Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  It didn’t happen. Felicity decided to take matters into her own hands and attack Surrette with a tool of some kind, and she made a mess of it.

  Gretchen took her finger from the trigger guard, her right eye focused through the scope, and watched the situation come apart.

  Take the shot, she heard a voice say.

  I’ll hit Felicity, she answered.

  Do it. She screwed things up.

  My head hurts. I can’t think. Just shut the fuck up.

  She saw Surrette hit Felicity, and she tightened the stock against her shoulder again, sure that this time she had a clean shot. She didn’t. Surrette grabbed Felicity as he would a slab of beef and wrestled her to his vehicle, blood leaking from his mouth. He opened the driver’s door and began stuffing her inside, at the same time driving his right fist into her ribs and the side of her head.

  He’s going to kill her, the voice said. Do it while there’s still time. Have you grown weak?

  I don’t have the right to risk someone else’s life.

  You want to feel good about yourself at the woman’s expense?

  If you were in the SUV with Surrette, what would you want me to do?

  Take the shot.

  I see. Just spit into the wind and see what happens? Oh, I hit you in the brisket? Sorry about that.

  Take the shot, Gretchen.

  You’re not inside the vehicle. You’re one of those who like to use terms like “collateral damage.”

  He’ll torture her to death. Try to imagine the level of pain she’ll suffer in just one minute. Then multiply that by several hours.

  I can’t do it.

  Take the shot now, bitch, or stop pretending you’re a player. Sign up with the titty-baby brigade and burn candles for the person you could have saved.

  Gretchen rose to her feet, lifting the rifle, trying to refocus on the target and catch the exact moment when Surrette’s image stood out in clear relief, separate from Felicity Louviere’s, framed forever inside the crosshairs, his face about to dissolve like a photograph curling over a flame.

  Surrette slammed the door and turned and looked back down the slope. The sun had just broken from behind a cloud, and he had probably seen the glint on her scope. He appeared puzzled rather than alarmed, as though no one had the right to intrude upon what was clearly his province.

  Eat this, Gretchen thought.

  Just as she squeezed the trigger, she saw Felicity Louviere raise her bloodied head directly behind Asa Surrette’s.

  THE ROUND TICKED the top of the steering wheel, an inch from Surrette’s hand, and pocked a hole the size of a nickel through the windshield, powdering the dashboard with splinters of glass. He floored the accelerator, the tires spinning on the slick logging road, and bounced over the apex of the switchback and down the far side. Felicity Louviere was thrown against the passenger door by the SUV’s momentum, her hair in her eyes, her face swollen and bleeding.

  “You told Gretchen Horowitz we were out here?” he said.

  “What does it matter?” Felicity replied. “She’ll hunt you down for the rodent you are. She’ll make you beg.”

  “Not like you will. Wait till you see what I have planned.”

  She was losing consciousness and talking at the same time. Surrette hit chuckhole after chuckhole, bouncing in the seat, looking sideways at her, his safety strap not snapped in place. “What are you mumbling about?” he asked.

  “He is risen,” she replied.

  He hit the brake and skidded to a stop. He lifted himself up on one knee in the seat and began beating her in the face with both fists, as though his rage could never be sated.

  GRETCHEN WORKED HER way up the slope, through the tree trunks, carrying the Mauser at port arms. The bound woman had tripped over a log and fallen to the ground. Her bare legs were smeared with dirt and leaves and deer droppings and tiny twigs; a mewing sound came from the cloth bag cinched under her chin.

  “Hey, it’s okay. You’re safe,” Gretchen said, kneeling beside her, propping the rifle on the log. “Surrette is gone. I’m here to help you.”

  She placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder and felt her shiver as though she had been touched with a piece of dry ice. “My name is Gretchen Horowitz,” she said. “I’m going to remove the bag from your head now, then cut the tape on your wrists. Don’t be afraid.”

  The woman did not reply. Gretchen loosened the drawstring and slipped the bag from her face. The woman stared into Gretchen’s eyes with the expression of an infant just emerging from its mother’s womb.

  “What’s your name?” Gretchen asked.

  “Rhonda. My name is Rhonda Fayhee. I live up by Lookout Pass. I work in the café. I went home from work. I don’t know what happened to me.”

  “Many people have been looking for you, Rhonda. They’re all your friends. The whole world is on your side.” She opened her pocketknife and cut the tape on Rhonda Fayhee’s wrists.

  “Who kidnapped me?” Rhonda asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I never saw anyone. I felt the needles someone put in me. Somebody fed me, too. A man did. The same one who put his—” She couldn’t finish.

  “It’s all right,” Gretchen said. “I’m going to take you to the hospital in Missoula.”

  “I don’t want to go there.”

  Gretchen sat down next to her. “Why don’t you want to go to the hospital?”

  “He did things to me.”

  “We’re going to fix him for that. I promise you,” Gretchen said.

  “I want someone to kill him.”

  Gretchen put her arm around Rhonda and kissed her on the cheek. “You’re going to be all right,” she said. “Not all at once but with time. Do you hear me? All of this will pass. None of it is your fault. All of the things that were done to you happened outside of you and have nothing to do with your soul or who you are.”

  “He had a smell. It will never go away.”

  “Yes, it will. I promise. Terrible things were done to me when I was a child, and also when I was an adult. But I’m still here. I’m here for you, too. Are you listening, Rhonda? I give you my word: We’re going to blow up this guy’s shit.” She pressed Rhonda Fayhee’s head against her breast and kissed her hair. “We’ve got to go now,” she said.

  “Not yet.”

  “He has another hostage, Rhonda. She traded herself for you. Her name is Felicity Louviere.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name. Who is she?”

  I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does.

  Gretchen did not share her thoughts and simply said, “We don’t have any phone service here. Let me help you up. There you go. Just put one foot after the other. See? You’re doing fine.”

  GRETCHEN DID NOT return to Albert’s ranch until almost dark. The news media cooperated with the sheriff’s department and released a minimum amount of information about the rescue of Rhonda Fayhee, to avoid telling Surrette that he’d been identified as her kidnapper. However, the redacted story was troubling on another level. There was no mention that Felicity Louviere had been abducted.

  I still had Love Younger’s unlisted number. I called it at 10:17 P.M. I thought he might screen the call, but he didn’t. When he picked up, I was treated to another instance of his irritability. “Why have you called my home?” he said.

  “I suspect by now you know that Surrette has abducted your daughter-in-law,” I said.

  “Why is that your business?”

  “Where’s your son?”

  “You’re probably the most presumptuous man I’ve ever met, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “Sir, what in the name of suffering God is wrong with you? This isn’t about me or you. It’s about Felicity Louviere and my daughter, Alafair. It’s also about Gretchen Horowitz, who was almost killed by Asa Surrette.”

  “Yes, the same woman who shot at him and may have wounded my daughter-in-law.”

  He was a master at deflecting any reasonable form of redress for a problem
that involved his agenda and his pride. Or in this instance, his profligate son. I asked again if he knew Caspian’s whereabouts.

  “I have no idea,” he said. His voice had dropped in register. “He’s drinking or using drugs. He’s been gone all day. Why do you torment us so?”

  “Every perp I ever met feigned the role of victim, Mr. Younger. A role like that is unworthy of you.”

  I did not expect what he said next. “My son may have become deranged. He’s always been frightened, ever since he was a little boy. Caspian, Caspian, my poor son Caspian. What else can I say, sir? His sins are mine. It’s I who planted the seeds of doubt and self-hatred in him. Do you know what it’s like for a father to accept the fact he has ruined his son, Mr. Robicheaux? Do you have any idea what that is like?”

  “Why would Surrette kidnap Felicity Louviere? Why would she be of interest to him? Is he working with Caspian?”

  The line went dead.

  CLETE HAD MADE several calls to people he knew in Vegas and Reno and Atlantic City and had found out little he didn’t already know about Caspian Younger. He tapped into another resource, a notorious New Orleans attorney by the name of Philo Wineburger, also known as Whiplash Wineburger. No one could say Whiplash was low-bottom, because Whiplash had no bottom. Over many years, he had fronted points for porn vendors in Baton Rouge and Miami, helped keep cockfighting legal in Louisiana, and represented not only the Mob but a Nicaraguan drug lord named Julio Segura, right up until the day Clete and I blew Julio apart in the backseat of his Cadillac.

  My favorite story about Whiplash involved his indignation at his divorce hearing when his wife described walking in on him while he was in the sack with the maid. When the judge asked Whiplash what he had to say in his defense, he answered, “I’m no snob, Your Honor!”

  Clete came up to the main house early Sunday morning. He was carrying a yellow legal pad, the top two pages filled with ink. He asked me to sit out back of the house, where we could be alone. He looked like he had just showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes and was in charge of his day, but I knew he had gotten little if any sleep the previous night.

  “Here’s what I got,” he said. “After Caspian’s father killed his credit lines at all the big casinos, he ran up a six-figure tab with a couple of shylocks in Miami, then couldn’t make the vig. So he borrowed more from some guys in Brooklyn, not telling them he was on the hook with these other guys in Miami. This time he invested the money in a big coke transfer. Ever hear of La Familia Michoacana?”

  “In Mexico?” I said.

  “Yeah, they’re meth addicts and religious crazoids,” Clete said. “They cut off people’s heads and leave them on curbsides with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. According to Whiplash, Younger financed a two-hundred-grand shipment of coke that was supposed to go through a tunnel under the border somewhere around Mexicali. It gets even better. The shylocks bundled up a bunch of queer with real bills and passed it on to Caspian, who used it to pay the Mexicans. Can you imagine paying those guys with counterfeit? They were going to take his skin off.”

  “How’d he get out of it?” I said.

  “His father bailed him out and got him in G.A. again, but it didn’t do any good. He went right back to Vegas for more of the same. Get this: The shylocks told Whiplash they didn’t like dealing with Caspian because they didn’t trust Felicity.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was honest. These guys consider honesty a character defect,” he said.

  “Did Wineburger know anything about Surrette?”

  “He didn’t know the name, but he said Caspian had the reputation for being an easy mark and for hanging around weird people. I think the tail has been wagging the dog on this one.”

  I waited for Clete to continue. He set down his legal pad and propped his hands on his knees and watched two white-tailed does and a fawn walking along a trail through the trees. Wildflowers were growing inside the shade, and the deer began grazing, indifferent to our presence. “I can’t take this, Dave,” he said. “I think about Felicity in the hands of that guy, and I start to go crazy.”

  “We’ll get her back.” I placed my hand on his shoulder. It felt like a chunk of concrete. “Did you hear me?”

  “Where do you think he took her?” he asked.

  “A place with a basement.”

  He lowered his head and shut his eyes. “I’m going to find Caspian Younger. If he doesn’t tell me where Surrette is, I’m going to do some things I’ve never done. There won’t be anything left of him.”

  “You want to let Surrette make you over in his image?”

  The back of his neck was flaming, his chest rising and falling. I could smell the heat in his clothes.

  “She made a choice, Clete. Maybe we have to honor it.”

  “That’s sick,” he replied.

  “You said it yourself—she was willing to risk her life to save the waitress. In her way, maybe she’s making up for her daughter’s death. Guilt is a luxury we don’t have time for, partner.”

  “I wish I’d run off with her to Nevada.”

  “She’s still married. That’s not your way,” I said.

  “That didn’t stop me from getting it on with her.”

  When others show levels of courage that seem beyond our own capabilities, we feel reduced in stature and are left wondering if a spiritual component is missing from our makeup. I once saw a black-and-white photograph of a Jewish mother walking with her daughter to a shower room in a Nazi death camp. The mother was holding the little girl’s hand. The weather was obviously cold; they were wearing cloth coats and scarves tied on their heads. They were flanked on either side by barbed wire and surrounded by other children filing into the same room, inside a concrete building somewhere in eastern Poland. No other adults, except the Nazi guards, were present in the photograph.

  There was no cutline on the photo that would explain the incongruity of the mother among all the children. The viewer could come to only one conclusion: She had asked to die with her daughter. The white sock on the little girl’s left foot had slipped down on her ankle. I have never been able to forget that image, nor the courage that the mother had shown in refusing to abandon her child, even at the cost of her own life.

  It’s my belief that the great heroes in our midst are the ones we never notice. I believed Felicity Louviere was one of them.

  “Let’s pull out all the stops,” I said. “If we have to paint the trees, fuck it. At our age, what’s to lose?”

  THAT AFTERNOON WYATT Dixon drove his pickup to the Younger compound and parked in front. The grounds were empty, and he could see no movement inside the house. His 1892 Winchester rested in the gun rack behind his head. He sat in the silence, trying to organize his thoughts, the taped bandage on his stomach as flat as cardboard under his shirt. He thought he could hear voices in the backyard and smell smoke from meat cooking on an open fire. He stepped out on the driveway and felt the earth shift under him, the stitches in his stomach drawing tight against the muscles like a zipper catching on skin.

  He walked around the side of the house and through a border of wood-tubbed bougainvillea and citrus and bottlebrush and Hong Kong orchid trees. He saw Love Younger sitting in a canvas chair by a picnic table, the sunlight dappling his face. Younger was wearing alpine shorts and sandals and a print shirt open on his chest. A decanter of whiskey and a silver bowl full of crushed ice had been placed in the middle of the table, along with a tray of picked shrimp. Jack Boyd was sitting across from him, his long legs out in front of him, his ankles crossed. Both men looked at Wyatt with an alcoholic warmth in their faces, although neither man spoke.

  “At the fairgrounds, you said something about my folks that I didn’t quite catch. Or maybe the words got knocked out of my head when Buster’s Boogie put me in the dirt. Can you refresh me?”

  Younger looked genuinely puzzled. “Whatever we were talking about, it’s flown away.”

  “You was saying something about whit
e trash and the nigger in the woodpile. You was talking about making me a rich man.”

  “I see. You’re here about money?”

  “No, I’m here ’cause I don’t like the way you was talking about my folks.”

  “I owe you an apology,” Younger said. “I thought you were someone else. What did you say your mother’s name was?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Would you mind telling me now?”

  “It was Irma Jean. Her maiden name was Holliday. Her people was from Georgia.”

  “Like Doc Holliday, the tubercular dentist?” Younger said.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “That’s interesting. Your name is Wyatt. Maybe that’s more than coincidence.”

  “You was calling us white trash?”

  “No, I was saying you’re a man among men. I was saying we probably have many things in common.”

  Wyatt gazed at the flower gardens and the fruit trees in the shade, and at the hand-waxed cars parked by the carriage house. “I can see our lifestyles are six of one and a half dozen of the other.”

  Younger picked a sprig of mint out of a bowl and put it in his glass, then refilled it with whiskey and fresh ice. He did not invite Wyatt to join them. Wyatt watched Love Younger raise his glass and drink, his throat moving smoothly, as though he were drinking beer rather than whiskey. The stitched wound in Wyatt’s abdomen began to throb against the pressure of his belt buckle.

  “Is there anything else?” Younger asked.

  “Is there a reason your son has a hard-on for me, or is he just a nasty little termite by nature?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use that kind of language while you’re on my property.”

  “Where’s he at?”

  “Taking a nap. He won’t be seeing you.”

  “Directly, he will, one way or another.”

  “Would you clarify that?” Younger said.