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“Of course you don’t. You want a—”
“Say it.”
“Go to a meeting. I’ve got my own problems. I feel like I’ve got broken glass in my head. I porked the wife of a guy who had his face burned off. What kind of bastard would do something like that?”
“You’re the best guy I ever knew, Cletus.”
“Save the douche water for somebody else.”
He drank the mixture of Beam and ice cream down to the bottom of the glass, his brow furrowed, his green eyes as hard as marbles.
TROYCE NIX HAD no trouble finding the location of Jamie Sue Wellstone’s home in the Swan River country. The problem was access to it. An even greater problem was access to Jamie Sue.
He sat in the café that adjoined the saloon on Swan Lake and ate a steak and a load of french fries and drank a cup of coffee while he looked at the snow drifting over the trees and descending like ash on the lake.
“It always snows here in June?” he said to the waitress.
“Sometimes in July,” she replied. “You the fellow who was asking about Ms. Wellstone?”
“I used to be a fan of her music. I heard she lived here’bouts. That’s the only reason I was asking.”
The waitress was a big, red-headed, pink-complected woman who wore oceanic amounts of perfume. “People around here like her. She’s rich, but she don’t act it. Harold said if you wanted information about her to ask him.”
“Who’s Harold?”
“The daytime bartender. He was gone when you were here before.”
Troyce’s eyes seemed to lose interest in the subject. He dropped coins in the jukebox, had another cup of coffee, and used the restroom. When he sat back down on the stool, he felt the bandages on his chest bind against his wounds. He removed a black-and-white booking-room photo from his shirt pocket and laid it on the counter. He pushed it toward her with one finger. “You ever see this guy around here?”
She leaned over and looked at the photo without picking it up, idly touching the hair on the back of her head. “Not really.”
“What’s ‘not really’ mean?” Troyce asked.
The waitress took a barrette out of her pocket and worked it into the back of her hair. “You a Texas Ranger?”
“Why you think I’m from Texas?”
“You know, the accent and all. Besides, it’s printed on the bottom of this guy’s picture.”
“You’re pretty smart,” Troyce said.
“I’d remember him if he’d been in here.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because he’s almost as good-looking as you.”
Troyce slipped the photo back in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap. “What time you get off?”
“Late,” she said. “I got night blindness, too. That’s how come Harold drives me home. And if he don’t, my husband does.”
Troyce left her a three-dollar tip and took his coffee cup and saucer into the saloon and sat at the bar. Through the back windows, he could see the surface of the lake wrinkling in the wind and the steel-gray enormity of Swan Peak disappearing inside the snow. “Ms. Wellstone been in?” he said.
The bartender picked up a pencil and pad and set it in front of him. “You want to leave a message, I’ll make sure she gets it.”
“You’re Harold?”
“What’s your business here, pal?”
