Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

The trees and hills were dark now, the sky like a bowl of blue light above her head. She got out of her uncle's stock car and waited by the stream, listening to the water that braided across the rocks, the thick sounds of bats' wings crisscrossing through the air, the animals that were coming down through the woods to drink at the close of day.

Where was Rackley? He had said people would be waiting for her. But once again she was alone, and now it was too dark for her to drive her uncle's car back home.

She saw the trees move on the ridge above her but she guessed it was only the wind. Upstream there was a clattering sound on the rocks, deer or elk or perhaps cattle crossing the creek bed.

She had to get it together, stop her hands from trembling, her blood from racing. If she could just think clearly, just for a moment, she knew she could figure a way out of this.

Rackley had said fuck it. That was a surprise. Was he letting her off the hook? Or did he plan to put moves on her, use her as his permanent snitch and part-time squeeze?

She saw lights coming up the road, a four-wheel-drive vehicle in low gear, and she folded her arms across her chest, starting to hyperventilate now, determined to stare down whoever it was, even if they killed her.

The agent named Jim and a second agent whose name she didn't know pulled their Cherokee onto the grass and parked next to her car and got out and walked toward her, dressed like trout fishermen, smiling easily.

"Amos says you had a rough day today," Jim said.

"Where've you been, you sonofabitch?" she said.

"Let's don't have profanity. That's not nice," Jim said.

"Somebody was following me," she said, trying to keep her voice from trembling.

"The road was empty. There's nobody out there," he replied.

"I want a plane ticket to Seattle," she said.

"I don't think that's in the cards right now," Jim said.

"You do it for people in Witness Protection all the time."

"We still got a lot of unfinished work. A lot of work," he said, shaking his head profoundly.

"Amos said 'fuck it.' He told me I did a good job."

"You shouldn't have boosted a post office, kiddo," Jim said.

"I got to take a leak," the other agent said.

As though she were not there, the two agents walked down by the stream and pointed themselves into a Douglas fir tree and urinated on the ground. She stared at their backs, listening to their banter, realizing finally how absolutely insignificant she was.

Screw you, she thought, and got into their Cherokee, started the engine, and made a U-turn, the driver's door swinging back on its hinges. Their mouths hung open in disbelief as the Cherokee roared down the road in the darkness.

Jim took a cell phone out of the pocket of his windbreaker and punched in several numbers.

"A little problem here, boss man," he said.

"What problem?" the voice of Amos Rackley said.

"Pocahontas just hauled ass."

"So go after her."

"Can't do it, Amos. She took the Cherokee and left us her shit machine. The one with no lights."

There was a pause.

"Have you visited Fargo in the winter?" Rackley asked.

Jim clicked off the cell phone and set it on the roof of Sue Lynn's car and propped his arms against the metal and stared at the waning light on the ridgeline. The trees rustled in the wind and he thought he smelled rain. He fished in his pocket and removed a cheese sandwich he had wrapped in wax paper and handed half of it to his friend just as a solitary raindrop struck the hood of the car.