Light of the World (67 page)

A
SA SURRETTE DID
not like electricity. During winter, in the home where he was born, static electricity was always nestled in the house, in the rugs ingrained with dust, on the surface of doorknobs and refrigerator handles and pipes in the cellar, in the touch of another human being’s hand. It was symptomatic of a harsh and unforgiving land, of winter winds that could sand the paint off a water tower, of horizons that seemed to blend into infinity.

Nor did he like electricity in the heavens, when it crawled silently through the clouds, flaring in yellow pools that leaped chainlike all the way to the earth’s rim, as though there were powers and spirits at work in the natural world that he could never control or understand. He sat in a straight-back chair on the first floor of a two-story stone house that had belonged to a California woman who no longer needed it. That was how he remembered her. She was the California woman who no longer needed things, not even her name. Now he sat in the almost bare living room of her former house, gazing at the light show in the sky, thinking about what he should do next, his fingers hooked under his thighs, his sandy-blond hair hanging in his eyes, a scab the size of a dime glued on his cheek.

He could hear no sound from the basement. He slipped off his loafers and pressed his feet flat against the floor, wondering if he would feel any movement from below or the vibrations of a voice,
even a whisper, through the wood. It wasn’t impossible. Not for him, it wasn’t. When he was in twenty-three-hour lockdown, he had come to believe he possessed not only a third eye but sensory powers that went far beyond the skills blind people developed out of necessity. That said, he had to keep his ego in check. His IQ and the classics he had read and his study of people and their weaknesses gave him a tremendous sense of confidence in his dealings with others but made him vulnerable. Excess confidence could lead him into entanglements with women, all of whom carried elements in their emotional metabolism that were like a drug.

Women were devious and alluring by nature, the sirens who waited on the rocks, their breasts bare, beckoning with their pale arms for the ship to sail just a little closer, through the froth of a wine-dark sea, their teeth white and their lips opening like purple flowers.

He did not like these images. They alarmed and attracted him at the same time, not unlike the smell of opium burning, or the smell of men in a steam room, or the happy cries of children playing in a park. Each of these things was a thorn inside a rose, and when he tried to think through the connections, nothing made any sense, and he felt a sense of anger and impotence that made his nails cut into his palms.

He was having other problems: his posture in a straight-back chair and the way he unconsciously gripped its undersided. The prison psychiatrist had latched on to that one—after he caught Asa Surrette spitting in his coffee cup when he stepped out the door for a minute. He said Surrette’s body language indicated the residual stress and anger and rebellion characteristic of people who went through severe toilet training. The psychiatrist became enthused by his own rhetoric and began to riff on the subject, enjoying himself immensely. “Some adult children of dysfunctional parents, people such as you, Asa, were probably strapped down for hours, usually by the mother. Do you have any memories of her giving you enemas? You don’t need to repress those memories anymore. Are you feeling anger about these things? You can be honest here. Oh, excuse me, you’re not angry? Then why is your face so heated? Did your mommy reward you when you went poo-poo?”

Asa Surrette decided he might return to Kansas and visit his old friend the psychiatrist when this Montana situation was resolved. Maybe fix him a cup of coffee he wouldn’t forget.

Right now he had to unload ten bags of crushed ice, each weighing thirty pounds, from the Mercedes SUV that the California woman didn’t need anymore. The Mercedes was parked in the garage, down by the lake. And the woman from California was parked three feet under the dirt in the cherry trees next to the garage, may that loudmouth tub of lard rest in peace.

Few people realized how easy it was to take others under your sway. A kind word at the supermarket, a tip of the hat, a show of sympathy at a funeral or after a 12-step meeting, that’s all it took if the situation was right and the target was trusting and needy.

Introspection was a luxury he could not afford at the moment, and the foibles of the
folk
had nothing to do with the problems dropped on him by Felicity Louviere. She was slipping away from him, about to be saved by mortality, the very weapon he had always held over the heads of his victims. She’d even thanked him for her pain. How sick was
that
?

He stood up in the bareness of the room. Even though the house was built of stone, it seemed to swell with the force of the wind sweeping down from the mountains to the north.
I’m your master and unto me your knee will bend,
he heard himself saying.
I have powers you cannot imagine. I can reach into the grave and extract your soul and make you my handmaiden for eternity. The choice will be mine, not yours. You will not reject me. Do you not understand that, you stupid woman?

He realized he was grinding his molars. His words seemed pretentious and self-mocking. “Damn her to hell,” he said under his breath, and wondered if anyone had heard the fear in his voice.

W
E STARTED UP
Eastside Highway and stopped at eleven
P.M.
down by the shore. We woke up people, confused most of them, and probably frightened some. It was late, and I could not blame them for their reaction. We had no legal authority there, and the implications
of our questions were not the kind anyone would want to deal with on a Sunday night. Flathead Lake and its environs were supposed to be a safe harbor from the problems in the rest of the country. The residents kept looking beyond us into the darkness, unsure who we were and yet fearful that we were telling them the truth. How do you explain to people who are basically good and trusting that their lives are predicated on an enormous presumption, namely, that the justice system works and that evil people will be prevented from coming into their lives?

Surrette could be dismissed as a psychological monstrosity whose mother would have been better off raising a gerbil. Here’s the rub: He’s not the only one. If you’ve ever been inside, either as a correctional officer or as an inmate, you know what “con-wise” means. The majority of people who stack time, male and female, are not different from the rest of us. They have families and work histories and skilled trades and are surprisingly patriotic. Some of them have remarkable levels of personal courage and are stand-up in an environment that would break a lesser man or woman. Most of them are also screwups. In other words, they belong to the family of man, even if only on its outer edges.

But ask anyone who has been inside about the bunch in permanent lockdown. These are the ones who scare you, even when they’re draped with waist and leg chains, and they scare you because looking into their eyes assures you they love evil for its own sake. Talk to the trusties who mop the floors in the lockdown unit and wheel the food cart from cell to cell. They do not make eye contact. Nor do the correctional personnel who sometimes have to enter a cell with body and face shields and cans of pepper spray and sometimes, like anyone who has witnessed a state execution, need to stop at a bar before going home that night.

Here is the most bothersome part about the men in permanent lockdown: They can hear each other’s thoughts. They network; they exchange kites with pieces of string the way pen pals might; they share stories that could have been invented by a medieval inquisitor. They’re shunned and reviled by the rest of the prison population, but among themselves, they rejoice in their iniquity. Check out the video
of Richard Speck getting stoned in a cell with some of his buds, his naked breasts enlarged by hormones, while he makes a joke about the nurses he raped and murdered.

Halfway up the lake, my cell phone chimed. It was Molly.

“I’m sorry we took off,” I said. “I thought you understood that the sheriff wanted to see us before we headed up to Flathead Lake.”

“Do you think I’m going to allow my family to expose themselves to risk without my being there?” she replied. “Is that what you think of me, Dave?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then why did you leave me behind?”

In my frustration, I took the phone away from my ear, then replaced it. “Maybe I didn’t want you to see something.”

“Like
what
?” she said.

“Maybe Surrette’s not going to be around much longer.”

“I don’t like what you’re suggesting.”

“That’s the way it is.”

“No, it is not. We don’t do things that way.”

“Where are you?” I asked.

“We just passed a marina. I didn’t catch the name. There’s a house down the slope with a couple of junk cars in the yard. There’s a shed with an auto repair sign on it.”

I had no idea where she was.

“Let me call you back,” she said.

“No, listen to me—”

She broke the connection. I tired to redial, but we had gone around a curve on a high spot above the water and had lost service.

“She’ll be all right,” Clete said.

“Albert is with her.”

Clete scratched his cheek. “I guess that’s a little different.”

I was trying to concentrate. I had missed a detail in Molly’s conversation. What was it?

Clete put his hand on the wheel. “Watch where you’re going. There’s an eighty-foot drop on the other side of that rail.”

“The wrecker,” I said.

“What wrecker?”

“See if you can get the sheriff on the phone,” I said.

“Are you kidding? I can’t stomach that guy.”

“For once, don’t argue, Clete,” I said. “Can you do that? I know it’s hard. But try. I’m sure you can do it if you work on it.”

“Who lit
your
fuse?”

A tractor-trailer rig passed us in the other direction, then a truck pulling a camper and what looked like a Cherokee. Up ahead, I saw Gretchen’s brake lights go on. I followed her to the bottom of the grade and into a parking area by a guardrail overlooking the water. It was almost midnight, and the heat lightning had drained from the clouds and disappeared in a dying flicker beyond the mountains. Small waves were capping on the lake, slapping the beach with the dull regularity of a metronome.

Gretchen stepped out of her pickup. “Did you recognize the guy in the Cherokee?” she said.

“I didn’t pay any attention,” I said.

“I think it was Jack Boyd,” she replied.

“Are you sure about that?”

“I should be. I kicked his ass today,” she said.

“I got the sheriff on the line,” Clete said.

F
ELICITY’S EYES HAD
been bound when he laid her down on the bedsprings and secured her hands and feet to the four bedposts. She assumed the electric current came from a wall socket, but she could not be sure. The first jolt knocked her unconscious. When he threw water on her and shocked her again, she heard a grinding sound inside her head that could have been a generator or the vibration of the bedstead against the concrete floor.

There were interludes when he went away, stomping as he climbed the wooden stairs, not unlike a resentful child. While he was gone, she drifted in and out of consciousness and experienced dreams or hallucinations she could not separate from reality. He had gagged her and left a window open, probably to clear the air of the sweaty odor that seemed painted on the basement walls. At first she thought she heard the wind blowing through a copse of thickly leafed trees;
then she realized the sounds were not leaves rustling together but the voices of human beings, many of them talking at once, creating a drone that made her think of a beehive.

The cotton pads taped over her eyes admitted no light, but she believed she could see tropical plants and flowers and palms, and she wondered if her ordeal had not bought her passage to the place where her father had died among the Indians in South America.

All her anger toward her father had disappeared. She wanted to reach out and touch his fingers and tell him that her life had not been bad after his death. She wanted to tell him that she had gotten by on her own, and she was proud of the sacrifice he had made for others, and that as long as he was in the basement with her, no harm would come to either of them.

Then she realized she was not in touch with her father. Instead, she was in an arid country where date palms grew along the roadways and the stone in the amphitheater was hot enough to scald the hands of the spectators in the noonday sun, and the only shade was over the box where Roman nobility sat.

Her warders had been Nubians who were so black, there was a purple shine on their skin. They herded her and her companions with spears from the dungeon below the seats into the brilliance of the day, and only then did she smell the blood that had dried in the sand and see the array of executioners with trident and flagellum and gladius and a metal-sheathed instrument she had not seen before.