"Black Cherry Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

CHAPTER 8

The regular baby-sitter wasn't home. I found Tess Regan's number in the telephone book, called her, then took Alafair over to her house.

An hour and a half later I drove up the dirt lane to Clete's small redwood house on Flathead Lake. All the lights were on. It was raining, and the lake was black in the background, and I could see the rain blowing in the light from the windows. Farther up the dirt lane, past the electronic gate, the Dio house was dark. I knocked on Clete's front door; when no one answered, I went inside.

I heard a toilet flush somewhere in back, then he walked out of the bedroom with a wet towel held to his mouth. His face looked bloodless, the skin as tight as a lampshade. His tie was pulled loose, and his white shirt was wet down the front. He sat down at the table by the sliding glass doors and drank noisily out of a coffee cup, his whole hand wrapped around the cup to keep it from shaking. On the table were a carton of milk and a fifth of Cutty Sark. He drew in deeply on a Camel and held the smoke down as though he were taking a hit off a reefer. His breath jerked in his chest when he let the smoke out. Out on the lake a lighted, anchored sailboat pitched in the troughs.

He rubbed the towel on his mouth again, then on the back of his thick neck.

"I can't keep anything down. I think I got a peptic ulcer," he said.

"Where is she?"

"In the main bathroom." He looked up at me with his poached face and swallowed.

"Get yourself together."

"I came back from Missoula, she was like that. I can't take this shit."

But I wasn't listening to him. I walked down the hall to the bathroom. When I looked inside I had to clasp one hand on the door-jamb. The safety razor lay on the tile floor, glued thickly to the surface with her blood. She was nude and had slipped down in the tub on her side so that only half her face floated above the soapy red water. There was a deep incision across the inside of both forearms.

Oh Lord God, I thought, and had to take a deep breath and look away.

She had bled until she was almost white. I sat on the edge of the tub and touched her soft, wet hair with my fingertips. It felt like wet feathers.

Written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror were the words:

C,

Checking out, Bye-bye, love,

I ran my hand through my hair and stared numbly at her. Then I saw the tiny scratches and the red discolorations, like pale strawberry bruises, like love bites, on her neck and shoulder. I took a sheet out of the bedroom and draped it over her, then went back into the living room.

Clete was pouring another scotch and milk at the table. The smoke from his Camel curled up over the nicotine stains on his fingers. The skin around his eyes flexed abruptly when he saw my expression.

"Hey, you get that look out of your face, man," he said.

"What were you doing in Missoula?" I said.

"I pick up cigars for Sal's old man. There's only one store in Missoula that carries his brand."

"Why tonight?"

"He told me to."

"Why haven't you called the locals?"

"They're going to bust me for it."

"For a suicide?" I watched his face carefully.

"It's no suicide. You know it's not."

"Clete, if you did this"

"Are you crazy? I was going to ask her to marry me. I'm seeing a therapist now because I'm fucked up, but when I was straightened out I was going to see about taking us back to New Orleans, living a regular life, opening up a bar maybe, getting away from the grease balls."

I looked steadily into his eyes. They stared back at me, hard as green marbles, as though they had no lids. The stitched scar that ran from the bridge of his nose through one eyebrow looked as red as a bicycle patch. Then his eyes broke, and he took a hit of the scotch and milk.

"I don't care what you believe," he said.

"If you think I got jealous over you and her, you're right. But I didn't blame her for it. I got a condition I can't do anything about right now. The therapist says it's because of all that stuff back in New Orleans and because I'm working for grease balls and pretending I like it when actually I wouldn't spit on these guys. But I didn't blame her. You got that?"

"She told you?"

"What's to tell? There's ways a guy knows. Butt out of my personal affairs, Streak."

"I put a sheet over her. Don't go back in there till the cops get here." I picked up the telephone. The moon had broken through a crack in the clouds over the mountains on the far side of the lake, and I could see the froth on the waves blowing in the wind.

"You saw the bruises?" Clete said.

"Yes."

"Most of the locals aren't real bright. But when the coroner does the autopsy, they're going to pick me up."

"Maybe. What's the point?"

He drank out of the cup again, then drew in on the cigarette. His breath was ragged coming out.

"You're not big on sympathy tonight, are you?" he said.

"To be honest, I don't know what I feel toward you, Clete."

"It's Sal. It's gotta be. I'm going to be on ice, he's going to be playing rock 'n' roll with Dixie Lee and the Tahoe corn holers I'm going to nail that fucker, man. I'm going to blow up his shit. I'm going to do it in pieces, too."

"What's his motive?" I set the receiver back down.

"He doesn't need one. He's psychotic."

"I don't buy that."

"She was on to something. It's got to do with oil, with Dixie Lee, maybe with dope. I don't know. She believed in spirits. She thought they told her things. Then yesterday she saw Sal chopping up lines for Dixie Lee and a couple of the Tahoe broads, and she told him he was a fucking cancer, that one day his kind were going to be driven into holes in the earth. Can you dig that? Holes in the earth."

"Where are the Dios now?"

"They said they were going to a play up in Bigfork."

"Have you heard Sally Dio say anything about a guy named Charlie?"

"Charlie? No. Who is he?"

"A hit man out of Vegas."

"Wait a minute, they picked up a guy at the airport in Missoula last night. I thought he was just another one of Sal's butt wipes I offered to drive in and get him, but Sal said I needed a night off."

"What did he look like?"

"I don't know, I didn't see him."

The clouds over the lake were silver where the moon had broken through, and the water below was black and glazed with light.

"I'm going to call the cops now, then I'm taking off," I said.

"I don't want my name in it, all right?"

"Whatever you say." Then he said, "You're pretty cool. A cool operator. You always were. Nobody shakes ole Streak's cookie bag. They could strike matches on your soul and not make you flinch."

I didn't answer him. I walked out into the misting rain and the broken moonlight and drove my pickup truck back down the lake-front road toward Poison. The cherry trees in the orchards were dripping with rainwater in my headlights. The wooded hills were dark, and down on the beach I could see a white line of foam sliding up on the sand. With the windows up I was sweating inside the cab. I passed a neon-lit bar, a boat dock strung with light bulbs, a wind-sheltered cove where the pines grew right down to the water's edge, a clapboard cottage where people were having a party and somebody was still barbecuing in the darkness of the porch. Then I turned east of Poison, at the foot of the lake, and headed for the Jocko Valley, and I knew that I would be all right. But suddenly the clouds closed over the moon again, the sky became as black as scorched metal, and a hard wind blew out of the ice-capped Missions. A curtain of driving rain swept across meadow, irrigation canal, slough, poplar windbreak, and willow-lined stream. Lightning leapt from the crest of the Missions to the black vault of sky overhead, thunder rolled out of the canyons, and hailstones the size of dimes clattered on my truck like tack hammers.

I pulled to the side of the road, sweat boiling off my face, my windows thick with steam. The truck shook violently in the wind. My knuckles were round and white on the steering wheel. I felt my teeth grinding, felt the truck's metal joints creak and strain, the tailgate tremble and reverberate against the hooked chain; then a shudder went through me that made my mouth drop open, as though someone had clapped me on both ears with the flats of his hands. When I closed my eyes I thought I saw a copper-colored stream beaten with raindrops, and in it a brown trout with a torn mouth and blood roaring in clouds from its gills.

The next morning I walked down to the old brick church next to Alafair's school. The sun was brilliant in the bowl of blue sky above the valley. High up on one of the mountains above Hellgate Canyon, I could see horses grazing in the new grass and lupine below the timber, and the trees along the river were dark green from the rain. The current looked deep and cold between the sunbaked boulders that protruded from the water's surface. Someone had planted a garden by the side door of the church, and yellow roses and spearmint bloomed against the red-brick wall. I went inside, crossed myself at the holy water fount, and knelt in a pew close to the altar. Like almost all Catholic churches, this one smelled like stone and water, incense, and burning wax. I think that fact is no accident inside a Catholic church. I think perhaps the catacombs, where the early Christians celebrated mass, smelled the same way.

I prayed for Darlene, for Alafair, my father and brother, and finally for myself. A muscular, blond-headed priest in black trousers, scuffed cowboy boots, and a T-shirt came out of the sacristy and began removing the flower vases from the altar. I walked to the communion rail, introduced myself, and asked if he would hear my confession.

"Let's go out into the garden," he said.

Between the church and the rectory was a sunny enclosure of lawn and flower beds, stone benches, bird feeders, and a small greenhouse. The priest and I sat next to one another on a bench, and I told him about my relationship with Darlene and finally about her death. While I talked he flipped small pieces of dirt at the leaves of a potted caladium. When I finished he was silent a moment; then he said, "I'm not quite sure what you're confessing to. Do you feel that you used this woman?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think you contributed to her death?"

"I don't think so. But I'm not sure."

"I think that something else is troubling you, something that we're not quite talking about."

I told him about Annie, the shotgun blasts that leapt in the darkness of our bedroom, the sheet drenched with her blood, the coldness of her fingers when I put them in my mouth. I could hear him breathing next to me. When I looked up at him I saw him swallow.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"It won't go away, Father. I don't believe it ever will."

He picked up another piece of hard dirt off the grass and started to flip it at the plant, then dropped it from his hand.

"I feel inadequate in trying to advise you," he said.

"But I think you're a good man and you're doing yourself an unnecessary injury. You were lonely when you met the Indian lady. You obviously cared for her. Sometimes maybe it's a vanity to judge ourselves. Did you ever think of it that way? You make your statement in front of God, then you let Him be the measure of right and wrong in your life. And I don't believe you caused your wife's death. Sometimes when that kind of evil comes into our lives, we can't explain it, so we blame it on God or ourselves. In both cases we're wrong. Maybe it's time you let yourself out of prison."

I didn't answer him.

"Do you want absolution?"

"Yes."

"What for?"

"I don't know. For my inadequacies. My failures. For any grief or injury I've brought an innocent person. That's the best I can say. I can't describe it."

His forearms were folded on his thighs. He looked down at his boots, but I could see a sad light in his eyes. He took a deep breath.

"I wish I could be of more help to you," he said.

"We're not always up to the situation. Our experience is limited."

"You've been more than kind."

"Give it time, Mr. Robicheaux." Then he smiled and said, "Not everybody gets to see a blinding light on the way to Damascus."

When I left that sunny, green enclosure between the buildings, he was kneeling down in a flower bed, troweling out a hole for the pink-and-gray-striped caladium, his eyes already intent with his work, his day obviously ordered and serene and predictable in a way that I could not remember mine being since I walked off the plane into a diesel-laced layer of heat at Tan Son Nhut air base in 1964.

I wanted to go into yesterday. And I don't think that's always bad. Sometimes you simply have to walk through a door in your mind and lose thirty or forty years in order to remember who you are. Maybe it's a self-deception, a mental opiate that I use to escape my problems, but I don't care. We are the sum total of what we have done and where we have been, and I sincerely believe that in many ways the world in which I grew up was better than the one in which we live today. I stuck a paperback copy of Ernest Gaines's Of Love and Dust in my pocket, and walked down to Bonner Park and sat on a bench under a maple tree and read. The fountain and concrete wading pool looked dry and white in the sun, and in the distance the mountains were a sharp blue against the clouds. The wind was cool blowing out of the shade, but I was already inside the novel, back on a hot sugarcane and sweet potato plantation in South Louisiana in the 1940s. No, that's not really true. I was back in New Iberia the summer after my second year in college, when my brother, Jimmie, and I worked on an offshore seismograph rig and bought a 'forty-six Ford convertible that we put dual Hollywood mufflers on, lowering blocks and fender skirts, painted canary yellow and lacquered and waxed until the metal seemed to have the soft, deep gleam of butter. It was the best summer of my life. I fell in love seriously for the first time, with a girl who lived on Spanish Lake, outside of town, and as is always the case with your first love, I remembered every detail of the season, as though I had never experienced summer before, sometimes with a poignancy that would almost break my heart. She was a Cajun like myself, and her hair was brown and bleached in streaks by the sun so that it looked like dark honey when the wind blew it. We danced at Voorhies Roof Garden in Lafayette and Slick's in St. Martinville, drank twenty-cent long-necked Jax beer under the oaks at Deer's Drive-in in New Iberia; we fished for white trout out on the salt, went to crab boils and fish fries at Cypremort Point and drove home in the lilac evening, down that long two-lane blacktop parish road between the cypress and the oaks, with the wind warm off the Gulf, the new cane green in the fields, the western sky streaked with fire, the cicadas deafening in the trees.

She was one of those girls who love everything about the man they choose to be theirs. She never argued or contended, she was happy in any place or situation where we were together, and I only had to touch her cheek with my fingers to make her come close to me, to press herself against me, to kiss my throat and put her hand inside my shirt. It rained every afternoon, and sometimes after it cleared and the clouds were pink and maroon on the horizon, we'd drive down the levee to the dock where my father kept his boat, the cypress dripping into the dead water, and in the soft light her face would have the color and loveliness of a newly opened flower.

Jimmy Clanton's "Just a Dream" was on every jukebox in southern Louisiana that summer, and car radios at the drive-in were always tuned to "Randy's Record Shop" in Memphis at midnight, when Randy kicked it off with "Sewannee River Boogie." Each morning was one of expectation, of smoky light in the pecan trees outside my bedroom window, of innocent desire and the confidence that within a few hours I would be with her again, and that absolutely nothing would ever come between us. But it ended over an unreasonable and youthful concern. I hurt her without meaning to, in a way that I could not explain to myself, much less to her, and my silence caused her an even greater injury that these many years later still troubles me on occasion.

I'll never forget that summer, though. It's the cathedral I sometimes visit when everything else fails, when the heart seems poisoned, the earth stricken, and dead leaves blow across the soul's windows like bits of dried parchment.

My experience has been that grief and loss do not necessarily become more acceptable with time, and commitment to them is of no value to either the living or the dead. The next morning I was back in the Lake County courthouse.

The sheriff looked as hard and round as a wooden barrel. His dark blue suit was spotted with cigarette ash that he had tried to clean off with a wet paper towel; he wore his gray hair in a crew cut, his white shirt lapels ironed flat so that his chest hair stuck out like a tangle of wire. He was one of those elected law officers who have probably been diesel mechanics or log-truck drivers before someone had talked them into running for office. He sat at the corner of his desk when he talked, rather than behind it, and smoked a cigarette and looked out the window at the lake with such private concentration that I had the feeling that he already knew the outcome of our conversation, and that he was talking to me now only because of a public relations obligation that the office imposed upon him.

"You were a homicide detective in New Orleans?" he said.

"That's right."

"Then a detective in the sheriff's department in… what's the name of that place?"

"New Iberia. Where they make Tabasco sauce." I smiled at him, but his eyes were looking through his cigarette smoke at the blue wink off the lake.

"You know a DEA agent named Dan Nygurski?"

"Yep."

"He was here yesterday. He said I could count on you coming to see me."

"I see."

"He said I should tell you to go back to Louisiana. What do you think about that?"

"Advice is cheap."

"You're wondering about the coroner's report?"

I let out my breath.

"Yes, sir, I am," I said.

"Because you think she was murdered?"

"That's right."

"What for? Who had reason to kill her?"

"Check out Sally Dee's record. Check on a guy named Harry Mapes, too." I felt the heat start to rise in my voice, and I paused.

"I'd give some thought to Purcel, too."

"From what I've been told, these are all people you've had trouble with at one time or another. You think you're being entirely objective here?"

"The Dios are animals. So is Mapes. Purcel killed a guy for some paramilitary crazies in New Orleans. I wouldn't underestimate the potential of any of them."

"Why would Purcel kill her?"

He looked at me with interest for the first time. I dropped my eyes to my shoes. Then I looked back at him.

"I was involved with Darlene," I said.

"He knew about it."

The sheriff nodded and didn't reply. He opened his desk drawer and took out a clipboard on which were attached Xeroxed copies of the kinds of forms that county medical examiners use in autopsies.

"You were right about the bruises," he said.

"She had them on her neck and her shoulders."

I waited for him to continue.

"She also had a bump on the back of her head," he said.

"Yes?".

"But it's going down as a suicide."

"What?"

"You got it the first time."

"What's the matter with you? You're discounting your own autopsy report?"

"Listen, Robicheaux, I don't have any evidence that she didn't kill herself. On the other hand, I have every indication that she did. She could have hit her head on the tub. She could have gotten the bruises anywhere. Maybe you don't like to hear this, but Indians around here get into trouble. They get drunk, they fight in bars, families beat the shit out of each other. I'm not knocking them. I've got nothing against them. I think they get a lousy break. But that's the way it is. Look, if I suspected anybody, it'd have to be Purcel. But I don't believe he did it. The guy's really strung out on this."

"What about Sally Dee?"

"You give me the motive, you put him in the house, I'll cut the warrant."

"You're making a big mistake, Sheriff."

"Tell me how. Fill me in on that, please."

"You're taking the easy choice, you're letting them slide. The Dios sense weakness in you, they'll eat you alive."

He opened a deep drawer in the bottom of his desk and took out a baton. The layers of black paint were chipped, and the grip had been grooved in a lathe and drilled to hold a leather wrist loop. He dropped it loudly on the desktop.

"The guy I replaced gave me this the day I took office," he said.

"He told me, "Everybody doesn't have to go to jail." And there's days when maybe I got that kind of temptation. I see Dio in the supermarket and I shudder. This is good country. He doesn't belong here. But I don't bust heads, I don't let my deputies do it, either. If that don't sit right with somebody, that's their problem." He mashed out his cigarette without looking at me.

"I guess I'll be on my way," I said, and stood up. Then, as an afterthought, I said, "Did the autopsy show anything else unusual?"

"Not to me or the medical examiner."

"What else?"

"I think we've ended this discussion."

"Come on, Sheriff, I'm almost out of your day."

He glanced again at his clipboard.

"What she had for supper, traces of semen in the vagina."

I took a breath and looked out the window at the electric blueness of the lake in the sunlight and the low green hills and pine trees in the distance. Then I pinched my eyes and the bridge of my nose with my fingers and put on my sunglasses.

"You were on the money about Cletus," I said.

"What are you talking about?"

"He didn't do it. He's impotent. She was raped before she was murdered." (He sucked his teeth, smiled to himself, shook his head slightly, and opened his newspaper to the sports page.

"You'll have to excuse me," he said.

"It's the only chance I get to read it."

I found out from the medical examiner's office that Darlene's family had picked up the body that morning and that the funeral was the next afternoon on the Blackfeet Reservation. The next day was Saturday, so Alafair drove across the mountains with me to Du-puyer, on the south end of the reservation. I found out from the local newspaper that the service was to be held at a Baptist church up on the Marias River at two o'clock. We had lunch in a clapboard cafe that was built onto the side of a grease-stained, cinder-block filling station. I had little appetite and couldn't finish my plate, and I stared out the window at the dusty street while Alafair ate her hamburger. The bars were doing a good business. Rusted pickup trucks and oversized jalopy gas burners were parked at an angle to the curb, and sometimes whole families sat listlessly in them while the old man was inside the juke joint. People who looked both devastated and broke from the night before sat on the curb, their attention fixed on nothing, their mouths open like those of silent, newly hatched birds.

Then I saw Alafair watching them, her eyes squinting, as though a camera lens were opening momentarily in her mind.

"What do you see, little guy?" I said.

"Are those Indians?"

"Sure."

"They're like me?"

"Well, not exactly, but maybe you're part Indian. An Indian Cajun from Bayou Teche," I said.

"What language they talk, Dave?"

"English, just like you and me."

"They don't know no Spanish words?"

"No, I'm afraid not."

I saw a question mark, then a troubled look slip into her face.

"What's on your mind, little guy?" I asked.

"The people in my village. They sat in front of the clinic. Like those people there." Her eyes were looking at an elderly man and woman on the curb. The woman was fat and wore army shoes and dirty athletic socks, and her knees were splayed open so that you could see up her dress.

"Dave, they ain't got soldiers here, have they?"

"You get those thoughts out of your head," I said.

"This is a good country, a safe place. You have to believe what I tell you, Alf. What happened in your village doesn't happen here."

She put her hamburger on her plate and lowered her eyes. The corners of her mouth were turned downward. Her bangs hung in a straight line across her tan forehead.

"It did to Annie," she said.

I looked away from her face and felt myself swallow. The sky had clouded, the wind had come up and was blowing the dust in the street, and the sun looked like a thin yellow wafer in the south.

The funeral was in a wood-frame church whose white paint had blistered and peeled into scales. All the people inside the church were Indians, people with braided hair, work-seamed faces, hands that handled lumber without gloves in zero weather, except for Clete and Dixie Lee, who sat in a front pew to the side of the casket. It was made of black metal, lined and cushioned with white silk, fitted with gleaming brass handles. Her hair was black against the silk, her face rouged, her mouth red as though she had just had a drink of cold water. She had been dressed in a doeskin shirt, and a beaded necklace with a purple glass bird on it, wings outstretched in flight, rested on her breast. Only the top portion of the casket was opened, so that her forearms were not visible.

The skin of Clete's face was shiny and stretched tight on the bone. He looked like a boiled ham inside his blue suit. I could see his cigarettes tight against his shirt pocket; his big wrists stuck out of his coat sleeves; his collar had popped loose under the knot of his tie; the strap of his nylon shoulder holster made a hard line across his back. His eyes had the glare of a man staring at a match flame.

I didn't hear, or rather listen to, much of what the preacher said. He was a gaunt and nervous man who read from the Old Testament and made consoling remarks in the best fashion he was probably capable of, but the rain that began clicking against the roof and windows, sweeping in a lighted sheet across the hardpan fields and river basin, was a more accurate statement of the feelings that were inside me.

I made a peculiar prayer. It's a prayer that sometimes I say, one that is perhaps self-serving, but because I believe that God is not limited by time and space as we are, I believe perhaps that He can influence the past even though it has already happened. So sometimes when I'm alone, especially at night, in the dark, and I begin to dwell on the unbearable suffering that people probably experienced before their deaths, I ask God to retroactively relieve their pain, to be with them in mind and body, to numb their senses, to cool whatever flame licked at their eyes in their final moments. I said that prayer now for Darlene. Then I said it again for my wife, Annie.

The cemetery, a windswept and weed-grown square of land enclosed by wire strung between concrete posts, was located a short distance from the edge of the river bottoms. The Marias basin was strange country; the bluffs and the gradated channelings of the river looked as if they had been formed with a putty knife, the clay and silt layered and smoothed in ascending plateaus. Even the colors were strange. The eroded bluffs on the far side of the basin were gray and yellow and streaked with a burnt orange that looked like rust. The water in the main channel was high and brown, and leafless cottonwood limbs floated in it. The sky was sealed with gray clouds from horizon to horizon; in the thin rain the countryside looked as if it were poisoned by the infusion of toxic waste. This was the place Darlene had told me about, the site of what was called the Baker massacre of 1870. On this afternoon, except for a solitary purple dogwood blooming by the cemetery fence, it looked as though the spring had never touched the land here, as though this place had been predestined as moonscape, a geographical monument to what was worst in us.

I watched the pallbearers lower Darlene's casket into the freshly dug hole in the cemetery. The piled orange-and-gray dirt next to the grave was slick with rainwater. The graves around hers were littered with jelly glasses and dime-store vases filled with dead wild-flowers. A small American flag lay sideways on a soldier's grave, spotted with mud. A picture of a little girl, not more than five or six, was wrapped in plastic and tied to a small stone marker with baling wire. On the incline to one side of the cemetery a long length of black plastic pipe ran from a house trailer down to the lip of the river basin. The pipe had cracked at a joint, and a stream of yellow-black effluent had leaked its way in rivulets into one side of the cemetery.

I walked over to the pickup truck, where Alafair slept on the seat with the door open; I stared out over the wet land. In the distance I could see rain falling heavily on some low gray-green hills dotted with a few pine trees. After a while I heard cars and pickups driving away over the dirt road, rocks knocking up under their fenders; then it became quiet again, except for the sound of the two grave diggers spading the mound of dirt on Darlene's casket. Then a strange thing happened: the wind began to blow across the fields, flattening the grass, wrinkling the pools of rainwater in the road. It blew stronger and stronger, so unexpectedly hard, in fact, that I opened my mouth to clear my ears and looked at the sky for the presence of new storm clouds or even a funnel. A cloud shifted temporarily away from the sun and a curtain of light moved suddenly across the bluffs and the gradated layers of the river basin. As it did, the wind stripped away the purple flowers of the dogwood blooming by the cemetery fence and blew them in a pocket of air out over the river's surface like a fragmented bird.

Then it was all over. The sky was gray again, the wind dropped, the weeds stood up stiffly in the fields.

I heard someone standing behind me.

"It looks like the end of the earth, don't it?" Dixie Lee said. He wore a gray western suit with a maroon shirt that had pearl snap buttons on it.

"Or what the earth'll look like the day Jesus ends it."

I saw Clete behind the wheel of Dixie 's pink Cadillac convertible, waiting for him.

"Who paid for the casket?" I said.

"Clete."

"Who did it, Dixie?"

"I don't know."

"Sally Dio?"

"I can't believe something like that."

"Don't tell me that."

"Fuck, I don't know." He looked at Alafair, who was sleeping with her rump in the air.

"I'm sorry… but I don't know. I ain't sure about anything anymore."

I continued to look out over the river flats, the swirl of dark current in the middle of the river, and the orange-streaked bluffs beyond.

"It ain't any good to stand out here studying on things," he said.

"Convoy on back with us and we'll stop in Lincoln for something to eat."

"I'll be along after a while."

I heard him light a cigarette, click his lighter shut and put it in his pocket. I could smell his cigarette smoke drifting from behind me.

"Walk over here with me. I don't want to wake up that little girl," he said.

"What is it, Dixie?" I said irritably.

"Some people say life's a bitch and you die. I don't know if that's right or not. But it's what you're starting to think right now, and it ain't your way. You get yourself a lot of distance between you and them kind of thoughts, son. Look, you got involved with her. Everything ain't lost on me. I know what you're feeling."

"You're sober."

"So I eased up a couple of days. I got my own program. You guys stay sober a day at a time. I get drunk a day at a time. Convoy on back with us. Give me a break from Clete. Sonofabitch is driving me crazy. It's like being next to a balloon that's fixing to float down on a hot cigarette. I tell you, he catches the guy that did this, it ain't ever getting to the jailhouse."

I followed them back toward the Divide, across the greening plains and into the mountains, up the glistening black highway into thick stands of ponderosa pine, blue shadow in the canyons, white water breaking over the boulders in the stream beds far below, long strips of cloud hanging wetly in the trees. It was misting heavily in the town of Lincoln; the air was cool and purple in the twilight and smelled of cut logs and woodsmoke and food cooking and the diesel exhaust from the eighteen-wheel log trucks idling in cafe parking lots. I saw Clete and Dixie pull off the road next to a cafe and look back at me. I shifted into second, accelerated through the traffic light, and kept going through town. Alafair looked at me in the light from the dashboard. Her window was half down, and there were drops of water in her hair and on her tan face.

"We ain't going to stop?" she said.

"How about I buy you a buffalo burger on the other side of the mountain?"

"They wanted you to stop with them, didn't they?"

"Those guys want lots of things. But like somebody once told me, I just don't want to be there when they find it."

"Sometimes you don't make no sense, Dave."

"I've got to have a talk with your teacher," I said.

On Monday morning I started to call my lawyer, then decided I didn't need higher phone bills or more depressing news. If he had gotten a continuance, he would have called me, and anything else he might have to say would be largely irrelevant. I walked Alafair to school, then ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts at the kitchen table and tried to think, as I had all day Sunday, of a reasonable plan to push Harry Mapes and Sally Dio to the wall. But I was quickly running out of options. I would never be able to find the bodies of the dead Indians, much less prove that they were killed by Harry Mapes and Dalton Vidrine. I wondered how I had ever thought I could solve my legal problems by myself, anyway. I wasn't a cop; I had no authority, access to police information, power of warrant, arrest, or interrogation. Most motion pictures portray private investigators as chivalric outsiders who solve crimes that mystify the bumbling flatfeet of officialdom. The reality is that most Pis are former jocks, barroom bouncers, and fired or resigned cops who would cut off their fingers to still have their civil service ratings. Their licenses gave them about as much legal authority as a postman.

I could go back on the eastern slope of the Divide and start checking oil leases in county courthouses. Maybe somehow I would tie Dio into Harry Mapes and Star Drilling Company and the Indians, but even if the connection existed, how would that help my defense on the murder charge in Louisiana? And who had killed Darlene and why? My thoughts became like dogs snapping at each other.

I was distracted by the sound of somebody walking between my house and the neighbor's. I got up from the table and looked through the bedroom door and out the screen window. In the leafy shade I saw a thick-bodied blond man in a yellow hard hat and a denim shirt with cutoff sleeves disappear through some bushes into the backyard. A tool belt clinked on his side. I walked quickly to the back door and saw him standing in the sunlight, in the middle of the lawn, staring up at the telephone pole with his hands on his hips. His biceps were big and red with sunburn.

"Could I help you?" I said.

"Telephone company. There's trouble on the line."

I nodded and didn't reply. He continued to stare up at the pole, then he glanced back at me again.

"Did you use your phone this morning?" he asked.

"No."

"Did it ring and just stop?"

"No."

"Well, it's no big thing. I got to get up on your pole, and then maybe I'll have to use your phone in a little bit. We'll get it fixed, though." He grinned at me, then walked out into the alley and behind the garage where I couldn't see him.

I went into the hallway, picked up the telephone, and listened to the dial tone. Then I dialed the operator. When she answered, I hung up. I looked out the back door again and couldn't see the repairman. I sat back down at the kitchen table and continued eating from my cereal bowl.

Something bothered me about the man, but I couldn't think what it was. Maybe I'm just wired, I thought. Or maybe I wanted the dragons to come finally into my own yard. No, that wasn't it. There was something wrong in the picture, something that was missing or that didn't fit. I went to the front of the house and stepped out on the porch. There was no telephone truck parked on the street. Four houses down a short man in a cloth cap with two canvas sacks cross-strung on his chest was putting handbills with rubber bands on people's doors. The bags were full and heavy, and there were sweat marks on his T-shirt.

I returned to the kitchen and thought I heard somebody between the houses again. I looked out the screen door, but the backyard was empty and the repairman was nowhere in sight. Then two doves settled on the telephone wire, and I glanced at the pole for the first time. The lowest iron climbing spikes were set in the wood some fifteen feet above the ground so children could not get up on the pole.

That's it, I thought. He didn't have climbing spurs strapped onto his boots and ankles, and he didn't wear a safety belt. I went back into the hallway and picked up the telephone receiver. It was dead.

I took the.45 out of the drawer of the nightstand next to my bed. It felt cold and heavy in my hand. I pulled back the receiver, eased a hollow-point round into the chamber, and reset the hammer. It was quiet outside, and the bushes next to the bedroom windows made deep shadows on the screens. I went to the front door just as the handbill carrier was stepping up on the porch. I stuck the.45 inside the back of my trousers and went outside.

"Listen, go to the little grocery on the corner, dial the operator, and ask for the police," I said.

"All you have to say is "Assault in progress at 778 Front Street." Can you do that for me, podna?"

"What?" He was middle-aged, but his stiff, straw-colored hair sticking out from under his cap and his clear blue eyes gave him a childlike appearance.

"I've got some trouble here. I need some help. I'll give you five dollars after the cops get here. Look, just tell the operator you need the cops out here and give them this number" I pointed to the tin numerals on the screen door. Then I took out my pocketknife, pried the set of attached numbers loose from the wood, and handed it to him.

"Just read the numbers into the phone. Seven-seventy-eight Front Street. Then say "Emergency." Okay, podna?"

"What's going on?" His face looked confused and frightened.

"I'll fill you in later."

"Just dial O?" A drop of sweat ran out of his cloth cap.

"You got it."

He started off the porch, the heavy canvas sacks swinging from his sides.

"Leave your sacks here. Okay?" I said.

"Yeah, sure. I'll be right back with the cops."

He headed down the street, the metal house numbers in his hand. I watched him go inside the little yellow-brick grocery store on the corner, then I headed around the side of the house, through the shrubs and shadows toward the backyard. I could see my telephone box, partly obscured by hedge under the bathroom window, and I was sure that the wires on it had been cut; but before I could look I saw the repairman walk across the sunny lawn toward my back door.

I moved quickly up to the edge of the house, the.45 in my right hand. I could feel the moisture in my palm against the thin slick of oil on the metal. The wind was cool between the houses and smelled of damp earth and old brick. The repairman pushed his yellow hard hat up on his forehead, rested his hand on the leather pouch of his tool bag, and started to knock on the screen door. Surprise time, motherfucker, I thought, cocked the.45, stepped out into the yard, and pointed it at him with both hands.

"Right there! Hands behind your head, down on your knees!" I shouted.

"What?" His face went white with shock. He stared incredulously at the automatic.

"Do it! Now!"

I saw his right hand flutter on his tool pouch.

"You're an inch from the next world, bubba," I said.

AlT right man! What the hell is this? All right! All right! I'm not arguing." He knelt on the wood steps and laced his fingers behind his neck. His hard hat slipped down over his eyes. His arms looked thick and red in the sunlight, and I could see the taut whiteness of his chest where the sleeves of his denim shirt were cut off. He was breathing loudly.

"You got me mixed up with somebody else," he said.

"Where's your truck?"

"Down the street. In the fucking alley."

"Because you're shy about parking it on the street. With your left hand unstrap your tool belt, let it drop, then put your hand behind your head again."

"Look, call my company. You got the wrong guy."

"Take off the belt."

His hand worked the buckle loose, and the heavy pouch clattered to the step. I rattled the tools loose out on the concrete pad pliers, blade and Phillips screwdrivers, wire cutters, an ice pick with a small cork on the tip. I held the ice pick up to the corner of his vision.

"You want to explain this?" I asked.

"Wasps build nests inside the boxes sometimes. I use it to clean out the corners."

"Drop your wallet behind you."

His fingers went into his back pocket, jerked the wallet loose, and let it fall. I squatted down, the.45 pointed at the center of his back, picked up the wallet, moved back on the grass, and shook everything out. The back of his neck was red and hot-looking in the bright air, and his shirt was peppered with sweat marks. I fingered through the dollar bills, ID cards, photographs, and scraps of paper at my feet, and gradually became more and more uncomfortable. He had a Montana driver's license with his picture on it, a social security card with the same name on it, a local Elks membership card, and two tickets to a U.S. West Communications employees dance.

I let out my breath.

"Where did you say your truck was?" I asked.

"Down the alley."

"Let's take a look," I said, getting to my feet.

"No, you walk ahead of me."

He stayed in front of me, as I had told him, but by this time I had eased down the hammer on the.45 and had let it hang loose at my side. We walked past the garage into the alley. Parked at the end of the alley, hard against somebody's toolshed in the shade of a maple tree, was his company truck. I stuck the pistol in my back pocket. His face was livid with anger, and he closed and unclosed his fists at his sides.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"You're sorry? You sonofabitch, I ought to knock your fucking teeth down your throat."

"You got a right to. You probably won't understand this, but somebody is trying to do me and maybe a little girl a lot of harm. I thought you were that guy."

"Yeah? Well, you ought to call the cops, then. I tell you, buddy, I feel like ripping your ass."

"I don't blame you."

"That's all you got to say? You don't blame me?"

"You want a free shot?"

There was an intense, measured look in his eye. Then the moment passed. He pointed his finger at me.

"You can tell the cops about it. They'll be out to see you. I guarantee it," he said. Then he walked to the back steps, put his tools back in his leather pouch, and replaced all the articles in his wallet. He didn't bother to look at me as he recrossed the lawn toward the alley and his parked truck. My face felt round and tight in the wind.

Two uniformed cops were there ten minutes later. I didn't try to explain my troubles with Sally Dio; instead, I simply told them that I was an ex-police officer, that the DEA had warned me that an attempt might be made on my life, that they could call Dan Nygurski in Great Falls to confirm my story, and that I had made a serious mistake for which I wanted to apologize. They were irritated and even vaguely contemptuous, but the telephone man had not filed charges against me, he had only phoned in a report, and I knew that it wasn't going anywhere and that all I had to do was avoid provoking them.

"I just didn't act very smart. I'm sorry," I said.

"Where is the gun?" the older of the two cops said. He was big and bareheaded and wore pilot's sunglasses.

"In the house."

"I suggest you leave it there. I also suggest you call us the next time you think somebody's trying to hurt you."

"Yes, sir, I'll do that. Actually I tried. Didn't the handbill man call you all?"

"The what?"

"A guy who puts handbills on front doors. I sent him to the grocery to call you when I thought my line was cut." I realized that I was getting back into the story again when I should let it drop.

"I don't know anything about it. Believe me, I hope I don't hear any more reports from this address. Are we fairly straight on that?"

"Yes, sir, you're quite clear."

They left, and I tried to reorder my morning. When the squad car had pulled up out front, some of the neighbors had come out on the porches. I determined that I was not going to be a curiosity who would hide in his house, so I put on my running shorts and an old pair of boat shoes and began pulling weeds in the front flower bed. The sun was warm on my back, and the clover among the rye grass in the yard was full of small bees. The willow trees out on the river were bent in the breeze. After a few minutes a man's shadow fell across my face and shoulders.

"The phone was broke. I had to go up on Broadway," the man said. His clear blue eyes looked down at me from under his cap.

"Oh, yeah, how you doing?" I said.

"Look, I'm sorry to send you running off like that. It was sort of a misfire."

"I saw the cops leave from the corner. So I had me a soda. Everything worked out all right, huh?"

"Yeah, and I owe you five bucks. Right?"

"Well, that's what you said. But you don't have to, though. It was three blocks before I found a phone."

"A deal's a deal, partner. Come inside. I'll get my wallet."

I opened the screen and walked ahead of him. He caught the screen with his elbow rather than his hand when he came in.

"Could I have a glass of water?" he asked.

"Sure."

We went into the kitchen, and as I took a jelly glass out of the cabinet I saw him slip both hands into his back pockets and smile. I filled the glass from the tap and thought how his smile reminded me of lips painted on an Easter egg. He was still smiling when I turned around and he raised the slapjack and came across my forehead with it. It was black and flat and weighted at the end with lead, and I felt it knock into bone and rake across my eye and nose, then I was falling free into a red-black place deep under the basement floor, with a jelly glass that tumbled in slow motion beside me.

I woke as though I were rising from a dark, wet bubble into light, except my arms were locked behind my head, I couldn't breathe or cry out, and I was drowning. Water cascaded over my face and ran down my nostrils and over the adhesive tape clamped across my mouth. I gagged and choked down in my throat and fought to get air into my lungs and felt the handcuffs bite into my wrists and the chain clank against the drainpipe under the sink. Then I saw the handbill man squatting on his haunches next to me, an empty iced tea pitcher in his hand, a curious expression on his face as though he were watching an animal at the zoo. His eyes were sky blue and laced with tiny threads of white light. He wadded up a ball of paper towels in his hand and blotted my face dry, then widened my eyes with his fingers as an ophthalmologist might. By his foot was one of his handbill sacks.

"You're doing all right. Rest easy and I'll explain the gig to you," he said. He took an Instamatic camera from his bag, focused on my face and the upper half of my body, his mouth askew with concentration, and flashed it twice in my eyes. My head throbbed. He dropped the camera back in his bag.

"I got to take a piss. I'll be right back," he said.

I heard him urinate loudly in the toilet. He flushed it, then walked back into the kitchen and knelt beside me.

"The guy wants before-after shots," he said.

"So I give him before-after shots. He's paying for it, right? But that don't mean I have to do everything else he wants. It's still my gig. Hell, it's both our gig. I don't think you're a bad dude, you just got in the wrong guy's face. So I'm going to cut you all the slack I can."

He looked steadily into my face. His eyes were vacuous, as clear and devoid of meaning as light itself. i "You don't understand, do you?" he asked.

"Look, you piss a guy off bad, you make him look like shit in front of people, you keep turning dials on him, you show him up a punk in front of his gash so they ain't interested in his Dream-sicle anymore, he's going to stay up nights thinking about you."

His eyes were serene, almost kind, as though it had all been explained in a way that should be acceptable to even the most obtuse.

"You're a little thick, aren't you?" he said.

"Look, you're supposed to go in pieces, left lung, then cock in the mouth. But I say fuck that. At least not while the guy knows it. Nobody tells me how to do my work, man. Hey, this maybe isn't much comfort to you, but it could be a lot worse. Believe me."

He put his left palm flat on my chest, almost as if he were reassuring or comforting me or feeling for my heartbeat as a lover might, and reached behind him into the canvas sack with his right hand. The knife was a foreign imitation of the Marine Corps K-Bar, t with a stainless steel blade, saw teeth on the top, a black aluminum handle with a bubble compass inserted in the butt. I remembered seeing them advertised for six dollars in the Times-Picayune Sunday magazine.

The back door was shut, the yellow linoleum floor glistened with sunlight from the window, water ran from my hair and drenched shirt like ants on my skin, my own breathing sounded like air being forced through sand. His hand moved down my sternum over my stomach, toward my loins, and he shifted his weight on his knees, cupped the knife palm up in his right hand, and moved his eyes slowly over my face. I clanged the handcuff chain against the drainpipe, tried to twist away from him, then jerked my knees up in front of my stomach as a child might, my voice strangling in my throat.

He took his hand away from my body and looked at me patiently.

"Come on, man. Trust me on this one," he said.

A shadow went across the glass window in the back door, then the handle turned and Clete came through the door as though he were bursting through barrel slats, flinging the door back against the wall, knocking a chair across the linoleum, his.38 revolver aimed straight out at the handbill man's face. He looked ridiculous in his old red and white Budweiser shorts, T-shirt, blue windbreaker, crushed porkpie hat, loafers without socks, and nylon shoulder holster twisted across one nipple.

"What's happening, Charlie?" he said, his face electric with anticipation.

"Throw away the shank or I blow your shit all over Streak's wallpaper."

The handbill man's vacuous blue eyes never changed expression. The white threads of light in them were as bright as if some wonderful promise were at hand. He set the knife on the floor and grinned at nothing, resting comfortably on one knee, his right forearm draped across his thigh.

"Charlie almost got away from me," Clete said.

"Sal told me he took his rental back to Missoula and caught a flight last night. Except Charlie's been getting some nook up on the lake and his punch told me she's supposed to meet him at the airport tonight. thought you were a pro, Charlie. You ought to keep your hammer in your pants when you're working. Roll over on your stomach and put your hands behind your neck."

Clete knelt behind him and shook him down, patting his pockets, feeling inside his thighs.

"Where's the key to the cuffs?" Clete said.

The handbill man's face was flat against the floor, pointed at me. His eyes were bright with light.

"Hey, you got problems with your hearing?" Clete said, and kicked him with the point of his loafer in the rib cage.

Still, the handbill man didn't say anything. His breath went out of his. lungs and he breathed with his mouth open like a fish out of water. Clete started to kick him again, then his eyes went to the top of the kitchen table. He slid the knife across the linoleum with his foot and picked up the handcuff key from the table. He knelt beside me and unlocked one of my wrists. I started to raise up, but before I could he snapped the loose cuff around the drainpipe.

"Sorry, Streak, not just yet," he said.

"Get the tape off your mouth and dangle loose a minute while we talk to Charlie here." He picked up the canvas sack by the bottom and shook it out on the floor. The Instamatic, a roll of pipe tape, and a.22 revolver clattered on the linoleum among the scatter of handbills.

"Sal wanted some pictures for his scrapbook, huh? And it looks like we got a Ruger with a magnum cylinder. Streak, we're looking at your genuine, all-American psychopath here. I got a friend at Vegas PD to pull Charlie's sheet for me."

I had the tape worked loose from my mouth now. I sat up as best I could under the lip of the sink and pinched the skin around my mouth. It was stiff and dead to the touch. I could feel a swollen ridge through my hairline and down my forehead.

"What are you doing, Clete?" I said. My words sounded strange and outside of myself.

"Meet Charlie Dodds. Vegas says he's been tied to five syndicate hits they know about, and maybe he iced a guy on the yard at Quentin. His finest hour was whacking out a federal witness, though. The guy's fourteen-year-old daughter walked in on it, so Charlie took her out, too."

"Give me the key," I said.

"Be mellow, Dave." He had put the.22 in one of the big pockets of his Budweiser shorts. He started to lean over the man on the floor.

"Call the locals, Clete."

He straightened up and looked at me as he would at a lunatic.

"You think you or I can keep this guy in jail? What's the matter with you?" he said.

"He'd be out on bond in three hours, even if these hicks would file charges. No matter how you cut it, he'd be back doing lines with the corn holers before the five o'clock news. I'll tell you something else, too, Dave. The mortician told me a tear was sealed inside Darlene's eye, he couldn't clean it out. You know what she must have gone through before she died?"

His jaw flexed, the skin of his face tightened, the scar that ran through his eyebrow and across his nose reddened, and he kicked the man on the floor hard in the rectum. He kicked him in the same place again, then leaned over him and whipped the barrel of the.38 across the back of his head. Then he said "Fuck" as though an insatiable rage had released itself in him, put his revolver in his other deep pocket, hoisted the man to his feet by his belt, as if he were made of rags and sticks, threw him against the wall and drove his huge fist into his face.

Then Clete held him erect by the throat, hit him again and again, until his knuckles were shiny and red and the man's eyes were crossed and a bloody string of saliva hung from his mouth.

"For God's sakes, cut it out, Clete!" I said.

"The guy's all we've got. Use your head, man."

"Bullshit. Charlie's no sissy. Our man here is a stand-up con." And with that, he wrapped his hand around the back of the man's neck, ran him across the room, and smashed his head down on the side of the stove. I saw the skin split above the eye; then Clete threw him to the floor. The man's eyes had rolled, and his straw-colored hair was matted with sweat.

Clete stuck his wrist down at my face.

"Feel my pulse," he said.

"I'm calm, I'm copacetic, I'm fucking in control of my emotions. I don't have a hard-on. I'm extremely tranquil. I saved your fucking ass this morning. How about a little gratitude for a change?"

"You unlock me, Clete, or I'm going to square this. I swear it."

"You'll never change, Streak. You're unteachable."

Clete picked up the roll of pipe tape and the survival knife from the floor and knelt next to the unconscious man. He ripped off a ten-inch length of tape, sliced through it with the knife, and wrapped the man's mouth. Then he pulled his arms behind him, wrapped each wrist individually, made a thick figure eight between both wrists, and sliced the tape again. The knife was honed as sharp as a barber's razor. He wrapped the man's ankles just as he had done the wrists.

"I don't know what your plan is, but I think it's a bad one," I said.

"I'm not the one up on a murder charge in Louisiana. I'm not the guy cuffed to a drainpipe. I don't have a knot on my head. Maybe I do something right once in a while. Try some humility along with the gratitude."

He went into the front of the house, and I heard him pushing furniture around, tumbling a chair or a table to the floor. A moment later he came back into the kitchen, dragging my living room rug behind him. His face was flushed, and sweat ran out of the band of his porkpie hat. He ripped off his windbreaker and used it to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. The powder-blue sleeves were flecked with blood.

"Sorry to fuck up your house. See if you can write it off on the IRS as part of Neighborhood Watch," he said.

He kicked the rug out flat on the floor and began rolling the man up in it.

"Clete, we can bring Dio down with this guy."

But he wasn't listening. He breathed hard while he worked, and there was a mean bead in his eye.

"You got out of that murder beef in New Orleans. You want them to stick you with another one?" I said.

Again he didn't answer. He went out the back door, then I heard his jeep grinding in reverse across the lawn to the steps. Clete came back into the kitchen, unhooked the spring from the screen door, lifted up the man inside the rolled rug, and dragged him outside to the jeep. When he came back inside his face was dusty from the rug and running with sweat and his big chest heaved up and down for air. He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it from a book of matches, and flipped the burnt match out through the open screen into the sunlight.

"You got a hacksaw?" he said.

"In my toolbox. Behind the driver's seat."

He went back outside, and I heard him clattering around in my truck. Then he walked back up the wood steps with the saw hanging from his hand.

"You can cut through the chain in about fifteen minutes," he said.

"If you want to call the locals then, ask yourself how much of this they'll believe. Also ask yourself how much trouble you want over a shit bag like that guy out there."

"What are you going to do with him?"

"It's up to him. Are you really worried about a guy who'd kill a fourteen-year-old girl? The guy's a genetic accident." He pulled up a chair, sat down, and leaned toward me while he puffed on his cigarette and tried to get his breath back at the same time.

"Did you ever think about it this way, Streak? You know how the real' world works, just like I do. But half the time you act like you don't. But it lets you feel good around guys like me. What do your AA pals call it 'drinking down'?"

"That's not the way it is, Cletus."

"Why'd you keep partnering with me at the First District after you saw me bend a couple of guys out of shape?" He grinned at me.

"Maybe because I'd do the things you really wanted to. Just maybe. Think about it."

"Don't kill this guy."

"Hey, I got to be on the road. You want anything before I split? A glass of water or something?" He put the hacksaw in my hand.

"It's never too late to turn it around."

"That's solid gold, Dave. I wonder if ole Charlie out there thinks of something like that while he's doing a job on somebody. Man, that's fucking noble. I got to remember that."

He hooked the spring on the screen door again, worked it back and forth a couple of times, then looked at me and said, "After you cut through the chain, the cuff key's there on the table. You want to take down Sal and that other fart that framed you in Louisiana, get real or buy yourself some Mouseketeer ears. In an hour I'll have Charlie's life story. You want in on it, call me at the Eastgate Lounge at six o'clock."

Then he was gone.