“No more than I know any of them.”
“He was half in the bag and scared about something. He said it had to do with you and somebody he called ‘the girl.’ ”
Albert shook his head. “Isn’t he the one who beat up the cowboy?”
“Yeah, he knocked Wyatt Dixon around.”
“Why spend time talking with a man like that?” Albert said. He set the FedEx box on the table. The return address was a geological lab in Austin, Texas.
After supper, Gretchen had gone into her bedroom and lain down on top of the covers, her arm across her eyes, then turned toward the wall and fallen asleep. Clete sat at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of him, and watched her sleep. He tried to think about the choices available to him. Have a quiet talk with the sheriff? Gretchen would end up shark meat. The sheriff would pull her jacket from Miami-Dade, and no credence would be given to anything she said. And the larger problem went way beyond Gretchen’s background. Again and again, victims of sexual assault were put on the stand and torn apart while the perpetrator either smirked at the defense table or shook his head in feigned disbelief. Rapes were downgraded to battery; child molesters were given probation. There was another problem, too. There was a sick culture in law enforcement, particularly among vice cops, and everyone knew it, Clete in particular: the corner-of-the-mouth jokes, the smug moral superiority, the collective rush in having set up a successful sex sting, the legal proximity to a sybaritic world where you could get laid in any way you wanted by just flipping out your badge.
For a vice detective with some loose time on his hands, after-hours New Orleans may not have been the Baths of Caracalla, but it was a pretty good surrogate.
In Clete’s opinion, the nation was still Puritan, at least when it came to the victimization of women. The temptress brought about her own downfall. The victim was the noun, the perpetrator an adverb. The moment Gretchen testified, she would be portrayed as a contract killer from Miami who had gone willingly to Bill Pepper’s home and entered into a tryst that ended in a lurid and inconsequential denouement on the Blackfoot River. She’d be lucky if she wasn’t charged with perjury.
Clete could see the curve of her hip and the tautness of her thighs and rump against the fabric of her jeans and her back rising and falling as she slept. She had begun a spartan health regimen in California and had lost twenty pounds by dieting and working out with weights and running four miles every morning on the beach in Santa Monica. The combination of her chestnut hair and violet-colored eyes and statuesque carriage made men turn and stare as she walked by. Even more intriguing, she seemed to take no notice of the attention they paid her, as though she were a polite but temporary visitor in their midst.
It was hard for Clete to separate the daughter he was looking at now from the woman who had been called Caruso in Little Havana. Blood splatter and the curse of Cain did not rinse easily from the hands or the soul. Anyone who believed otherwise knew nothing about the makeup of human beings, he thought. Aside from psychopaths, every person who killed another human being took on a burden he carried for the rest of his life. The daylight hours allowed you to concentrate on making money and buying food and clothes and worrying about your bald automobile tires. The nocturnal hours were a little different. The gargoyles that lived in the unconscious had their own agenda and were not interested in the ebb and flow of your daily life. When you were in bed by yourself at four A.M., you could hear them slip their tethers and begin production of a horror movie in which you were the star, except you had no control of the events that were about to take place. How did you deal with it? You could try reds, four fingers of Jack, or even Nytol. Except you usually mortgaged the next day for a few hours of drugged sleep. There was another way: You could drop a solitary round in the cylinder of your .38 and pull back the hammer and, with one soft squeeze of the trigger, put the problem out of your mind forever.
Somehow Gretchen had escaped the life she had fallen into. But after she had shown mercy and trust to a rogue cop who had ridiculed her in front of other men, he had repaid the favor by drugging and binding her and torturing her with his genitalia. How did you address a situation like that? Did you hand your girl over to the system and hope she wasn’t degraded again? Did you allow her to return to the criminal life she had freed herself from? Did you allow others to wad up her life like a piece of used Kleenex and throw it away?
What conclusion would any reasonable person come to?
Clete wrote a note on the back of an envelope and propped the envelope against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. Then he pulled a duffel bag from the closet and checked its contents: a cut-down twelve-gauge Remington pump, a box of double-aught bucks and pumpkin balls that he had hand-loaded, a .25-caliber semi-auto with acid-burned serial numbers, a push-button stiletto, latex gloves, plastic ligatures, a lead-weighted blackjack that could break a two-by-four in half, handcuffs, a set of lock picks, brass knuckles, a bottle of bleach, a slim jim, nylon fishing line, and duct tape.
Restraint, reason, working within the system?
Fuck that.
He carried the duffel bag outside and put it in the trunk of the Caddy and drove away.
The note on the table read:
Don’t worry about anything, kid. I’ll be back before morning. All this will be behind us.
Love,
Your pop,
One hour later, Gretchen woke and did not know where she was; nor, for the moment, did she remember the events that had occurred in the home of Bill Pepper or on the banks of the Blackfoot River. Then she realized the sleep was an illusion and the reality was the assault on her person committed by Bill Pepper. The touch of his hands and his genitalia seemed to cling to her skin like wet cobweb, and the more she rubbed her hands on herself, the more she seemed to re-create what he had done to her, as though she had become a surrogate for the man who assaulted her.
She walked to the kitchen table and read the note Clete had left. She set it down and stood for a long time under the lightbulb that hung directly over her head, trying to think of answers to her situation and his. Through the window, she saw a cinnamon cub come out of the trees on the hillside and work his way through the fence in the moonlight. Albert had sent a chain e-mail through the valley telling others that the cub had been separated from his mother and to be careful while driving down the dirt road. The cub pulled his hind foot loose from the fence, the smooth wire twanging on the posts, then disappeared into the tall grass, creating a path like a submarine gliding just below the surface of the ocean. When Gretchen stepped out on the gallery, the cub bounded across the creek and through the cottonwoods, his rump bouncing up and down in the moonlight.
Gretchen felt a tear in her eye as she watched the cub scramble under the rail fence on the far side of the pasture and head up the hill over rocks and snags into the darkness, the slag from an old geological slide rattling down the incline.
Bill Pepper had lied to her about everything except one item. He’d told the truth when he said he had thrown her tote bag in a tree by the side of the dirt road. What he had not told her was his motivation, which was probably to show his contempt for her possessions and to create a situation where he would continue to control her when she was forced to climb naked into a tree to recover what he had taken from her.
She removed her Airweight .38 from under her pillow and placed it in the bag, alongside the expandable baton and can of Mace, which were still in the bag when she plucked it out of the tree. Then she put on her scarf and her red nylon jacket, the same kind James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. As she drove slowly under the arch onto the road in her chopped-down pickup, the subdued power of the Merc engine vibrating through the floor stick into her palm, she thought she saw the cub moving through the trees and wondered if he would find safe harbor for the night.