Swan Peak by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page A

his right hand on Ridley’s shoulder. Two fingers on his hand were missing, and the skin was shriveled so that the bones were pinched together and looked as small as those in a dried monkey’s paw.
    “I’m Leslie Wellstone, Ridley’s brother.”
    I waited for him to offer his hand, but he didn’t. “I’m glad to meet you,” I said.
    “The woman is Jamie Sue. She’s my wife.” There was a mirthful light in his eyes, one that was not pleasant to look at.
    “I see.”
    “You do?” he said.
    I had no idea what he meant, and I didn’t want to find out.
    “Get me up,” Ridley Wellstone said.
    “Give Ridley a saddle, and he’ll be sitting on one of your horses,” the brother said. “That’s how he fixed up his back. Ridley goes from hell to breakfast and doesn’t stop for small talk.”
    “I said get me up and leave Mr. Robicheaux to his work.”
    “How do you know my name?” I said.
    Ridley Wellstone lifted his eyes to mine. “I know everything about you. You’ve killed over a half-dozen men.”
    I felt my ears pop in the wind, or perhaps I heard a sound like a flag snapping on a metal pole. “Repeat that, please?”
    He was breathing through his mouth; there were tiny flecks of spittle on his lips. “You’ve got blood splatter all over you,” he said. “Maybe you did it with a badge, but you’re a violent and dangerous man all the same. I don’t judge you for it. I just don’t want you dragging your grief into our lives.”
    “ What ?” I said.
    “I’ve known your kind all my life. Every one of you is a professional victim. If you had your way, we’d be studying Karl Marx instead of Thomas Jefferson. This whole country would be run by faggots and welfare recipients. A man of your experience and education knows this, but he’s at war with his own instincts. It’s nothing against you personal. I just want shut of you.”
    I decided a little of the Wellstone family could go a long way.
     

CHAPTER 4
     
    ONE MONTH EARLIER, on a piece of baked hardpan out in West Texas, within sight of the shimmering outline of the Van Horn Mountains, a convict by the name of Jimmy Dale Greenwood was finishing his second year on a three-to-five bit, all of it served in a contract prison, courtesy of a judge who didn’t like half-breeds in general and smart-ass hillbilly singers like Jimmy Dale in particular.
    The contract prison was a squat blockhouse nightmare that, except for the parallel rows of electric fences topped with coils of razor wire surrounding the buildings, resembled a sewage plant more than a penal facility. Most of the work done by the inmates was meant to be punitive and not rehabilitative in nature. In fact, both inmates and prison personnel referred to the work as “the hard road.” The hard road came complete with mounted gunbulls, leather-cuff ankle restraints, and orange jumpsuits that rubbed the skin like sandpaper in winter and became portable ovens in summer.
    The majority of the personnel were not deliberately cruel. But drought and wildfires and the loss of family farms weren’t of their making, and shepherding prison inmates on a tar-patch crew beat delivering Domino’s pizzas or clerking at the adult-video store on the interstate. The line “It’s your misfortune and none of my own,” from the classic trail drover’s lament, seemed an accurate summation of the Texas contract gunbull’s attitude toward his charges.
    Most of the inmates in the contract prison were recidivists and didn’t question their fate or the power structure under which they lived. That meant they didn’t grab-ass, eyeball, complain about the food, dog it on the job, wise off to Hispanic guys with Gothic-letter tats, or sass the hacks. If you committed the crime, you stacked the time. Then one day you popped out on the other end of your jolt and got a lot of gone between you and West Texas. It was that simple. Or should have been.
    Jimmy Dale went down ostensibly for grand theft, the arrest being