James Burke - Bitterroot

I stepped back from the boulder, my temples pounding, my ears almost deaf from the four rounds I had discharged. I eased the hammer back down with both thumbs and shoved the pistol into my belt and walked back through the trees, stepping across a creek drainage, mounting a small hill that should have brought me out above my truck and the campground on the river.

Instead, I walked right into two of Amos Rackley's Treasury agents.

They were set up behind a rock, like picnickers, a lunch box opened in front of them, with sandwiches placed on paper napkins next to their thermos and cell phone and binoculars.

"What do you think you're doing, asshole?" the blond, crewcut man named Jim said, chewing a small bite of sandwich. He wore khakis and a checkered shirt and a tan cap with a green fish on it. There was a blood-filled bump on the bridge of his nose. He and his partner wore identical sunglasses.

"Me?" I said.

"Dixon did a mind-fuck on you, huh?" Jim said.

"Is Wyatt around here? That's why you guys are here?" I said.

"You haven't had the pleasure," Jim said to his partner. "This guy's a real wit."

I took a breath and widened my eyes. My face felt sweaty and dilated in the breeze. "Tell me if my reasoning is messed up. You don't care if somebody pops Ole Wyatt or not. You know you can't turn him, so he's of no use to you."

"You ought to ask Amos for a job. He's always looking for new talent," Jim said.

I dumped my spent brass in my palm.

"Give him this for me, will you?" I said, and bounced the casings off the rock in front of them. "It's great seeing you. Keep up the good work."

Jim bit into his sandwich and turned to his friend. "This guy was an Assistant U.S. Attorney," he said. The friend grinned and looked at his nails.

I was still wired when I walked into an old brick Catholic church on the north side of Missoula early the next morning. The day was cool and misty, and the pillared interior of the church, whose ceilings were painted with celestial scenes, seemed to enclose an unnatural, smoky blue light. The few parishioners in the pews were elderly, traditional people from another era who said rosaries and probably attended Mass daily and confessed sins that were largely imaginary to a priest who fought to keep from nodding off. I felt like an intruder in their midst.

I knelt in the back of the church and prayed to be relieved of the anger that still throbbed in my wrists and left my mouth as dry as paper and my thoughts like shards of glass. A young priest in a cassock entered the center booth in the confessional and I followed him and knelt in the adjoining booth and waited for him to slide back the wood cover on the small screened window that separated us.

"I should confess early on I know another priest here in town but I chose not to go to him," I said.

"Why is that?" the priest asked.

"I'm ashamed."

"There's no shame when you take your sins to God."

"I tried to kill a man yesterday, Father. He was unarmed. I shot at his back four times."

The priest started to turn, to look through the screen at my face, but instead lowered his eyes and remained motionless. I could hear the soft rise and fall of his breath.

"What you're telling me is very serious," he said.

"This man did something truly evil to a friend of mine," I said.

"With respect, I have to stop you there. You don't bargain in a sacramental situation."

"He buried her alive."

I saw him press his forehead with the heel of his hand.

"Listen, do you plan to make another attempt against this man's life?" he said.

"I'll do him no harm except in defense of myself or another."

I could see a thin sheen of perspiration along his jawbone and a lump of cartilage working below his ear. He waited a long time before he spoke again.

"If you have not been honest with me, the absolution you receive here will be of little use to you. That said, you are forgiven of your sins," he said. Then added, as I rose from the kneeler, "You must put away your violence, sir. You will never have peace until you do. Until that day comes, a minister such as I will be only a seashell echoing the wind."

His words clung to me like a net when I walked out into the sunlight.

I WALKED from the church down to the river and sat on a shady bench and watched the sun burn the mist off the hills. The siltation caused by the snow melt had settled out of the river and the water was now a dark green again, undulating smoothly over the submerged boulders in the deepest part of the river, the trout rising on the edge of the shade for the first fly hatch of the day.

I had less than three weeks to prepare Doc's defense. When all else failed, a hard-nosed criminal lawyer could always put the police on trial. But that was not only unwise in the case of Sheriff Cain, who was an intelligent and decent man and also well liked, a defense strategy deliberately based on destroying people's faith in their legal system was a little bit like burning down all your neighbors' houses in order to save your own.

Who had really killed Lamar Ellison? I had an idea, but my speculations were of no value. I believed Lamar Ellison and his two cohorts were sent by Carl Hinkel to Doc Voss's house to rape his daughter. But all three rapists were dead now and I would probably never get Hinkel into a courtroom. Hinkel was like the drunk who runs a red light at ninety miles an hour and fills an intersection with mayhem and carnage and disappears back into anonymity.

Regardless, as much as I disliked him and the xenophobic mentality that was characteristic of his kind, I did not think he was behind Ellison's murder. I tried to think through the tangled web Doc and I had wandered into the night he went up against the bikers in the bar at Lincoln: gold mine interests on the Blackfoot River, Cleo Lonnigan's belief that Lamar Ellison's biker gang had murdered her child, Nicki Molinari's insistence that Cleo Lonnigan had stolen money from him, Xavier and Holly Girard's involvement with Molinari, the kidnapping and murder of Sue Lynn Big Medicine's little brother, the fanatical dedication of the ATF agents who wanted to avenge the deaths of their friends and colleagues in the Alfred P. Murrah Building.

I wondered what it would be like to line up childhood photos of all the above-mentioned people. Would it tell us something about the influence of the world on each of us? Probably. But the lesson was too depressing to even think about.

"I have a bone to pick with you," a voice said behind me.

"Oh, hello, Ms. Girard," I said, removing my hat and rising from the bench.

She wore shades and a white suit and high heels and white stockings and carried a shopping bag from a fashionable store by its paper straps. She sat down and crossed her legs and lit a cigarette with a silver lighter.

"Do you mind?" she asked.

"No," I said, not quite sure if she was referring to her cigarette or her sitting down uninvited.

"God forbid, my prayers have been answered. My husband has stopped drinking. He has also gone crazy. I think he gets some of his ideas from you and Doc Voss," she said. "I doubt it."

"He wants to stop production of my picture. He says more publicity about the Blackfoot will cause it to be overrun by tourists. He says he's going to rat-fuck Nicki Molinari. Do you think that's an advisable activity?"

"I wouldn't know, Ms. Girard. To tell you the truth, I don't care, either."

She removed her sunglasses and let them rest in her lap. In the shade, or perhaps because of her makeup, her eyes had the color of lilacs. They roved over my face thoughtfully, then she smiled in that unrehearsed and vulnerable way that seemed totally foreign to everything else she did.

"I've made a bad impression on you twice now," she said.