Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “I think you’re a stand-up guy, Seymour. It takes guts to talk about your problems in a roomful of people, many of them strangers. Did this guy in your store have a name besides Tin Man?”

  “No, just a stink. It’s like he left shit prints all over the place. I had to wipe down everything he touched with Lysol.”

  I didn’t want to see him get wired up again, so I changed the subject. “You’re not too warm in that shirt?”

  “I was trying to hide my tats.”

  “You were in the system?”

  “No. The guy called me a fraud. I think he’s probably right. I didn’t earn my ink. I wanted people to think I was a badass. I even got the meeting off track tonight. We’re supposed to talk about using and drinking, not about problems with old geeks who read porn magazines. I feel awful.”

  “He wants to infect others with his sickness, partner. Don’t let him get inside your head. You’re a good guy. You keep remembering that.”

  “When I looked into his eyes, it really scared me, man. It was like looking into a cave that didn’t have a bottom.”

  “Did he give you any indication where he might be living?”

  “No. He had two girls with him. He was driving a gray SUV.”

  “Do you remember the tag?”

  “I wrote it down, then erased it.”

  “Do you remember any part of it?”

  “No. It was a Montana plate. That’s all I know. He said he was the godfather of the two girls. You’ve had some kind of run-in with him?”

  “I think he tried to kill my daughter. If we’re talking about the same man, his name is Asa Surrette. He’s tortured and killed eight people.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Maybe that’s why he had those girls with him. You think they’re runaways? I wonder if that’s why he had all the dope.”

  “What dope?”

  “The OxyContin. He had another prescription, too. I think it was for sleeping pills or downers.”

  “What were the other items he made you buy?”

  “Tampons, toothpaste, fingernail clippers, dental floss, women’s deodorant, Pepto-Bismol.”

  “He didn’t say who these things were for?”

  “He wasn’t someone you ask a lot of questions. He said I was part of history. What’d he mean by that? What the fuck does history have to do with any of this?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “OxyContin is as close to heroin as legal dope gets. He’s gonna cook the Oxy and shoot those girls up, isn’t he? That’s how he’s gonna get in their pants.”

  “He masturbates on his victims after he strangles them. That’s the guy who was in your store, Seymour. You treat your encounter with him as you would a sickness. You let go of it forever. He has nothing to do with your life. You have a lot of friends in that room upstairs. You keep remembering who you are, a likable guy who’s doing the best he can. You got me on that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I wrote my cell number on the back of my departmental business card and gave it to him. When I got up to go, he remained on the steps, staring up at me, not speaking.

  “Tell you what, how about a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” I said.

  “I think I can handle that,” he replied.

  THE REAL SIGNIFICANCE of my conversation with him did not hit me until four the next morning. I sat up in bed, numb, my ears ringing with a sense of urgency that seemed to have no origin. I went into the bathroom and turned on the light and propped my arms on the lavatory, trying to reconstruct the dream I’d just had. In it, I saw a girl locked inside a giant plastic bubble, her hands pressed against the side, her cries inaudible, her oxygen supply running out.

  I looked in the mirror and saw Molly standing behind me. “Did you have a nightmare?” she said.

  “She’s alive,” I said.

  “Who’s alive?”

  “The girl who was abducted up by Lookout Pass,” I replied.

  I WAS IN ELVIS Bisbee’s office by nine that morning. I told him of my chance meeting with Seymour Little. He made notes on a legal pad while I spoke. “Okay, we’ll talk with this kid and check out the pharmacy,” he said. “Thanks for coming in.”

  “I’ve already been to the pharmacy. The prescriptions were phoned in by a scrip doctor in Whitefish. I called his office. He’s somewhere in Canada and not expected back for a while.”

  “You went to the pharmacy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What makes you think you can come here from out of state and conduct your own investigation?”

  “I’m sorry you don’t approve.”

  He set down his pen and stared out the window at the trees and the war memorial on the courthouse lawn. “Mind telling why the pharmacist shared his information with you?”

  “I showed him my badge.”

  “You explained to him you were from the state of Louisiana and you had no legal authority here?”

  “That didn’t seem to be a problem for him.”

  He remained motionless in his swivel chair. The tips of his mustache were as white as ash. The clarity in his blue eyes made me think of an empty, sunlit sky. He was one of those whose decency and sense of honor were not an issue. A less patient man would have been far more severe in his attitude toward Clete and Gretchen Horowitz and me. Elvis Bisbee believed the world was a rational place and that procedure in many ways was an end in itself. Without his kind, we probably would have chaos. However, there is a caveat to that kind of thinking. Those who are rapacious and prey upon the weak and who would undo the system are not bound by procedure, and they take great delight in the presence of those who are.

  “Rhonda Fayhee is alive, Sheriff. I don’t think we have a lot of time,” I said. “I was almost sure Surrette had killed her. He has never kept his victims alive, except to torture them. This time he decided to do it differently.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t telegraph his pitch. He hides it in his glove or behind his thigh.”

  “Why are you so sure it’s Surrette?”

  “Because he’s getting better and better at what he does. He could have picked up the prescriptions himself. Instead, he used and degraded a kid who looks like a sack of broken Popsicle sticks. He also knew the kid would report him and we’d figure out the girl is still alive. Except we have no idea where she is or what she’s going through while we’re wasting time in your office.”

  “Waste of time, is it?”

  I got up from the chair. “Surrette is about to send us something. They all do. I don’t know what it will be. I don’t even want to think about it. But that’s what he’s going to do. Something is troubling me about our conversation, Sheriff.”

  “Don’t hold back.”

  “You’re an intelligent man. I think you already know all these things. Surrette is here for the long haul, and your department isn’t equipped to deal with him. So it becomes a whole lot easier to swat at flies rather than admit you’ve got a real monster in your midst. I don’t blame you for being impotent about your situation. I do blame you for pretending to be ignorant of it.”

  He picked up the pen from his desk and balanced it on one end, then on the other, and finally let it topple onto the blotter. “Good-bye, Mr. Robicheaux. If you have any other information for me, phone it in. I make this request of you because I would like you to stay the hell out of my office for a very long time.”

  WHEN SHE WAS little, Alafair could never hide secrets. Her emotions immediately showed on her face, with a transparency that was like looking through glass. She used to get into raging confrontations with Batist, the elderly black man who worked at our bait shop and boat dock. The issue was always the same: Tripod, her pet raccoon, who had only three legs but was a master burglar when it came to breaking into Batist’s stock of energy bars and fried pies. In one instance, I looked down the slope from our old home and saw Alafair racing from the bait shop with Tripod cradled in her arms and Batist in full pursuit, a broomstick cocked over h
is head. She powered up the slope through the pecan trees and live oaks and streaked past me into the house, Tripod’s tail flopping like a spring.

  “What happened down there?” I said.

  “Batist is mean! I hate him!”

  “You shouldn’t talk about Batist like that, Alafair. Did Tripod do something that got him upset?”

  “He didn’t do anything. Batist said he was going to cook him in a pot. I hope he falls in the water and gets hit by a boat. Why doesn’t he take his smelly cigars and go home?”

  “Can you explain why Tripod has chocolate on his paws and all over his mouth?”

  Her face was as round as a plate, her bangs hanging in her eyes. She looked sideways. “He probably found a candy bar on the dock.”

  “Yeah, a lot of people throw their candy bars on the dock. Did you notice that Tripod’s stomach looks like a balloon full of water?”

  “He was going to hurt Tripod, Dave. You didn’t see his face.”

  “Batist can’t read or write, but he takes great pride in the work he does for us. When Tripod tears up the counter, Batist feels like he’s let us down. You and Tripod have to see things from his point of view.”

  Her face crumpled and she began to cry. When I tried to pat her on the head, she ran out the back door, slamming it as hard as she could, Tripod bouncing in her arms.

  She had a horse named Tex that I let her ride only when I was close by. While my wife, Annie, and I were gone one afternoon, Alafair put on Tex’s bridle and bit and used the slat fence to climb up on his back. She was wearing her Baby Orca T-shirt and the Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill that we had bought at Disney World. For whatever reason, she decided to start quacking the bill. Tex responded by pitching her end over end into our tomato plants. When we returned from town, Alafair had dirt in her hair and a scrape on the side of her face, but she refused to tell us what had happened. I looked through the side window and saw Tex standing by the shed, his reins hanging in the dirt.

  “Did you ride Tex while we were gone?” I asked.

  She squinted as though she couldn’t quite recall the event. “Maybe for a little bit. Yeah, I think I did.”

  “You fell off?”

  “No, he went up in the air and threw me over his head!”

  “Okay, so let’s not do that again. What if you had been knocked unconscious?” I said.

  She shut her eyes, tears leaking down both cheeks.

  “What’s wrong, little guy?” I said. “It’s not that bad. Just don’t do it again.”

  “You said the tomatoes are for the black people. Now I smushed them, and they’re not going to have anything to eat, and everybody is going to get mad at me,” she said.

  Many years down the road, the same little girl was still in my life, no different in my mind from when we lived in an idyllic world south of New Iberia. When I returned from the courthouse in Missoula, I went into the kitchen to fix a sandwich. Through the window, I could see Alafair watering the potted petunias and geraniums on the deck with a sprinkler can. She swept the can back and forth over the flowers, hitting the deck as often as the pots. Then she refilled it and started watering the pots a second time. “Did you water last night?” I said through the screen. “Your catch saucers are overflowing.”

  “Oh, I didn’t see that. Sorry,” she said, setting down the can.

  “You want something to eat?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  She gazed at the lawn and at the horses drinking from the tank in the south pasture and at two chipmunks eating the shells that had spilled from the bird feeder.

  “Something on your mind?” I said.

  She turned and looked me full in the face. “What kind of morning have you had?”

  “Sheriff Bisbee indicated he didn’t need to see me in his office for a long time.”

  “Can you come out here?”

  “I’m fixing lunch. Come inside.”

  “I think I’d rather not be in a confined space right now.”

  I opened the sliding screen door and sat down at a table with a ceramic top that Albert had bought in Mexico.

  “Gretchen made contact with Asa Surrette,” Alafair said.

  I nodded, keeping my expression blank. “When?”

  “Saturday.”

  I watched the shadows of clouds moving across the pasture and up the hillsides and over the fir and larch and cedar trees on the ridges. I looked at the sun and felt a pain that was like a laser burning through my retinas. “This happened three days ago?”

  “She ran a notice in the personals. She told Clete about it.”

  “But not about Surrette calling?”

  “No, she hasn’t told him about that.”

  “Is there any reason you’ve kept this information from me?”

  “I waited for Gretchen to tell y’all. I made a mistake.”

  “You didn’t think you could trust me?”

  “Dave, we can’t be sure she actually talked to Surrette. Any crank could have read her notice in the paper.”

  “Stop it.”

  She had one hand resting on the deck rail, as though the wind were affecting her balance. “You didn’t want me to go to Kansas and interview him. I wouldn’t listen to you. I’m to blame for a lot of what’s happened.”

  “I don’t know if I want to hear this, Alafair.”

  “I have another problem,” she said. “After I met Surrette, I wrote articles that were meant to inflame the reader. I wanted to see him sent to the injection table. No, that’s not accurate. I wanted to see him boiled in his own grease.”

  “That’s what he deserves,” I said.

  “Using journalistic advantage to promote someone’s execution doesn’t make me feel very good, even if the subject is a sorry sack of shit.”

  “You wanted to cap him yourself?”

  “I could shoot Surrette and take a nap after I did it.”

  “Don’t give power away to a man like that. Don’t ever let him taint you with his poison.”

  “I didn’t want you going after him, Dave. You’re shot to hell. You just won’t admit it.”

  I rubbed my face. “You remember your Baby Orca T-shirt?”

  “Don’t change the subject,” she said.

  “I still have it in my footlocker, along with your Donald Duck cap and your Baby Squanto books and your tennis shoes with ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ embossed on the toes.”

  She waited for me to go on.

  “That’s all I was going to say,” I said. “I get your cap and T-shirt and your books and your tennis shoes out of the footlocker and I look at them and then I put them away. I’ll probably do that every three or four days for the rest of my life. That’s the way it is, little guy.”

  I went back inside and made lunch for both of us.

  IT’S CALLED AN M-1 thumb. If you get one, it’s usually during the cleaning of the sweetheart of all World War II infantry weapons, a lovely creation by John Garand that the Imperial Japanese and the Third Reich had not planned to deal with. Had it not been for the M-1, the ground war in Europe and the Pacific theater may have worked out differently. It was a marvelous yet simple piece of engineering, its peep-sight accuracy and rapid-fire punch and knockdown power without peer. It took only seconds after the bolt locked open for the boogie-woogie boys from Company B to thumb another eight-round clip into the magazine.

  With Albert’s permission, I unlocked one of his gun cabinets and removed his M-1 and a bandolier heavy with .30-06 clips and went up to the shooting range with them. I pulled back the bolt and wiped down the barrel and stock and peep sights and magazine and receiver. I eased my thumb down on the trip mechanism that released the bolt, the heel of my hand anchored on the operating-rod handle, and rolled my thumb and hand free before the bolt slammed home. The M-1 weighed over ten pounds and felt heavy in my hands, but in a reassuring way; its aim was not affected by wind or inclement weather or tall grass or underbrush scraping against the stock and barrel. Every inch of the M-1 was
devoted to practicality and efficiency, even the tubular insertions in the butt where you could carry a cleaning rod and barrel swabs and a bore brush. It didn’t jam; it was easy to tear down. You couldn’t have a better friend in snow or tropical rain.

  For the ultimate improvised gun-range target, Albert had placed a World War II salvaged tank turret on a mound of dirt against the hillside. It was tall and cylindrical and dark brown with rust and had a viewing slit in the top. It resembled the helmet worn by Crusader knights. I knelt on one knee, perhaps forty yards from the target, opened the bolt on the M-1, and pushed a clip loaded with armor-piercing rounds into the magazine. I sent the bolt home, wrapped my left forearm in the sling, aimed through the peep sight, and began firing. I saw rust powder in the air and the scoured streaks on the sides of the turret where the rounds didn’t impact dead-on, then the holes in the center where the rounds punched through the steel and out the other side.

  After I fired the eighth round, the bolt locked open and the clip ejected with the ping that anyone who has fired an M-1 associates with it. I removed the plugs from my ears and gazed at the tank turret and tried to imagine what the same rounds would have done to the head of a human being, in this instance the head of Asa Surrette.

  Why such a dark speculation?

  Just before removing Albert’s rifle from his gun cabinet, I had once again accessed the photographs of Surrette that could be found on the Internet. I discovered two posts I hadn’t seen. One contained photographs, probably taken by a news photographer at Surrette’s crime scenes in Wichita. These are of a kind you do not want to see, not now, not ever. The second post included a photo of a typed letter Surrette sent the Wichita Police Department, one xeroxed on a copy machine in the WSU library. In the letter, he described in detail every moment of his victims’ torment, the degree of pain they suffered, and their pleas for mercy. He said the latter brought him a rush he had never thought possible.