Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"Then why don't you get a message machine?" she asked.

"Because it's not my home."

"Did you send that nasty little bitch up to my ranch?" she said.

"What did you say?"

"Ms. Carrol. Is she house-trained?"

"You keep your mouth off her, Cleo."

"Do you think you can take a woman to bed and then just say, 'Drop dead, I'm busy color-matching my socks right now'?"

"Good-bye, Cleo. You're an amazing woman. I hope I never see you again," I said, and gently hung up the phone.

I went outside so I would not have to hear the phone ring when she called back.

I WALKED through the cottonwoods and aspens on the riverbank. The river was in shadow under the canopy, but the sun had risen above the ridge and the boulders in the center of the current were steaming in the light. I saw L.Q. Navarro squatting down on his haunches in the shallows, scraping a hellgrammite off the bottom of a rock with the blade of his pocketknife. The bottoms of his suit pants were dark with water, his teeth white with his grin. He threaded the hellgrammite onto a hook that hung from a fishing pole carved out of a willow branch.

"The last couple of days been bard on your pride?"

"You might say that."

"Next time that ATF agent smarts off, you bust his jaw. I never could abide them federal types."

"What am I going to do with Cleo Lonnigan?"

"Get out of town?"

"That's not funny."

"It wasn't meant to be."

Then his attention wandered, as it often did when I imposed all my daily concerns upon him. His hellgrammite had slipped off the hook in the current, and he waded deeper into the water, into the shade, and lifted up a heavy rock from the bed and set it down on top of a boulder and scraped another hellgrammite from the moss-slick underside.

"Hand me my pole, will you, bud?" he said.

I picked up the willow branch he had shaved clean of leaves and notched at one end for his line and walked into the stream with it. The current, filled with snowmelt, climbed over my knees and struck my genitals like a hammer. The sunlight had gone and the tunnel of trees suddenly seemed as cold as the grave.

I realized L.Q. was looking beyond me, at someone on the bank. Then L.Q. was gone and in his place a huge hatch of pink and dark-winged salmon flies churned over the current.

"You always get in the water with your clothes on, Mr. Holland? Hand me your stick and I'll pull you out," Nicki Molinari said from the bank, his cigarette smoke leaking like a piece of cotton from his mouth.

Chapter 16

Nicki Molinari wore leather hiking shorts rolled tightly around his thighs, alpine climbing shoes with red laces and heavy lugs, and a purple polo shirt scissored off below his nipples. A nest of scars, like pink string, was festooned on his skin between one hip and his rib cage. On his left hand was a sun-bleached fielder's glove with a scuffed baseball gripped inside the pocket.

His eyes searched up and down the tunnel of trees, as though he heard voices in the wind.

"Were you talking to somebody out here?" he asked.

I saw his convertible parked in the sunshine. His men were nowhere around.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"That skank up in the Jocko Valley owes me seven hundred grand. I'll pay you a ten percent finder's fee if you can get it out of her."

"The skank is Cleo Lonnigan?"