At first light I looked through my window and saw him on all fours, cupping water out of the river and sipping it from his palm. When I walked up behind him, he turned his head slowly, as though he were in pain. His face was gray with hangover, his eyes the color of iodine.
"How'd I get here?" he asked.
Smoke from Lucas's breakfast fire was blowing through the trees out onto the darkness of the water. Upstream I could see Lucas standing in the middle of the riffle, false-casting a dry fly under the overhang.
"Looks like you might have wanted to wash your Jeep," I said. I found a clean cup in Lucas's rucksack and filled it with coffee from the pot on the fire, then squatted down next to Xavier and handed it to him. "How's your hand?"
He looked at the dirty elastic bandage that hung from his fingers like strips of mummy cloth. "It doesn't feel good to be my age and wonder if you're anybody's punch," he said.
I shifted my weight on one haunch and picked up a small, flat stone and flipped it with my thumb into the current. "Why'd you come out here, sir?" I said.
"I don't rightly remember. It probably made a lot of sense last night," he said.
His face was dripping with river water and he blotted his mouth and forehead on his sleeve. His eyes were puffed, as though they had been stung with bees, his breath as dense as sewer gas.
"Have you ever thought about hitting one of those twelve-step meetings?" I said.
"They're full of drunks," he said.
"I guess that's a possibility," I said, my gaze focusing on nothing.
He sat on a rock and held the coffee cup to his mouth with both hands. He tried to drink but couldn't swallow. He pressed the back of his wrist to his forehead. His fingers were shaking.
"I talked with Holly about starting up a defense fund for Doc. She said it was none of our damn business," he said. The river was still in shadow, and he stared upstream at Lucas false-casting in the riffle, as though the image of a young man in hip waders silhouetted under the lighted canopy of the forest was a reminder of someone he might have known long ago.
"Maybe she has her reasons," I said.
He pitched the coffee from his cup into the rocks. "You see a gin bottle around here?"
"It's over there, in the grass."
He walked over to the bottle and picked it up and tightened the cap on it, then tilted it sideways, measuring its content.
"I'd better go now," he said.
"Come back anytime."
"Holly worries about finances. I've gone belly-up on a couple of deals. She always thinks we're going to take on legal liability. That's why she's a lot more conservative than I am," he said.
"Makes sense," I said.
"Forget I was here, will you, Mr. Holland?"
"No problem," I said, and watched him walk to his Jeep Cherokee, his fingers spidered around the square edges of the gin bottle. When he drove into the sunlight, grinding the gears, the skin of his face seemed to shrink at the hard, bright, lonely reality of the day that awaited him.
Later, I drove out to see Cleo at her place in the Jocko Valley. When I thumped across the cattle guard I saw Cleo's gay carpenter arguing with three men in a maroon Cadillac convertible. The carpenter wore a leather tool belt and no shirt; a ball-peen hammer hung loosely from his right hand. Farther up the dirt drive I could see Cleo standing on the porch of her house.
I got out of my truck and walked toward the convertible. It wasn't hard to make the men inside. They wore slacks with knife-blade creases and sport shirts unbuttoned at the top to show off their gold chains and chest hair, and radiated a visceral self-satisfaction. Their stares were invasive, vaguely contemptuous, devoid of all empathy. The man in back was eating the last of a hot dog. When he finished, he wiped the mustard off his mouth with a paper napkin and let the napkin blow away on the grass.
The carpenter grinned at me as I approached the convertible. He flipped the hammer into the air and caught it again and slipped the handle through a loop in his belt. His skin was bronzed and his hair gold from the sun.
"These fellows are just leaving. Cleo's up at the house," he said.
"I see," I said.
"They didn't like the welcome they got," the carpenter said.
I looked the carpenter flatly in the face. Don't crowd them, bud, I thought.
"Catch you later," he said to me, and walked back toward the barn where he had been working.
The driver of the convertible was a muscular, handsome man, with smooth skin and black hair that he combed straight back. He wore a bright yellow golf shirt, and when he had drawn his car abreast of me, he said, "You got a problem, too?"
"No, I don't think so," I replied.
"Your truck's in the road," he said.
"Just pull around on the grass," I said.
"Why you looking at me like that?" he said.
"You're Nicki Molinari."
"You know me from somewhere?"
"I used to work for the G. Your picture would float across my desk from time to time."
"Sorry the recognition isn't mutual. Now please move your fucking truck out of the fucking road."
"What's your business with Cleo, Nicki?"
"Where you get off calling me by my first name?"
"You're a famous guy. No offense meant. I heard you were doing a nickel in Terminal Island."
The man in the passenger seat started to get out. But Nicki Molinari raised his hand.
"Here's your lesson for the day, whatever your name is," he said. "If that broad is your regular pump, I feel sorry for you. Second of all, I'd better not see you again."
He eased his transmission out of park and drove around my truck, across the cattle guard, and onto the county road. When I pulled into Cleo's yard, she walked down the steps toward me, but her eyes were still on the convertible that was now disappearing over a rise.
"What's with the greaseballs?" I said.
"You know them?"
"Every DEA agent in the country knows who Nicki Molinari is. You didn't answer my question. Why are they here?"
"They claim my husband owed them money,"
"What did you tell them?"
"To get out."
"Why would your husband owe them money?"
"I don't care and I don't want to know."
"These aren't guys you just run off."
"I just did. I stuck a gun in his face. He looked bad in front of his men, so he tried to give Eric a hard time. You want to come in or not?"
"I thought you might want to go to lunch,"
"I can fix something if you're hungry," she said, her voice flat, disinterested, her eyes lingering on the dust cloud left by Nicki Molinari's convertible.
"This isn't quite what I had in mind, Cleo."
"What?" she said, her attention refocusing itself on my words.
"No, I'm not hungry. I thought you might be. Maybe I should go."
"Will you just come in, Billy Bob?" she said, and pulled me by the arm, either out of irritation or conciliation, I didn't know which.
A chrome-plated.44 Magnum revolver rested on a table in the hallway.
"Just a minute," she said, and picked up the revolver and entered the den and opened a felt-backed glass gun cabinet where at least two dozen antique and modern pistols were hung. She flipped open the cylinder on the Magnum and dumped the cartridges into her palm, then fitted the Magnum on its hooks and closed the glass doors.
"What a collection," I said.
"They were my father's. He was career Army. He wanted a son."
"He taught you to shoot?"
"I taught myself. You want a roast beef sandwich?"
"Sure," I said.
On the way out of the den I saw on top of a bookcase a framed photograph of a little boy. He wore a cowboy hat and sat atop a Shetland pony. The pony was eating out of a bucket, and the little boy's legs were too short to reach the stirrups. The boy was holding on to the pommel as though he were frightened by the distance to the ground.
I followed Cleo into the kitchen.
"Why so quiet?" she asked.
Greaseballs in her front yard, her suppressed rage and grief over a murdered child, compassion for a rape victim and destitute Indians, a personality that blew hot and cold with the moment. I couldn't begin to express my thoughts.
"My son's staying out at Doc's. I'd like for you to meet him," I said.
But she made no reply.
I stood next to her at the drainboard. Through the window the Douglas fir trees on the hill crest looked hard and perpendicular against the sky. I placed my hand on her back. "You have to be at the clinic this afternoon?" I said.
"Not really."
"You have any other commitments?" I said, touching her hair.
"I have a lot of chores to do," she said.
I nodded and took my hand away.
"You interrogated me, Billy Bob. I don't care for it," she said.
"Nicki Molinari is a dope dealer and a degenerate. He not only kills people, he has them taken apart."
"You don't have to tell me that. My husband brought him to our house. He used our phone to have a chippy delivered to his motel."
It was not a time to say anything else. In fact, I was tired of playing the fool's role. I picked up my hat and left. When I was driving back out the front gate, I saw her in the rearview mirror, standing in the doorway, her dress blowing across her thighs.
I WENT BACK to Doc's and found Lucas sitting on the front steps, playing his guitar. It was a Martin HD-28, one I had given him for his birthday. The lightest touch of the plectrum on the strings resonated out of the box with the deep, mellow quality of sound that might have been aged in oak.
"Here's one I bet you don't know," he said. Then he began to sing,
"I'm an old log hauler,
I drove a big truck.
I shot the pinball machine,
But it caused me bad luck.
All I ever made
On a pinball machine
Was four katty-corners,
Then I'd miss the sixteen."
He rested his arm across the top of the Martin, careful not to scratch the finish with the button on the cuff of his denim shirt.
"That's one of them old ones," he said.
"Really?" I said, trying not to smile at what he considered old. "Where is everybody?"
"Doc and Maisey had a fight. I don't know where he went, but she took off with some high school boy.
Does Maisey act kind of funny for a girl who's been raped?" he said.
"How's that?"
"The way she was dressed and acting. Hoop earrings, fire-engine makeup, one of them bras that-" His eyes went away from mine, as they always did when he felt he had to protect me from his generation's knowledge of the world.
"That what?" I said.
"It don't exactly signal a guy to keep his big-boy in his britches."
"That's how it works, Lucas."
"What works?" he asked.
"Rape victims want to show they still have control. So they try to fly back through the candle flame."
He seemed to study the thought, his fingers chord-ing without sound on the neck of the guitar. "An Indian gal was looking for you," he said.
"Sue Lynn?"
"She didn't say. She has blond streaks in her hair. What's the deal on her?" He threaded his plectrum through the strings at the top of the guitar neck and adjusted his straw hat and gazed abstractly at the river.
"Why?" I said.
"No reason. She said she liked country music. I was showing her some chords."
"I'd leave her alone."
"She seemed pretty nice."
"She hangs with some bad dudes. Why not keep things simple and enjoy the trout fishing?"
He fed a stick of gum into his mouth and nodded his head slowly, as though humbly agreeing with a profound statement.
"That's how come you been milking through Doc's fence?" he said.
I walked on inside the house and hung my hat on a wood peg and poured a glass of iced tea in the kitchen. Through the front door I could see him putting his guitar inside its case, tucking the cloth strap around its edges, gum snapping in his jaw, his eyes bright with a thought he couldn't handle. He got up from the porch step, the guitar case still open, and came inside.
"I didn't mean to say that."
"I asked for it."
He grinned and spun his hat on his finger. "Who am I to argue with superior minds?" he said.
Temple Carrol had been told the juvenile file on Wyatt Dixon's knife-throwing friend, Terry Witherspoon, had been sealed. But there was another avenue. Temple had written down the name of the small town in western North Carolina where Witherspoon had been convicted, and I called the sheriff's department in the county seat there and asked to talk with any officer on duty who handled juvenile cases.
My call was transferred to a detective named Benbow.
"Terry Witherspoon's a suspect in a murder investigation in Montana?" he said.
"Not exactly."
"Sounds a mite vague, Mr. Holland. Regardless, his records were sealed a long time ago. For all I know they were destroyed when he reached legal age."
"You know him?" I asked.
"I wish I didn't."
"Give me a thread," I said.
"You say you were a Texas Ranger?"
"Yes, sir."
I waited.
"Then you know the rules. Wish I could help," he said, and hung up.
But a half hour later he called back.
"I can't tell you anything about the records the court has sealed. We clear on that?" he said.
"You bet."
"But I can tell you about suspicions I have that never became part of a formal investigation. A year ago we had a bomber hid out in these mountains. I think Terry was bringing him food. I don't have any evidence to prove that. But I've known Terry since he was seven years old, and he's the meanest little shit I ever came acrost."
"He's hooked up with terrorists?"
"The cause will find Terry, not the other way around. A farmhouse was broken into not far from the caves where this bomber was hid out. The owner and his wife probably came home and surprised the intruder. He tied them both to chairs and stuffed gags in their mouths. Then he cut the woman's throat and shot the man."
"You think Witherspoon did it?"
"The FBI still hasn't caught the bomber. Whoever was feeding him knew every cave in this county. I think the same guy killed the two people in the farmhouse. We have a small population here. To my knowledge, we've produced only one kid around here the likes of Terry Witherspoon. You know what kills me about this stuff, Mr. Holland?"
"What's that?"
"The only job this simpleton ever had was boxing up groceries at a supermarket. We'll spend our careers getting a net over a box boy."
"You know why he came out to Montana?"
"He said he wanted to be a mountain man in a whites-only nation. Is it true you can buy Montana T-shirts that say 'At Least Our Cows Are Sane'?"
That night, outside a small settlement near the Idaho border, a truncated man with arms that were too short for his torso was carrying everything he owned out of a clapboard house and packing it into his automobile. The moon had just risen above the hollow where the man lived, and the crests of the mountains were black against the sky and the hard-packed dirt road in front of the house wound like a flattened white snake under the railroad trestle, past other dilapidated houses, out to the four-lane highway the man planned to drive full-bore all the way to the Cascades and Seattle.
The man's name was Tommy Lee Stoltz, and he wore a black cowboy hat mashed down on his ears and engineering boots with double soles and heels and thick glasses that made his eyes look like large marbles. Tiny blue teardrops were tattooed just below the corners of his eyes so that he appeared to be in a state of perpetual mourning. The night air was cold but he was sweating inside his clothes and his heart raced each time he heard automobile or truck tires on the dirt road.
Why had he ever left Florida? He'd had a good life dry-walling, hanging in open-air bars down on the beach, getting ripped on beer and cheap weed that was smuggled in from the islands, and opening up his scooter on Seven-Mile Bridge. Even that one-bit he did on a road gang in the Keys wasn't bad. The winter days were beautiful, and the fish was fresh and deep-fried and, if you wanted it, the Cubans on the serving line at the stockade would heap shitpiles of black beans and rice on your plate.
It was in California that his luck did the big flush, over a union card, locked out of the Operating Engineers because he couldn't pass a tenth-grade arithmetic test. Then he got evicted from his hotel in Santa Monica and had to sell his scooter and move into South Central. A Crip shoved him down a stairs. Two Bloods listened to him ask directions to the bus line, then roared at his cracker accent, and tossed him from a fire escape into a Dumpster filled with rotting produce.
Screw that. If he had to live in a toilet, he might as well go native and enjoy it. So he got in on the next Los Angeles riot. The gangbangers, the illegals, the pipeheads, the out-of-work peckerwoods like himself, everybody on the South Side was burning out the Koreans, looting liquor stores and pawnshops, pulling business types out of their cars and robbing them and busting bottles over their heads, all of it on TV, helicopters swirling overhead while the cops stood behind their own barricades and watched. It was like going apeshit in a war zone, except the other side wasn't allowed to shoot back. There was definitely an upside to slum life and social protest, Tommy Lee told himself.
But after five days of watching the city burn, the Army finally moved in, setting up sandbags and machine guns, herding looters into six-bys. Guess who they nail? Because he was white, that was it. Three dozen cannibals are running out of the appliance store, carrying TVs and stereo players on their heads, and here he comes, tripping through the broken glass, trying to heft a huge microwave out the window for this black broad who promised she'd haul his ashes if he scored something nice for her kitchen, and whop, he gets a baton right across the spine.
Then lands on all fours and watches a.25 auto spill out of his pocket onto the sidewalk.
Next stop, San Quentin, the beaner and melon picker capital of America. Where a short white dude with fishbowl glasses and a hush-puppy accent is anybody's portable pump.
That's when he met Lamar Ellison, out on the yard, Lamar wearing mirrored sunglasses, eye-balling the cannibals, cleaning his nails with a toothpick. "I can put you with the AB, Tommy Lee. They're righteous dudes and they look after their own. You'll walk on water, my man," Lamar said.
You couldn't mistake the AB out on the yard, clanking iron, their bodies glowing with stink, sweat popping on their tattoos, their shaved heads wrapped with blue and red bandannas to show their contempt for the Crips and the Bloods.
Three years in Quentin and not one black dude or East L.A. bean roller ever put a hand on him. No one stole cigarettes or scarf out of his house, and the worst wolf in the joint would emasculate himself before trying to put moves on him in the shower. Business types thought they had respect? Unless you'd been in the Aryan Brotherhood, you didn't know the meaning of the word.
The downside was the nature of the dues. The AB was for life.
He was going to miss Montana. Next week Merle Haggard was playing at the Mule Palace up in the Jocko Valley. Man, he'd like to see that, the Hag, an Okie by way of Bakersfield, who'd done two and one half years at Quentin and was still a legend there, bigger than Cash or Paycheck, living proof you could wear state blues and still reenter the world and get sprinkled with starshine.
He threw the last box of his belongings into his car and went back into the house to unscrew all the lightbulbs, remove the toilet paper roll, and tear out the elk rack the last tenant had left nailed above the living room door.
But no matter how he tried to occupy himself or stay in motion, he could not shake a recurring image out of his head.
It was the Voss girl. With her face pressed down under the pillow, her body writhing, her fists striking at his chest. Why had he let Lamar talk him into busting a sixteen-year-old girl, one who'd dime them all as soon as she could get to a phone?
But secretly he knew the answer. He'd been afraid of Lamar. And not only of Lamar, but of Tommy Lee's father, who'd been a gunbull in the Georgia penal system, of people who made fun of his sawed-off torso, of guys who rode with the Jokers and Outlaws and Angels and Banditos and kept him around like a pet, a motorized goof they sent for cigarettes and beer and sometimes cheap rock down in Boon Town.
In fact, Tommy Lee could not remember when he had not been afraid.
But Lamar had gotten his. Big Time. Soaked in paint thinner and flame-roasted from head to foot like a burned burrito. Man, he didn't want to think about it. Nor about the fact the girl's father was out on bail, a doctor who was some kind of government-trained killing machine.
A doctor who kills people? The illogic of it hurt his head.
Time to slide on down the road, he thought. He stuffed two lightbulbs into his jeans pockets and hefted a box of canned goods on one shoulder and the elk rack on the other and pushed open the front door and stepped out into the coldness of the night.
A hatted figure was standing at the corner of the house, holding a revolver in two hands, the barrel pointed at the ground.
"Who is that?" Tommy Lee said.
There was no answer. The hatted figure raised the revolver at arm's length and aimed, the knees squatting slightly into a classic shooter's position.
Tommy Lee knew that somehow he could make words come out of his mouth that would show the hatted figure he was no threat to anyone, that in the big scheme of things his worst offenses were only those of a motorized goof, a harmless, good-natured little guy the swinging dicks took care of. What did this guy in the hat want? Why didn't the guy say something? Tommy Lee's skin felt as if it were being peeled off his face.
He couldn't keep his thoughts straight. In his mind he saw the farm in Georgia where he had grown up, a girl who had asked him to dance with her at a high school prom, a red molten sun descending into the Gulf of Mexico. He wanted all these things back in his life and would pay any price to return to them. If he could only make that happen, he would correct all the wrongs he had done and make amends to every person he had ever harmed.
If only the hatted figure with the shadowed face would please point the revolver somewhere else.
He had almost formed the sentence that would contain all those thoughts when the pistol barrel exploded with light and sound and the copper-jacketed round punched a neat hole through the right lens of his glasses and blew a single spurt of blood out the back of his head onto the grass.