Light of the World (10 page)

He leaned down, the heat and the smell in his clothes almost suffocating her. She could taste the tobacco on his tongue when he put it in her mouth.

T
HE ACCIDENT ON
the state highway happened a short distance before the turnoff onto the dirt road that led to Albert Hollister’s ranch. A tractor-trailer rig carrying a three-story-high piece of oil field equipment bound for Canada had blown two tires and skidded off the shoulder, toppling the load into a stand of cottonwoods by the creek. The few cars coming off the crest of Lolo Pass had come to a stop, as well as the traffic from the town. Clete and I got out of my pickup truck and started walking toward the accident. There was a trace of purple at the bottom of the sky, the evening star twinkling just above the mountains. A helicopter was hovering directly overhead. I thought it carried a news team from a local television station. I was wrong. The chopper landed on the highway, not in a field but on the highway, and one of the wealthiest men in the United States stepped out of it.

I had seen him once before, in Lafayette, right after an offshore blowout had killed eleven men on the derrick and strung miles of fecal-colored oil all over the Gulf Coast. If I ever saw a Jacksonian man, it was Love Younger. He was as rough-hewn as carved oak, with the broad forehead and wide-set eyes we associate with the
Anglo-Scotch minutemen who fired the first shots at Lexington and Concord. He had grown up in a place in eastern Kentucky I visited once, a wretched community of shacks, some with dirt floors, where the residents drew their water from the same creek their privies were on. Paradoxically, he had not come to Lafayette to talk about the oil well blowout but to establish a scholarship fund based on merit and need at the University of Louisiana.

I saw Alafair standing by the side of her Honda, looking down at the massive load of machinery that had toppled off the trailer into the edge of the creek, snapping all the boomer chains like string. The stand of cottonwoods it had fallen on had been crushed into the mud. “Was he speeding?” I said, looking up toward Lolo Pass.

“I heard the driver say his tires blew,” she replied.

Evidently, that explanation did not work for Love Younger. He was arguing with a highway patrolman, jabbing his finger in the air, motioning at a hilltop on the far side of the highway. The patrolman kept nodding, his mouth a tight seam, raising his eyes only to nod again.

“That guy’s name is Love?” Clete said.

“He claims to be a descendant of Cole Younger.”

Clete wasn’t impressed. “He also smeared a guy with the Silver Star and a Purple Heart.”

“Have y’all heard from Gretchen?” Alafair said.

“What about her?” Clete said.

“We were going to have a drink in Missoula. She doesn’t answer her cell phone.”

“When’s the last time you talked with her?” Clete said.

“Six.”

He checked his cell phone for missed calls. “Did she say where she was going?”

“She said she had to take care of some personal business.”

Clete looked at her. “What kind of personal business?”

“The personal kind,” she said. “She wouldn’t tell me what it was.”

“Did it have anything to do with those cops who were up on the ridge this morning?” I asked.

“Maybe. I didn’t think about it at the time. I gave the arrow
to a plainclothes detective named Pepper. He made me kind of queasy.”

“How?” I said.

“His eyes. They look at you, but there’s no light behind them.”

Clete began punching a number into his cell phone with his thumb. “Direct to voice mail,” he said. “What’s the name of that plainclothes again?”

“Bill Pepper,” I said. “Let me see how long this is going to take.” I walked up to within four feet of the highway patrolman and Love Younger and two of his aides who were standing close by. None of them took any notice of me.

“My driver says he’s almost sure he heard the crack of a rifle,” Younger said to the patrolman.

“That’s not what I heard him say, sir,” the officer said.

“You calling me a liar?”

“No, sir. Your driver said he heard two popping sounds. That could have been his tires.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Younger said. “We’re two miles from the ranch of Albert Hollister. He’s well known as an environmental fanatic and rabble-rouser. He and the Sierra Club have done everything in their power to stop the transportation of my equipment.”

I opened my badge holder. “Would you mind if we pull out on the shoulder and work our way on up to the next turnoff?”

“Yes, sir, go right ahead,” the patrolman said.

“Mr. Younger, could I have a word with you?” I said.

“Concerning what?”

“Your granddaughter.”

In the illumination of emergency flares and headlights, I saw Love Younger’s eyes sharpen and fix on mine. There were tiny blue and red veins in his cheeks, a bit of stubble on his throat above his collar, and a look of heated intensity in the face that usually hides either great tragedy or great anger.

“Up on that ridge just west of us, somebody shot a hunter’s arrow at my daughter. It cut her ear,” I said. “A half inch closer, she probably would have been killed. We think the guy who did it could be connected to the death of your granddaughter.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dave Robicheaux. I’m a sheriff’s detective in New Iberia, Louisiana.”

“Get his information,” Younger said to one of his aides.

“No, sir, I’ll talk to you, or we’ll not talk at all.”

He turned toward me, his expression neutral, and seemed to take my measure a second time. He pulled a notepad from his shirt pocket and handed it to me. “Write down your contact number. I’ll call you as soon as I clean up this mess. What’s your name again?”

I told him.

“You were involved in a shooting in Louisiana. I was there when it happened. You killed a man named Alexis Dupree,” he said. “I knew him.”

“I didn’t do it, but a friend of mine did. I was there and watched it and thought my friend did the right thing. I think the world is a better place for it. I’ll look forward to your call, Mr. Younger. My condolences for your loss.” I walked back down the line of cars and rejoined Alafair and Clete.

“What’s the haps?” Clete said.

“Jacksonian democracy is highly overrated,” I replied. “Did you hear from Gretchen?”

“No, something’s wrong. She always lets me know where she is, even out in California. Does a day come when you don’t have to worry about your kid?”

“Never,” I said.

A
S SHE LAY
helpless in the back of the van, her wrists fastened behind her with plastic ligatures, she could see the black shapes of the mountains through the rear windows and the rain slapping against the roof and sweeping in sheets across the highway. Her muscles felt like butter, her neck so weak it could barely support the weight of her head. She estimated that the van had been on the four-lane only about ten minutes before it made a turn, and she guessed they were now on the two-lane state road that led through the old company mill town of Bonner and on up the Blackfoot River. Pepper had been
silent the whole time, filling the inside of the van with the smoke from his unfiltered cigarettes.

She heard the hollow rumbling of a bridge under the van. Abruptly, the van swung off the asphalt onto a dirt surface, gravel pinging the undercarriage. Minutes later, the van climbed a steep hill and came down the other side, then turned left onto a rocky track pocked with holes and probably strewn with desiccated tree branches and twigs that snapped and splintered up into the frame.

Bill Pepper hit the brakes, tossing her against the back of his seat. When he cut the engine, she could hear the rain pattering on the roof and see the wind flattening the drops of water on the back windows. She could not remember a time in her life when the smallest of details about the natural world had seemed so important to her. Pepper continued to smoke his cigarette, leaning forward to get a better look at the heavens, like a sailor or a fisherman trying to anticipate a squall. “I like it out here,” he said, staring straight ahead.

When she tried to speak, her voice box felt stuffed with cotton.

“My daddy used to take my little sister and me fishing for speckled trout south of Mobile Bay,” he said. “When the rain would first dimple the water, they’d start to school up. You could smell them, just like when they’re spawning.”

He rolled down his window halfway and flicked his cigarette into the darkness. A balloon of yellow electricity flared and raced through the clouds overhead and disappeared without sound beyond the hills on the far side of the Blackfoot. “You brought this on your own self. You know that, don’t you?” he said.

“My father is—” she began.

“Yeah, I know. Your father is going to punch my ticket. So why didn’t you send him after me instead of coming to my door with Mace and an ASP in your bag?”

“Clete Purcel is my father.”

“It doesn’t matter who he is. It’s just you and me now. You came to my house to do me harm. If you do me injury, you do injury to my grandchildren, and I won’t put up with that.”

He got out of the van and walked to the back and opened the doors, the rain spotting his hat and leather jacket. He stepped on the
back bumper and climbed inside and closed the doors behind him. He reached in his pocket and removed a small flashlight and turned it on and set it on the floor. “A vice cop in Broward County told me you pulled a train for the Florida Outlaws.”

“He lied to you.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because he knew it was what you wanted to hear.”

“You look like a biker girl. Except I think you have a high IQ.”

His weight shifted, and she heard him remove something from his pocket. Then she heard the snap of a metallic mechanism locking into place. He fitted his left hand on her upper arm. “This same vice cop said maybe you did a couple of hits for the Mob. Was he lying then?”

“Anything I ever did was because I wanted to.”

He moved his hand up the nape of her neck and slipped his fingers into her hair. “Do you think those things I did to you back there were bad? Or did you enjoy them a little?”

She craned her head and, in the corner of her eye, saw the dull-colored blade of the clasp knife and the long sliver of brightness along the bottom edge where it had been honed on a whetstone.

She straightened her arms and shoulders and closed and opened her eyes as a doll might, a pain growing in her right shoulder, her nerve endings coming alive.

“Opposites attract sometimes,” he said. “I can be good to a woman and love her like a father or a husband.”

She stared at the side paneling of the van and, in her mind, went to a private place where long ago she had learned to shut down her sensory system and remove herself from hands that reached down out of the dark and touched her in ways that no human being should ever be touched.

“You’re an attractive girl,” he said. “I may go to work for a very wealthy man. I could take care of you. Are you listening?”

“My father will get you. If he doesn’t, I will.”

“I wouldn’t be talking like that. This could be your last night on earth.”

“I’ll get you anyway. I’ll come back. I’d rather die than have your hands on me.”

She saw his thumb slip higher on the handle of the knife, establishing a firmer grip.

“You stink and have dandruff in your hair. You’re everything a woman loathes,” she said. “Even whores don’t want to fuck a man like you.”

“You’re starting to make me angry, Gretchen.”

She felt his callused fingertips go inside her shirt and move along her collarbone and settle on her carotid. He teased his thumbnail under her jaw and around her ear and spread his hand in the center of her back, pressing the heel into the muscles. “I could have been a lot harder on you,” he said.

“Kill me.”

“You really mean that?”

“Fuck you, asshole,” she said, her hatred and level of helplessness so intense she could hardly say the words.

She heard him snapping on a pair of latex gloves; then he ran the blade of his knife down the back of her shirt and through her bra strap and through the back of her jeans and her panties. He tore the clothes off her body, even pulling off her suede boots and her socks. He opened a bottle of bleach and soaked a wad of paper towels and scrubbed her hair and skin with it, then climbed out of the van and fitted his hands under her arms and dragged her over the bumper onto the ground.

She lay in the mud, the rain falling in her face, while he went to the front of the van and removed a paper sack from behind the seat. He took out a half pint of whiskey and a Ziploc bag of weed and splashed the whiskey in her mouth and on her face and bare breasts and over her hair, then forced weed past her lips and teeth and rubbed it into her hands and forearms and ears and nose, his chest laboring from the exertion.

He gathered up her clothes and boots and stuck them in the sack, then inserted the knife under the ligatures and sliced them loose from her wrists. “I threw your tote bag in the trees about three miles back. Write this off as a learning experience. For me it’s over, in case you ever want to let bygones be bygones. Nobody is gonna believe you, Gretchen. People like me. I’m a good guy. You’re shit on a stick.”

He got in the van and started the engine and drove past her with the window down, lighting another cigarette, the rain slashing across the taillights.

She walked a mile and a half up the road, her skin prickling with cold, her hair matted and dripping with water and dirt and twigs. A Jeep passed her and turned in to the trees at the peak of a hill. A boy and a girl got out and stared at her. A red nylon tent with a lantern hissing inside it stood in a grove of cedar trees. Below the hill, Gretchen could see the riffle on the river gliding between giant boulders, like a long streak of black oil shining in the moonlight.

“Jesus Christ, lady, are you okay?” the boy said.

She tried to cover her breasts with her arms and discovered that nothing she could do or say would explain or change her situation or undo the damage that had been done to her, not now, not ever. The greatest injury of all was the knowledge that her own merciful tendencies had allowed this to happen.