Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

Lamar pulled onto a gravel turnaround against the mountain, killed his engine, and walked back down the shoulder of the road to the Cherokee. He bent down over each tire and sliced off the valve stem with his pocketknife, then stepped back and viewed his handiwork.

It still needed a little something extra.

He found some rocks under a culvert, heavy and solid and hand-sized for throwing. He heaved one through the front window and two through the passenger windows, then reached inside with his knife and began slicing the leather seats.

That's when he heard Xavier Girard running at him.

It was funny how a celebrity punk thought the real world was like the one he made up in his books. Lamar shifted his knife to his left hand and caught Xavier in the mouth with his right. Xavier went down in the gravel like a sack of grain.

Lamar shook his fingers.

"You must have ate your iron pills today. I think you busted my hand, Xavier," he said.

Xavier didn't answer. He was on his hands and knees now, his mouth dripping blood and spittle, his stomach hanging out of his belt like a balloon full of milk.

"You're done, Xavier. Don't get up. Oh well, I guess this means I don't get a part in one of your wife's movies," Lamar said.

He pulled Xavier the rest of the way to his feet, then propped him against the side of the Cherokee and drove his fist into Xavier's stomach, just below the sternum.

Xavier fell to his knees and vomited, then pressed his forehead against the gravel, gasping for breath, his back shaking.

"See you around. By the way, I read one of your books in the joint. I thought it sucked," Lamar said, and started back toward his Harley.

But Xavier's hand caught the calf of his leg, then he wrapped both arms around Lamar's thigh.

"You want a little soft-shoe? 'Cause this time I'm gonna take out all your teeth," Lamar said, and cocked back his boot.

Holly Girard seemed to float out of nowhere, holding a nickel-plated revolver with both hands, the tiny bones in her hands whitening behind the cylinder. Her dark blond tresses hung on her cheeks and her mouth was as red and soft-looking as a strawberry that he would have loved to burst against his teeth.

He stepped back from her, his palms raised upward. Three or four other people had walked out of the cottage behind her.

"It's over as far as I'm concerned. Your old man shouldn't have dissed me. You want to call the heat, I understand your point of view," he said.

That ought to leave a fishhook or two in her head, he thought.

But when he looked at her eyes, then at Xavier and the other people from the cottage, he realized they never heard him, that the loathing and disgust they felt for him was so great they viewed him as they would a voiceless obscenity trapped under a glass bell.

He walked away, toward his motorcycle, his hobnailed boots crunching on the gravel. When he turned around they were gone, back inside the cottage, probably dialing 911.

So what? He was probably better off in the can than back on the street. He fired up his Harley and roared down the asphalt.

Home was a one-room block house made of railroad ties and an open-air tin shed where he sometimes repaired motorcycles. But it was on the Blackfoot, right upstream from a bar that was surrounded by pine trees, and he could cross the water on a cable-hung walk-bridge and shoot deer and bear up a canyon just above the old railroad bed. This spring he had killed a black bear and had hung it by its hind legs from an engine hoist to dress it out, then had gotten drunk and let the meat spoil. The bear still hung in the shed, coated with blowflies, its smell rising up against

the tin roof of the shed as the day heated.

He sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness of his cabin, stripped to the waist, and smoked a joint and drank a quart bottle of beer, then lay back on the pillow and went to sleep. Tomorrow was another day. The same sun would rise on the jail as on the river. You just stayed on the hucklebuck, man. It didn't matter where you did it.

In his dream he thought he heard the weight of the black bear swinging slightly from the engine hoist in the tin shed, then he awoke and realized someone was in the room with him.

A chain locked down across his throat, the links binding and cutting into his skin. Lamar pried at the chain with his fingers, but the dark figure who stood above him fitted a pipe over the boom handle, as a professional logger would, and squeezed down the boom, tightening it until saliva ran from both corners of Lamar's mouth.

Lamar heard the rattle of liquid inside a tin container, then a splashing sound on the floor. The unmistakable sharpness of paint thinner climbed into his nostrils. A match flared in the figure's hands and just briefly in the illumination Lamar saw a face that was both strange and familiar at the same time.

The fire spread under his bed in seconds. He thrashed his legs, twisting his head back and forth, and beat his fists against his own skull.

The fire swelled over him in a cone, and inside the flames he thought he heard a sound like blowflies and he saw himself, for just an instant, hanging upside down over a bright fissure in the earth he had long ago convinced himself did not exist.

Chapter 10