Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

He put on his sunglasses and stared at the sunlight on the river's surface, then took them off again.

"You see the trout feeding in the shade? You can always see them better with dark glasses on. They cut the glare off the water," he said. He looked at me. "You're not interested in fish?"

"Yeah, I am."

"You got to forgive Jim. He lost some friends in the Oklahoma City bombing," Rackley said.

"A guy named Wyatt Dixon followed me up here. He's bad news," I said.

"You got that right. But that's our worry, not yours."

"Then get him out of my life-"

He raised the ball of his index finger at me before I could continue.

"Jim wasn't the only one who lost friends at Oklahoma City. You quit the Justice Department. You don't have a vote in what we do. If one of our people gets hurt because you've got your nose in the wrong place, I'm going to break it off," he said.

He got back into his car, and the three agents drove away. I stared after them, my face tight and insentient, as though a cold wind had just died and left my skin dead to the touch.

I went to the restaurant where I was supposed to meet Cleo but she wasn't there and she didn't answer her phone, either. I waited an hour, then drove back up the Blackfoot to Doc's house. I went to bed without seeing either Doc or Maisey and dreamed of Texas and a field of bluebonnets in which a white stallion splattered with blood tried to mount a mare that turned and bit him in the forequarters.

Chapter 9

In the morningI discovered that Cleo had left three messages on Doc's answering machine. The messages said only that she had gotten to the restaurant late and did not explain why. I called her at home.

"It was Lamar Ellison. I'd gone up to the Indian family's house to check on the children. He followed me," she said.

"Ellison? Why's he coming around you?" I said.

"I don't know. I saw him on his motorcycle out on the road. The Indians don't have a phone. I couldn't get back to the house. It was awful," she said.

"Did he do anything?"

"No, he just sat out there in the twilight, looking up and down the road. Then he left."

"I'm coming out," I said.

"No, I have to go to work. I'll call you this afternoon."

"Cleo-"

"I'm sorry. I have to go. I didn't sleep much last night."

"Does this have anything to do with your son?"

"How would I know? I just hope this man Ellison dies a horrible death. I hate him," she said.

I WENT outside and lifted my fly vest and canvas creel off a wood peg on the front porch and put on my hip waders and drove my truck along the dirt road to a spot on the river that was seldom fished. I walked a quarter of a mile through woods and down a soft, green slope where huge gray boulders seemed to grow out of the soil like mushrooms without stems. I waded into the river, which was ice-cold from the melt and lack of sunlight, and fished a deep pool that was fed by a small waterfall.

The days were growing warmer now, and each morning the snow line in the mountain crests was receding and the rivers and creeks were rising and turning from green to copper-colored.

I tied on a royal coachman and coated it with fly dressing and cast it out twenty-five feet into the riffle at the head of the pool. A rainbow rose from the gravel bed and hit the coachman as it floated toward me, high and stiff and flecked with red hackle on top of the riffle.

The rainbow must have been sixteen inches and should have been mine. But just as I saw the strike, like a flickering of quicksilver on top of the current, and jerked up my rod, I heard the loud roar of a motorcycle out on the dirt road. I cut my eyes in the direction of the road and the fly went whipping past my head into a tree limb and the rainbow's dorsal fin roiled the surface and disappeared.

I saw the rider of the motorcycle pull to the top of a knoll above me and look down at me through the trees. He gunned his engine, the straight exhaust pipe violating the green-gold, pine-scented stillness of the air, reverberating off the boulders on the hillsides and through the gullies that fed into the river.

Then he drove back toward my truck.