"This isn't good for either of us, Cleo."
"If you won't open it, I'll do it myself."
She tore away the paper and the ribbon, her hands shaking slightly. The paper blew away in the wind when she folded back the top of the box.
"There's every kind of bass lure here," she said. "That's what you fish for in Texas, isn't it? Bass? Do you like the lures?"
"I appreciate your thoughtfulness. I'm headed out right now. I wish perhaps you had come out at another time."
"Stop being cute, Billy Bob. Southern charm doesn't work too well after you bed a woman and drop her."
"You have a lot of qualities, Cleo. You're devoted to your work. You obviously have compassion for the poor. Any guy would be lucky to have a lady like you."
"I want you to come out to my place. It doesn't have to be tonight. But this has to be worked out."
"It's not gding to happen."
"I'm sorry to hear you say that," she said.
"Let me be straight up with you. Nicki Molinari told me your husband and son were murdered by gangsters, not by Lamar Ellison's biker gang. The sheriff believes the same thing. Why don't you give Molinari and his friends the money your husband owed them and be done with it?"
"You quote Nicki Molinari to me about my son? You worthless piece of Southern garbage," she said.
"Adios," I said, and got into my truck. While I ground the starter I could feel her eyes pulling the skin from my bones.
That same evening Sue Lynn Big Medicine drove her uncle's pickup truck into the Jocko Valley and onto the Flathead Indian Reservation. She passed the rodeo and powwow grounds and followed a dirt road into the hills, climbing higher into trees and deep shadows and outcroppings of gray rock that were marbled with lichen.
She pulled off the road into a flat, thinly wooded area by a creek. The remains of an abandoned sweat lodge stood next to the creek, the concave network of shaved willow limbs hung with strips of rotting canvas. She cut the engine and walked down to the water and leaned against a rock and smoked a cigarette and waited. It was not long before she heard a four-wheel-drive vehicle grinding in low gear up the road.
The man who had told her where to wait for him got out of his vehicle and walked toward her. He wore slip-on, half-topped boots and khakis and a long-sleeve blue cotton shirt and a bill cap. His hair was neatly clipped, and even though it was evening he was freshly shaved and smelled of the lotion on his jaws.
"Did I keep you waiting long?" Amos Rackley asked.
"I wasn't doing anything else," she said, inhaling her cigarette, her chin raised, her gaze averted.
"Where's your uncle's race car, the one with numbers on it?"
"It doesn't have lights."
He seemed to look at her kindly but for just a second his eyes would focus on her mouth and drop to her throat and breasts.
"I have a folder here with some pictures of guns in it," he said. "I want you to look at the pictures and tell me if you've seen any of these guns inside Carl Hinkel's house."
He opened the folder on top of the rock she was leaning against and shone a tiny flashlight on a series of glossy prints. She felt the hair on his forearm touch hers.
"I don't know anything about guns," she said.
"A gal from the Res? Who grew up around hunters? That's hard to believe, Sue Lynn."
"I don't know what kind of guns Carl Hinkel has. They're guns."
"I see. We need you to go back into Hinkel's house," he said, closing the folder.
"They're on to me."
"I don't think that's true. They're just a suspicious lot by nature. Call up Wyatt and tell him you had a fight with the Holland boy and you want to see him again."
"I don't want to ever be alone with Wyatt again. You don't know what he-"