Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

They swelled into a meadow channeled with wild-flowers and grazed into the tall grass by cottonwoods that grew along a copper-colored stream. Their humps were coated with crusted snow, and the heat of their bodies melted the snow and made the entire herd glow with a smoky aura against the sunrise.

"What do you think,

Skeeter?" Doc asked his daughter.

"My name is Maisey," she replied.

We drove into Missoula and ate breakfast in a cafe across the street from the courthouse. Through the café window I could see the crests of the mountains ringing the city and trees bending in a wind that blew down an arroyo. Deer were feeding on a slope above the train yard, and the undersides of their tails were white when they turned their hindquarters into the wind.

I left Doc and Maisey in the cafe, crossed the street to the courthouse, and went to the sheriff's office. The sheriff had called Doc's house up on the Blackfoot the previous night and had left the type of recorded message that not only irritates but leaves the listener vaguely unsettled and apprehensive: "Mr. Holland, this is Sheriff J. T. Cain. Got a bit of information for you. Eight-forty-five, my office. You can't make it, be assured I'll find you."

I took off my hat and opened his office door. "I'm Billy Bob Holland. I hope I'm not in trouble," I said.

"That makes two of us," he answered.

He was a big, crew-cropped, white-haired man, who wore a suit and black, hand-tooled boots. His skin was deeply tanned, his neck and face as wrinkled as a brown leaf.

A folder full of fax sheets was spread open on his desk blotter.

"You recall a man named Wyatt Dixon?" he asked.

"Not offhand."

"He got out of a county lock three or four days ago in West Texas. He left behind a sheet of notebook paper with a half dozen names on it. Also a drawing of human heads in a wheelbarrow. Yours was one of the names."

"Who contacted you?" I asked.

"The sheriff down there ran your name through the computer. You were a Texas Ranger?"

"Yes, sir."

He fitted on his spectacles and peered down at a fax sheet.

"It says here you and your partner were investigated in the killing of some drug mules down in Mexico," he said.

"Rumors die hard," I replied.

He read further on the fax sheet, his eyes stopping on one paragraph in particular. His eyes became neutral, as though he did not want to reveal the knowledge they now held.

He picked up a clipboard and propped it at an angle against his desk. "You're not gonna kill anybody up here, are you?" he said.

"Wouldn't dream of it."

His pencil moved on the clipboard, then his face lifted up at me again.

"You're an attorney now?" he said.

"Yes, sir."

He wrote something on his clipboard.

"You know what bothers me? You haven't asked me one question about this guy Wyatt Dixon," he said.

"A lot of graduates make threats. Most never show up," I said.

He studied his clipboard and tapped on the metal clamp with his mechanical pencil.

"I can't argue with that," he said. "But Dixon did five years in Huntsville before he got picked up in Fort Davis for drunk driving. He did time in California, too. His record indicates he's a violent and unpredictable man. You're not curious at all?"