The report sounded like that of a starter gun at a track meet. The shot went wide and disappeared with a pinging sound down in the trees. Jimmy Dale pulled the trigger twice more, and Sally Dio’s left leg buckled under him, just like someone had kicked him behind the knee. Billy tried to swing his Mac-10 clear of Dio for a shot, but Clete Purcel was all over him, pinning his arms at his sides, picking him up and slamming him to the ground, kicking the gun from his hand, stomping the side of his head, picking him up again and driving his fist into his face.
I got Sally Dio’s nine-millimeter from his hand and aimed it at the man in the mask. Dio tried to fight with me, but his best blows were like those of a dried-out crustacean – weightless and empty, like Sal himself, a shell of a man whose strength existed only to the degree that he could inculcate fear in others. Oddly, the man in the mask showed no reaction that I could see, as though he was merely a witness to all the events taking place around him.
Clete was still hitting Billy, holding him down with one knee in his chest, hitting him so hard he had started to beg.
“Cletus, ease up,” I said.
“You’re right,” he said, getting to his feet, the Mac-10 in his right hand, his attention focused on the man in the mask, his finger curling inside the trigger guard.
“Don’t do it,” I said.
“He’s going to skate. The sicker they are, the easier they get off on an insanity plea,” he replied.
“That’s just the way it is. We’re not executioners, podna. Lower the piece.”
“No, I’m going to walk him into the woods. Call it Q-and-A time. Who knows how it might work out?” His green eyes were charged with adrenaline, his face slick with sweat, his cheeks as red as apples.
“We don’t give them power. We don’t become like them. Waxman will rot in a cage, and he’ll take Ridley Wellstone down with him. We’ll take two guys off the board instead of one. You want to do their time?”
“Good try,” Clete said.
“You always said it, the Bobbsey Twins are forever. Who am I going to drink Dr Pepper with?”
I saw hesitation in his movements, like an elephant in must suddenly becoming pacified, his size actually deflating, a suppressed grin on his mouth. “You can really rain on a parade, Dave.”
He made Harold Waxman take off his mask and lie down on the ground, then pulled Candace Sweeney and Jimmy Dale Greenwood out of the pit, brushing off their clothes for them as he did, maybe reassuring them in his clumsy fashion that the world was a better place than they had thought.
But in truth, I cannot tell you with any exactitude what happened inside that clearing during a midsummer electric storm west of Swan Lake, Montana. I know that the rain falls and the sun rises on evil men as well as on the good and just. I know that on that particular night we were spared a terrible fate. At the same time, men a theologian would probably term wicked were put out of business. Perhaps we even made a dent in the venal enterprises they represent.
But if there is a greater lesson in what occurred inside that clearing, it’s probably the simple fact that the real gladiators of the world are so humble in their origins and unremarkable in appearance that when we stand next to them in a grocery-store line, we never guess how brightly their souls can burn in the dark.
Or at least that’s the way it seems to me.
EPILOGUE
TROYCE NIX HAD never thought of himself as a liar, or at least not a very good liar. However, he discovered he was far more adept at it than he had thought, particularly after being interviewed by both the Missoula County and Lake County sheriffs and then a team of FBI agents.
The latter group questioned him on the shore of Swan Lake, directly below the clearing where the mass shooting had gone down, asking him to describe again, in detail, how Jimmy Dale Greenwood had drowned.
“It’s like I said. I chased him through the trees, but he just kept on hauling ass. He hit the water running and swum out about forty yards and then started fighting in the water and went down like a brick shithouse.”
“It was pitch dark. How could you see anything?” one agent asked.
“There was lightning flashing up in the clouds. I think he probably had a cramp or them goons busted him up inside. I seen his arms flailing around for just a minute, then he sunk under a bunch of bubbles. Throw some grappling hooks out there. He probably ain’t floated very far.”
“That lake has mountain peaks under it. The drop-offs go straight down a hundred and thirty feet,” the same agent said.
“Really? I guess that’s how come all them big pike are in there,” Troyce said.
“Did you try to go after him?” a female agent asked. She was the same Amerasian woman he had seen the night Quince Whitley tried to throw acid in Candace’s face.
“The last time I got close to Jimmy Dale, he cut me up and left me to bleed to death. If you ask me, he was a mean little piss-pot and worthless half-breed and deserved worse than what he got. I wish he hadn’t drowned. I wish I could have had the opportunity to stick him in that wood chipper by the log house.”
The Amerasian woman looked at Troyce for a long time. “Do you know it’s a felony to lie to a federal agent who is conducting a criminal investigation?”
“If I got a reason to cover up for that nasty little turd, it’s lost on me. Y’all keep up the good work,” Troyce said. “Say, y’all think I might have a chance of becoming a FBI agent?”
Two weeks later, I placed flowers on the graves of both Seymour Bell and Cindy Kershaw. I didn’t try to contact or console their families, because I believe absolutely without reservation that the worst thing that can happen to human beings is to lose one’s child, and the words we offer by way of solace become salt inside the wound. Instead, I said a prayer over their graves and told them that I hoped they were all right, and I also asked them to watch over me and my family and to keep all of us safe from those who Jesus said should fasten millstones around their necks and cast themselves into the sea.
But sometimes neither prayer nor visiting the graves of homicide victims expunges the images associated with the manner in which they died, and I knew I had to go to the source of their suffering and look him in the face, in the same way a child has to open a closet door and confront the darkness inside in order to be free of it.
Harold Waxman was being held in the Lake County jail, the first of a series of lockups in which he would reside until both state and federal authorities agreed to let him be prosecuted in the jurisdiction where the greatest amount of damage could be done to him by the legal system. The chances that he would be gassed, electrocuted, or injected were minimal. Unlike Ted Bundy, who deliberately committed heinous crimes in Florida – including the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl – knowing he would fry if he were caught and prosecuted there, Harold Waxman seemed to have no death wish and killed people for only one reason: He enjoyed it. Consequently, he was more clever than Bundy, less compulsive, and not given to the thespian temptations of televised trials.
I have known police officers and soldiers who I believed to be sociopaths. I have also interviewed sociopaths in death houses in the Huntsville pen, Raiford, Angola, and Parchman. They have one commonality that never varies from individual to individual, replicated in such exact detail that you feel they all know one another and have rehearsed their statements and are taking you over the hurdles. They not only lack remorse for the deeds they have committed; they are bemused when you indicate they should.
I was surprised Waxman consented to the interview, since I had no legal jurisdiction in the state of Montana. For the interview, he was moved from a lockdown unit to a holding cell, one with a barred rather than a solid door. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and waist and ankle chains, his wrists cuffed close to his hips, his whole body tinkling with steel as he shuffled into the cell. He had been interrupted during his lunch and had brought a sandwich wrapped in foil with him, clenching it with his fingers, although there was no way he could raise it to his mouth. The turnkey locked him in the holding cell and brought me a chair so I could sit outside the bars and not inside the cell.