Read Online Light of the World by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online Page A

cowboy’s arm and began to muscle him up the slope past the rock where Gretchen was sitting. The cowboy had a profile like an Indian’s and a dimple in hischin and eyes that looked prosthetic rather than real. He slipped in the mud and slid down the incline, trying to stop himself with his bare feet, his clothes slathering with mud and fine gravel and pine needles.
    “Get up!” said the man in the suit, grabbing him by the back of the shirt, twisting the cloth in his fingers. “Did you hear me, boy?”
    The cowboy tried to get up and fell again. The man in the suit ripped the straw hat off the cowboy’s head and began whipping him with it, striking him across the ears and eyes and the crown of his skull, again and again. “You want to get tased? I’ll do it.”
    “I think you might have what they call anger-management issues,” the cowboy said, squinting up from the ground. “I heered you ran into your ex at the Union Club and asked if her new boyfriend wasn’t disappointed by her poor old wore-out vag, and she said, ‘Soon as he got past the wore-out part, he liked it just fine, Bill.’ Is that true, Detective Pepper?”
    The detective dropped the boots he had been carrying and picked up the cowboy by the shirtfront and sent him crashing through the pine saplings and into a tree stump. All of this was taking place thirty feet from where Gretchen Horowitz was sitting with her Styrofoam container balanced on her knees. She pushed the tines of her plastic fork through a small piece of sausage and a bit of egg and placed them in her mouth, chewing slowly, her eyes lowered. She heard the cowboy fall again, this time grunting. When she raised her head, the cowboy was sitting with his back against a boulder, sucking wind, his mouth hanging open, his face draining as though he had been kicked in the ribs or stomach. The detective removed a Taser from his coat pocket and activated it and leaned down and touched it to the back of the cowboy’s neck. The cowboy’s head jerked as though he had been dropped from the end of a rope, his face contorting. The detective stepped back and turned off the Taser and glanced down the slope at Gretchen. “What are you looking at?” he said.
    Gretchen closed the top of the Styrofoam container and set it on the rock and got up and walked up the incline toward the detective. The trees were wet and motionless in the shadows, strips of thickwhite cloud hanging on the crest of the ridge. “What am I looking at? Let me think. A guy in cuffs getting the shit kicked out of him?”
    “You better mind your business.”
    “I am. I’m a guest here. I was eating breakfast. What’s your name?”
    “What’s my name?”
    “That’s what I said.”
    He stared at her without answering.
    “My name is Gretchen Horowitz. You don’t give your name out while you’re on the job?”
    “ Hor owitz?”
    “It’s Jewish.” She picked up her gold chain and religious medal from her throat and held them in her fingers for him to see. “This is Jewish, too. It’s called the Star of David.”
    “You’re interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty.”
    “Say my name again?”
    “What?”
    “I want to hear you pronounce my name. You accented the first syllable. You think that’s funny?”
    “No. You sound like you’re from New York.”
    “Try Miami. That’s in Florida. New York is north of Florida. Why not let the cowboy put on his boots?”
    “Who the hell do you think you are?”
    “You don’t want to find out, bacon. Where’s your boss?”
    I HAD GONE INTO Missoula with Albert early that morning to buy a fishing license, and until we pulled into the driveway, I didn’t realize the forensic team was up on the hill.
    “Waste of tax money,” Albert said.
    “What is?” I asked.
    “Messing around on that ridge. Homeless people wander off the highway all the time. They camp in the woods because they don’t have any other place to go. They don’t kidnap girls out