Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"I already tried. The number's blocked."

"Tell Dr. Voss to change his number."

"He did that yesterday."

I heard him take a deep breath. "Tell Dr. Voss to come in and sign a complaint," he said.

"Where's this militia leader live? What's his name, Hinkel?" I said.

"You're jumping me over the hurdles, right?"

"I'm not sympathetic with the problems of your office. You're telling a raped girl and her father, 'Eat shit, you're on your own.'"

"You got a gift, son. Just talking to you gives me the red scours. You should contact the Pentagon, see about a career in biological warfare."

Carl Hinkel's ranch was outside Hamilton, down in the Bitterroot Valley. Beyond the stone house in which he lived were green pastures dotted with prize Angus, and beyond his pastures were mountains that rose up blue and as jagged as tin against the sky, their saddles and peaks blazing with new snow.

Carl Hinkel's drive was planted with poplar trees, his white gravel walks bordered with rosebeds. An American flag flew upside down in the front yard, the cloth popping in the wind, the chain tinkling against the silver pole.

There was no gate across the cattle guard, but I must have triggered an electronic signal when I entered Hinkel's property, because two men immediately came from behind the house and stood in the driveway, their feet slightly spread, their hands opening and closing at their sides, their bodies contoured with the anatomical distortions of steroid addicts. They wore military boots and undershirts and carried pistols in their belts, and in each of their unshaved faces was a pinched, dark light that seemed to have no relationship to anything in their environment. I nodded at them, but they continued to stare at me with the fixated intensity of people for whom daily life was part of a cosmic conspiracy.

Hinkel emerged from a small stone hut off to the side of the main house, wearing a navy blue shirt and white suspenders and corduroy trousers. He eyed me carefully, smoke leaking from around the stem of the corncob pipe clenched in his mouth. He waved the two men away.

"You were at the rodeo. You have a history with Wyatt," he said.

"I'd like to talk with you about him, Mr. Hinkel. Or, more specifically, about a man named Lamar Ellison," I said.

"Wyatt says you were a Texas Ranger."

"Among other things."

"A Ranger?" he said reflectively. "Well, we'll just have to ask you in, sir."

I followed him into the hut, stooping slightly under the doorway's wood casement. The desk and tables and shelves inside were stacked with clutter. The monitor on his computer bathed the stone walls with a green light. He clicked off the screen so I could not read what was on it.

On the wall were pictures of Douglas MacArthur, A. P. Hill, and the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell. There was also a youthful photograph of Carl Hinkel in uniform.

"You were in the airborne, Mr. Hinkel?" I said.

His eyes had a peculiar cast in them. They seemed to look at me in a mirthful way, and at the same time analyze each word I had just spoken.

"You asked about this man Ellison. He's been here. But not recently. He won't be back, either," he said, ignoring my question about his military background.

His accent was Tidewater, the r's almost like w's. He sat erectly in his chair at his desk, his entire posture one of ninety-degree angles.

"Ellison is no longer welcome?" I said, and tried to smile.

"I have nothing to say about him."

"Wyatt Dixon offered to kill him for two thousand dollars. That's bargain basement. I have the feeling Wyatt was trying to pick up two grand on a done deal."

"You're offensive, sir."

"Excuse me?"

"I don't share your frame of reference. You presume that I do."

I placed my elbow on his desk and leaned toward him and said, "Psychopaths like Lamar Ellison and Wyatt Dixon and the men who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City? They all seek validation from male authority figures, fraudulent patriarchs who manipulate them for their own ends. They come to you like rats down a mooring rope, Mr. Hinkel."