Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  He could have squared the situation with the girl even after molesting her. But he’d found out today his troubles over her were just beginning. She was important to people for reasons he didn’t understand. Who was she, anyway? Why were these other people coming down on him? They acted like he knew everything about her. The truth was, he knew nothing about her. If he’d known anything about her, he would have left her alone.

  How had he let her get under his skin? How could he explain that to others when he couldn’t explain it to himself? She was attractive, certainly. No, that wasn’t the right word. She was beautiful. Her eyes were mysterious and alluring and a little dangerous and at the same time vulnerable. She was a young girl buried inside a body that was every man’s wet dream. He knew his thoughts were sick, but he couldn’t help desiring her. No man could. He was only human. Maybe his feelings were even fatherly, he told himself.

  She’s getting to you again, he thought. You know the real reason for your fascination with her. She’s not afraid. Not of you, not of anyone, not of anything, not even death at the hands of a man inserting a knife blade between her neck and collar, inches from her carotid.

  He emptied his glass and filled it again, this time not bothering to stir it, drinking the brandy as fast as he could get it down. He thought he heard a tree limb break and fall into the yard. Or was that the deer coming down to drink from the lake? He had told that cop and his daughter from Louisiana that he wanted to go back to Mobile. That was still a possibility, wasn’t it? His fellow white officers at the LAPD had never understood Bill Pepper’s attitude toward people of color. He had no resentment toward them; he felt comfortable in their midst and didn’t blame them because a deranged colored vagabond had killed his father. The group he couldn’t abide was white trash like Wyatt Dixon, the kind of man who visited his odium on other Southerners, the kind of man who reminded Bill Pepper of the alleyway he lived on in Macon.

  He lit a cigarette and poured more brandy in his glass and watched it swirl inside the milk. He drank the glass almost to the bottom, hoping he could stop the process taking place in his head. What did the drunks at A.A. meetings call it? Mind racing? That was it. Your head seemed to explode, like a basketball with barbed wire wrapped around it. Something even more serious was happening inside Bill Pepper’s head. The world as he knew it was ending, the filmstrip ripping loose from the reel and snapping in front of the projector’s light, throwing one disjointed image after another onto the screen.

  Where had it all gone wrong? Secretly, he knew the answer to his question, and the problem was not the girl. Rich people did not care about people like Bill Pepper. To them, cops had the same status as yardmen. He had played the fool with Love Younger, trying to ingratiate himself, violating every protocol of his profession, believing that Younger would give him a job as a security expert or even make him a personal assistant. In fact, men like Love Younger wouldn’t take the time to spit in your mouth if you were dying of thirst.

  The wind was picking up outside, cutting long V’s across the surface of the lake. Again he heard a sudden crack and a cascading sound like a limb snapping from the trunk of a birch and falling against the side of the cottage. He had never been this afraid, and worse, for the first time in his life, the booze wasn’t working. His fear ate right through it, the way a hot skillet vaporizes a drop of water. He looked at his hands. They were shaking.

  Write it down, a voice said. If they get you, leave something behind that tells people you didn’t deserve this. Tell them you’re Bill Pepper and you were old-school at LAPD and you wronged the Horowitz girl but you’re sorry and you even told her you’d like to look after her. Yes, tell them, Bill Pepper. Don’t go silently into that good night.

  Where had he heard that line? Then he remembered. It came from a black prostitute who worked as an independent on South Vernon Avenue. She had cooked her head with crystal meth but was fascinated with books he had never heard of. She used to ball him for free and whisper lines of poetry to him while she spread herself on his thighs in the back of his cruiser in an alleyway behind a Vietnamese grocery. What a thing to remember, here on a lake in western Montana at the close of day. He remembered her with tenderness rather than lust and wondered if she was still alive. Or maybe it was Bill Pepper who had fried his mush and not the black prostitute and none of this was real.

  Using only a penlight, he sat at the kitchen table and wrote these words on top of a flattened paper bag: Some guys think I’m tight with the Horowitz girl at Albert Hollister’s ranch. I’m not. I’ve used up nine of the twenty-four hours they gave me. If you find this and not my body, they got me. I’m sorry for what I did to that girl. As far as the rest of it is concerned, fuck it.

  He signed his name and under it wrote his LAPD badge number. Up on the two-lane, a car slowed and then accelerated, its headlights bouncing off the trees and the mountainside that bordered the far side of the asphalt. Bill Pepper went into the yard, his Glock hanging from his hand, the wind cold on his face, a stray raindrop or two striking his skin. Farther down the shore, lights were burning in a house close to the water. The glow reflected on the waves sliding under a dock where a red canoe was tied. The sight of the occupied house and the canoe bobbing in the chop and the waves sliding on the sand cheered Bill Pepper up and made him wonder if he hadn’t been too pessimistic, too hard on himself, too quick to write off the rest of life.

  He turned in a full circle, his arms stretched out like a bird’s wings. There were no cars on the two-lane, no one hiding in the trees, no powerboat approaching from the far side of the lake. He went back inside and turned on the kitchen light to show his absence of fear, then started in on a plate of fried chicken and deviled eggs that had been in the refrigerator all week. It was cold and delicious, and he ate it hungrily with his fingers, washing it down with milk, his melancholia finally lifting, his eye on his spinning rod in the corner. It wasn’t too late to fling a red-and-white-striped Mepps in the water, he told himself. The rainbow were in close to shore, down in the weeds, hiding from the pike. They fed by the moon and, at this time of evening, would hit anything he threw at them, bending the rod’s tip to the surface, stripping line off the reel. Yes, he thought, to hell with the girl, to hell with the guys who thought he knew something he didn’t, and to hell with his own foolish behavior. A man had a right to catch trout at moonrise on a Friday night.

  Then he heard a sound that shouldn’t have been there, a hand turning the front doorknob and then releasing it, the sole of a shoe scraping on the concrete step as the person stepped onto the grass and disappeared into the shadows.

  Bill Pepper picked up the Glock and went out the back door. The wind was blowing harder, shredding leaves from the branches overhead, rocking the canoe with a metronomic beat against the dock. “Who’s out there?” he said.

  There was no reply.

  Bill Pepper walked around the side of the house into the front yard and shone his penlight on the lawn and concrete steps but could see no depressions in the grass or mud smears on the steps. He looked at the lights of the house down the shore and thought about knocking on the door, introducing himself, inviting everyone over for a drink. That would be the coward’s way. He walked down to the lakeside, constantly glancing back over his shoulder, his breath wheezing in his nose. Up the slope, by the corner of the cottage, he thought he saw a figure step from behind a tree and stare straight at him. He lifted the penlight into the darkness but could see nothing except a car passing on the two-lane and the bonelike whiteness of the birch trunks in the headlights. Calm down, he told himself. You’re going into the DTs, that’s all it is.

  That’s all it is? a voice mocked him. The DTs were a minor consideration? He was that sick? Then he heard a loud thud, and this time he knew the sound was not a product of his imagination. It was heavy and solid, like a sack of grain smacking down on the roof. He lifted the beam of the penlight just as a cougar jumped from the cottage roof into a tree and, in one bound, sprang off a limb a
nd landed on four feet in the yard.

  The cougar must have been six feet from tail to nose. Its coat was yellow and gray, and white around the mouth and on the belly, a dark streak of fur running up the nose between the eyes. Its tail flipped as though discharging the tension in its body.

  “This is my place. You’re trespassing,” Bill Pepper said.

  The cougar seemed to slink away, then turned and walked in a figure eight. It stopped and looked at Bill Pepper again, sniffing at the air.

  “Go back up the mountain where you belong. Go on, now. I don’t want to shoot you.”

  The moon broke from behind a cloud, and Bill Pepper could see the muscular smoothness of the cougar’s neck and forequarters, the thickness of its feet, the ribs that looked stenciled above the sag of the belly. The cougar’s whiskers were as stiff as wire. It turned and ran along the shore, leaping over a creek that fed into the lake, the whiteness of its hindquarters showing under its tail in the moonlight.

  Well, what do you know? Bill Pepper said to himself.

  Except his satisfaction in standing up to the cougar was short-lived. He could not explain away the doorknob turning and the sole of somebody’s shoe scraping on the concrete step. And what about the figure he’d thought he saw among the trees? He walked to the front of the house and examined the ground and saw nothing that indicated anybody had been there in the last week except him.

  “If anybody is out there, I’m yours for the asking,” he called out. “Come and get it. I’d love to have a tête-à-tête with you.”

  The only sounds he heard were the wind and the husks of winter leaves tumbling across the cottage roof, perhaps a pinecone rolling down the incline. “I don’t care what you do to me,” he said. “Before I check out, I’ll paint the bushes.”

  He waited in the silence, then went back in the house and clicked on all the lights, in control again, his forearms pumped. He was Bill Pepper, the scourge of East Los, the Bama Badass cruising South Central, a cigarette hanging in his mouth, the friend of street people from Adams Boulevard down to Hawthorne. He had been in the middle of the Rodney King riots and had carried a two-hundred-pound black woman out of a burning building on his back. He’d still have his badge if a queer-bait bicycle cop in West Venice hadn’t hung a second DWI on him. It wasn’t fair. None of it. The murder of his father, the loss of his home in Mobile, the shanty his mother and siblings had lived in on the backside of Macon. He wanted to smash his fist into the wall.

  Standing at the kitchen table under the lightbulb, he drank the last of the brandy in the bottle and stuffed the Glock back in its holster and picked up his spinning rod and went out the back door. Someone in the house down the shore had turned on Rhapsody in Blue. The skies were clearing, the stars were out. It was a perfect night. Except for the fact that he hadn’t relieved himself in two hours and his bladder was bursting. He unzipped his trousers.

  You joining ranks with the Wyatt Dixons of the world? a voice said. Why not get yourself some Copenhagen and a Styrofoam spit cup while you’re at it?

  He returned to the house and walked through the kitchen and into the narrow hallway that led to the bathroom. In under a second, his universe turned upside down.

  The bone-crunching pain that exploded in the back of his head could have come from a sap or a chunk of pipe with a bonnet on it or maybe someone touching a Taser to his scalp. It didn’t matter. He crashed against the wall, taking the telephone stand down with him, landing on his face, his nose bleeding. He wanted to crawl away, but his arms wouldn’t work properly. A figure that smelled like rain and leaves and body heat was pulling his wrists behind him, fitting handcuffs on them, squeezing the steel tongues tightly into the flesh.

  “Who are you?” Bill Pepper said.

  The figure released his wrists and walked through the cottage, clicking off all the lights. The hallway dropped into total darkness. The figure closed the door to the bathroom and the kitchen and then turned Bill Pepper over and looked down at him.

  “Tell me what you want,” Bill Pepper said, straining to see the face. “Who sent you here? I can’t fix anything unless you tell me what you want.”

  He heard a sound that made him think of metal snipping against metal. “No, please,” he said. “I haven’t done anything to deserve that. Please don’t do that. Listen to me. There’s no reason for this.”

  He stared up at the face coming closer to his own, his viscera turning to water, the music of George Gershwin disappearing inside a voice he hardly recognized as his own.

  THE PHONE RANG at six-fifteen Saturday morning. Everyone else was still asleep. I picked up the receiver and went out on the balcony and closed the door behind me. In the east, the light behind the mountains was cold and weak, hardly more than a flicker touching the bottom of the clouds. Gretchen’s hot rod was parked by the creek bed, the top white with frost. The Caddy was gone. “Hello,” I said.

  “This is Sheriff Bisbee, Detective Robicheaux. I need to confirm some information. You know a man named Clete Purcel?”

  “I’ve known him for forty years. He’s staying with us at Albert Hollister’s place.”

  “Right now he’s staying in a jail cell in Big Fork. Do you know any reason why he’d be in the Swan Lake area?”

  “Maybe he went fishing. He didn’t tell me. What’s he charged with?”

  “He got stopped at a roadblock at twelve-fifteen this morning.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Why are you calling me about a traffic stop in Lake County?”

  “I didn’t say anything about a traffic stop. He was carrying a cut-down pump in his car. He also had burglar tools in his possession, along with latex gloves, a throw-down, a blackjack, plastic ligatures, brass knuckles, and a boxful of buckshot. I almost forgot. He had some nylon fishing line with a hoop tied on the end. The kind of rig home invaders stick through a window to turn the latch.”

  “He’s a private investigator, and he runs down bail skips for a couple of bondsmen in New Orleans.”

  “He told me that. Otherwise, I might have thought he was planning to break into someone’s residence. He wouldn’t do that, would he?”

  “No.”

  “Glad we got that out of the way. What’s the worst homicide you ever investigated?”

  “I never got around to ranking them.”

  “You must have been a busy man. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Bill Pepper had his problems, but nothing that would warrant the mess I saw in his cottage this morning. Do you read me?”

  “I’m trying to be helpful. To my knowledge, Clete never met Detective Pepper.”

  “Then I wonder why he was at Pepper’s cottage. Just passing by, I guess. Maybe you should come up here. Pepper died with a plastic bag over his head. With luck, he died of asphyxiation. The blood loss is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Are you starting to get the picture?”

  “No, not at all,” I said.

  “When it’s this bad, it’s usually sexual. Does your friend have problems along those lines?”

  “Pepper was mutilated?”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “You’re looking at the wrong guy.”

  “Somebody called in a 911 and reported a maroon Cadillac convertible with a Louisiana tag leaving the crime scene.”

  “Who was the caller?”

  “The issue is your friend, not the caller. He seems to have an extraordinary capacity for getting into trouble.”

  “He’s the best guy I’ve ever known.”

  “Pepper was dead when Purcel left the cottage. Why didn’t he report it?”

  I didn’t have an answer. “Ask him.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  “What did the killer do to Pepper?”

  “Probably several things. I’ll have to wait on the coroner’s report to know for sure. His penis and testicles were in the sink. You believe in an afterlife?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I suspect Bill Pepper found his hell right here on earth
,” the sheriff said.

  CLETE HAD FALLEN asleep sitting on a bench in a holding can somewhere on the north end of Flathead Lake. In his dream, he was a little boy and had gone with his father and mother and sisters to Pontchartrain Park for July the Fourth. It was dusk in the dream, and the sky was printed with the fireworks exploding over the lake, and he could hear the popping of rifles in the shooting gallery and the music from the carousel. His father and mother were smiling at him, and his sisters were holding hands and skipping down the boardwalk, the wind smelling of salt and caramel popcorn and candied apples.

  When he woke from the dream, he looked through the window and saw the pink glow in the sky and thought the neon-striped Kamikaze packed with screaming kids was teetering against the sunset, about to rip like a scythe through the air and plummet toward the ground, then rise again into the gloaming of the day. He closed and opened his eyes and looked at the peeling yellow paint on the walls, the names burned into the ceiling with cigarette lighters, the toilet where someone’s vomit had dried on the rim.

  The sheriff of Missoula County pulled up a chair to the barred door and sat down. He placed a yellow legal pad on his knee and studied it. “Other people will be talking to you, Mr. Purcel. But since it was a member of my department who was killed, I want the first crack at you,” he said.

  “Y’all towed my Caddy?”

  “I think that’s the least of your worries.”