Swan Peak

“Call 911,” I said.

“And tell them I’m meeting an escaped convict?”

“I can’t help you.”

“They’ve set up a trap. Clete doesn’t answer his cell. They’re going to kidnap or kill Jimmy Dale.”

“Where did you have the car delivered?”

She gave me the name of a bar on the Flathead res and described the vehicle.

“You said someone betrayed you.”

“I paid Harold Waxman to buy the car and park it at the bar in Arlee,” she said.

“You paid the bartender at the club on the lake, the man now working for your husband?”

“I thought he was my friend. It’s not my fault. I thought he was loyal. I can’t believe he sold us out.”

“What do you know about Waxman?”

“Nothing. He was a fan and an admirer. Maybe I’m wrong about him. Maybe Lyle Hobbs followed him. Maybe Harold is i

I couldn’t help but wonder if her sense of betrayal had less to do with an individual than her discovery that fame and celebrity are cheap currency and seldom purchase loyalty in others. I wanted to ask why she hadn’t stuck by Jimmy Dale when he went to prison and why she had married into a collection of scum like the Wellstones. I wanted to ask if she ever felt remorse because she’d helped deceive the audiences who had bought in to Reverend So

“Are you there?” she said.

“Clete knows nothing about your plan to run off with Jimmy Dale?” I said.

“No. Are you going to ask him to help?”

“Tell me, Ms. Wellstone, does it bother you at all that you’re asking a man you slept with to help you leave your husband and run off with a third man? No, let me rephrase that. Does anything at all bother you except the fact that you screwed up your life?”

“Yes, quite a few things bother me, Mr. Robicheaux. I deserted Jimmy Dale when he needed me most, and I married a monster. Now I have a little boy who may fall into the hands of the most evil people I’ve ever known. If you condemn me for it, I’ve earned every bit of your scorn and then some.”

The side of my face felt as though it had been stung by a bee when I replaced the receiver in the cradle.

“YOU SURE THIS is the place?” Candace asked as she and Troyce pulled off the narrow asphalt road in the middle of the Jocko Valley. A bar built of logs and topped with a peaked red roof was set back from the road, a few vehicles parked in front, the windows lit with neon beer signs.

“It’s got to be. There’s only one or two bars here,” he said.

“How do you know what the car looks like?”

“The waitress told me. The bartender came by the café with it.”

Troyce drove the pickup around the back of the log building, leaning forward to see beyond a parked tractor rig. His face was gray under his hat, the skin around his eyes whiter than it should have been. He cleared his throat and spit out the window.

Candace touched his cheek with the back of her wrist. “You’re sick,” she said.

He didn’t argue. All the way from Swan Lake, a pain like a shard of glass had been working its way through his viscera, causing him on a couple of occasions to suck in his breath as though his skin had been touched with a hot wire.

He pointed through the windshield. “Look yonder – a white Camry, just like she said.”

Candace had hoped they wouldn’t find it, that Troyce would give up his anger and pride and stubbor

“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.