James Burke - Bitterroot

Sue Lynn got up from the couch and washed her face and walked down the slope to the river, then wandered along the bank to a shady copse of trees and sat down in the grass and watched the spokes of white light the sun gave off beyond the rim of the Bitterroots.

Then she heard the dirt bike go silent and the voices of Wyatt and Terry and she realized the two men were no more than twenty yards above her, behind a boulder, and Terry was sharpening his knife on a whetstone, probably spitting on it, as was his fashion, and grinding the knife in a slow, monotonous circle.

"She's got a mouth on her, I'll 'low that. 'Birth to a tumor'?"

"It's not funny, Wyatt."

"You ain't got to tell me. An Indian woman shouldn't be talking to a white man like that," Wyatt said, his voice suddenly somber.

"What are you gonna do about it?" Terry asked.

"Have a little talk with her."

"I want it to hurt."

"Oh, it will."

"Wyatt?"

"What?"

"I want to watch."

Sue Lynn sat in the shadows, bent forward, her stomach sick. Even in the coolness of the wind off the river she was sweating all over, a fearful sweat that clung to her skin like night damp. She remained motionless, afraid to get up or turn around. Then she heard Wyatt and Terry walking out of the trees toward the campground upstream, where Terry sometimes worm-fished with a handline behind a beaver dam.

When they were out of sight she ran for her uncle's windowless stock car that had no headlights. She fired up the engine and fishtailed across the gravel driveway in front of Carl's house and roared up the dirt road toward the highway that led back into Missoula, her heart pounding, the reflected images of Carl Hinkel and three of his subordinates staring at her like painted miniatures in the rearview mirror.

She stopped at Lolo, ten miles south of Missoula, and used a pay phone outside a cafe to call the contact number the Treasury agents had made her memorize. An unfamiliar voice answered, then the call was relayed to another location and she heard the voice of Amos Rackley.

"I can't take it anymore," she said. "Slow down. You can handle this."

"Carl knows.''

"You're having a panic attack. He doesn't know. He's not that smart."

"They're out there." "Out where?" he said.

A low-slung red car ran the yellow light at the intersection and she felt her heart stop. Then she saw the car was not Wyatt's.

"They're everywhere. They have radios in their cars," she said.

"Go to the meeting place on the Res. People will be waiting for you there. Now stop worrying. You did a good job."

"I never saw the guns." "So fuck it," he said.

She drove on through Missoula and caught the highway west of town that led to the Flathead Reservation. The Clark Fork of the Columbia River looked like a long, flat silver snake in the twilight.

The evening star had risen above the mountains when she drove up into the timbered hills above the Jocko River and pulled off the dirt road and parked by the abandoned sweat lodge on the creek bank. Twice on the highway she had seen cars pace themselves behind her, dropping back when she slowed, accelerating when she sped up. Then she had turned on to the Res and had lost them. But five minutes later, as she climbed into the hills, she had seen headlights down below, tracking across the same bridges she had crossed, following the same dirt roads she had driven.

The trees and hills were dark now, the sky like a bowl of blue light above her head. She got out of her uncle's stock car and waited by the stream, listening to the water that braided across the rocks, the thick sounds of bats' wings crisscrossing through the air, the animals that were coming down through the woods to drink at the close of day.

Where was Rackley? He had said people would be waiting for her. But once again she was alone, and now it was too dark for her to drive her uncle's car back home.

She saw the trees move on the ridge above her but she guessed it was only the wind. Upstream there was a clattering sound on the rocks, deer or elk or perhaps cattle crossing the creek bed.

She had to get it together, stop her hands from trembling, her blood from racing. If she could just think clearly, just for a moment, she knew she could figure a way out of this.

Rackley had said fuck it. That was a surprise. Was he letting her off the hook? Or did he plan to put moves on her, use her as his permanent snitch and part-time squeeze?

She saw lights coming up the road, a four-wheel-drive vehicle in low gear, and she folded her arms across her chest, starting to hyperventilate now, determined to stare down whoever it was, even if they killed her.

The agent named Jim and a second agent whose name she didn't know pulled their Cherokee onto the grass and parked next to her car and got out and walked toward her, dressed like trout fishermen, smiling easily.

"Amos says you had a rough day today," Jim said.

"Where've you been, you sonofabitch?" she said.

"Let's don't have profanity. That's not nice," Jim said.

"Somebody was following me," she said, trying to keep her voice from trembling.

"The road was empty. There's nobody out there," he replied.

"I want a plane ticket to Seattle," she said.

"I don't think that's in the cards right now," Jim said.

"You do it for people in Witness Protection all the time."

"We still got a lot of unfinished work. A lot of work," he said, shaking his head profoundly.

"Amos said 'fuck it.' He told me I did a good job."

"You shouldn't have boosted a post office, kiddo," Jim said.

"I got to take a leak," the other agent said.

As though she were not there, the two agents walked down by the stream and pointed themselves into a Douglas fir tree and urinated on the ground. She stared at their backs, listening to their banter, realizing finally how absolutely insignificant she was.

Screw you, she thought, and got into their Cherokee, started the engine, and made a U-turn, the driver's door swinging back on its hinges. Their mouths hung open in disbelief as the Cherokee roared down the road in the darkness.

Jim took a cell phone out of the pocket of his windbreaker and punched in several numbers.

"A little problem here, boss man," he said.

"What problem?" the voice of Amos Rackley said.

"Pocahontas just hauled ass."

"So go after her."

"Can't do it, Amos. She took the Cherokee and left us her shit machine. The one with no lights."

There was a pause.

"Have you visited Fargo in the winter?" Rackley asked.

Jim clicked off the cell phone and set it on the roof of Sue Lynn's car and propped his arms against the metal and stared at the waning light on the ridgeline. The trees rustled in the wind and he thought he smelled rain. He fished in his pocket and removed a cheese sandwich he had wrapped in wax paper and handed half of it to his friend just as a solitary raindrop struck the hood of the car.

He and the other agent got inside and closed the doors and ate the sandwich, bored, irritated with themselves, wondering if Amos was serious about Fargo.

High up on the ridge a man wearing cowboy boots with sharply defined heels worked his way through the tree trunks until he saw the stock car parked down below in the glade, the orange numerals in bold relief against the gray primer on the door. He stuffed rubber plugs in his ears and got down in a prone position and steadied a rifle on a collapsible tripod in the softness of the pine needles, then pulled back the bolt and chambered a round.

He sighted down the slope and waited, working his jaw comfortably against the stock. The moon was up now and he could see clearly into the glade. A shadow moved behind the steering wheel; a cigarette lighter flared on a face. Perfect.