Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

He waited for me to speak. When I didn't, he said, "What was you gonna say?"

"Nothing. Y'all have a good time."

"Say, you couldn't let me have a ten-spot till I cash a check, could you? Tickets are twenty-five dollars," he said.

I ate supper with Doc and Maisey, then took a walk along the river and threw pinecones into the current and watched them float downstream into the shade. I saw L.Q. Navarro sitting in the fork of a cottonwood tree.

"Quit picking on that Indian gal," he said.

"She keeps company with people you wouldn't spit on, L.Q. Don't lecture at me."

"You got a way of getting upset when that boy takes up with minority people."

"That's a dadburn lie."

"Then leave him alone."

"All right, I will. Just stop pestering me."

"Where you goin?" L.Q. said.

"None of your business."

I walked back to the house and called Temple Carrol at her motel in Missoula. "You like Merle Haggard?" I asked.

Temple picked me up at Doc's and we drove back down the Blackfoot highway toward Missoula. The sun was still above the mountains in the west, but the bottom of the canyon was already in shadow. When the wind gusted, the leaves of the cottonwoods and aspens along the riverbank flickered like paper against the copperish-green

tint of the current.

"Your hot water bottle occupied tonight?" Temple said.

"Pardon?"

"Your girlfriend, the one who works at the clinic on the Reservation."

"I haven't seen her."

"A friend ran her name through NCIC. He got a hit."

"Cleo?"

"Her ex-husband was Mobbed-up with a gangster named Molinari on the West Coast."

"I know all about it," I said.

"Good," she said, and didn't speak again until we reached the top of the long, timber-lined grade that fed into the Jocko Valley.

The concert was being held outdoors on the edge of the Flathead Indian Reservation. The sun had just gone down behind the mountains, and the hills were plum-colored and the floor of the valley a dark green under a light-filled sky that gave you vertigo when you looked directly up into it. The air was heavy with the cool smell of water in irrigation ditches and the pine trees that were in shadow on the hillsides and the faintly acidic warm odor of mules and horses penned outside the viewing stands. To one side of the stage, concessionaires were grilling sausages and hamburgers on open pits and selling beer and soda pop out of galvanized horse tanks swimming with crushed ice. Merle Haggard had just walked out on the stage with his band, and the crowd on the cement dance slab was shouting, "Hag! Hag! Hag!"

Temple and I sat midway up in the stands. Her cheeks were as red as a doll's, her mouth like a small purple flower, her face glowing with the perfection of the evening. But it was obvious her thoughts were far away.

"I came up to Montana because Doc asked me to. But maybe I should head back to Deaf Smith," she said.

"I need you here, Temple," I said, my eyes looking straight ahead.

"I'm not convinced Doc's an innocent man," she said.

"Guilty or innocent, we still defend him."