Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"The language I use offends your sensibilities, that's too bad. Her husband was the business partner of some associates of mine. He stiffed them, they stiffed me. I ended up in Terminal Island. The shorter version is I got cluster-fucked eight ways from breakfast and that broad is living on a horse ranch bought with my money."

"Not interested," I said.

He flipped the baseball into the air and caught it.

"You want to play catch?" he said.

"No."

He grinned and tossed the ball at my face so that I had to catch it or be hit.

"See, you can do it," he said. "Come on, I got another glove in the Caddy."

"How about getting out of here?" I said.

"I thought you might have a sense of humor."

I walked past him, into the sunlight, and handed him his ball. I heard him follow me.

&nb

sp; "What do you have against me?" he asked.

"You hurt people."

"Oh, you heard the stories, huh? I leave body parts in garbage grinders, throw people off roofs, stuff like that? It's DEA bullshit."

"I don't think so."

"Were you in the service?"

"No."

"I was in Laos, at a place where these sawed-off little guys called the Hmongs grew a lot of poppies. Me and about four hundred other guys. We got left behind. Why do you think that happened?"

"I don't know."

"Yeah, you do. You worked for the G. If you like government mythology about wiseguys, that's your business. What I do in five years don't add up to five minutes of what I seen in Vietnam. That includes dope getting flown out of the Golden Triangle on American planes."

"How'd you get out of Laos?"

"Play catch with me and I'll tell you the whole story," he said.

"Nope."

"Were you in the sack with Cleo?"

"You're out of line, Nicki."

"There's my first name again. I love it. I did some boom-boom with that broad, too. It was like curling up with an ice cube. Tell me I'm wrong."

He bounced the baseball up and down in the pocket of his glove, studying its scuffed surface, his mouth down-hooked at the corners.

That night I dreamed I saw Doc Voss standing waist-deep in a stream, under a yellow moon, his skin prickled with cold. Then his fly line stiffened in the riffle and the tip of his rod bent almost to the water's surface, trembling with tension.

He wrapped the line around his left forearm, so tightly his veins corded with blood, and horsed a long, thick-bodied brown trout through the shallows onto the gravel. He slipped a huge knife from a scabbard on his side and stooped over the trout and inserted the knife point into the trout's anus and slit its belly all the way to the gills.

Doc lifted the trout by its mouth and the unborn roe fell in a gush of heavy pink water from the separated skin in its belly and glistened on the rocks at Doc's feet. He looked up and grinned at me, but I hardly recognized him. His face had become skeletal, his eyes lighted with the moon's reflection off the river.