James Burke - Bitterroot

"Is this the line for the bathroom?" I asked.

They stopped talking and looked at me peculiarly, as though I had spoken in another language. Then a woman said, "Holly's inside."

The door was ajar, and I saw Holly Girard bend over a framed mirror that lay horizontally on a marble-topped counter. Her evening dress was backless, and I could see the delicate bones under her skin as she inhaled a chopped white line deeply into her lungs through a rolled dollar bill. She wiped the mirror's surface with her index finger and rubbed her finger inside her gums.

She straightened her shoulders, turned and opened the door, and looked blankly into my face.

"Oh hello, again," she said. "The maid must have misplaced my toothbrush. I had to brush my teeth with my finger. Can you imagine?"

"Right. Can I get out through that far door?" I said, pointing toward the end of the hallway.

"Are you offended in some way?" she asked.

"No, I'm not."

"Then stay," she said, and reached out and encircled my wrist as she had earlier.

"You asked me why I quit the Justice Department," I said. "It's because a Texas Ranger named L.Q. Navarro and I killed a bunch of cocaine and tar mules down in Old Mexico. I hate the son-sofbitches who sell that stuff, and if I had it to do all over, I'd kill those men again. So I guess it'd be a little hypocritical of me if I prosecuted homicide cases.

The group by the oil painting stared at me with the opaqueness of people caught in a strobe light.

"Don't be that way," Holly said to me, her expression suddenly tender.

I walked down the hall and out the door into the night, the back of my neck flaming with embarrassment.

Doc AND I dropped Cleo at her car by the ice cream parlor, then drove up the Blackfoot River toward his house. We turned off the highway north of Potomac, rumbled across the log-and-cable bridge onto the dirt road, and drove along the edge of a dry creek bed that was white and dusty and webbed with algae under the moon.

Doc kept squinting his eyes through the front window.

"That looks like a fire," he said.

"Where?"

"Through the trees. You see it?" he said.

"No," I said, irritably, and used the electric buttons on the door to roll down all the windows in the truck. "You smell any smoke?"

"None," he said.

"Then for God's sakes, shut up. I don't want to hear any more doom and gloom. If just for five minutes. Okay, Doc?"

We went across a cattle guard and drove down the two-track lane through the meadow behind his house. I had been right. There was no fire in the vicinity. Instead, Doc's yard was filled with emergency vehicles whose flashers lit the front porch of the house and the trees and the pebbled bank of the river and the current that flowed through the boulders with the dull red glow of a smithy's forge.

A FEW MINUTES LATER I watched the paramedics carry Maisey on a gurney to the back of an ambulance and place her inside. The night air was cold and a paramedic had pulled a blanket to her chin. Her face was turned from me, but I could see a marbled discoloration on her neck, like the shape of a hand. A sheriff's deputy wearing latex gloves came out of the house carrying a vinyl garbage bag that contained Maisey's jeans and torn blouse and undergarments.

Doc climbed into the back of the ambulance with her and looked back at me, his face like I'd never seen it before.

"I'll follow y'all to the hospital," I said.

He didn't answer. A paramedic closed the door and the ambulance turned around in the yard and drove back through the meadow toward the gate and the dirt road. The engine made no sound, and I could hear the grass that grew along the two-track lane brushing against the ambulance's undercarriage.

"Your friend is having a bad night, so I don't hold his rudeness against him," the sheriff said. "But I'm gonna tell you what I told him, and you can repeat it to him in the morning. There were three bikers."

He held up three fingers in front of me.

"One way or another we'll nail them. That means your friend takes care of his daughter and I take care of the law. You hearing me on this?" the sheriff said.

"Yeah, I am, Sheriff. What bothers me is it's the same bullshit I ran on crime victims when I knew the perps would probably skate," I said.

"I don't care for your manner, Mr. Holland, but I'm gonna let that go… We talked to the boy she was with earlier. The kids told Dr. Voss they were going to a movie. But that wasn't the real plan. After you and the doctor left, they thought they'd have a little private time together. Except they had a fight at some point and the boy went home. I say 'at some point,' do you follow me?"

"They were in the sack?" I asked.

"Neither one is willing to say that, but that'd be my guess."

"So even if you nail the bikers, their attorney will put it on Maisey's friend?"

"You're a defense lawyer. Do you know an easier client to get off than a sex predator?"

"I couldn't tell you. I don't take them."

"You damn shysters take anybody with a checkbook," he said.

Then he shook his head as though taking himself to task. "Look, back in the 1860s the Montana Vigilance Committee lynched twenty-two murderers and highwaymen," he said. "They bounced them off cottonwood trees and barn rafters all over the state. I guess it could make a man yearn for the good old days. But this ain't them. You tell that to Dr. Voss for me."

Try telling him yourself, bud, I thought as he walked away from me, the thickness of his sidearm showing against the flap of his coat.

I stayed with Doc in the waiting room at St. Patrick's in Missoula while he paced and hammered one fist on top of the other.

"Slow it down, Tobin," I said.

He stopped pacing, but not because of me. He was listening to a conversation outside the door. Two uniformed deputies were enjoying a joke of some kind, one with coarse edges, a reference to sodomy, a laugh at the expense of a woman.

Doc stepped out into the hall.

"You guys have something else to do?" he said.

"What?" one of them said.

"We're all right here," I said, stepping into the deputy's line of vision.

One deputy touched the other on the arm, and the two of them walked back toward the hospital entrance.

"I'll buy you a cup of coffee across the street," I said to Doc.

"I'm going back to the emergency room," he said.

"They told you to stay out. Why don't you let them do their job?"

"You lecture me one more time, Billy Bob, and I'm going to knock you down," he replied.

I couldn't blame him for his anger. He was a good man who loved his daughter, and the two of them had just stepped into the middle of an unending, degrading, and callous process that treats victims and family members as ciphers in an investigative file, rips away all vestiges of their privacy, and often inculcates in them the conclusion that somehow they are deserving of their fate.

I left Doc alone and went outside into the darkness. The maple trees were in full leaf, the night air crisp and tinged with smoke from a grass fire on a hill. Children were riding bikes on a sidewalk and the sounds of a baseball game broadcast from the West Coast came through the open window of an old brick rooming house. It was a scene from the brush of Norman Rockwell. But inside the hospital Maisey Voss was plugged into a morphine-laced IV, her body strung with purple and yellow bruises that went into the bone, the fetid breath of her attackers still wrapped around her face like cobweb.

A few feet away I saw L.Q. Navarro leaning with his back against the trunk of a maple tree, rolling a cigarette, his down-tilted Stetson and black suit silhouetted against the lighted entrance of the emergency room.

"You don't have anything to say?" I asked.