James Burke: Bitterroot

"I'd head for the barn on this one," he said.

"That wasn't ever your style, L.Q.," I replied.

"Doc fired them bikers up because he cain't let go of his wife's death."

"You don't walk out on your buds," I said.

"He says he didn't like Vietnam? Maybe dying has messed up my ability to remember things. I thought SEALs was volunteers."

I never could win an argument with L.Q. He twisted the ends of his cigarette and put it in his mouth and struck a kitchen match on the butt of his holstered revolver. His skin and mustache flared in the cupped flame of the match.

"This one ain't just about bikers. Why do you think the sheriff pointed you at that alcoholic crime writer and his wife, the actress, what's that gal's name, the one who snorts up coke like an anteater?" L.Q. said.

"I stubbed my toe on that one, too."

"You gonna keep us here?"

"I'll let you know," I said.

He drew in on his cigarette and breathed the smoke across the tops of his fingers. His eyes were filled with a black luminescence, the ascetic, lean features of his face even more handsome in death. I thought I saw him grin at the corner of his mouth.

A HALF HOUR LATER Doc Voss joined me outside.

"They moved her upstairs. You want to hear what those bastards did to her?" he said.

"I was a cop, Doc. I've been there," I said.

But he told me anyway. In physiological detail, his voice cracking in his throat, his palms opening and closing at his sides.

"She's alive, partner. A lot of predators don't leave witnesses," I said.

"You're pretty glib for a guy on the sidelines," he said.

I let it pass and looked down the street, away from his angry stare.

He pressed the ball of his thumb into my arm.

"What would you do if she were your daughter? Don't you lie, either," he said.

"Try to get the wrong thoughts out of my head," I replied.

"You and L.Q. Navarro stuck playing cards in the mouths of dead people," he said.

"They tortured a DEA agent to death. They threw down on us first."

"My daughter doesn't count as much as a federal agent?" he said.

"I think you're working on a nervous breakdown, Tobin."

I walked away from him. Down the street a sheriff's department cruiser pulled around the corner and approached us. Inside were the two deputies whom Doc had insulted earlier. One of them sat in back with a handcuffed man whose jaws were bright with gold stubble, his long, tangled hair tied up on his head with a bandanna that leaked blood above one eye. The deputy in back lifted the handcuffed man's chin with a baton, as though displaying a severed head on a plate.

"This is one of the guys who raped and sodomized your daughter. He fell down a fire escape while resisting arrest," the deputy said. "Lamar, you got something you want to say to Dr. Voss?"

"Yeah. My dick in your ear," the biker named Lamar Ellison said out the window.

"The standards in street mutts gets lower every day," the same deputy said, shaking his head. He tapped on the seat for his partner to drive on.

Doc stared at the rear window, his jawbone flexing.

"They got one. They'll get the others," I said.

"It's not enough," he replied.

Maisey came home from the hospital three days later. Doc tied balloons on the furniture in her bedroom and bought teddy bears and stuffed frogs and giraffes and a pink rabbit that was four feet tall and propped them up on her pillows, but his attempt at good cheer and optimism was like wind blowing through an empty building.

Maisey's eyes seemed possessed, haunted by thoughts she didn't share. Her face jumped at sudden noises. Her breath was sour and funk rose out of her clothes. When her father tried to comfort her, she curled into a ball and pulled the bedcovers over her head, spilling the stuffed animals he had bought her on the floor.

Through the doorway I saw Doc sitting on the side of the bed, his hand on his daughter's back, staring into space. "What are we going to do, kiddo?" he said, more to himself than to her.

The sun was above the mountain now, but the inside of the room was filled with a brittle yellow light that gave no warmth.

At noon Cleo Lonnigan arrived in her truck and fixed lunch and drove into Bonner and bought a cake and a gallon of ice cream. Later she convinced Maisey to put on her quilted robe and fluffy slippers and to sit on the porch with her father while Cleo showed us what she could do with firearms.

She took a holstered.22 revolver off the gun rack in her truck, buckled it on, and set three tin cans in a row against a dirt bluff, then walked back fifty feet and blew each can into the air, then nailed it again as it rolled down the embankment.

"You want to give it a try?" she asked Maisey.

"No. I don't like guns," Maisey said.

"Sure?" Cleo said.

"Yes. Thanks anyway. I just don't like guns. I never did," Maisey said, her eyes slightly out of focus, as though she were thinking of who or what she had once been. The wind blew her hair and made gray lines in her scalp. She stuck her hands inside the sleeves of her robe.

I walked down to the dirt bluff and helped Cleo pick up the cans and place them in a paper sack.

"Good try," I said.

"She's going to need some heavy counseling. I don't think Doc has any idea what they're in for," she said.

"Don't underestimate him."

"You know what victim rape is?"

"The system does it to her a second time?"

She glanced toward the porch, where Doc and Maisey were sitting in the shade. She turned toward the river, so her voice would carry away from the house.

"I talked with the sheriff this morning. Maisey couldn't pick Lamar Ellison out of a photographic lineup," she said.

"What about fingerprints? They lifted prints all over her room," I said.

"Not his. He was released from jail this morning. No charges are being filed."

I let out my breath and looked up at the porch. Doc was petting a calico cat. He scratched its head, then set it in Maisey's lap.

"I wish I had let Ellison strangle to death. I think about putting my hand in his mouth and I want to scrub my skin with disinfectant," Cleo said.

"The sheriff hasn't told Doc?"

"No."

"Why would he tell you first?"

Her throat was red, as though chafed by the wind. "Because I've known the sheriff since my son was murdered. Because Lamar Ellison is a member of the Berdoo Jesters. They were seen at the campground the night before my son died."

She went to the back of the house and dropped the paper sack with the cans in it into a trash barrel, then walked back to her truck. She unbuckled the holstered revolver, threw it on the seat, and slammed the door as though ending an argument in her own mind.

A few MINUTES LATER I saw a Jeep Cherokee turn off the dirt road and clatter across Doc's cattle guard and come through the grass behind the house. The Cherokee pulled around by the porch and Holly Girard got out from the driver's side. She picked up a covered dish from the seat and walked up to the steps. A man I didn't know sat in the passenger seat, a camera around his neck.

"I thought you could use some of Xavier's coonass gumbo," Holly said.

"That's thoughtful of you. Where's Xavier?" Doc said.

"Drinking ice water and eating aspirin in the sauna. Guess why?" she replied.

She wore crimson suede boots and tailored khakis and a white blouse that puffed in the wind and exposed the tops of her breasts. She had on a safari hat, but she removed it and tossed her hair, then I saw the photographer get out of the Jeep and walk down toward the river, as though he did not want to intrude upon a private moment.

"We want Maisey to know she has lots of friends in Missoula," she said.