“Good night, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

“Good night,” I replied.

But they didn’t get far. Just outside the apron of light that fringed the tent, I saw Jamie Sue Wellstone’s driver buttonhole them. I walked up behind the three of them. Quince, the driver, was planted like a stump, his arms pumped, his hands opening and closing at his sides. “Don’t lie to me, boy,” he said. “I saw you pestering people as soon as you come in.”

“Boy?” Troyce said, smiling easily.

“You answer my question.”

“I didn’t hear you ask one.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“No sir, I wouldn’t do that.”

“Then state your goddamn business.”

“I work for a faith-based foundation in El Paso. I was trying to find a man who’s inherited a lot of money. But I ain’t had no luck in that.”

“The man on that photo you were showing around?”

“Could be.”

“Let’s see it.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“It is if you want your evening to go on in a reg’lar way.”

Troyce looked into the darkness, his forehead undisturbed by wrinkles or thought. He removed the toothpick from his mouth and looked at Candace rather than Quince. “I guess it cain’t hurt,” he said. He unbuttoned his shirt pocket and slipped the photo from it. The image on it had been cropped with scissors, snipped clean of the jailhouse location and numbers under it. “Seen that fellow around?”

Quince studied the photograph for a long time. Even in the shadows, I could see his scalp flex. “No,” he said.

Troyce smiled again, his eyes tolerant, faintly amused. “Sure about that?”

“I said it, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did. You’ve been a good little fellow. If I get the chance to talk to your mistress up yonder on the stage, I’ll tell her that myself.”

Candace Sweeney and Troyce walked into the mist and ground fog, the vast silhouettes of the Mission Mountains stretched across the sky behind them.

Quince turned around, noticing me for the first time. “What are you looking at?” he asked.

“Not a whole lot,” I replied.

I walked to the end of the tent area and up the dirt road that ran by the Indian powwow grounds. A moment later, an SUV with Candace Sweeney behind the wheel and her friend Troyce in the passenger seat went past me, the taillights braking where the dirt road intersected with the state highway. I wrote down the plate number, then drove home in an electric storm that lit the Bitterroot River and the cottonwoods like pistol flares floating down from a forgotten war.

CHAPTER 10

CANDACE SWEENEY HAD never understood abstract concepts connected with death, geographical permanence, or what people called “planning for the future.” She associated those particular concerns with people who either lived in a different world from the one she knew about or who deluded themselves about the nature of reality. The kind of people who spent their time at garage sales, window-shopping at the mall, or watching the Business Channel. Like they were going to take any of that crap with them.

The future didn’t exist, right? So what was the point of trying to control what hasn’t happened? The same applied with relationships. People came and went in your life, just like people entered turnstiles and exited them on the other side. In and out, right? Why place your trust in anyone who was just passing through?

She didn’t remember her mother. Her father was nicknamed Smilin’ Jack. He claimed the mother had died of ovarian cancer up in British Columbia, where he had worked as a gypo logger and sometimes on commercial fishing boats. But others said Candace’s mother was a morphine addict and a prostitute who ran a brothel in Valdez. When Candace was thirteen, Smilin’ Jack left her with a cousin in Seattle and went into the Cascades to pan gold. He was never seen again. He didn’t abandon her. He wasn’t profligate or mean or selfish. He had simply walked off in the rain, just like he was entering a turnstile, and had been absorbed by the great green-gray mass of mountains east of Seattle.

Now it was early Thursday morning in a budget motel not far from the Blackfoot River, downwind from a sawmill that smelled like the Pacific Northwest where Candace had grown up. The lights were on in a truck stop across the road, and log trucks were parked outside the café area, their diesel engines hammering. The rain had quit, and Candace knew it was going to be a good day. Or did she just want it to be a good day? The latter thought was disturbing to Candace, because wanting or needing anything, particularly when it had to be granted by other human beings, was an invitation to dependency and trouble.

She had made a cup of instant coffee from the hot water in the bathroom tap, and she drank it in her pajamas by the window and watched Troyce sleep. She didn’t understand Troyce. He was not like any man she had ever known. He opened doors for her, waited for her to order first in a restaurant, and didn’t use profanity in her presence. He seemed to genuinely like being with her and gave her money for whatever she wanted to buy without her even asking. But their first night together in a motel, she had clicked off the television set with the remote and turned off the overhead bed lamp and pulled the blanket up to her chin, waiting in the darkness for his hand to touch her. When he fell fast asleep, his back to her, she attributed his behavior to the fatigue that the injuries in his chest caused him.

In the morning she had felt his hardness against her hip, his breath touching her cheek like a feather. Then he’d opened his eyes and smiled at her like a man who wasn’t quite sure where he was. He’d gone into the bathroom and brushed his teeth and shaved and combed his hair. When he came out, drying his neck with a towel, his cheeks ruddy, he was completely dressed. He asked her what she wanted for breakfast.

She did not question him about his past, less out of fear of what he was than fear that he would lie to her. If he lied to her, she would know that in reality he was like other men, that he did not respect her and his attitude toward her had been dishonest and manipulative from the beginning. Her realization that she had stepped over a line and had made herself vulnerable to a man she hardly knew – except that he reminded Candace of her father – filled her with trepidation and anxiety and a growing sense of distrust about herself.

She had taken care of herself since she was thirteen. She didn’t need any more lessons in the school of hard knocks.

But now she found herself residing in a canyon wet with dew, across from a truck stop whose neon signs smoked in the cold, wondering if all her experience on the ragged edges of America had adequately prepared her for the relationship she had entered with a six-feet-five man by the name of Troyce Nix.

He pushed himself up in bed, his face flinching with the pain his wounds caused him. He had never been specific about the origin of his injuries. He had said simply, “A fellow tried to do me in. He dadburned near pulled it off.” He never denied he had been a cop of some kind. By the same token, he didn’t indicate he had been one, either. From the way he talked, she believed he had been in the army, maybe even to Iraq, and had encountered some kind of trouble there, maybe even in an army stockade. He always read the articles about the war first when he opened the newspaper. But wherever he had been or whatever he had done, he was a man’s man, and other men knew it. When she was with him, other men didn’t let their eyes wander as they would have if she had been alone. He seemed to find no fault in her, never criticized, and always laughed at her jokes and her irreverence. He had become the man who had always lived on the edge of her dreams, one who had chased float gold in the Cascades, believing rocks washing down from snowmelt could make him and his daughter rich.