James Burke - Bitterroot

The shooter squeezed back the trigger and burned the entire thirty-round magazine, swinging the barrel on the tripod, the copper-jacketed.223 rounds pocking the door panels and the roof, gashing the seats, blowing glass out of the dashboard, popping the horn button loose like a tiddlywink.

When the breech locked open, the shooter rose to his feet and removed the rubber plugs from his ears, dropping one into the pine needles, and walked back down the opposite slope to his vehicle.

Down in the glade the driver's door of Sue Lynn's car swung open and Jim fell out on the grass, his mouth blooming with uneaten sandwich bread. He clawed his way up the side of the car and found his cell phone where he had left it on the roof, then collapsed on the ground again, his clothes soaked with blood, and pushed the redial button.

But when Amos Rackley answered, Jim realized that the sucking chest wound he tried to close with his hand had stolen his voice. He lay on his back in the grass, one leg bent under him, and used his fingernail to tap out a last message on the mouthpiece to Amos Rackley.

"You KNOW what he Morsed me? 'Sorry.' He was sorry," Amos Rackley said.

It was the next morning, and we were standing in front of Doc's porch. Rackley's face was drained of color, his eyes smoldering.

"Sue Lynn Big Medicine hasn't been here. I don't know where your vehicle is, either," I said.

"Is your son in his tent?"

"He took my truck to town. Leave him alone, Mr. Rackley. He's not in this."

"He just porks her on a regular basis when she's not getting federal agents killed?"

I looked at the fatigue and caffeinated tension in his face and knew it was only a matter of time before the anger in his eyes focused inward and Amos Rackley found himself locked up with his own thoughts for many years.

"Come inside, sir," I said.

"What?"

"Have you eaten? I have some coffee and pancakes on the stove."

He took a breath of air through his nose, looking off into the distance, as though he were choosing between one of several insults to hurl at me.

"I should have been with them," he said.

"They were doing their job. Why not give them credit for it?"

"I made a wisecrack to Jim about Fargo. That's the last thing I said to him."

"It wasn't anybody's fault except the bastards who did it. These are the guys you hang out to dry. Not yourself, not a kid like Sue Lynn Big Medicine."

He rubbed his face with his hand. He had shaved so closely there were pink scrape marks on his chin. He seemed to take my measure as though he didn't know who I was.

"I'll take a raincheck on the pancakes. Could I use your bathroom?" he said.

As Rackley drove through the field behind Doc's he passed Temple Carrol's Explorer. She parked in the yard and walked up on the porch, her backpack full of research materials slung from one hand.

"That guy looked like a fed," she said.

"He is. Two of his agents were killed on the Flathead Reservation last night."

"The ones who rousted you?"

"Yeah, one of them, anyway."

"Who did it?"

"Probably one of Carl Hinkel's people. Sue Lynn took the agents' vehicle and left them stranded with her uncle's stock car. The shooter probably thought she was inside."

Temple threw her backpack onto a chair and went into the house and came back out with a cup of coffee in her hand.

"Where's Sue Lynn?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"I checked out the background of Xavier and Holly Girard," she said.

"What for?"

"He's a writer and she's an actress, but they keep showing up where they don't have any business. Each time they have some innocuous explanation. Read this," she said, and handed me a manila folder filled with fax sheets from a private investigator in Phoenix, Arizona.

"By the way, Holly Girard didn't meet Nicki Molinari out here. Their families both belonged to the same country club in Scottsdale," she said.

I sat down and read through the sheets in the folder.

"Her mother's maiden name was Carruthers?" I said.

"You got it."

"Why is it I feel I've been had?" I said.

"I couldn't guess," Temple said.

We drove to the Girards' house above the Clark Fork but no one was home. Then, because I was unconvinced of Xavier's sobriety, we tried the downtown bars. We found him playing pinochle in the back of a workingman's place on Front Street called Stockman's, a bottle of ginger ale by his elbow. He gave me a tired look. "What is it now?" he asked.

"Not much, a discussion of assets, family names, mining interests, that sort of thing," I said.

He grinned at the other players and shrugged his shoulders, as though saying "What can I do?" We went out the back door into the sunshine. A carousel was revolving on the riverbank, the hand-carved wooden horses filled with children.

"Your wife is a member of the family that owns the Phillips-Carruthers Corporation, the same guys who want to destroy the Blackfoot River?" I said.

"You're talking about Holly's mother, not Holly. Holly doesn't own anything," he replied, leaning against an iron rail, looking off at the river.

"That's a little bit disingenuous, don't you think?" I said.

"Hey, get out of our lives, Mr. Holland." "You misled me. I think you've misled this community, too."

"About what?" he said.

"Your wife has a vested interest in seeing Doc hurt. By extension, so do you. That brings us right back to the rape of Maisey Voss and the murder of Lamar Ellison," I said. "You're full of shit."

But he looked like a wounded animal, the hot glare in his eyes focusing on nothing, as if nothing in his range of vision would connect with the confused thoughts in his head. He had managed to combine the roles of cuckold, novelist, flamboyant drunk, Hollywood iconoclast, friend of the environment, confidant of gangsters, and object of pity all in one persona. I wondered when the day would come when he stuck a pistol into his mouth.

Temple and I started to walk away.

"If it's any of your business, Holly and I are busting up," he said at my back.

"Why?" I said.

"She's getting it on with Molinari again. I've had it," he replied.

But if he intended to elicit sympathy, he failed with Temple. She walked to within a foot of his face.

"You're going on the stand, baby cakes. Get used to it," she said.

Later, Maisey got into Doc's truck with a shopping list and headed down the dirt road toward the main highway and the small, independent grocery store in Bonner. As she approached the log bridge over the Blackfoot she saw a low-slung red car in her rearview mirror. The bridge trembled under her as she rumbled across the wood planks and a dust cloud blew out on the water and disappeared in the current. When she swung out onto the highway she looked back briefly and saw the red car again and this time she recognized Terry Witherspoon behind the wheel.

He followed her all the way into Bonner, through the quiet stretch of tree-shaded, company-owned houses, past the sawmill and the piles of green lumber stacked next to waiting train cars, past the normal world that most people lived in, then around a bend in the road to the grocery store parking lot. She got out of the truck and started inside, then went back and locked the door, even though she left the window open.

Terry Witherspoon pulled in close to the store entrance and was now waving at her, as though the only problem between them was her failure to recognize who he was.

Then he got out of his car, smiling at her above the top of the door.

"Didn't you see me back there?" he said.

"Right," she said.

He was dressed in khaki slacks and shined loafers and a gold and burgundy University of Montana sweater.

"I was coming up to your house when you zoomed on past me," he said.