Swan Peak (25 page)

LESS THAN FIFTY
feet away, Albert Hollister’s pickup truck was parked in a grove of pine trees, the camper bladed with moonlight. Inside the camper, J. D. Gribble was sleeping in a fetal position, a blanket wrapped around his head, his dreams peopled with images that he could not dispel or extract himself from. He heard the night sounds of a jail — the count man clicking his baton against the bars, somebody yelling in the max unit, a kid being wrestled down on a bunk, a rolled towel jerked back against his mouth. But the dream and the images in his head, brought on by the mixture of alcohol and cold medicine, were not just about stacking time.

He saw a dark corridor with bars set in the middle, and on the other side of the bars, a lighted world where a gold-haired woman in a sequined blue evening dress was playing an HD-28 Martin guitar. Her mouth was red, her expression plaintive, her dress as tight on her body as the skin on a seal. Behind her was a backdrop of alkali wasteland and low purple mountains that rimmed the entire horizon. She curved her palm around the guitar’s neck to chord the frets and seemed to purse her lips at Gribble as she sang.

In the dream, he walked down the corridor toward her until he reached the bars and had to stop and rest with his hands clinging to them. From out of the glare, a man in a linen suit approached the woman and opened a parasol, lifting it above her head, shading her from the sun. For the first time, Gribble noticed the woman’s belly was swollen with child. The man’s face was disfigured and did not look quite human, even though he was grinning at the corner of his mouth. The woman wore blue contact lenses, and both she and the disfigured man were staring oddly at Gribble, as though wondering why he did not recognize the inevitability of his rejection.

Was it so hard for him to understand that a woman carrying an unborn child must find ways to survive? Did he want the child aborted? Was she supposed to live on welfare while the father of her child spent his most productive years in a contract prison?

Actually, he understood those questions and would not argue with the answers they implied. The real question was one nobody had asked. Was her choice of a disfigured rich man driven by her need to survive or the need to sustain her celebrity? No one who has ever been sprinkled with stardust walks away from it easily. In fact, no one of his own volition
ever
walks away from it. Like youth, fame and adulation are not surrendered, they’re taken away from you.

It was cold inside the camper shell when the man who called himself Gribble woke from his dream. He pulled the blanket from his head and sat up in the darkness. He could feel the wind blowing against the camper, and through the tinted glass in the side panel, he thought he could see pine needles sifting through the air and the shadows of the trees changing shape on the ground. Then he realized the shadows were not just those of trees.

He rubbed his hand on the glass and saw a humped figure at the base of a ponderosa with his wrists fastened behind the trunk. He saw a second figure walk out of the darkness, carrying an armload of organic debris from the undergrowth. The figure stood above the man fastened to the base of the tree trunk and poured the load of twigs and dead branches and leaves on the man’s head and shoulders.

The man wore work boots and a dark suit and dark shirt. His hands and wrists were covered by rawhide gloves with cuffs that extended back over the wrists. He wore a full mask, one that was molded from thick plastic, bone-colored, hard-edged, and incised with slits to cool the skin. He seemed encased in his own darkness, his movements simian, his ritual one that he had learned and refined and fed in a private world that only his victims were allowed to witness.

Gribble could not understand how he had gotten where he was or what was going on by the pine tree. Through the back window of the camper, he could see a long wooded slope and part of a log road that zigzagged through the trees. He could see stars over the Bitterroot Valley and a creek full of white water notched deeply in earth that was soft with lichen and layers of damp pine needles. Had Mr. Purcel gotten into it with the bikers at the saloon? Had they followed the truck and forced it off the road? But there were no motorcycles here, nor any other vehicle that he could see.

The man in the mask was examining the ground as though he had lost something. He picked up a cigarette butt and put it in his pocket, then brushed his foot across the spot where the cigarette had been.

A pinecone fell from overhead and pinged on the pickup’s hood. Suddenly the man in the mask was staring at the truck, his body motionless, a red gas container in his hand. Gribble froze, staring back at the man in the mask, afraid to move, afraid not to. His hand touched the barrel of the Remington pump.

What should he do? This wasn’t his business. The worst trouble in his life had always come from messing in other people’s business. He hadn’t made the world. Why was it his job to change it? Why didn’t people deal with their own damn grief? A good deed had sent him to the pen, on the hard road, spreading tar under a white sun that gave even black men heatstroke. It wasn’t fair. He had just wanted to listen to music, to drink one or two beers and not think about the catastrophe he had made of his life.

Another pinecone toppled from the tree, hitting the camper’s roof. The man in the mask looked upward and seemed to relax and lose curiosity about the truck, turning his attention to the figure sitting on the ground.

CLETE PURCEL TILTED
up his head, listening, trying to sense the movements of the man who had covered him with debris from the woods. “Tell my why you’re doing this? I know I’m not walking out of here. What’s to lose?” he said.

A long time seemed to pass. Then the man got down on one knee, his breath echoing inside a hard surface of some kind. When he spoke, his voice was thick and ropy, hardly more than a whisper, like that of someone in the throes of sexual passion: “It’s fun. Particularly when I do it to somebody like you.”

Had Clete heard the voice before? There was no inflection or accent in it that he could detect. But all whispers sound alike, and the tonality of one has almost the same tonality as another.

The only life preserver available was time.
Make him keep talking
, Clete thought.
Keep him occupied with his own sick head. The sicker they are, the more they want to talk. Inside every sadist is a self-pitying titty baby
. “But I know you, right? Somehow I got in your space, jammed you up, maybe, not even knowing I was doing it?” Clete said.

No answer.

“I remind you of somebody,” Clete said. “Maybe somebody who knocked you around when you were a kid. Ever do any reformatory time? It’s a bitch in those places. You know what the Midnight Express is, right? A skinhead with Gothic-letter tats all over him holds a knife at your throat while he drives a locomotive up your ass. Is that what we’re talking about here? The whole country is turning into
The Jerry Springer Show
, and the jails are worse. Someone make you pull a train when you were a kid?”

He heard the man chuckle and get to his feet. For a moment there was no sound at all, then the man kicked Clete in the ribs, waited a second, and kicked him again, harder.

“I was in ’Nam,” Clete said, eating his pain. “I saw psychopaths do stuff that made me ashamed I was a human being. I always wanted to believe some of them got help when they came back. But the truth is, they probably didn’t. Know why? Because nobody cares what they did. They did it to Zips, and we were in the business of killing Zips. ‘How do you shoot women and children? Easy, you just don’t lead them as much.’ Ever hear that one? What I’m saying is, you’re not as different as you think you are. You ever see a ville full of straw hooches naped? Nobody gave a shit then, they don’t give a shit now. Somebody screwed you over when you were a kid. You got a legitimate beef. When I say ‘screwed over,’ you dig exactly what I’m talking about, right? I smoked a federal informant. That was in Louisiana. I could have ridden the bolt on that one. Instead, I’ve got a PI license and a permit to carry a piece.”

“No cigar, fat man,” the voice whispered.

The man standing above Clete was breathing deep in his chest, as though oxygenating his blood. Then he poured the rest of the gasoline on Clete’s body and on the dried wood and leaves and pine needles, saving out a little to trail off of Clete’s shoes so he could use it as a liquid fuse without exposing himself to the whoosh of flame that was about to burst from the base of the tree.

GRIBBLE WATCHED THE
man in the mask set down his gas can and take his cigarette lighter out of his pocket again. Gribble’s pulse was pounding in his ears. The man in the mask removed a piece of paper from his coat pocket, twisted it into a tight wrap, then flipped open the top of his cigarette lighter. He lit the tip of the paper and watched the flame curl along the edges toward his fingers.

Gribble grasped the stock of his Remington pump and pulled the lever on the door of the camper. He rolled onto the ground, momentarily losing sight of the man in the mask. Then he was on his feet, erect, throwing the stock to his shoulder, jacking a round into the chamber.

“Back away and put out the fire!” he shouted. “I’m holding a rifle. I’ll pop you between the eyes.”

The man in the mask stood stock-still. Then he seemed to make a decision, extending his arm away from his body, the twist of burning paper lighting the surfaces of his mask. He released the paper, letting it float to the ground, igniting the trail of gasoline he had poured on the leaves and pine needles.

CHAPTER 14

THE CRIME-SCENE TAPE
enclosed an area not unlike a trapezoid on the hillside, the emergency vehicles from the Ravalli County Sheriff’s Office lighting the trees with their flashers, firemen spraying the area outside the tape where sparks had blown into the underbrush.

J. D. Gribble sat in the back of a silver Stratus with a government tag on it while an Amerasian government agent stood outside the door, in jeans and a gunbelt and a windbreaker with the yellow letters FBI on the back, asking him one question after another.

“You didn’t see where the guy in the mask went?” she said.

“No, I told you, he bagged ass while I was stomping out the fire,” Gribble said.

“But you heard a vehicle of some kind?” she said.

“Yeah, but later, like it was way off down the road. It didn’t have no lights. I just heard the engine, then maybe a door slamming.”

“Like somebody was already in the car?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything, I done told you. I had to put the fire out before it got to Mr. Purcel. Then I had to get them ties off his wrists and drag him out of there before sparks set off the gasoline again. You could smell it everywhere. It was soaked into his clothes and on everything around him.”

“Then you walked down the log road to the farmhouse?”

“An old man was up watching television with his grandson. He called 911. Then I come back up here to help Mr. Purcel.”

“And you never saw a vehicle headed for the highway?”

“Maybe. I ain’t sure. Long as that guy wasn’t coming back up here, I didn’t care what he did.”

She put her hand on his shoulder. Because she was bent forward, her long hair hung on her cheeks and made her face look narrower, more intense. “You did a good job, Mr. Gribble. But we want to catch this guy. Every detail we learn from you can put us one step closer to this guy. Did you hear him say anything at all?”

“If he did, I didn’t hear it. He had that mask on, and the wind was blowing in the trees. I pointed my rifle at him, and he dropped a piece of burning paper on the gasoline and took off. He looked back once over his shoulder. The moonlight on that mask was maybe the scariest thing I ever seen. Is that the guy killing people around here? Is that why the FBI is here? I read about the murders in the paper, those kids and that couple in the rest stop.”

“Tell me again what you actually saw the man do. Don’t leave anything out. Small things can turn out to be real important to us.”

“I saw him throw an armload of sticks and leaves on Mr. Purcel. I saw him pour gas from that can yonder on Mr. Purcel. I saw him searching around on the ground. He picked up a cigarette butt and put it in his pocket. Then he kind of kicked at the ground with his foot.”

She scratched at a place on her cheek and seemed to think about his last statement. It was cold in the trees, and a mist had started to settle on the hillside. “This next question doesn’t imply any reflection upon you. But why didn’t you shoot?” she said.

“I’m a ranch hand. Shooting people ain’t in my job description.”

“We can find you at Albert Hollister’s?”

“I got no reason to go anywhere else.”

“You’re sure about that?” she said.

“What’s that mean?” he asked.

But she walked away without replying, and J. D. Gribble wondered if he had wandered into an outdoor mental asylum.

Two Ravalli County sheriff’s deputies were interviewing Clete Purcel. He was sitting on the floor of the ambulance, the back doors open, his legs hanging over the bumper. He had taken off his shoes and socks and gasoline-soaked clothes and had put on a big smock given to him by the paramedics. His bare feet looked strangely white and clean in contrast to his face and hair, both of which were streaked with soot and the cleansing cream the paramedics had used on him.

“Give us a minute?” the FBI agent said to the deputies.

After they had walked off, she stepped into the box of light created by the interior of the ambulance. “What did the guy in the mask have to say to you?” she asked.

“Not much. He said he was having fun.”

“Just like that, ‘having fun’?”

“I asked him why he was doing it. He said, ‘It’s fun.’”

“What else did he say?”

“I tried to keep him talking and turn his thoughts on himself. I thought maybe I could buy a little time. He thought that was funny. He said, ‘No cigar.’”