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

made after he crashed the stolen vehicle he was driving at ninety an hour through a police barricade. In reality, the judge dropped the jailhouse on Jimmy Dale’s head because of an unprosecutable knife beef that had taken place outside a saloon off Interstate 10. Jimmy Dale never denied he drove the shank hilt-deep into the victim’s chest. Nor did he deny boosting the car. What was he supposed to do? he explained to the highway patrol. Hang around and hope the victim’s friends in the Sheriff’s Department didn’t use him for a piñata? The problem for the DA was the fact that the victim pulled the shank, not Jimmy Dale. Another problem was that the victim was a pimp who believed he had the right to beat up his whores in the parking lot. Also, his claim that Jimmy Dale had butted into his business would probably not flush with a jury made up of First Assembly and Church of Christ members. Last, the stabbing victim was the judge’s nephew, and the judge had indicated to the DA that he didn’t see any need for feeding the liberal media’s appetite for scandal.
    After two years on the hard road, with a shot at early parole because of overcrowding in the system, Jimmy Dale had the bad luck to fall under the supervision of one Troyce Nix, a six-feet-five-inch gunbull who once confessed to his peers, “Nothing gives me more pleasure than watching a full-grown man piss his pants.”
    Nix had another inclination, one that for years he had satisfied with rental videos or on the Internet or across the border in Mexico. His inclination had cost him two marriages and his career as an MP in the United States Army. He saw nothing unusual about his behavior, much less perverse. In a coupling of any kind, he was always the male, never the female; hence, he was not a homosexual. Anyone who doubted that fact, particularly his sexual partner, was given a lesson about the true nature of physical dominance.
    You set your parameters, you drew your lines. When people crossed your lines, you slapped them into shape. What was wrong with that? Troyce had worked at the Abu Ghraib prison, thirty-two klicks west of Baghdad. When one of his current colleagues asked him what it was like, Troyce replied, “At least none of the graduates come back for seconds.”
    “No, after y’all got finished with them, they was probably busy blowing the shit out of American soldiers with IEDs,” one of the other hacks said.
    The hack who made the remark was fired three weeks later.
    Troyce’s body was covered with reddish-blond hair that seemed to glow like a nimbus in the sunlight. On the hard road, he wore a white straw hat coned up on the sides, shades, and needle-nosed cowboy boots that a trusty spit-shined every night. His olive-green trousers and shirt, with red piping on the pockets, were always starched and pressed, his black gunbelt polished. With his military posture, his shirt tucked tightly into his belt, he was a fine-looking man, his face serene, his voice neutral in tone. In some instances, he was almost fatherly toward the inmates under his supervision.
    Jimmy Dale Greenwood was a different matter. Other than his conviction for grand auto, Jimmy Dale came into the prison population without a sheet. More simply stated, he wasn’t a criminal by nature and didn’t belong there. Also, it was impossible to read his expression or to know what he was thinking. He had a way of making enigmatic remarks that seemed to float on the edges of provocation and insult.
    “I hear you left pecker tracks in a lot of white women’s beds,” one of the gunbulls said to him.
    “I reckon it beats writing your name on the washroom wall, boss,” Jimmy Dale replied.
    The gunbull was going to put Jimmy Dale on the barrel that night. But Troyce Nix intervened and, at the close of the workday, told Jimmy Dale to climb up in the truck cab and ride back to the prison compound with him.
    “I stink pretty bad, Cap’n,” Jimmy Dale said.
    Troyce grinned at him from