"Yeah, I was here all night."

"Doing what?" the sheriff said.

"

Sleeping."

"You vouch for that?" the sheriff said to me.

"What's this about, Sheriff?" I said.

"Nothing much. Another dead man. Step out here, please," he said to me.

I followed him to his car. The sun wasn't up yet, and fog rose off the boulders in the river and hung in the trees. The sheriff stood with his hands on his hips, his cowboy hat slanted on his head, his wide red tie clipped to his shirt.

"That man in there didn't leave the house last night?" he asked.

"To my knowledge, no."

"To your knowledge, huh? Take a ride with me."

"What for?"

"You defense lawyers spend too much time in your office. I want you to see the handiwork of our shooter."

I got into his car and we rode west of Missoula, up the long grade toward the Idaho line. The mountains were green with Douglas fir, the crests tumbling higher and higher against a salmon-colored sky. Then the Clark Fork dropped away in the canyons below us and finally disappeared from view altogether.

We went through the little town of St. Regis, then turned off the four-lane under a train trestle and entered a hollow traversed by a dirt road that was dotted with clapboard houses on each side. The yards were strung with washlines and littered with debris, like a scene out of Appalachia.

The sheriff had said very little during our journey.

"See all that old growth timber up there? That's the way it used to be everywhere," he said. "We didn't have cyanide in the river and runoff from the clear-cuts destroying the spawning beds. We didn't have no Aryan Nation or Christian Identity or militia people coming in here from Idaho, either. You know why they like it up here in the woods?"

"They're cowards. They fear blacks and Jews and locate in places where they'll never have to face them on equal terms."

He turned his head and stared at me and almost drove us off the road.

"Damn, son, you may have more sense than I give you credit for," he said.

The coroner had been late in arriving at the crime scene and was just finishing his work. Two paramedics were waiting by the road with a gurney. An empty black body bag lay unzippered on top of it.

The impact of the round had blown Tommy Lee Stoltz off the porch and into the yard. A roll of toilet paper from the box of groceries he had been carrying had bounced down the steps and rolled back under the porch into a pool of brown water. Stoltz lay on his back, staring at the sky, his shattered glasses crooked on his face. The right lens was embedded in the eye socket, coated with blood.

The sheriff from Mineral County stooped under the front door and walked out on the porch and looked at me and Sheriff Cain. He had a broad stomach and red face and graying blond hair and mustache. He wore a sheep-lined vest and a blue baseball cap with the letters MCSD on it.

"Who's he?" he said to Cain.

"An ex-Texas Ranger along for the ride. What have you got?" Sheriff Cain said.

"A neighbor heard the shot and looked out the window and saw somebody in a hat and a long coat with a chrome-plated pistol. We didn't find any brass, so the shooter picked it up or he was using a revolver. I don't think we'll get much from ballistics. The exit wound and the splatter tell me that round's way up on the hillside somewheres. This one of the guys you pulled in for questioning in the Voss rape?"

"Yep," Sheriff Cain said.

"Where was the girl's father last night?"

"He says he was at home," Sheriff Cain said.

"You believe him?"

Tags: James Lee Burke Billy Bob Holland Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net