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Jimmy Dale stood up from the Camry’s fender, his expression empty. The engine of the cargo van was running, the sliding side door open. The three men from the van formed a circle around him. One of them lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at an upward angle, as though he had stopped to shoot the breeze with a friend who was having car trouble. There was no one else in the parking lot. Candace could feel her ears popping and hear the wind whistling through the open windows of the pickup. The men from the van were smiling, touching Jimmy Dale on the arms, patting his back, picking up his duffel and sleeping bag for him, nodding reassuringly.
The sun dipped behind a cloud, and she saw Jimmy Dale’s eyes look through the pickup’s windshield and lock on her own. This time it was obvious he recognized her as the woman he had rescued from Quince Whitley in a Missoula parking lot. His expression was that of a man who knows he’s been tricked and lied to, taken over the hurdles again, treated
for the fool he has always been. No, worse, it was the expression of a man who thinks he deserves his fate, who thinks the role of victim and loser is one he began earning from the moment of his birth.
He started to fight with the three men, kicking impotently while they held his wrists, their smiles still in place, as though they were protecting a drunk friend from himself.
Troyce, for God’s sake, get out here, she thought.
But the cavalry was in the can, and Candace Sweeney was on her own.
She reached under the seat and felt the cold touch of the lug wrench Troyce kept there. He had said, “Don’t let them bust you for carrying a concealed firearm. Carry a baseball bat or a lug wrench. Ain’t nothing like a wrench or a ball bat to make Christians out of unwanted presences.”
She clasped her fingers around the wrench’s shank and pulled it clanking from under the seat and opened the door and stepped out on the gravel, the wind cold on her face. The wrench was heavy in her hand, weighted with a rough-edged, thick steel socket welded on the tip. She began walking toward the Camry and the three men who held Jimmy Dale by his arms. The great green-gray density of the mountains seemed to tilt on the horizon. She felt small inside the vastness of the landscape, even smaller inside the wind that seemed to finger her blouse open, exposing her tattoos and her sagging breasts. In fact, she felt the entire valley was empty of people except her and Jimmy Dale Greenwood and the three men who had already started pushing him inside the van.
“Leave him alone,” she heard herself say.
“What’s that you’re saying?” one man asked. He was blond and chewing gum. He had green eyes that were like drills and biceps the size of softballs and an upper torso that was too long for his short height. There was an electric anticipation in his face, like that of a man riding on the crest of a wave. “Want a drink?” he said. “Let me get our friend in the car, and I’ll buy you a drink.”
“I said let him go. He hasn’t done you any harm.”
Jimmy Dale began to fight again, driving his boot heel into one man’s foot, spitting in another man’s face, dropping his weight down on his suspended arms to spear-kick the blond man in the groin.
“Get her out of here,” one of the other men said.
The blond man shoved her in the chest. “You heard him. Hoof it, sweet thing,” he said. “Our friend is plastered. You deaf? I said you haul your gash out of—”
She swung the lug wrench at him, tearing skin, breaking something, maybe his nose, maybe the ridge above his eye, but something that smeared blood and shock across his face.
“You stupid—” he said, holding one hand to his wound. Then he let out a sound like an animal whose foot was caught in a trap, except it was a grinding noise, one of personal offense and not pain.
She heard a brief buzzing sound, similar to downed power lines arcing in a puddle of water. Then something exploded in her chest, like steel tongs cutting deep inside her, expanding into places she did not know existed. Her knees buckled, a plaintive cry rose involuntarily from her throat, and she felt herself being thrown headlong into the cargo van, side by side with Jimmy Dale Greenwood, like two slabs of spoiled beef on their way to the acid pit.
CHAPTER 27
THERE HAD BEEN a three-car pileup on Evaro Hill, the narrow pass that leads up to the plateau on which the Jocko Valley is geologically located, and vacationer traffic had been backed up to the interstate. Clete had tried to work his way through a number of cars, then had clamped an emergency flasher on the dash — one he was not legally empowered to use — and had swung out on the shoulder and driven over the pass onto the Flathead reservation.
When we arrived at the bar, the first person we saw was Troyce Nix, wandering in the rear of the parking area, looking in all directions, raindrops spotting his hat. Clete pulled up abreast of him, rolling down the window. “What’s going on?” he said.
“She’s gone,” Nix replied.
“Who’s gone?” Clete said.
“Candace is. I went inside to use the restroom, and I come out, and she was gone,” Nix said.
“What are you all doing here?” Clete said.
“Looking for Jimmy Dale Greenwood.”
“How’d you know Greenwood was going to be here?” Clete said.
“I followed the bartender from Swan Lake, a guy by the name of Harold Waxman. What are y’all doing here?”
“Same thing you are. Start over again,” Clete said.
But Troyce Nix wasn’t faring too well. He wandered about in a daze, staring at the tire marks next to the white Camry, staring at the two-lane road that led through the valley and up a rise into mountains that seemed stacked higher and higher against the western sun. I got out of the Caddy and placed my hand on his shoulder. When he turned and looked at me, I could see a sense of loss and bewilderment in his eyes that I did not associate with a man of his size and physical strength.
“Nobody saw anything?” I said.
