James Burke - Bitterroot

"I'd start with Wyatt Dixon. Why do you allow a psychopath like that in your town, anyway?" "Say again?" he said.

"Back home our sheriff is a one-lung cretin who couldn't go to the bathroom without a diagram. But he'd have Wyatt Dixon pepper-Maced and in waist chains five minutes after he hit town."

"Yeah, I heard about the way you do things down there. We sent a bunch of our convicts from Deer Lodge to one of your rental prisons. We're still paying off the lawsuits. Now, look, Missy-"

"Say that again?"

"Sorry. I mean Ms. Carrol. You and Mr. Holland aren't married, are you? You two seem to make a fine match," the sheriff said.

"I'll be back later."

"Oh I know. Yes, ma'am, I surely know," he said, two fingers pressed against one eyebrow.

Temple and I walked outside into the sunshine. The maples on the courthouse lawn were puffing in the wind, and a long procession of bicyclists in brightly colored Spandex outfits was threading in and out of the traffic.

"Who was the kid with Dixon? The one at the literary reading you told me about?" Temple said.

"You got me. Why?"

"We need to find a weak link. What's the deal on this Indian gal?" she said.

"Her name is Sue Lynn Big Medicine. I think she's working for the ATE"

"What's their interest?"

"Guns, maybe. Or the Alfred P. Murrah Building."

"The Oklahoma City bombing?"

"Sue Lynn asked me why the feds would want information on people who have been in Kingman, Arizona."

Temple widened her eyes.

"That puts a new perspective on things," she said.

"I don't buy it," I said. "This trouble is local, and it has to do with money."

"It always has to do with money. Or sex and power," she said. "Who's this woman you're involved with?"

It WASN'T HARD to get the name of the kid who had accompanied Wyatt Dixon to Xavier Girard's literary reading. The reading had been intended as a library fund-raiser, and everyone attending had been required to sign the guest book and give his mailing address at the door.

The name above Wyatt Dixon's was a woman's. The name below was Terry Witherspoon.

Temple used her cell phone to call a friend in the sheriff's department in San Antonio. He ran the name through the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., and called us back. Temple listened, then thanked him and clicked off her phone.

"If it's the same kid, he was in a juvenile facility in North Carolina," she said. "What for?" "His records are sealed."

Terry Witherspoon lived in a knocked-together shack on a dirt road notched out of a hillside high above the Clark Fork River.

I parked in a clearing among the pines and waited for the dust to blow away before we got out of the truck. Out in the trees we could see a great, rust-streaked, ventilated iron cylinder set up on a rubber-tired trailer. A huge gray hunk of raw meat was hung inside the front of the cylinder, crawling with flies, stinking of putrefaction.

"What's that?'' Temple said. "A bear barrel. Fish and Game uses them to trap black bears when people complain about them."

"Billy Bob, there's something in there," she said. A cinnamon bear, one weighing perhaps two hundred and fifty or three hundred pounds, had climbed into the back of the barrel, lured by the odor of meat, and an iron gate had slammed down behind it, trapping it so it could not turn around or go either forward or backward.

In a railed dirt lot behind the shack a lean, bare-chested kid, with ribs etched against his skin, was throwing a long, single-bladed pocketknife into a fence post. His brown hair grew over his ears, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses and a mocking smile at the corner of his mouth.

"You Terry Witherspoon?" I asked. His glasses were full of reflected light when he looked at us.

The smile never left his mouth. "Who wants to know?" he said.

"We're investigating the death of Lamar Ellison," Temple said. She opened her private investigator's badge holder, then closed it.

"Yeah?" he said, almost enthusiastically. The knife's blade hung from the tips of his fingers. Hardly glancing at his target, he whipped the knife sideways, flinging it end over end into the fence post, where it embedded solidly into the wood and trembled like a dinner fork.

"What's the story on the bear?" I asked.

"It's been getting into my trash. I called the game warden. They brought out the barrel," he replied.

"When are they going to pick it up?" I said.

"They didn't say. Maybe if it gets thirsty in there, it won't come back when they turn it loose," he said.

His face was flat and his glasses wobbled with light.

Temple studied a folded-back page in her notebook. "Wyatt Dixon talk to you about killing Lamar Ellison?" she said.

His face seemed to soften. "Wyatt hasn't hurt anybody. If I was you, I wouldn't be talking about him that way," he said.

He pulled the knife from the fence post and walked back into the center of the lot. He stood at an oblique angle to the post, concentrating, the knife blade dripping from his fingers. His mouth pursed slightly before he flung the knife again. This time the handle caromed off the post.

"You go to the university, Terry?" I said. "I'm thinking about it. Or I might take up rodeoing."

"What were you down for in North Carolina?" I asked.

He grinned and pushed his glasses up on his nose. "Littering," he said.

"Did you guys make Ellison for a snitch? Because if you had knowledge of what was going to happen to him, you've become an accessory," Temple said.

"Y'all are local cops who went down South and learned your accents?" he said. He pitched his head at his own joke.

"You seem like a smart young guy, Terry," I said. "Wyatt's been down at least twice. He'll probably go down again. You want to be his fall partner?"

"Y'all have a TV camera hid out in the bushes? I'd like to say hello to my mom," he said.

Temple looked at me, then began punching in numbers on her cell phone.

"Who you calling?" Witherspoon asked.

She didn't reply. She spoke into the cell phone and clicked it shut.

"Fish and Game will be here in a little while," she said. "You're right, Terry, I'm not a local cop. That means I really wish you'd wise off again so I can rip that grin off your face and shove your puny little ass into that bear barrel."

He pitched his head again, clearing his hair off his glasses, then cocked the knife over his shoulder and parked it solidly into the fence post. When he walked over to retrieve it, his profile jiggled with laughter.

That NIGHT I heard a vehicle grinding through the field behind Doc's house, then a rattling sound like rocks under the vehicle's fenders and a thud down in the trees by the river. I unlocked the front door and walked barefoot out on the porch. It was cold and the valley and cliffs were lighted by the moon, and I could see a sports utility vehicle high-centered on a sand spit in the river, the current riffling around its tires. A man waded from the driver's door toward the front of Doc's property.

The man stumbled and fell in the water but held aloft the square-shaped gin bottle he carried so it did not break on the rocks. He splashed up on the bank, his clothes and thick hair dripping with water and moonlight. Just before he tumbled into the grass and passed out I saw the bandaged hand and feral and besotted face of Xavier Girard.

I closed the door and slipped the bolt and went back to sleep and hoped the sun would rise on a better world for all of us.

At first light I looked through my window and saw him on all fours, cupping water out of the river and sipping it from his palm. When I walked up behind him, he turned his head slowly, as though he were in pain. His face was gray with hangover, his eyes the color of iodine.