Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"No, it ain't. He's my neighbor. I run a church. Now I got a shitpot of criminals and whores swimming naked in a pool within view of our services."

"I guess what I aim to do is mess up Nicki Molinari's day any way I can."

When he grinned he showed two teeth that stood up in his gums like slats.

"Drive straight toward the Sapphires. The China-Polish hogs are mine. The Cadillacs and the naked whores throwing beach balls on the lawn are his," he said.

The ranch owned by Nicki Molinari and his friends looked out of place, out of sync with itself, as though it had been designed and put together by someone who had toured the West and wasn't quite sure what he remembered about it.

The house was Santa Fe stucco, with shady arcades and tile walkways and big glazed urns spilling over with flowers. An antique freight wagon sat by the driveway, as though announcing a historical connection to the past. A half dozen horses, their backs rubbed with saddle sores the size of half dollars, stood listlessly in a lot that was nubbed down to the dirt, while rolled hay lay humped and yellow in the fields. A swimming pool the color and shape of a chemical green teardrop steamed in the cool air next to a new log barn that housed no animals or farm machinery but an enclosed batting cage with an automatic pitching machine inside.

I pulled into a gravel parking area on the side of the house. Molinari shut down the pitching machine and opened a door in the batting cage and came toward me, dressed only in tennis shoes and knee-length socks and cutoff sweatpants that were hitched tightly into his genitalia.

"Am I gonna have trouble here?" he said. "Call somebody if you feel uncomfortable," I replied.

"If I call anybody, it'll be for an ambulance. You're starting to be a nuisance."

"You bashed Cleo Lonnigan's carpenter. I got picked up for it. While I was in jail, a friend of mine was buried alive by Wyatt Dixon."

His eyes fixed on mine, as though reading significance in my words that only he understood. He scratched at a pimple on top of his shoulder.

"I'm sorry about the carpenter, but it's not on me. Cleo is sitting on money that don't belong to her. I told you, the people her husband stiffed give out motivational lessons nobody forgets. Her husband didn't learn that lesson, either, and it got him and his kid killed," he said.

He squeezed the pimple until it popped, then brushed at his skin.

"Save the shuck for your hired morons. My friend and I took your weight. That means if Wyatt Dixon comes around my friend again, I'm going to be out to see you," I said.

"Right," he said, and looked off into the breeze. His skin was olive-toned and looked cool and taut in the sunshine. "You want to hit some in the cage?"

"No."

"Don't go, man. What do you think of Xavier Girard as a writer?"

"Why?"

"Because he's writing my life story. Because I've told him stuff I don't tell everybody."

"What stuff?"

"You asked me once how I got out of Laos. I rode out on the skid of a helicopter. Except I pushed another guy off the skid. A GI. At five hundred feet." His eyes left mine, then came back and refocused on me again. His face seemed to energize, as though the answer to all his questions lay within inches of his grasp. "After you capped your friend, that other Texas Ranger, you saw a shrink?"

I wanted to simply walk away, to pretend I was above his inquisition and his criminal level of morality. He waited, his face expectant. A woman with dyed red hair came out of the house and got into a convertible with a bright white top and began blowing the horn at him.

"Shut up that damn noise!" he yelled at her, then turned back to me. "How'd you get that guy off your conscience?"

"I didn't. I never dealt with it. I feel sorry for you," I said.

"You never dealt-" he said, then stopped and pressed his fingers in the center of his forehead, his mouth open slightly, as though he were fingering a tumor or perhaps recognizing a brother-in-arms.

That same day Carl Hinkel drifted his single-engine plane on currents of warm air above the Bitterroot River and landed on a freshly mowed pasture at the rear of his ranch. As soon as Wyatt Dixon stepped from the passenger door, he was arrested by two sheriff's deputies. But before they could cuff him he peeled off his T-shirt and shook it loose from his hand like a stripteaser on a stage. The veins and tendons in his upper torso looked like the root system in a tree.

"Please notice I am burned from the neck all the way down one shoulder," he said, lifting a thick pad of grease-stained bandages from his skin. "I am placing myself at y'all's disposal, with hopes you will take me to a hospital. It is civil servants such as yourself a rodeo cowboy must turn to when he don't have enough sense not to drop a red-hot car muffler on his face."

He held his right hand in stiff salute against his eyebrow.

The voice lineup consisted of an escaped Arkansas convict who was being held in the county jail, a toothless cook at the transient shelter, a sheriff's deputy from Sweetwater, Texas, an insane street preacher who spent the day shouting at traffic in the middle of town, and a university speech therapist from Oklahoma whose voice sounded like wire being pulled through a hole in a tin can. Together, they represented a cross section of mushmouth and adenoidal Southern accents that would have probably caused Shakespeare to burn his texts and rewrite his plays in Cantonese.

But the lineup was not like one shown in television dramas. Neither the city police nor the sheriff's department had a stage, and the latter did not even have an interview room large enough to accommodate the six men who were to take part in the voice identification. So the sheriff recorded Wyatt Dixon and the five other men on cassettes and numbered each cassette one through six. Each man read the same statement into the microphone: "This world has done become a toilet."