JIMMY DALE GREENWOOD could smell the rawness of the freshly dug pit in which he lay, the severed tree roots, the water leaking out of the scalped sides, the cold odor of broken stone, and he knew, even though his eyes were taped, that his greatest fear, the one that had pursued him all his life, was about to be realized: In the next few minutes, he would be buried alive.
He kept twisting and jerking at the tape that bound his wrists, but it was wound deeply into the skin, cutting off the blood in the veins, numbing his fingers and palms. Troyce Nix’s woman lay next to him, but there was a third person in the pit, and Jimmy Dale had no idea who the person was or why he or she had been put there. He could hear the voices of the men who had abducted him in the cargo van, and the voice of the man who had dragged him from the van and flung him into the pit. He could also smell the stench of diesel exhaust and the odor of electric lights smoking in the mist.
He tried to reach inside himself for the strength to accept whatever ordeal lay in store for him. He remembered all the great challenges in his life that in one way or another he had mastered and come out on the other side of: a horse named Bad Whiskey that he rode to the buzzer in Vegas with two broken ribs; his first appearance on a stage, at an amateur competition in Bandera, Texas, when he was so frightened his voice broke and his fingers shook on the frets but he finished the song regardless and won a third-place ribbon; the time he tied himself down with a suicide wrap on a bull that slung him into the boards and whipped two extra inches on his height; and the biggest crossroads of all, the day he decided to get a shank and end the abuse visited upon him by Troyce Nix.
But all those milestones in his life, or the degree of victory over fear they may have represented, had been of no help in overcoming his nightmares about premature burial. Now the nightmare was about to become a reality. Once, in a beery fog at a roach motel outside Elko, Nevada, he had flicked on the television set and inadvertently started watching a documentary about the atrocities committed during the Chinese civil war between the nationalists and the communists. Peasants with their hands bound behind them had been laid out in rows and were being buried alive, a shovelful at a time, the dirt striking their faces while they pleaded in vain for mercy.
Jimmy Dale had never rid himself of that image, and now he was at the bottom of a pit, waiting to become one of the images he had seen in that grainy black-and-white film years ago.
He felt a hand touch his wrist and pull against the tape. It was the woman; she had gotten her fingers on the tip of the tape and was peeling back a long strand from his wrist.
“Can you hear me?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said, the word barely audible behind the tape that covered his mouth.
“Don’t move, don’t talk. I’ll get you loose,” she said.
He heard footsteps and other voices by the pit, and he felt the woman’s hand go limp.
“You’re putting a mask on?” Layne said.
“What about it?”
“Why do you put on a mask if we all know what you look like?”
“Because I like to.”
“Each to his own, huh?”
“You seem to have a lot of comments to make about what other people do.”
“No sir, I don’t. I’m sorry if I gave that impression.”
“You’re sorry, all right. You don’t know how sorry you really are.”
Layne was obviously not sure what he was being told. Nor did he seem to know how to respond. “There’s some lights coming up the road,” he said.
“You figured that out, did you?”
“I got nothing else to say to you, man.”
“You were watching the girl, weren’t you, thinking about what’s going to happen to her?”
“I was gonna have a smoke.”
“No, you were imagining her fate. But you don’t have the courage to make that fate happen, do you?”
“Buddy, I won’t say another word to you. I got no issue with what you do.”
“No issue? You mimic the language of people who don’t have brains.”
The speaker walked away, his footsteps heavy, booted, a man whose movements and speech were all in exact measure to his purpose. Jimmy Dale heard Layne exhale.
WE CAME OVER a knoll and walked down into a depression that was flanked on either side by fir and larch trees. Ahead, the road climbed again, and just beyond the spot where it peaked, I could see a glow shining upward through the trees, and I knew this was the place where all the roads Clete and I had followed for a lifetime had finally converged. Leslie Wellstone and the man with the Mac kept behind us, their shoes padding softly on the layer of wet pine needles that carpeted the ground, the truck with Jamie Sue and Ridley Wellstone and the other hired man bringing up the rear.
At the corner of my vision, I saw a movement in the trees. Or at least I thought I did. Perhaps it had been wishful thinking, I told myself. But I saw Clete’s eyes glance sideways, too. A moment later, the wind blew in a violent gust across Swan Lake and swept up the side of the mountain, shaking the trees, filling the air with pine needles and a smell like water and humus and cold stone. Have you ever been in a nocturnal environment where snipers lurk inside the foliage? The wind becomes your indispensable ally. When the trees and undergrowth and sometimes the elephant grass begin to thrash, the object that does not move or the shadow that remains like a tin cutout becomes the entity that is out there in the darkness, preparing to take your life.
Except in this case, the presence on our perimeter, among the fir and larch and pine trees, was our friend and not our enemy.
Nix was a military man and knew what to do when wind or a pistol flare threatened to reveal his position. He settled himself quickly into the undergrowth, his arms freezing into sticks, his face downturned so as not to reflect light. But I had seen him, and I knew Clete had seen him, too.
Neither Leslie Wellstone nor the man with the Mac had taken their eyes off us. Wellstone obviously had noticed something in our manner that was making him suspicious.
Clete had told me to keep them distracted.
“There’re too many loose ends,” I said. “You guys won’t get away with this.”
“Your lack of both wisdom and judgment never ceases to amaze me, Mr. Robicheaux,” Wellstone said.
“I majored in low expectations,” I replied.
“That’s not bad. I’ll have to remember that,” he said.
“Remember this,” Clete said. “Every one of these morons working for you is for sale. You don’t think the feds are going to start squeezing them? Who are they going to roll over on?”
“God, you two guys are slow on the uptake,” Wellstone said. “You know why most crimes go unsolved? Because most cops have IQs of minus eight. Those are the smart ones.”
For a moment the supercilious accent and manner were gone, and I heard the clipped ethnic speech that I used to associate with only two crime families – one in Orleans Parish, one in Galveston, Texas.
“You think the FBI is stupid, too, Sal?” Clete said.
“What’d you call me?”
“You’re Sally Dee, right?” Clete said.
“What’s he talking about, Mr. Wellstone?” the man with the Mac asked.
“Nothing. Mr. Purcel is a noisy fat man who’s having a hard time accepting that he ruined his career and his life and that his options are quickly running out. Is that fair to say, Mr. Purcel?”
“No matter how it plays out, you’re still a french fry, Sal. And I’m the dude who did it to you.”
Shut up, Clete, I thought.
“Well, maybe someone is arranging a special event for you tonight. The gentleman who will be taking care of it is quite imaginative,” Leslie Wellstone said.
“Sal, you were a pretentious douche bag twenty years ago, and you’re a pretentious douche bag now. In the joint, you were a sissy and a cunt. Your old man sent you out to Reno because you couldn’t even run one of his whorehouses on your own. After your plane crashed, a couple of your ex-punches told me you were a needle dick your skanks laughed at behind your back.”