AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Don’t tell me that.”
“She said she called the FBI and the sheriff. She was in fine form.”
“Why didn’t she call me?” I said.
“Because she’s so pissed off, she’s afraid of what she might say?”
“Why’d you bring this?” Gretchen said. She was standing by the bed of my pickup.
“Bring what?” I said.
She lifted up a rusted chain. “The bear trap Surrette almost lured me into,” she said.
I looked at Clete.
“I put it in there,” he said. “You never know.”
“Know what?” I asked.
“When you might need one.” He stared out at the black luminosity of the lake, his fatigue and powerlessness clearly greater than any hope he had for the rescue of Felicity Louviere and the two teenage girls.
ASA SURRETTE DID not like electricity. During winter, in the home where he was born, static electricity was always nestled in the house, in the rugs ingrained with dust, on the surface of doorknobs and refrigerator handles and pipes in the cellar, in the touch of another human being’s hand. It was symptomatic of a harsh and unforgiving land, of winter winds that could sand the paint off a water tower, of horizons that seemed to blend into infinity.
Nor did he like electricity in the heavens, when it crawled silently through the clouds, flaring in yellow pools that leaped chainlike all the way to the earth’s rim, as though there were powers and spirits at work in the natural world that he could never control or understand. He sat in a straight-back chair on the first floor of a two-story stone house that had belonged to a California woman who no longer needed it. That was how he remembered her. She was the California woman who no longer needed things, not even her name. Now he sat in the almost bare living room of her former house, gazing at the light show in the sky, thinking about what he should do next, his fingers hooked under his thighs, his sandy-blond hair hanging in his eyes, a scab the size of a dime glued on his cheek.
He could hear no sound from the basement. He slipped off his loafers and pressed his feet flat against the floor, wondering if he would feel any movement from below or the vibrations of a voice, even a whisper, through the wood. It wasn’t impossible. Not for him, it wasn’t. When he was in twenty-three-hour lockdown, he had come to believe he possessed not only a third eye but sensory powers that went far beyond the skills blind people developed out of necessity. That said, he had to keep his ego in check. His IQ and the classics he had read and his study of people and their weaknesses gave him a tremendous sense of confidence in his dealings with others but made him vulnerable. Excess confidence could lead him into entanglements with women, all of whom carried elements in their emotional metabolism that were like a drug.
Women were devious and alluring by nature, the sirens who waited on the rocks, their breasts bare, beckoning with their pale arms for the ship to sail just a little closer, through the froth of a wine-dark sea, their teeth white and their lips opening like purple flowers.
He did not like these images. They alarmed and attracted him at the same time, not unlike the smell of opium burning, or the smell of men in a steam room, or the happy cries of children playing in a park. Each of these things was a thorn inside a rose, and when he tried to think through the connections, nothing made any sense, and he felt a sense of anger and impotence th
at made his nails cut into his palms.
He was having other problems: his posture in a straight-back chair and the way he unconsciously gripped its undersided. The prison psychiatrist had latched on to that one—after he caught Asa Surrette spitting in his coffee cup when he stepped out the door for a minute. He said Surrette’s body language indicated the residual stress and anger and rebellion characteristic of people who went through severe toilet training. The psychiatrist became enthused by his own rhetoric and began to riff on the subject, enjoying himself immensely. “Some adult children of dysfunctional parents, people such as you, Asa, were probably strapped down for hours, usually by the mother. Do you have any memories of her giving you enemas? You don’t need to repress those memories anymore. Are you feeling anger about these things? You can be honest here. Oh, excuse me, you’re not angry? Then why is your face so heated? Did your mommy reward you when you went poo-poo?”
Asa Surrette decided he might return to Kansas and visit his old friend the psychiatrist when this Montana situation was resolved. Maybe fix him a cup of coffee he wouldn’t forget.
Right now he had to unload ten bags of crushed ice, each weighing thirty pounds, from the Mercedes SUV that the California woman didn’t need anymore. The Mercedes was parked in the garage, down by the lake. And the woman from California was parked three feet under the dirt in the cherry trees next to the garage, may that loudmouth tub of lard rest in peace.
Few people realized how easy it was to take others under your sway. A kind word at the supermarket, a tip of the hat, a show of sympathy at a funeral or after a 12-step meeting, that’s all it took if the situation was right and the target was trusting and needy.
Introspection was a luxury he could not afford at the moment, and the foibles of the folk had nothing to do with the problems dropped on him by Felicity Louviere. She was slipping away from him, about to be saved by mortality, the very weapon he had always held over the heads of his victims. She’d even thanked him for her pain. How sick was that?
He stood up in the bareness of the room. Even though the house was built of stone, it seemed to swell with the force of the wind sweeping down from the mountains to the north. I’m your master and unto me your knee will bend, he heard himself saying. I have powers you cannot imagine. I can reach into the grave and extract your soul and make you my handmaiden for eternity. The choice will be mine, not yours. You will not reject me. Do you not understand that, you stupid woman?
He realized he was grinding his molars. His words seemed pretentious and self-mocking. “Damn her to hell,” he said under his breath, and wondered if anyone had heard the fear in his voice.
WE STARTED UP Eastside Highway and stopped at eleven P.M. down by the shore. We woke up people, confused most of them, and probably frightened some. It was late, and I could not blame them for their reaction. We had no legal authority there, and the implications of our questions were not the kind anyone would want to deal with on a Sunday night. Flathead Lake and its environs were supposed to be a safe harbor from the problems in the rest of the country. The residents kept looking beyond us into the darkness, unsure who we were and yet fearful that we were telling them the truth. How do you explain to people who are basically good and trusting that their lives are predicated on an enormous presumption, namely, that the justice system works and that evil people will be prevented from coming into their lives?
Surrette could be dismissed as a psychological monstrosity whose mother would have been better off raising a gerbil. Here’s the rub: He’s not the only one. If you’ve ever been inside, either as a correctional officer or as an inmate, you know what “con-wise” means. The majority of people who stack time, male and female, are not different from the rest of us. They have families and work histories and skilled trades and are surprisingly patriotic. Some of them have remarkable levels of personal courage and are stand-up in an environment that would break a lesser man or woman. Most of them are also screwups. In other words, they belong to the family of man, even if only on its outer edges.
But ask anyone who has been inside about the bunch in permanent lockdown. These are the ones who scare you, even when they’re draped with waist and leg chains, and they scare you because looking into their eyes assures you they love evil for its own sake. Talk to the trusties who mop the floors in the lockdown unit and wheel the food cart from cell to cell. They do not make eye contact. Nor do the correctional personnel who sometimes have to enter a cell with body and face shields and cans of pepper spray and sometimes, like anyone who has witnessed a state execution, need to stop at a bar before going home that night.
Here is the most bothersome part about the men in permanent lockdown: They can hear each other’s thoughts. They network; they exchange kites with pieces of string the way pen pals might; they share stories that could have been invented by a medieval inquisitor. They’re shunned and reviled by the rest of the prison population, but among themselves, they rejoice in their iniquity. Check out the video of Richard Speck getting stoned in a cell with some of his buds, his naked breasts enlarged by hormones, while he makes a joke about the nurses he raped and murdered.
Halfway up the lake, my cell phone chimed. It was Molly.
“I’m sorry we took off,” I said. “I thought you understood that the sheriff wanted to see us before we headed up to Flathead Lake.”
