Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

But it wasn't a good evening for Terry. Wyatt was still mad about Maisey Voss destroying the front of his car and had told him if he wanted to go anywhere, he could walk or hitchhike, because neither Wyatt nor Carl would give him a vehicle to drive.

Now Wyatt and Carl had gone to the drive-in movie in Missoula and left Terry to his own devices. Terry walked along the riverbank to the campground upstream from the compound and baited his hand line with a piece of corn and cheese and threw it into an eddy behind a rotted cottonwood. The mountains on the western rim of the valley were purple with shadow, lighted only on the high crests where the snow had not melted.

He heard a car door open and feet crunching on the silt and pebbles behind him, then he turned and stared into the face of the biggest man he had ever seen.

"Walk up there and get in the trunk of the car," the man said. The voice was flat, mechanical, clotted with rust.

"Fuck that," Terry said.

The man slapped Terry on the ear, so hard Terry thought the drum was broken. He jerked Terry's line from his hand and threw it into the river, and, by his belt, dragged him stumbling up the embankment and pushed him headlong into the trunk of a small car and slammed down the hatch.

A half hour later Terry was sitting in a heavy wooden chair inside a batting cage, his wrists roped to the chair, staring at an automatic pitching machine loaded with scuffed baseballs. The cage was located inside a closed barn, and motes of dust and wisps of hay floated in the haze of the electric lights that ran the length of the horse stalls.

The man who had kidnapped him had not spoken a word since removing him from the car trunk.

"You work for that doctor? Is this over Maisey?" Terry said.

But the man did not answer.

A side door opened and a man in a cutoff baseball jersey and blue jeans that were new and stiff from the box stepped inside the barn. His hair was black and combed, his skin olive-toned, his eyes brown like a deer's.

He leaned over in the shadows and picked up a remote-control button that was attached to the pitching machine.

"You did a one-bit in North Carolina?" the man said.

Terry ran the tip of his tongue along his lips. Don't give a smart answer, he thought.

"Not exactly. I was in the reformatory. I bashed a fudge packer who came on to me," Terry said.

"I can respect that. Now, all you got to do is tell me and Frank the truth about a couple of things, and we'll take you home. This machine pitches up to seventy miles an hour. You getting the picture on this?"

"No," Terry said, then realized he'd just given the wrong answer.

The man's right thumb moved and the mechanical arm of the pitching machine fired a ball into Terry's chest, then reset itself for another pitch. Terry felt as if someone had driven an auger into his breastbone.

"I know, it hurts. I been hit by it," the man said.

"You're Nicki Molinari," Terry said.

"What's in a name?" Molinari said.

Terry started to reply, but Molinari held a finger up for him to be quiet.

"Two years ago, on July Fourth, a man and a little boy were killed on the Clearwater National Forest. Who you think did that?" Molinari said.

"How am I supposed to know?" The machine clanked and Terry leaned sideways, straining against the chair, but the ball caught him on the collarbone. He tried to eat his pain, but he couldn't bite down on the groan that welled out of his chest.

"Was it Lamar Ellison?" Molinari asked.

"Lamar? He was a snitch for the ATF."

"So?" Molinari said.

Terry knew he needed to provide an answer, but he couldn't think, couldn't sort out all the wise remarks and insults that he had always carried around like a sheaf of arrows.

"Ask Wyatt. He celled with Lamar," he said, and realized how afraid he actually was.

"The rodeo clown? You think I go to clowns for my information? That's what you're telling me?" Molinari said.