Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  FELICITY LOUVIERE HAD asked Clete to meet her that evening at the Café Firenze, a lovely buff-colored restaurant on a side road in the Bitterroot Valley, set among aspens and poplar trees, backdropped by the Sapphire Mountains in the east and the gigantic outline of the Bitterroots in the west. Clete shined his shoes and laid out his clothes on the bed and shaved in the shower stall and stayed under the hot water until his skin glowed. Then he put on his beige slacks and tasseled loafers and a blue shirt with a lavender tie and the sport coat that he wore to the track in New Orleans. The perfection of the evening, the pink sky, the distant smell of rain, a flicker of electricity in a cloud, reminded him of springtime in Louisiana, when he was young and the season seemed eternal and all of his expectations were within inches of his grasp.

  He arrived early at the restaurant and ordered a glass of red wine at a table by a window. He saw her turn off the highway in the fading twilight and come down the county road and park her Audi by a row of poplar trees. She put on a pair of dark glasses before she came into the restaurant.

  When he stood up to hold out her chair, he saw the red abrasions at the corner of one eye and the bruise on her jaw that she had covered with foundation. “Did your husband do that?” he said.

  “I told him I’m leaving. The prenup is a hundred thousand. I’m going out to Nevada with it.” She took a sip from his wineglass and smiled in a self-mocking way. “Want to roll the dice under the stars?”

  “He beat you up?”

  “Who cares? He’s a child.”

  “I care.”

  “He’s taken to drinking absinthe. It makes him go crazy sometimes. He’s a scheming, cruel little man, but nobody forced me to marry him. Now I’m going to unmarry him and do something with my life. You don’t want to come along?”

  “I can’t think straight right now, Felicity. My daughter still has this bogus murder beef against her. It’ll go away, but in the meantime, I can’t just take off.”

  She picked up the menu and stared at it without seeming to see it. “Can we order?” she asked.

  He took the menu from her and set it on the tablecloth. “You want to get married out there?”

  “I’m not divorced yet.”

  “You want to or not? You ever spend time around Austin, Nevada?”

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s seven thousand feet up in the clouds. It’s like going back a hundred years. People play poker twenty-four hours a day. The river is so cold, the rainbow trout have a purple stripe down their sides. I could seriously dig a lifestyle like that.”

  “You’re serious?” she said.

  “I’ve got addictive issues. I’m no bargain.”

  “I’ve got to make up for some wrong choices I’ve made, Clete. I haven’t thought it all out yet.”

  “Get away from that kind of thinking. The past is the past. Why spend your time sticking thumbtacks in your head?”

  “I married into wealth, and I did it for selfish reasons. Somehow I feel I’m responsible for Angel’s death. If I’d been a better mother, she wouldn’t have been drinking at the biker saloon.”

  “Her presence in that saloon didn’t have anything to do with her death. The issue was money. In almost every homicide, the issue is sex or money.”

  Felicity’s brow wrinkled. “Angel didn’t have any money. Not of her own.”

  “This crap is all about money. I’m not sure how, but that’s the issue. Or most of it, anyway.”

  “Your marriage offer is very generous. There’s another problem. Caspian is jealous and vindictive. He knows people who can hurt you.”

  Clete looked out the window. “Are you expecting him?”

  “Here? No, I’m not. He doesn’t know where I am. Unless he heard me on the phone.”

  Clete took his cell phone from his coat pocket. “He and another guy just pulled into the lot. You said he goes crazy sometimes. Does he ever carry a weapon?”

  “I’m not sure,” she replied.

  “Who’s the other guy?”

  She looked through the window. “He used to be with the sheriff’s department. Caspian just hired him as his new security chief. His name is Boyd.”

  ALBERT CALLED ME into the kitchen and said Clete was on the line.

  “I’m with Felicity at Café Firenze in Florence,” Clete said. “I think I might need backup or a witness.”

  “For what?”

  “Caspian Younger and a dude who used to be a sheriff’s deputy are sitting on the other side of the room. Younger beat up Felicity earlier today. I think maybe it’s a setup.”

  “Who’s the ex-deputy?”

  “Boyd.”

  “He was one of the guys who gave Gretchen a bad time up by the cave. What are they doing right now?”

  “Ordering. It’s a setup, Streak. I can smell it.”

  “Do you have your piece?”

  “It makes Felicity nervous. I left it at the cabin.”

  The little settlement of Florence was on the four-lane, ten miles south of Lolo. When I pulled into the parking lot, the summer light was still high in the sky, the mountains massive and purple with shadow against the western horizon. I went directly to Clete and Felicity Louviere’s table without looking in Caspian Younger’s direction.

  “He’s packing,” Clete said.

  “Who?” I said.

  “The ex-deputy. When he got up to go to the restroom, I saw his clip-on. It’s probably a twenty-five.”

  I pulled up a chair and asked the waiter to bring me a cup of coffee. Clete and Felicity Louviere were already eating. She hadn’t spoken or even acknowledged my presence. I could not see through her dark glasses and had no idea whether she was looking at me or not. She ate in small bites, as though the food were tasteless or a forbidden pleasure. I had no idea what went on in her head or if she was part of a plot to take Clete Purcel off the board.

  “It’s nice to see you again,” I said.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” she said.

  How do you respond to a statement like that? “You miss New Orleans sometimes?” I said.

  “My memories of New Orleans are more bad than good. I suspect that’s my fault. But no, I don’t miss it.”

  I saw the blank look in Clete’s face. I ordered a bowl of minestrone. Across the room, Caspian Younger and Jack Boyd were eating silently, without expression. Caspian’s right leg was jiggling up and down.

  “I’m going into the can,” Clete said. “If one of those guys follows me, it’s going down.”

  “Sure you want to play it out here?” I said.

  “I’ve got to use the can. What am I supposed to do? Hold it all the way back to Lolo?” he replied.

  After he had left the table, Felicity Louviere looked up from her food and said, “You don’t approve of me, do you?”

  “I like you just fine,” I replied. “But I don’t like the fact that you’re married, and I don’t like what you’re doing to Clete.”

  “I don’t blame you,” she replied. She resumed eating, tilting her head back down.

  “Why don’t you cut him loose?”

  “I already have. I’m leaving my husband. Watch out for the father.”

  “Why should I be worried about Love Younger?”

  “He’s sentimental, and like most sentimental people, he’s unaware of his own cruelty. He has great guilt for what he’s done to his family. If you cross him, he’ll destroy you.”

  I looked over at Caspian Younger’s table. Neither he nor the former detective seemed to have taken notice of Clete’s trip to the restroom. Maybe Clete had been unduly alarmed and the evening would pass uneventfully, I thought. The tables were set with flowers, the tablecloths immaculate. Music was playing in the background, and families at the other tables were breaking loaves of fresh bread and dividing platters of spaghetti and meatballs. I wanted to put aside all the violence and rage and self-destructiveness that had characterized my life and Clete’s and join in the festive mood. I had even come to like Fel
icity Louviere, and I wondered if he and she could start a new life, one that would preempt the denouement he and I had courted for decades.

  Clete returned to the table without incident. “How about we eat up and go somewhere else?” I said.

  “I need another drink. How about you, Felicity?” Clete said.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” she said.

  “We can get a drink down the road,” I said.

  “You worry too much, Streak,” Clete said.

  I felt like getting back into my truck and leaving them to their own devices. Felicity looked at my face. “He’s right. We should go, Clete,” she said.

  Clete paid the check, and the three of us walked outside together. “Sorry I got you out here for no reason,” Clete said.

  “Maybe they were going to pop you in the lot. Maybe my being here discouraged them.”

  It was apparent that Clete had already moved on. “We thought we’d take a drive farther down in the valley, maybe talk some things out,” he said.

  Back on the horizontal bop, I thought. But it was Clete’s gig, and I needed to leave it alone. “See y’all around,” I said.

  They left Felicity’s Audi in the parking lot and drove down to the four-lane in the Caddy and turned south toward Stevensville. Behind me, I heard the front door of the restaurant open and the voice of Caspian Younger talking to Jack Boyd. Neither looked in my direction. They got into Younger’s vehicle and drove away. They, too, turned south, not back toward Missoula.

  I followed Younger and Boyd farther down into the Bitterroot Valley. Outside Stevensville, they passed a semi and gave it the gas and left me stuck behind a slow car blocking the left lane. When I was able to pass, their vehicle was nowhere in sight. I made a U-turn and headed back in the opposite direction. Then I saw a filling station and convenience store by the Stevensville exit and Clete’s Caddy parked at one of the pumps. Caspian Younger had pulled into the parking area on the side of the store. I swung my truck off the four-lane.

  Everyone in law enforcement is aware of the following lesson: You don’t get nailed in a firefight with the bad guys. The bad guys usually give it up when they’re confronted with an assault team made up of former SEALs and marines and paratroopers. When you go up against a barricaded suspect—usually a mental case who’s determined to write his name on the wall with his own blood or the blood of his hostages—the bad guy gets isolated and gassed, and if that doesn’t work, he gets hosed.

  When a police officer is killed, it’s usually in the most innocuous of circumstances, such as a noise complaint. The responding officer walks up some rickety back stairs attached to a tenement, where a man and his wife, both of them drunk, are fighting in the kitchen. Maybe the officer is at the end of his watch, tired, resigned to ennui, careless, his cautionary instincts dulled by fatigue. Before he can even speak, the husband stumbles out on the porch in his undershirt and fires a gun point-blank into the officer’s face.

  Here’s another scenario, the kind you can’t foresee or do anything about. A taillight up ahead is flickering on and off. The problem is probably a loose wire or bulb, something that can be fixed in ten minutes at a truck stop. You protect and serve in a state that permits people to own and drive motor vehicles whose windows are smoked the color of charcoal. Maybe the same state allows the driver to carry a loaded handgun in the glove box or under the seat. The officer approaches the driver’s door with no knowledge of who or what is waiting for him inside the vehicle. Emotionally, it’s like stepping out on a high wire while blindfolded. An incautious moment, a slip in judgment, a mistaken extension of trust, that’s all it takes. You’re not in Shitsville. You’re dead.

  Clete had gotten out of the Caddy and inserted the gas nozzle in his tank, the blue fluorescence of the lighting overhead shining on his car and the concrete pad. Felicity was sitting in the passenger seat, looking straight ahead. Caspian and Jack Boyd walked toward Clete, Caspian in front, his jaw hooked like a barracuda’s.

  “You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said.

  “About what?” Clete said.

  “Putting your dick where it doesn’t belong.”

  Clete looked down at his fly. “No, it’s right where it’s supposed to be.”

  I parked by the air pump and stepped out on the concrete. I saw Jack Boyd look back at me, then at Caspian and Clete. I started walking toward the rear of the Caddy, unarmed and certain that Clete was about to be shot. The gas pump had done an automatic shutoff, but Clete squeezed the trigger on the handle and restarted the flow, glancing at the stars above the mountains, his face serene.

  “You think you’re a comedian?” Caspian said. “You hump a broad who’s thirty years younger than you, and you think you’re hot shit? Adultery is a virtue in New Orleans? That’s what you think?”

  “It’s time for you guys to beat feet,” Clete replied.

  “Look at me.”

  “I am. Remember the guy in the Charles Atlas ads? The ninety-pound weakling who was always getting sand kicked in his face? I look at you and think about that ad from forty years ago. It’s a nostalgic moment.”

  “You’re a fun guy. I like you. I can see why she likes you, too,” Caspian said. “But dildos are dildos. I hope it’s been worth it.”

  Clete removed the nozzle from the tank and began to screw the gas cap back on the funnel, his expression flat, his eyes neutral. One of the fluorescent tubes above the gas island had shorted and started buzzing, like a wasp trapped inside a crawl space. Caspian leaned forward, within six inches of Clete’s ear, and spat on him.

  Clete finished screwing the cap back on the gas tank, his green eyes as dispassionate as marbles. He pulled two paper towels from a dispenser and wiped the spittle from his cheek and ear and hair and dropped the towels into a trash barrel. Felicity opened the passenger door on the Caddy and stepped outside. “Can’t you leave us alone, Caspian?” she said. “You’ve gotten everything you wanted. Why do you want to go on hurting people?”

  Caspian grinned at Clete. “Did you go downtown with her?” he said. “I have a feeling that’s one reason she’s kept you around. The bigger they are, the easier they are to control.”

  “You guys win,” Clete said.

  “Win what?” Caspian asked.

  “You guys have got your way. Y’all are a whole lot smarter than me. What can I do?”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand Sanskrit,” Caspian said.

  “Really?” Clete said. “See how this translates.” He kicked Jack Boyd so hard in the groin that his face turned beet-red, then eggplant, as he went down on his knees, both hands clenched to his privates, his mouth locking open with pain that was so intense, no sound came out of his throat.

  The roundhouse that caught Caspian lifted him into the air and sent him crashing into the side of the Caddy. Clete turned his attention back to Jack Boyd and kicked him in the face and stomped his head with the sole of his loafer, breaking his lips and nose and teeth. When Caspian tried to get up, Clete grabbed him by the back of the shirt and drove his face down on the Caddy’s fin, then whipped his head into a gas pump again and again, finally flinging him to the concrete.

  He wasn’t finished. He ripped a small automatic from Boyd’s clip-on holster and released the magazine and threw it into the darkness, then ejected the round in the chamber and threw the gun on the roof of the convenience store. “Where’s your drop, asshole?” he said.

  Boyd was trying to sit erect, coughing teeth and blood on his shirt.

  “Clete, stop it! Please!” Felicity said. “Please don’t hit them anymore!”

  “See this?” Clete said to Felicity, jerking up Boyd’s trouser leg. “It’s called a throw-down. He was going to pop me. Maybe you, too.”

  He pulled the small revolver from the Velcro-strapped holster and flipped out the cylinder and shook the five .22 rounds from the chambers into Boyd’s face. The revolver was rust-pitted, the bluing on the cylinder worn, the sight filed off, the wood grips wrapped with electrician�
�s tape that was inverted, sticky side out. Clete shoved the revolver into Boyd’s mouth and hammered it down with the heel of his hand.

  “We’re done, Cletus. Back away,” I said.

  “They were going to take both of us out, Streak. These guys need special handling. Yes, indeedy they do. You ever see a ville trashed with Zippo tracks, boys? You can’t believe what ran out of the hooches.”

  At that moment I knew Clete had gone into a separate time zone, one where reason and morality held no sway and psychosis was the standard. He drenched both men with gasoline, spraying it in their faces and mouths and eyes. He fished his lighter out of his pocket. “Nobody does a number on the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. You got that? Show me you understand, or you’re going to be a pair of human pinwheels.”

  “Clete, don’t!” Felicity begged. “This isn’t you. No matter what they’ve done, you can’t do this.”

  “Listen to her,” I said. “It’s over. Look at them. They’re pitiful. They’ll never forget this night as long as they live.”

  I put my hand over the lighter and squeezed, splaying his fingers and thumb. He stared at me woodenly. I saw the glaze go out of his eyes, the heat leave his face, like the glow of a hot coal dying inside its own ashes.

  “They knew I was kidding,” he said. “No big deal. Right? You boys copacetic down there? How about a soda?”

  Through the window of the convenience store, I saw a clerk dialing the phone and talking into the receiver, his mouth moving rapidly.

  “We’re in Ravalli County,” I said. “I don’t want to explain this to the locals.”

  I started toward the pickup. I thought we were done. Then I heard Caspian get to his feet and stumble against the pumps, grabbing the trash barrel for support, gasoline and blood running down his face, his broken lips twisted into a grin. He started to speak, then had to spit and begin again. “Neither one of you has any idea what this is about, do you?” he said. “Know why that is? You’re the little people, but you’re too stupid to realize it. Ask Felicity what kind of guy my father is. She ought to know. He fucked her. Now they’re both going to fuck you, just like they both fucked me.”