretly we wanted to emulate them, to possess their power, to burn that brightly inside the mist, incandescent as they pursued all the trappings of the American dream, just as we did? Was it because the art deco world of 1940s Hollywood and the sweet sewer it represented were as much a part of our culture as the graves of Shiloh?
Clete rolled down his window halfway, and the rain blew inside. “Listen,” he said.
“What?” I said, waking from my reverie.
“I thought I heard a piece of heavy equipment working. You hear it?”
“No,” I replied.
“Maybe I’m going nuts. I still hear that motherfucker who tried to set fire to me.”
I rolled down my window and looked at our headlight beams bouncing off the tree trunks, but I could not see anything unusual or hear any sound except the wind sharking through the canopy and a solitary peal of thunder across the sky.
JAMIE SUE COULD not understand her own thoughts. She had stayed in the barn, her cell phone in her jeans, grooming the horses, listening to the rip of thunder across the skies and the rain mixed with hail that was clattering on the barn’s metal roof. Leslie or one of the servants carrying out his orders had removed all the vehicle keys from the hooks in the mudroom. His and Ridley’s security personnel had tripled in number in the last week, men who dressed neatly and were barbered and clean-shaved and were deferential but, she guessed, also more professionally criminal than either Quince Whitley or Lyle Hobbs. In retrospect, Lyle seemed like an amateur, perhaps another Judas for sale, blowing the compound with whiskey on his breath and a tic in his eyes like that of a crystal addict, but by comparison, a bumbling amateur.
Jamie Sue had never understood why Leslie had hired Lyle. It seemed to have something to do with their common experience in Vegas or Reno, or other marginal enterprises the Wellstones dabbled in as part of the price they paid for doing business in what they considered a corrupt culture.
She had taken little Dale into the barn with her and unrolled a plastic tarp on the floor for him to play on. But the two of them were trapped, with no means of escape, and she had no idea where Jimmy Dale was or the fate that might be awaiting him if he had been abducted by Ridley and Leslie’s goons. She felt a terrible sense of urgency, as though she were drowning in full view of others and no one on the bank could hear her voice. Or was that just her melodramatic daytime-television mentality kicking into gear?
No, time was running out, and not simply on this situation on this particular Saturday in the summer of 2007, she thought.
The choices she had made over the years all had a consequence and a cost, and the bills were coming due. She should have toughed it out by herself when Jimmy Dale went to jail, staying loyal to him and accepting privation as her lot, just as her blind mother and disabled father had. What would have been the worst thing to happen if she had gone it on her own? Second-class-celebrity status as an aging honky-tonk performer? Living in a trailer? Putting up with over-the-hill, drunk truck drivers who wanted her to sing “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music)”?
The list of things she should not have done was long. She shouldn’t have married her community-college English professor and used his alcoholism to sue him in divorce court for almost everything he owned. She shouldn’t have posed as a religious woman and deceived the crowds who flocked to Sonny Click’s revivals. She shouldn’t have used her sexuality to manipulate uneducated family men who trusted her. She shouldn’t have used Leslie, and she shouldn’t have pretended she had married him in order to care for Dale.
It was the last thought that bothered her most. Everything she’d done had been a justification for her own agenda. She had even used her little boy as an excuse, when in reality, she had loved all the benefits of marriage to a man like Leslie Wellstone – the limos and luxury cars and private planes, the palatial estates, the servants who attended her every need, the awe and respect and diffidence she created with her presence wherever she went. In the meantime, she had lost her music, the one element in her life she had treated as a votive gift and had not compromised for the sake of either celebrity or commercial success. In her earlier career, she had continued to sing in the traditions of Skeeter Davis and Kitty Wells while everybody else in Nashville was going uptown, then somewhere along the way, she had forgotten who she was and what she was and had taken the gift for granted and used it to manipulate people into voting against their own interests.
She remembered a statement that Keith Richards once made regarding a famous R amp;B musician whose hostility to his own audience hid just beneath his skin: “Chuck’s tragedy is he doesn’t realize how much joy he brings to other people.”
Her head was dizzy, her hands dry and hard to close.
She began brushing a mahogany-black gelding in his stall, raking burrs out of his mane and forelock, rubbing him under the jaw, touching the graceful line and smoothness of his neck, talking in a reassuring voice in his ear. The gelding was four now but still hot-wired and subject to spooking and rearing in dry mustard weed, and neither Ridley nor Leslie would ride him. But Jamie Sue could and did, sometimes without a saddle, using only a hackamore to rein him.
Ownership of a fine horse came with ability, not legal title, Jimmy Dale always said. He said no one owned the sunrise or the rain, or mesas and mountains, or the bluebonnets of South Texas. Your claim to ownership of the earth was based on the six feet of dirt that went into your face. The rest of it was a grand playground that God had given to all His children. At least that was what Jimmy Dale and his peyote-soaked friends said.
She wondered if her thoughts amounted to what a theologian would call contrition. She decided they probably did not. But perhaps they were a start.
She picked up Dale from the tarp and set him like a clothespin on the gelding’s back, keeping her arm around his waist to steady him. “I’m going to get you your own pony one day,” she said. “Maybe back in Texas, where your grandma and granddaddy used to live and your mama grew up.”
“Just when do you plan on doing that, Jamie Sue?” a voice said behind her.
She turned and looked into her husband’s face. “What have you done with Jimmy Dale?” she asked.
“I haven’t done anything with him. I’ve never even had the pleasure of meeting him. But tell me, why is it you think I might have harmed him? You weren’t planning on going somewhere with him today, were you? You haven’t been screwing him in the bushes, have you?”
She had stepped into his trap. “I’ve never understood your mean-spiritedness, Leslie. Your brother orders things done to his enemies, but only when he’s forced to. You enjoy offending and hurting people just for the sake of hurting them. Maybe the war did that to you. Maybe it’s because you married someone who doesn’t love you. But you’re a sad man and an object of pity. Not because of your deformity, either. You’re pitied by others because of what you are, and that’s what you’ve never understood about yourself.”
She lifted Dale off the horse and set his weight on her hip, momentarily shifting her attention away from Leslie. When she looked at him again, his head was tilted sideways, the shriveled skin alongside one cheek and his neck stretched free of wrinkles, like a large piece of smooth rubber.
“I have the sense you’re at a point of decision in your life,” he said. “Standing at the crossroads, wading across the Jordan, that kind of thing. You know, Scarlett O’Hara gazing out upon the wastes?”
“What decision? How can I make decisions? You’ve fixed it so I can’t go anywhere.”
“Would you like to go for a late dinner tonight? I’ll have Harold drive us in the limo to Bigfork or Yellow Bay.”
“Who lives inside you, Leslie? Who are you?”
“Not interested in dinner tonight? The lake is lovely when the rain is falling on it. Last chance, Jamie Sue. I wouldn’t ignore the importance of the choice you’re about to make. There are maybe three or four choices we make in our lives that determine our fate. A random turn off a freeway into the wrong neighborhood, buying a burnt-out sweet-potato patch that sits on top of an oil pool, taking off the night chain because we trust the Fuller Brush man. You took a chance and married a man who is physically repellent to you. Want to back out? I don’t mind. Want to roll the dice and see what happens? Tell me. Tell me now.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice dropping in register, a cold hand squeezing at her heart.
“It’s all a matter of choice. You want to believe you can walk away with half of our wealth. You also want to believe you can walk away with all your knowledge about how things really work, how we jerk around others, how our enterprises are nothing like they seem. Pick up the dice and drop them in the cup. Everyone should have a second chance. It’s easy enough. You’re a brave girl. Shake the cup and rattle them out on the felt.”
She looked into the moral vacuity of his eyes and for the first time felt genuine mortal fear of the man she had married. She started to speak, but her words caught in her throat.
“A country-and-western band should be entertaining the folk at Yellow Bay,” Leslie said. “We can watch the folk at work and play in the fields of the Lord. It’s Saturday night for the folk, and their messianic songstress will be there to brighten their lives.”
“I think you’re going to hell,” she said.
“We already live there, my dear. You just haven’t realized it.”
He reached out with his mutilated hand and touched little Dale’s cheek.