Light of the World (48 page)

“Like what?”

“With that smile on your face.”

“Your tats. You want people to think you’ve been inside. But you haven’t. You couldn’t cut it inside, Seymour. First night in the shower, the wolves would make lamb chops out of you. They would have you sizzling in the pan like a lump of butter.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m helping you so you won’t shoot off your mouth to the wrong man again. You’ll always remember this moment. No matter how long you live, you’ll remember me. When you think you’ve changed, that you’re strong and all this is behind you, you’ll have a dream about me and realize I’ll always be inside your head. Run along now. Everything will be shipshape when you get back. Do you mind if I get myself a soda?”

The clerk went to the pharmacy and returned in under thirteen minutes, his face chastened, his skin as dry and bloodless as paper. He looked as though half of what he used to be had been left outside the store. “Can I ask you something?” he said.

“Go ahead,” the customer replied.

“The girls in your SUV, are those your daughters?”

“I’m their godfather. Why do you ask?”

“Why do you need all that OxyContin?”

“I’m pimping them out.” The man waited, then his face split into a grin. “You never know when a guy is ribbing you, do you? Enjoy the rest of your day, Seymour. Take consolation in the fact that you’re a part of history. You just don’t know it yet.”

As the customer drove away with the two teenage girls, the clerk memorized the tag number and wrote it in pencil on the counter. Then he picked up the telephone and dialed 911. As soon as he had completed the third digit, he hung up and rubbed the tag number out of the wood with the heel of his hand, a lump as big as a walnut protruding from his throat.

W
HY DO PEOPLE
in A.A. claim they pay the biggest membership dues in the world? That’s easy. Early in life, you set out to deconstruct everything good you thought you’d turn out to be. When you’re finished doing that, you foul your blood, piss your brains into the street, trade off your tomorrows, destroy your family, betray your friends, court suicide on a daily basis, and become an object of ridicule and contempt in the eyes of your fellow man. That’s for openers. The rest of the dance card involves detox, jail, padded cells, and finally, the cemetery. If you want your soul shot out of a cannon, or you want to enter a period of agitated depression and psychoneurotic anxiety known as a Gethsemane Experience, untreated alcoholism is a surefire way to get there.

The big surprise at your first A.A. meeting is the apparent normalcy of the people in the room. They come from every socioeconomic background imaginable. The only thing most of them have in common is the neurosis that has governed their lives. The meeting I attended on Monday night was held on the second floor of a Methodist church, across from a high school in a maple-lined neighborhood reminiscent of an earlier time. The woman seated next to me was a Lutheran minister. The woman on the other side of me was a former middle-school teacher who had been molested as a child and had seduced two of her male students. The man leading the meeting was a housepainter who had been a door gunner in Vietnam and had
killed innocent people in a free-fire zone (in his words, “just to watch them die”). The kid who came in late during the recitation of the Serenity Prayer and plunked down next to me in a whoosh of nicotine was the first to speak when the moderator opened up the meeting.

“My name is Seymour, alcoholic addict,” he said.

“Hi, Seymour!” everyone said.

He carried his wallet on a chain and wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, even though the evening was warm. He wore jeans stitched with guitars on the back pockets and cowboy boots that looked made of plastic. There was an oily shine on his forehead, and his voice sounded like a guitar string wound on a wood peg to the point of breaking.

“The subject I got tonight is people who try to take a dump inside your head, and after a while you don’t know if it’s them who’s the problem or you,” he said. “What I’m saying is there was this guy who came into the place where I work, and he had this stink on him like dog shit, and when I said something about it, he told me I had shot off my mouth to the wrong guy and he was gonna teach me a lesson.

“He told me to look into his face. No, he said look into his eyes. He really made me afraid. My sponsor says I haven’t owned up on the Fifth Step and I got a lot of buried guilt that bounces off other people and comes back on me. It makes me want to drink and use. I thought about going out and copping tonight, but I came to a meeting instead. Maybe all this is just my imagination working, right?”

Everyone thought he was finished and had started into a collective “Thanks, Seymour” when he waved his hands at the air and began talking again. “See, he made me go down to a pharmacy and pick up his prescriptions for him and shop for women’s stuff, a guy I never saw before, I mean a guy who took pleasure in telling me what a pitiful loser I was. Maybe that’s what I am. I don’t know, man, but I feel like walking out on the fucking railway track. Know what he said when he was going out the door? ‘Hey, tell your friends you met the Tin Man.’ Who’s the fucking Tin Man?”

Others tried to help him by telling their stories, but it was obvious
that Seymour had packed his bag and moved into a dark space inside his head that no one else could enter. After the meeting ended, I put my hand on his shoulder. “My name is Dave Robicheaux,” I said. “You got a minute?”

“You a cop?”

“What makes you think that?” I said, smiling.

“I’ve seen you at another meeting. You wear a sport coat and keep your hands at your sides. Cops never let you know what they’re thinking. I’m right, huh?”

“Yeah, how about we go outside?” I said.

“I’m not feeling too good right now. Maybe I should head home.”

“The guy in your store is from Kansas. He’s a bad dude. And we need to talk.”

He looked out the window at the sun descending beyond the mountains in the west. “Mind if I smoke?”

“No,” I lied.

We sat on the steps of the church in the twilight. The streetlamps had come on, and the maple trees along the sidewalks contained a green luminescence that reminded me of the subdued yet brilliant colors you see in a van Gogh painting. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth and struck a paper match and tried to cup it in his palms, but he was shaking so badly, he dropped the match on the concrete. “I feel like I’m jonesing,” he said.

“I think you’re a stand-up guy, Seymour. It takes guts to talk about your problems in a roomful of people, many of them strangers. Did this guy in your store have a name besides Tin Man?”

“No, just a stink. It’s like he left shit prints all over the place. I had to wipe down everything he touched with Lysol.”

I didn’t want to see him get wired up again, so I changed the subject. “You’re not too warm in that shirt?”

“I was trying to hide my tats.”

“You were in the system?”

“No. The guy called me a fraud. I think he’s probably right. I didn’t earn my ink. I wanted people to think I was a badass. I even got the meeting off track tonight. We’re supposed to talk about using
and drinking, not about problems with old geeks who read porn magazines. I feel awful.”

“He wants to infect others with his sickness, partner. Don’t let him get inside your head. You’re a good guy. You keep remembering that.”

“When I looked into his eyes, it really scared me, man. It was like looking into a cave that didn’t have a bottom.”

“Did he give you any indication where he might be living?”

“No. He had two girls with him. He was driving a gray SUV.”

“Do you remember the tag?”

“I wrote it down, then erased it.”

“Do you remember any part of it?”

“No. It was a Montana plate. That’s all I know. He said he was the godfather of the two girls. You’ve had some kind of run-in with him?”

“I think he tried to kill my daughter. If we’re talking about the same man, his name is Asa Surrette. He’s tortured and killed eight people.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Maybe that’s why he had those girls with him. You think they’re runaways? I wonder if that’s why he had all the dope.”

“What dope?”

“The OxyContin. He had another prescription, too. I think it was for sleeping pills or downers.”

“What were the other items he made you buy?”

“Tampons, toothpaste, fingernail clippers, dental floss, women’s deodorant, Pepto-Bismol.”

“He didn’t say who these things were for?”

“He wasn’t someone you ask a lot of questions. He said I was part of history. What’d he mean by that? What the fuck does history have to do with any of this?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“OxyContin is as close to heroin as legal dope gets. He’s gonna cook the Oxy and shoot those girls up, isn’t he? That’s how he’s gonna get in their pants.”

“He masturbates on his victims after he strangles them. That’s the
guy who was in your store, Seymour. You treat your encounter with him as you would a sickness. You let go of it forever. He has nothing to do with your life. You have a lot of friends in that room upstairs. You keep remembering who you are, a likable guy who’s doing the best he can. You got me on that?”

“Yes, sir.”

I wrote my cell number on the back of my departmental business card and gave it to him. When I got up to go, he remained on the steps, staring up at me, not speaking.

“Tell you what, how about a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” I said.

“I think I can handle that,” he replied.

T
HE REAL SIGNIFICANCE
of my conversation with him did not hit me until four the next morning. I sat up in bed, numb, my ears ringing with a sense of urgency that seemed to have no origin. I went into the bathroom and turned on the light and propped my arms on the lavatory, trying to reconstruct the dream I’d just had. In it, I saw a girl locked inside a giant plastic bubble, her hands pressed against the side, her cries inaudible, her oxygen supply running out.

I looked in the mirror and saw Molly standing behind me. “Did you have a nightmare?” she said.

“She’s alive,” I said.

“Who’s alive?”

“The girl who was abducted up by Lookout Pass,” I replied.

I
WAS IN ELVIS
Bisbee’s office by nine that morning. I told him of my chance meeting with Seymour Little. He made notes on a legal pad while I spoke. “Okay, we’ll talk with this kid and check out the pharmacy,” he said. “Thanks for coming in.”

“I’ve already been to the pharmacy. The prescriptions were phoned in by a scrip doctor in Whitefish. I called his office. He’s somewhere in Canada and not expected back for a while.”

“
You
went to the pharmacy?”

“That’s right.”

“What makes you think you can come here from out of state and conduct your own investigation?”

“I’m sorry you don’t approve.”

He set down his pen and stared out the window at the trees and the war memorial on the courthouse lawn. “Mind telling why the pharmacist shared his information with you?”

“I showed him my badge.”

“You explained to him you were from the state of Louisiana and you had no legal authority here?”

“That didn’t seem to be a problem for him.”

He remained motionless in his swivel chair. The tips of his mustache were as white as ash. The clarity in his blue eyes made me think of an empty, sunlit sky. He was one of those whose decency
and sense of honor were not an issue. A less patient man would have been far more severe in his attitude toward Clete and Gretchen Horowitz and me. Elvis Bisbee believed the world was a rational place and that procedure in many ways was an end in itself. Without his kind, we probably would have chaos. However, there is a caveat to that kind of thinking. Those who are rapacious and prey upon the weak and who would undo the system are not bound by procedure, and they take great delight in the presence of those who are.

“Rhonda Fayhee is alive, Sheriff. I don’t think we have a lot of time,” I said. “I was almost sure Surrette had killed her. He has never kept his victims alive, except to torture them. This time he decided to do it differently.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t telegraph his pitch. He hides it in his glove or behind his thigh.”

“Why are you so sure it’s Surrette?”

“Because he’s getting better and better at what he does. He could have picked up the prescriptions himself. Instead, he used and degraded a kid who looks like a sack of broken Popsicle sticks. He also knew the kid would report him and we’d figure out the girl is still alive. Except we have no idea where she is or what she’s going through while we’re wasting time in your office.”

“Waste of time, is it?”

I got up from the chair. “Surrette is about to send us something. They all do. I don’t know what it will be. I don’t even want to think about it. But that’s what he’s going to do. Something is troubling me about our conversation, Sheriff.”

“Don’t hold back.”

“You’re an intelligent man. I think you already know all these things. Surrette is here for the long haul, and your department isn’t equipped to deal with him. So it becomes a whole lot easier to swat at flies rather than admit you’ve got a real monster in your midst. I don’t blame you for being impotent about your situation. I do blame you for pretending to be ignorant of it.”