Free Swan Peak by James Lee Burke Page A

inserted in the sanded-down handle of a shoe-polish applicator, all of it wrapped in a scabbard made from newspaper and electrician’s tape.
    “Sorry to hurt you like this, kid, but that’s just the way it is,” Nix said.
    “You got it all wrong, boss,” Jimmy Dale replied.
    He turned with the shank and slashed Nix backhanded across the jaw, opening the flesh to the bone. Then he hit him twice in the chest, each time going deep, aiming for the heart or the lungs. Nix reached out toward him, either trying to keep his balance or to ward off the next blow. But Jimmy Dale got under his arm and drove the blade into Nix’s chest again, going even deeper this time and snapping it off at the hilt, as Hidalgo had instructed him. Nix struck the ground heavily, his mouth puckered, his breath coming in short gasps, as though, somehow, through an act of will, he could control the massive hemorrhage taking place inside his chest.
    Jimmy Dale went through the back door of the house and pulled a shirt and pair of work pants out of Nix’s bedroom closet, streaking the interior of the house with Nix’s blood. As he changed into Nix’s clothes, he looked through the back window and saw Nix rise from the ground and then collapse below the level of the window. A sound like kettle drums was thundering in Jimmy Dale’s head.
    Moments later, he was roaring down the dirt road in the stake truck, hailstones bouncing off the windshield, his hands trembling on the wheel. He skidded in a cloud of dust onto the state road and headed due west, the front end shaking when he hit ninety, the engine needle on the dash climbing into the red. Nix’s stolen clothes felt like an obscene presence on his skin.
     

CHAPTER 5
     
    FROM WHERE SHE sat at the bar, Jamie Sue could see out the back window of the saloon onto Swan Lake. The lake was vast and steel-colored in the twilight, ringed with alpine mountains, the white cap of Swan Peak razored against the sky on the south end. Down the shore was a group of guest cottages among birch trees, and when the wind gusted off the water, the riffling leaves of the birches made Jamie Sue think of green lace.
    A man and a woman Jamie Sue didn’t like were drinking next to her. They said they were from Malibu and driving to Spokane to catch a flight back to California. The woman’s hair hung to her shoulders and was dyed black, and she had a habit of touching it on the ends, as though it had just been clipped. She had an ascetic face and gray teeth and wore dark clothes and purple lipstick. She seemed to have no awareness of her surroundings or the fact that the subject of her conversation would be considered bizarre and distasteful by normal people.
    “After about a year I got tired of working for Heidi,” she said. “Most nights I’d sit and watch while an eye surgeon freebased himself into the fourth dimension. I’d rather make five hundred a night having dinner and intellectual conversation, and maybe messing around later, than fifteen hundred watching a married guy freebase and pretend he’s head of FOX, know what I mean?”
    Jamie Sue tried to focus on what the woman was saying, but she was on her third whiskey sour, and her attention kept wandering across the empty dance floor to a face she thought she had seen behind the bead curtain that gave onto the café attached to the saloon.
    “So you’re in the entertainment business, too?” the man from Malibu said. He was deeply tanned, soft around the edges, his blond hair chemically sprayed so it dangled in wavy strands on his forehead. He wore black leather pants and a maroon shirt unbuttoned to his midsternum. His face was warm with alcohol, his elbow poised on the bar while he waited for Jamie Sue to answer his question.
    “I used to sing professionally, but I don’t do that anymore,” she said.
    “Is that really Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill in the picture?” the woman in purple lipstick asked the bartender.
    The bartender glanced at the