Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"I see. You were protecting Sue Lynn Big Medicine. Did you go there armed?"

"None of your business."

"Accept my word on this, Mr. Girard. I'm going to do everything in my power to see you charged with obstruction and depraved indifference."

"Indifferent? You're calling me indifferent?"

I looked at the bruises along his jawline. "I'm not calling you anything, sir. How's your book going?"

"Which book?"

"Your biography of Nicki Molinari."

"Guess," he replied.

As I left I heard what sounded like a metal trash basket tumbling end over end across a bare floor.

The next morning was white with fog that boiled off the Blackfoot River and hung wetly in the trees and gathered like damp cotton on the hillsides. I walked down to Lucas's tent and watched him fix a fire and start cracking eggs and laying out ham strips in the oversize skillet he cooked in.

Minutes later I picked up the spatula and started to shovel some food onto my plate. Lucas gently removed the spatula from my hand and went to his tent and picked up a plastic dog bowl. He began shredding pieces of white bread into the bowl while his dog, now named Dogus, watched.

"Remember what you told me Great-Grandpa Sam wrote in his journal? 'Always feed your animals before you feed yourself,'" Lucas said, and scooped a fried egg out of the skillet and chopped it up in the bread.

Later, we ate in silence. The trees along the river were dark and wet and black-green inside the fog, and I could hear a hoofed animal clopping on the rocks on the far side of the water.

"I know what you want to ask me," Lucas said.

"My head's totally blank," I said.

"Sue Lynn didn't call. I don't blame her. She tried to tell me all along she was in over her head. It don't seem right, though."

"What's that?"

"She's on the run and all them other people-that fellow Wyatt Dixon and Witherspoon and the people who killed her little brother-these guys just go on hurting folks and nobody does anything about it."

"Eventually they'll go down," I said. "It sure does take a long time," he replied. He got up from the rock he was sitting on and rinsed his tin plate and cup and fork and meat knife in the river, then scrubbed them with sand and rinsed them clean again and put them into his grub box. He poured the coffeepot on the fire and refilled it with water and doused the fire a second time while steam boiled off the stones in the fire ring.

Both our fly rods were propped against his tent, the dry flies snugged into the cork handles, the tapered leaders tight inside the guides. He picked both rods up and handed me mine.

"Come on, there's a fat rainbow up yonder that wants to add your flies to his underwater collection," he said.

"You're growing up on me, bud," I said.

He looked back over his shoulder at me, not quite sure what to make of the remark.

WHEN THE LETTER for Wyatt Dixon arrived at the compound, delivered by a nervous florist gripping a handful of pink and blue balloons, Wyatt was out in the equipment lot, barefoot and bare-chested, his jeans on so tight they looked like they'd split, working on Carl Hinkel's tractor engine. Wyatt paused a wrench on a nut and stared over his shoulder at the florist, then walked to the fence and took the letter and clutch of balloons from the florist's hands.

"Sir, you look like you're fixing to piss your pants," Wyatt said.

"No, sir. I wouldn't do that."

"Good. Get out of here," Wyatt said.

He thumbed open the envelope and read the letter inside, the wind blowing the paper, the tethered ribbons on the balloons tugging in his hand.

Terry watched Wyatt's face. Wyatt had only two expressions. One was the idiot's grin off a jack-o'-lantern. The other was a nonexpression, a total absence of any feeling or thought or content whatsoever, at least not any that could be seen. It made Terry think of a clay mask that a sculptor might have molded on an exhumed skull, with prosthetic eyes stuffed into the sockets.

Wyatt finished reading the letter, then folded it and stuck it inside his belt, against his skin. His left hand opened and the balloons rose into the wind and floated out over the Bitterroot. He turned slowly toward Terry, the clay mask transforming itself, cracking into the idiot's grin again.