Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

I got back into the truck and started the engine and Temple punched in a 911 call to the Ravalli County Sheriff's Department.

"Y'all going in there?" the preacher said.

"Yeah, I think we'd better."

"Wait a minute," he said, and went into his church house and came back out with a Bible. He climbed up into the bed of the truck and scrunched down like a squirrel and hit the cab with his fist.

We drove up to the stucco house and parked behind Molinari's convertible and a white Cherokee. When we got out of the truck, our footsteps seemed as loud as rocks on slate. Out in a field an unmilked cow, its udder hard and veined, bawled in the wind. I picked up L.Q.'s revolver from the seat and let it hang from my right hand. We walked through the arcade that fronted the house, past the ceramic urns spilling over with passion vine, around the side to the heated pool that looked like a chemical green teardrop.

"Good God," Temple said.

A fat woman in a dress floated stomach-up in the pool, her face goggle-eyed beneath the surface, her blood already breaking up in the water. The man named Frank sat in a lawn chair, a cigarette burning in his lap, a small bullet hole above one eyebrow.

A second man, one I didn't know, with a pink face and thinning blond hair, lay on the grass, as if he had curled up and gone to sleep, an exit wound in his neck. There were bees in the clover where he lay, and one of his hands twitched involuntarily. When I felt his throat he opened his eyes and tried to breathe and a hard piece of chewing gum fell out of his mouth.

The preacher squatted beside him and stared into his face. He patted the man's chest with the tips of his fingers.

"You ain't got to talk. I'll say the words for you. You just pretend in your own mind they're your words. 'I commend my soul into the hands of the Lord.' The prayer's that simple, son. Don't be afraid. Ain't nothing bad can happen to you now," the preacher said.

Temple and I walked on into the backyard. The barn door was open and I could see Carl Hinkel tied to a chair inside the batting cage. The area around his feet was covered with scuffed baseballs. Hinkel's face didn't look human.

Xavier Girard sat on a plank table, drinking from a huge red plastic cup that rattled with ice and smelled of mint leaves and bourbon. His face was gloriously happy. A Ruger.22 automatic and two spare magazines lay next to his thigh. "Where's Molinari?" I asked.

"In the shower. He almost made it to his clothes. He might have been trouble," he repli

ed.

"Did you kill Hinkel?" I said.

"You bet. In the ear. Twice."

Xavier leaned forward and peered out the door at the preacher bending over the man on the grass. Xavier smiled fondly, then looked up at me and Temple, his eyes full of expectation, as though somehow he had liberated himself from all the baggage of a dull existence and he waited for us to usher him into his new life.

"Why'd you kill the woman?" Temple asked.

"Frank's wife?" Xavier seemed to review a scene in his head. "Yeah, she got it, too, didn't she? It's hard to put the bottle down when it's half full. What a rush. I'm still high."

The wind fluttered the barn doors. The air was cool and filled with the smells of horses and alfalfa and distant rain in the mountains. I didn't want to stand any longer among the creations of Xavier Girard's alcoholic madness.

Xavier picked up his.22 and rested it on his thigh, the balls of his fingers rubbing the checkered grips.

"Molinari left you a message. He said, 'Tell the counselor I'm square.' What do you think he meant by that?" he said.

"You going to do anything else with that Ruger?" I said.

"I haven't decided."

"Yeah, you have," I said. I gave L.Q.'s.45 to Temple and wrapped my hand around Girard's pistol and removed it from his grasp and pulled the magazine from the butt and ejected the unfired round in the chamber and sailed the pistol by its barrel into the barnyard. I stuck his spare magazines and the ejected round into my pocket and poured his booze and ice into the dust and set his empty cup next to him, then Temple and I walked back into the wind and sunlight and the rumble of thunder out in the hills.

"Don't quote me about the rush. That was off the record," Girard called out behind us.

Temple and I had to go into Hamilton with the Ravalli County sheriff, then we drove back to Doc's place on the Blackfoot. Fires were burning in Idaho, and the western sky was red with smoke, but a sun shower was falling on the Blackfoot Valley and the light was gold on the treetops along the river and there were carpets of Indian paintbrush and lupine on the hillsides.

I wanted to scrub all the sounds and sights from Molinari's ranch out of my mind. But I knew I would dream about dead people that night and the collective insanity that caused human beings to kill one another and justify their deeds under every flag and banner and religious crusade imaginable. Any number of people were probably delighted that Carl Hinkel and Nicki Molinari were dead, and each of them would find a way to say a higher purpose had been served. But I've always suspected the truth of the human story is to be found more often in the footnotes than in the text.

Carl Hinkel would be lionized in death by his followers, then replaced by someone just like him, perhaps someone who had already planned to assassinate him. Molinari was a passing phenomenon, an ethnic gangster caught between the atavistic bloodletting of his father's era and Mob-funded gaming corporations in Chicago and Las Vegas that now operate lotteries and casinos for state governments.

If Nicki Molinari's life and violent death had any significance, it probably lay in the fact that he had volunteered to fight for his country and had been left behind in Laos with perhaps four hundred other GIs, whose names were taken off the bargaining list during the Paris peace negotiations at the close of the Vietnam War.