Light of the World (61 page)

“I had to tie up a problem or two. That’s the nature of my work.”

“I see. Well, next time I’m sure you’ll remember to call. You look tired. Maybe you should take a nap.”

“I don’t need a nap.”

“Like Scripture says, we must always be alert. But as a minister, you already know that. You ran into a nail? How awful.”

“I’m going into my room now.”

“By the way, we’re going to be painting the upstairs. We’ll need to move you into the cubby for a few days.”

“What’s the cubby?”

“It’s in the basement. It’s only temporary. There’s a window and a toilet. You can come upstairs to bathe.”

“That’s not convenient for me.”

“Beg your pardon?” she said.

“I don’t live in basements. I’m not a bat.”

She sniffed the air and made a face. “What’s that smell?” she said.

“I don’t know. I don’t smell anything.”

“It’s very strong. Check the bottom of your shoes.”

He could hear himself breathing, his irritability climbing like a tarantula up his spinal cord. Her mouth made him think of a plumber’s helper, one smeared with lipstick. “Who’s home?” he said.

“Ralph’s splitting wood. The girls went to the movies. Why do you want to know?”

“I thought we’d have a meeting of the minds.”

“You’re acting strangely. I think I should have a look at your cheek. You may already have an infection. Are you running a fever?”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Well, I never.”

“Do you have some baling wire?”

“Ralph probably has some in the shed.”

“Yes, folksy hinterland people would always have some baling wire lying around, wouldn’t they? Ralphie splinters the wood, and then you cord it up for the winter. That’s what folksy salt-of-the-earth people do.”

“What has gotten into you?” she said.

“A little of this, a little of that,” he said, dipping his hand into his overnight bag. “Mostly, I just don’t like the way you look. Or the way you talk. Or your stupid expression.”

He lifted up a .22 auto outfitted with a suppressor and popped a solitary round through the middle of her forehead, the hole no bigger than the circumference of an eraser on a wood pencil. She went straight down on the floor in a heap, like a puppet whose strings had been released by the puppeteer. That was how they always went down when they weren’t expecting it. Not like in the movies, when the shooting victim flew backward through a glass window.

He studied her surprised expression and the pool of blood forming on the floor, then put away the semi-auto and picked up the brass and stepped out on the landing. “Hey, Ralph!” he called down. “Can you bring some baling wire up here? The wife wants you to help hang something.”

The husband snicked his ax into the stump and gazed up at the landing, squinting against the sunlight. “Be there in a jiff, Geta. We wondered where you were,” he said. “I told the wife not to worry, you were doing the Lord’s work. Glad you’re back home safe and sound.”

A
FTER BERTHA PHELPS
drove away, Clete went down to the cabin, and I went back up on the hill, trying to retrace the route Asa Surrette used to get on and off Albert’s property. It was 3:48
P.M.
and shady and cool inside the trees, but on the opposite side of the valley, I could see harebells and asters and paintbrush and mock orange and sunflowers and bee balm on the hillsides, where the grass was green and tall and the trees were few because of the thin soil layer. Then I saw Clete laboring up the grade toward me, his porkpie hat on, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his right hand, his shoulders as heavy-looking as a bag of rocks.

“I thought you could use some company,” he said, sweating, his breath coming hard. He sat down on a boulder and wiped his brow. “I guess I still haven’t acclimated to the thin air.”

“Maybe you ought to put the hooch away today,” I said.

Mistake.

He pulled the cork and upended the bottle, one eye fixed on my face. “See, no problem. The world hasn’t ended,” he said. “Marse Daniel never lets me down.”

“Who are you kidding?”

“I told you, I needed a drink. So I took one. I think my liver is shot. I take one hit and it’s like mainlining. That means I drink less.” He waited for me to argue with him, but I didn’t. “What do you think you’re going to find up here?” he asked.

“The last time Surrette was on the hill, he tried to lead Gretchen into a bear trap,” I said. “I followed his trail over the crest to the far side. His tracks led to a rock outcropping, then disappeared. He had to go south to get to the highway. There are two or three deer trails that would have taken him there, but his tracks weren’t on them. I don’t get it.”

“What if he headed north?”

“He’d end up in a blind canyon. It was night. He would have to climb out of it in the dark. Where would his vehicle be?”

“What’s in the canyon?”

“Three or four houses. People Albert knows,” I replied.

Clete took another hit off the bottle. I could see a chain of tiny air bubbles sliding up the neck as he drank. He set the bottle on his leg. “I shouldn’t do this in front of you. But I’m not doing too good today, and I need it.”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“Not at all?” he said.

“Maybe a little. Like a thought that’s buried in the unconscious. Like an old girlfriend winking at you on the street corner.”

“That bad?”

“It comes and goes. I don’t think about it as often; I dream about it. The dreams are always nightmares. Sometimes I can’t wake myself up, and I walk around thinking I’m drunk.”

“How often do you dream about it?”

“Every third night, about four
A.M.
”

“All these years?”

“Except when I was back on the dirty boogie. Then I didn’t have to dream. My life was a nightmare twenty-four hours a day,” I said.

He stared through the trees into the sunlight. Down below, Albert was watering the grass. I could hear birds singing and chipmunks clattering in the rocks. I thought of all the days Clete and I had hiked through woods to get to an isolated pond in the Atchafalaya Basin. I thought about diving the wreck of a German sub that drifted up and down the Louisiana coast, and knocking down ducks inside a blind on Whiskey Bay, and trolling for marlin south of Key Largo, the
bait bouncing in our wake. I thought of all the Cubans and Cajuns and Texas fisherpeople we had known along the southern rim of the United States, and the open-air oyster bars we had eaten in and the boats on which we had hauled tarpons as thick as logs over the gunwales. What is the sum total of a man’s life? I knew the answer, and it wasn’t complicated. At the bottom of the ninth, you count up the people you love, both friends and family, and you add their names to the fine places you’ve been and the good things you’ve done, and you have it.

Clete stood up and dusted off the seat of his trousers. “Let’s hike on up a bit higher,” he said.

“Where’s Gretchen?”

“I wish I knew. When it comes to her old trade, she’s a loner. She said something I hadn’t thought about. That Surrette is going to come apart.”

“Why?” I asked.

“She’s known guys like him, guys the Mob took out. She said they’re all anal-retentives. They’ve got a master plan. When it doesn’t work out, their world goes to shit.”

“What’s Surrette’s master plan?”

“Breaking Felicity.”

I didn’t look at his face. The implication in his voice was enough. I heard him lift the bottle again, the whiskey sloshing inside the neck.

“Sometimes you have to keep an empty space in your head and not let the wrong thoughts get in it,” I said.

“That’s why I drink this. It’s why I need a little slack sometimes, noble mon,” he said.

I heard him take another hit and squeak the cork tight in the bottle.

We walked up the hill, me in front, angling toward the crest in a northwesterly direction. The new grass was coming up between the winter thatch, and in places where a spring had leaked down the slope, I could see the sharply defined tracks of deer and at least one canine.

“Is that a wolf track?” Clete said.

“I think it is.”

“That’s another thing that’s weird,” he said. “Surrette comes and goes and doesn’t seem to give the wolves any thought.”

“They’re brothers-in-arms?”

“I didn’t say that. Don’t pretend it’s not weird, though. I don’t feel easy out here unless I’ve got my piece.”

“He’s a sociopath. He thinks the universe can’t go on without him.”

Clete pointed down the slope at a depression where a large animal, probably a bear, had been digging grubs. The soil was black and loamy and burrowed out from under a log. Inside the dirt and the disturbed leaves and pine needles, I could see a rusty length of chain. I worked my way down the slope and jerked on the chain until the bear trap on the other end pulled free from the ground.

“That’s the one he almost got Gretchen with?” Clete said.

I ran my thumb along the teeth on the two half-moon steel bands that had sprung tightly together. “Yeah, this is probably it.”

“You think he buried it because his prints are on it?” Clete said.

“There’s a good chance. Or he planned to come back and get it.”

Clete looked toward the north, the trees swaying overhead. A hawk was drifting on the wind stream, its feathers ruffling. “Surrette is closer to us than we think.”

“Or he was,” I replied.

“Maybe we should start knocking on some doors,” he said.

I followed him down the hill, dragging the bear trap through the thatch and detritus on the forest floor, the chain as cold and damp as a serpent in my palm.

G
RETCHEN ONCE READ
an autobiographical work titled
Something About a Soldier,
written by a Miami novelist named Charles Willeford. At age thirteen, in the bottom of the Depression, the author ran away from an orphanage and rode the rods all over the American West. Three years later, he enlisted in the horse cavalry and was stationed in the Philippines and at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. In his account, Willeford talked about certain individuals for whom there were no lines. Some of them were fellow enlisted men, twenty-year-olds who looked him
straight in the face and said, never blinking, “There are no lines.” They were talking about sexual intercourse with Filipino children.

The lesson Willeford took away from the experience was simple: There are always lines. No matter how bad it gets, at Normandy or in the Hürtgen Forest or at Arnhem, where he commanded a tank, there are lines. Under a black flag, inside the belly of the beast, in a man-made hell like Auschwitz, there are still lines, and the day you say otherwise is the day something flies out of your breast and does not return.

Gretchen had read Willeford’s autobiography two weeks before she popped Bix Golightly. For years she had created different scenarios in anticipation of catching up with him one day. She had convinced herself that a man who would sodomize a six-year-old girl deserved anything that happened to him.

She took the contract without fee and flew to New Orleans and followed him around the city for two days. On the third night, he crossed the bridge into Algiers and parked on a deserted side street. She could see every detail of his face as she approached his vehicle—the scar tissue in his eyebrows, the bonelike forehead, the Mongolian eyes, the crooked bridge of his nose, the flat profile from the punches he had taken at Angola and in the ring. He was smoking a perfumed cigarette and at first showed no particular interest in her presence. Then he recognized her as the contract hitter he knew only as Caruso, an almost mythic figure with obscure origins in Miami’s Little Havana. He may not have made the connection between Caruso and the little girl whose life he had ruined, but he knew that the intersection of his life with Caruso’s on this backstreet not far from the oily water of the Mississippi was not coincidence and that the last page on his calendar was about to be ripped off.

He began talking to her through the window as though they were old friends, his words spilling out nonsensically, his breath rife with funk. She never spoke. She watched him as she would a hamster racing around inside a glass box. She thought of popping him in the neck and pulling him out on the asphalt, where she would finish the job. She didn’t. There were always lines.

She squeezed off three rounds, so fast that Golightly never knew what hit him. The side of his head slapped the steering wheel, his mouth dropped open, his eyes stared at a garbage can on the opposite curb as though it were the most interesting object on earth.

Then she spat on his corpse, indifferent to the possibilities of DNA analysis, and walked away.

Now she was troubled again by Charles Willeford’s anecdotal admonition regarding lines. She had talked for forty-five minutes at the hospital with Rhonda Fayhee and had concluded that the simple and innocent girl would live with nightmares the rest of her life. Fortunately, she had been sedated so heavily by Surrette that she did not remember some of the things he probably did to her.

During the captivity, the bag had stayed on Rhonda’s head, and she never saw her surroundings. Nevertheless, she remembered details that were unmistakable: the smell of damp stone or brick, a faint glow of sunlight through a window at dawn, a sound like the chuck of waves against a boathouse or a beach.