Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

But those are events that are of little interest today.

The only real winner in the mass murder committed by an Edgar Award-winning novelist was an individual whose name would not be reported in a news story. The man responsible for killing Cleo Lonnigan's child had not only been tortured and executed, but Cleo now could keep the seven hundred thousand dollars her husband had stolen from Nicki Molinari and almost no one, including Xavier Girard, the shooter, would ever know the enormous favor the fates had done her.

Doc fixed a late supper for all of us and we ate in the kitchen, then I took a walk by myself along the river, through the lengthening shadows and the spongy layer of pine needles under the trees. The air was heavy with the smell of damp stone and the heat in the soil as it gave way to the coldness rising from the river. But I couldn't concentrate on the loveliness of the evening. I listened for the sound of a car engine, the crack of a twig under a man's shoe, strained my eyes into the gloom when a doe and a spotted fawn thudded up the soft humus on the opposite side of the stream.

Then I saw a track, the stenciled outline of a cowboy boot, in the sand at the water's edge. It was too small to be either mine or Lucas's, and Doc didn't wear cowboy boots. I picked up a stone and cast it across the stream into a tangle of dead trees and listened to it rattle through the branches, then click on the stones below.

But there were no other sounds except the rush of water through the riffles and around the beaver dams and the boulders that were exposed like the backs of gray tortoises in the current.

The sky was still light but it was almost dark inside the ring of hills when I walked back to Lucas's tent. He had built a fire and had turned on his Coleman lantern and was combing his hair in a stainless steel mirror that he had hung from his tent pole. His guitar case lay by his foot.

"Is Temple staying up here tonight?" he said.

"That's right."

"He's out there, ain't he?"

"Maybe. Maybe he holed up in a canyon and died, too. Maybe nobody will ever find him."

"Doc propped his '03 behind the kitchen door," Lucas said.

"Then Wyatt Dixon had better not get in his sights."

"You aim to cool him out, don't you?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"You can go to church all you want, Billy Bob, but you don't fool nobody. You get the chance, you're gonna gun that fellow."

"Would you hold it against me?"

He slipped his comb into his back pocket and picked up his guitar case and removed his hat from the top of the tent pole and put it on his head.

"You mind if I borrow your truck?" he asked.

"You didn't answer my question," I said.

"Like you say, maybe he holed up and died in a canyon somewheres. See you later, Billy Bob. It don't matter what you do. I love you just the same," he replied.

Sunday morning Temple and I drove up the Blackfoot into the Swan Valley to look at property. The lakeside areas and the campgrounds along the river were full of picnickers and fishermen and canoeists, and we walked with a real estate agent along the shore of Swan Lake and I stood in a copse of shaggy larch that was cold with shadow and cast a wet fly out into the sunlight and watched it sink over a ledge into a pool dissected by elongated dark shapes that crisscrossed one another as quickly as arrows fired from a bow.

Something hit my leader so hard it almost jerked the Fenwick out of my hand. The line flew off my reel through the guides and the tip of my rod bent to the water's surface before I could strip more line off the reel, then suddenly the rod was weightless, the leader cut with the cleanness of a razor.

"What was that?" Temple asked.

"A big pike, I suspect," I replied.

"We have to get us a place here, Billy Bob."

"Absolutely."

I looked at the severed end of my leader. The air seemed colder in the shade now, damp, the sunlight out on the water brittle and hard.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"I don't want to leave Lucas alone," I replied.

But my anxieties about my son seemed groundless. When we got back to Doc's he was sitting on the front porch, the belly of his Martin propped across his thigh, singing,