Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"I live here," he said, his breath hiccupping in his throat.

"That doesn't matter. Get out of my sight until I'm gone."

He backed away from me, hooking on his glasses crookedly, then turned and hurried into the forest, the dead rabbit coated with dust and blood, swinging stiffly against his thigh.

I drove back into Missoula and used a pay phone to call the sheriff at his office. There was no answer. I called the 911 dispatcher.

"It's Sunday. He's not in his office today," she said.

"Give me his home number."

"I can't do that."

"This is about an attempted homicide. I'll give you my number. I'll wait by the pay phone."

"Sir, you'd better not be jerking people around," she replied.

But she pulled it off. Five minutes later the pay phone rang.

"Go up to Terry Witherspoon's shack on the river. There's a roll of half-burned pipe tape by the trash barrel in back. Get there before he finishes destroying it and I bet it'll match the tape that was used to tie up Temple," I said.

"You tossed his place?" the sheriff said.

"No, I tossed Witherspoon."

"I think you just managed to blow it for everybody. It's Sunday. I have to get a hold of a judge and a search warrant."

"I need directions to Nicki Molinari's dude ranch," I said.

"You're about to start a second career, son. Convict cowboy over at Deer Lodge. The place is full of smart asses who got their own mind about everything. You'll fit right in," he replied.

BUT ACTUALLY I didn't need the sheriff's directions to find the Molinari ranch. Previously the sheriff had mentioned it was outside Stevensville, twenty-five miles down in the Bitterroots. On Mond

ay, I drove to Stevensville and stopped at a barbershop in an old brick building on the main street and went inside. Two barbers were cutting hair while a third customer, an old man with his trousers tucked inside his boots, read a newspaper, his elbows on his knees, his face scowling with disapproval at the news of the day.

"Could you tell me where Nicki Molinari lives?" I asked.

Both the barbers turned their backs on me and went on snipping and combing hair as though they hadn't heard me. The customers in the barber chairs cut their eyes at me, then looked straight ahead.

But the old man had lowered his newspaper and was staring at me with the intensity of a hawk sighting in on a field mouse from a telephone line. His skin looked like it had been cured in a smokehouse, his clothes soaked in a bucket of starch and flat-ironed on his skinny frame. A cross was embroidered with gold thread on the pocket of his white snap-button shirt, and there were choleric blazes in his throat, as though heat were climbing out of his collar.

"You a pimp?" he asked.

"Sir?" I said.

"I asked if you're a procurer, one of them that brings women out to that greaser's ranch." His accent was Appalachian, West Virginia or perhaps Kentucky, a wood rasp being ground across a metal surface.

"No, sir. I'm an attorney."

"Is there a difference?" he said.

"Thanks for y'all's time," I said, and went back out on the street.

But the old man followed me out on the sidewalk. The Sapphire Mountains rose up behind him, their green slopes the texture of velvet, the crests strung with clouds.

"What's your business with that gangster?" he asked.

"As you imply, sir, it's my business."