Swan Peak (48 page)

“This doesn’t feel right, Troyce,” she said.

“What don’t?”

“Everything — this place, that car, the way the light is changing, those dark clouds moving across the valley.”

“It’s probably just one of them dry electric storms. All snap, crackle, and pop, and not one drop of rain.”

“What do you know about that bartender? You said you knew a dishonest man when you saw one. Why do you trust what the waitress says? You like her boobs?”

“Cut that stuff out.”

“Then start thinking about what we’re doing.”

“It ain’t that complicated, darlin’. Jamie Sue Wellstone got that idiot to help her run away with an escaped felon. That makes the idiot a felon, too. But he ain’t figured that out yet. You know why criminals are criminals? It’s ’cause most of them majored in dumb.”

Troyce parked the truck thirty yards from the Camry and cut the engine. He closed and opened his eyes as though he were dropping through an elevator shaft.

“We need to take you to a hospital,” she said.

“I just need to hit the can. Come inside.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Sitting at the bar by myself in a joint on the res on Saturday afternoon?
Duh
!”

She watched him enter the back of the bar. Two Indian men who looked like father and son came out the side door. Both of them wore braided pigtails on their shoulders. They got into the cab of a flatbed and drove away, neither of them looking directly at her. She watched their vehicle disappear down the highway, over a rise, dipping into the sun, straw blowing off the bed of the truck. She wondered if they were going home to a Saturday-evening meal with the members of their family gathered around the table, an unwatched television set playing in the living room, the mountains gold and purple against the sunset. She wondered if a time would come when the simplest activities of others would not make her covetous.

The wind was picking up, and a solitary drop of rain struck her face like a BB just below the eye. She turned, wiping the wetness off her skin, just as a bus stopped on the road and a dark-complexioned man carrying a duffel and a rolled sleeping bag stepped down on the gravel in a whoosh of air.

He walked into the parking lot, carrying his bag on his shoulder, a shapeless, sweat-rimmed hat low on his brow. He was unshaved, his denim jacket tied by the arms around his waist. But incongruously, he wore an immaculate white long-sleeve cowboy shirt, one with pearl-gray snap buttons and a silver thread woven into the fabric.

He stopped and stared at the white car, then surveyed the parking lot and looked over his shoulder at the bar. His eyes seemed to linger on Candace’s for a moment, as though he recognized her, but the sun’s refracted glare was like a heliograph’s on the windshield, and it was obvious he could not make out her features. Oddly, without thinking, Candace had started to raise her hand from her lap and wave at him, as though they were old friends.

Jimmy Dale Greenwood set his duffel and rolled sleeping bag on the hood of the Camry and began fishing under the fender with one hand. When he could not find what he was looking for, he squatted on one haunch and put his arm deeper under the fender’s recesses.

Then a black cargo van backed up from the far side of the bar, not hurriedly, not in a dramatic fashion, merely creeping across the gravel as though the driver wished to create a wide arc in order to turn around. But when the vehicle stopped and the driver and two passengers got out, stepping down almost gently on the ground, Candace knew her premonitions were as they had always been — true and destined to be disbelieved by others.

The three men were not large; they were simply physical. They were the kind of men whose stare was always invasive, whose teeth were too big for their mouths, whose hard bodies were genetic and not earned, whose hands could be like the claws on a crab.

Where was Troyce? Why did he have to get sick now? Why had she not gone inside with him?

Jimmy Dale stood up from the Camry’s fender, his expression empty. The engine of the cargo van was running, the sliding side door open. The three men from the van formed a circle around him. One of them lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at an upward angle, as though he had stopped to shoot the breeze with a friend who was having car trouble. There was no one else in the parking lot. Candace could feel her ears popping and hear the wind whistling through the open windows of the pickup. The men from the van were smiling, touching Jimmy Dale on the arms, patting his back, picking up his duffel and sleeping bag for him, nodding reassuringly.

The sun dipped behind a cloud, and she saw Jimmy Dale’s eyes look through the pickup’s windshield and lock on her own. This time it was obvious he recognized her as the woman he had rescued from Quince Whitley in a Missoula parking lot. His expression was that of a man who knows he’s been tricked and lied to, taken over the hurdles again, treated for the fool he has always been. No, worse, it was the expression of a man who thinks he deserves his fate, who thinks the role of victim and loser is one he began earning from the moment of his birth.

He started to fight with the three men, kicking impotently while they held his wrists, their smiles still in place, as though they were protecting a drunk friend from himself.

Troyce, for God’s sake, get out here
, she thought.

But the cavalry was in the can, and Candace Sweeney was on her own.

She reached under the seat and felt the cold touch of the lug wrench Troyce kept there. He had said, “Don’t let them bust you for carrying a concealed firearm. Carry a baseball bat or a lug wrench. Ain’t nothing like a wrench or a ball bat to make Christians out of unwanted presences.”

She clasped her fingers around the wrench’s shank and pulled it clanking from under the seat and opened the door and stepped out on the gravel, the wind cold on her face. The wrench was heavy in her hand, weighted with a rough-edged, thick steel socket welded on the tip. She began walking toward the Camry and the three men who held Jimmy Dale by his arms. The great green-gray density of the mountains seemed to tilt on the horizon. She felt small inside the vastness of the landscape, even smaller inside the wind that seemed to finger her blouse open, exposing her tattoos and her sagging breasts. In fact, she felt the entire valley was empty of people except her and Jimmy Dale Greenwood and the three men who had already started pushing him inside the van.

“Leave him alone,” she heard herself say.

“What’s that you’re saying?” one man asked. He was blond and chewing gum. He had green eyes that were like drills and biceps the size of softballs and an upper torso that was too long for his short height. There was an electric anticipation in his face, like that of a man riding on the crest of a wave. “Want a drink?” he said. “Let me get our friend in the car, and I’ll buy you a drink.”

“I said let him go. He hasn’t done you any harm.”

Jimmy Dale began to fight again, driving his boot heel into one man’s foot, spitting in another man’s face, dropping his weight down on his suspended arms to spear-kick the blond man in the groin.

“Get her out of here,” one of the other men said.

The blond man shoved her in the chest. “You heard him. Hoof it, sweet thing,” he said. “Our friend is plastered. You deaf? I said you haul your gash out of—”

She swung the lug wrench at him, tearing skin, breaking something, maybe his nose, maybe the ridge above his eye, but something that smeared blood and shock across his face.

“You stupid—” he said, holding one hand to his wound. Then he let out a sound like an animal whose foot was caught in a trap, except it was a grinding noise, one of personal offense and not pain.

She heard a brief buzzing sound, similar to downed power lines arcing in a puddle of water. Then something exploded in her chest, like steel tongs cutting deep inside her, expanding into places she did not know existed. Her knees buckled, a plaintive cry rose involuntarily from her throat, and she felt herself being thrown headlong into the cargo van, side by side with Jimmy Dale Greenwood, like two slabs of spoiled beef on their way to the acid pit.

CHAPTER 27

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.”