Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  A HALF HOUR LATER Doc Voss joined me outside.

  "They moved her upstairs. You want to hear what those bastards did to her?" he said.

  "I was a cop, Doc. I've been there," I said.

  But he told me anyway. In physiological detail, his voice cracking in his throat, his palms opening and closing at his sides.

  "She's alive, partner. A lot of predators don't leave witnesses," I said.

  "You're pretty glib for a guy on the sidelines," he said.

  I let it pass and looked down the street, away from his angry stare.

  He pressed the ball of his thumb into my arm.

  "What would you do if she were your daughter? Don't you lie, either," he said.

  "Try to get the wrong thoughts out of my head," I replied.

  "You and L.Q. Navarro stuck playing cards in the mouths of dead people," he said.

  "They tortured a DEA agent to death. They threw down on us first."

  "My daughter doesn't count as much as a federal agent?" he said.

  "I think you're working on a nervous breakdown, Tobin."

  I walked away from him. Down the street a sheriff's department cruiser pulled around the corner and approached us. Inside were the two deputies whom Doc had insulted earlier. One of them sat in back with a handcuffed man whose jaws were bright with gold stubble, his long, tangled hair tied up on his head with a bandanna that leaked blood above one eye. The deputy in back lifted the handcuffed man's chin with a baton, as though displaying a severed head on a plate.

  "This is one of the guys who raped and sodomized your daughter. He fell down a fire escape while resisting arrest," the deputy said. "Lamar, you got something you want to say to Dr. Voss?"

  "Yeah. My dick in your ear," the biker named Lamar Ellison said out the window.

  "The standards in street mutts gets lower every day," the same deputy said, shaking his head. He tapped on the seat for his partner to drive on.

  Doc stared at the rear window, his jawbone flexing.

  "They got one. They'll get the others," I said.

  "It's not enough," he replied.

  Chapter 7

  Maisey came home from the hospital three days later. Doc tied balloons on the furniture in her bedroom and bought teddy bears and stuffed frogs and giraffes and a pink rabbit that was four feet tall and propped them up on her pillows, but his attempt at good cheer and optimism was like wind blowing through an empty building.

  Maisey's eyes seemed possessed, haunted by thoughts she didn't share. Her face jumped at sudden noises. Her breath was sour and funk rose out of her clothes. When her father tried to comfort her, she curled into a ball and pulled the bedcovers over her head, spilling the stuffed animals he had bought her on the floor.

  Through the doorway I saw Doc sitting on the side of the bed, his hand on his daughter's back, staring into space. "What are we going to do, kiddo?" he said, more to himself than to her.

  The sun was above the mountain now, but the inside of the room was filled with a brittle yellow light that gave no warmth.

  At noon Cleo Lonnigan arrived in her truck and fixed lunch and drove into Bonner and bought a cake and a gallon of ice cream. Later she convinced Maisey to put on her quilted robe and fluffy slippers and to sit on the porch with her father while Cleo showed us what she could do with firearms.

  She took a holstered.22 revolver off the gun rack in her truck, buckled it on, and set three tin cans in a row against a dirt bluff, then walked back fifty feet and blew each can into the air, then nailed it again as it rolled down the embankment.

  "You want to give it a try?" she asked Maisey.

  "No. I don't like guns," Maisey said.

  "Sure?" Cleo said.

  "Yes. Thanks anyway. I just don't like guns. I never did," Maisey said, her eyes slightly out of focus, as though she were thinking of who or what she had once been. The wind blew her hair and made gray lines in her scalp. She stuck her hands inside the sleeves of her robe.

  I walked down to the dirt bluff and helped Cleo pick up the cans and place them in a paper sack.

  "Good try," I said.

  "She's going to need some heavy counseling. I don't think Doc has any idea what they're in for," she said.

  "Don't underestimate him."

  "You know what victim rape is?"

  "The system does it to her a second time?"

  She glanced toward the porch, where Doc and Maisey were sitting in the shade. She turned toward the river, so her voice would carry away from the house.

  "I talked with the sheriff this morning. Maisey couldn't pick Lamar Ellison out of a photographic lineup," she said.

  "What about fingerprints? They lifted prints all over her room," I said.

  "Not his. He was released from jail this morning. No charges are being filed."

  I let out my breath and looked up at the porch. Doc was petting a calico cat. He scratched its head, then set it in Maisey's lap.

  "I wish I had let Ellison strangle to death. I think about putting my hand in his mouth and I want to scrub my skin with disinfectant," Cleo said.

  "The sheriff hasn't told Doc?"

  "No."

  "Why would he tell you first?"

  Her throat was red, as though chafed by the wind. "Because I've known the sheriff since my son was murdered. Because Lamar Ellison is a member of the Berdoo Jesters. They were seen at the campground the night before my son died."

  She went to the back of the house and dropped the paper sack with the cans in it into a trash barrel, then walked back to her truck. She unbuckled the holstered revolver, threw it on the seat, and slammed the door as though ending an argument in her own mind.

  A few MINUTES LATER I saw a Jeep Cherokee turn off the dirt road and clatter across Doc's cattle guard and come through the grass behind the house. The Cherokee pulled around by the porch and Holly Girard got out from the driver's side. She picked up a covered dish from the seat and walked up to the steps. A man I didn't know sat in the passenger seat, a camera around his neck.

  "I thought you could use some of Xavier's coonass gumbo," Holly said.

  "That's thoughtful of you. Where's Xavier?" Doc said.

  "Drinking ice water and eating aspirin in the sauna. Guess why?" she replied.

  She wore crimson suede boots and tailored khakis and a white blouse that puffed in the wind and exposed the tops of her breasts. She had on a safari hat, but she removed it and tossed her hair, then I saw the photographer get out of the Jeep and walk down toward the river, as though he did not want to intrude upon a private moment.

  "We want Maisey to know she has lots of friends in Missoula," she said.

  "Yes, I know she does," Doc said. "How'd you learn about our trouble?"

  "Xavier is friends with the police reporter at the Missoulian," Holly said.

  "Seems like Xavier's friend is more loquacious than he should be," Doc said.

  There was silence, then Holly Girard said, "Well, should I put this inside?"

  Behind me I heard Cleo Lonnigan open the door and step out on the porch. She looked down on the riverbank, then bit the corner of her lip.

  "I just burned something on the stove. The odor's terrible. Here, I'll take that inside for you," she said. "Who's our friend with the camera?"

  Holly smiled and stepped up on the porch and put the covered dish in Cleo's hands, her face turned at an angle so that it caught the light.

  "He's doing a photo essay on the 'Take Back the Night' march at the university. I hope you don't mind him tagging along with me," Holly said.

  Doc got up from his chair and put a stick of gum into his mouth. He chewed it, his eyes crinkling at the corners, the way he often did when he chose to ignore what was worst in people.

  "Come on in and have some cake," he said.

  But Cleo remained in front of the door.

  "That man's taking pictures, Doc," she said.

  Doc turned and looked down the embankment at the photographer, who had now lowered his camera.
/>
  "Is that true, Holly?" Doc asked.

  "I didn't know he was going to do that. I'm sorry. If you want the film, you can have it," Holly said.

  "I think you should leave," Cleo said.

  "Excuse me?" Holly said.

  "Bad day for photo-ops. That shouldn't be difficult to understand," Cleo said.

  "Does this person speak for you, Tobin?" Holly said.

  "Why don't all of you stop talking like I'm not here?" Maisey said.

  We all turned and stared at her. She wore no makeup, and her face had the bloodless quality of people who have experienced long illness.

  "They did it to me, not you. What right have you all to make decisions about what happens around me? You're treating me like a dumb animal," she said.

  In the silence we could hear the wind blowing in the cottonwoods and the water coursing around the exposed boulders in the middle of the river. The photographer rubbed the back of his neck, as though he were massaging an insect bite or waiting for a momentary external problem to pass out of his vision. Then he detached the telescopic lens from his camera, got back into the Jeep, and yawned sleepily, waiting for Holly Girard to join him.

  After Holly Girard was gone, I drove down to Bonner and called the sheriff's office.

  "You kicked Lamar Ellison loose?" I said.

  "At eight o'clock this morning. Right after he ate. He said he couldn't hardly let go of our sausages and hashbrowns," the sheriff replied.

  "You think that's funny?"

  "You give your damn guff to somebody else. If I had my way, I'd pinch his head off with a log chain."

  "Then why don't you do it?"

  "Because I don't have victim ID. They put a pillow down on her face. Besides, I don't have bean dip for physical evidence."

  "There was DNA in her clothes and on the bed-sheets. They took swabs at the hospital," I said.

  The line was quiet.

  "Hello?" I said.

  "It got sent to the lab… We don't know what happened to it," the sheriff said.

  "Say again?"

  "You heard me. I'm coming out there to explain all this to Dr. Voss."

  I could feel my hand opening and closing on the phone receiver, my chest rising and falling.

  "These bikers, the Berdoo Jesters? Cleo Lonnigan says they may have been involved in her son's murder," I said.

  "That's what she believes. I like Cleo, but the truth is her husband washed money for the Mob. Maybe she don't like to admit where her wealth comes from. There might even be a mean side to Cleo you don't know about," the sheriff said, and hung up.

  I called him back, my hand shaking when I punched in the numbers.

  "Rapists who get away with it come back. They increase their power by tormenting the victim," I said.

  "Take Dr. Voss and his daughter back to Texas. Let us handle it," he replied.

  My ass, I thought.

  The first call came the next day. I happened to answer it. In the background I could hear people laughing and a motorcycle engine revving.

  "Is this the doctor?" the voice said.

  "Who's calling?"

  "Thought you might want to know she'd already lost her cherry. So don't make out it's a bigger deal than it was," the voice said.

  "What's your name, partner?"

  "I just wanted to tell the pill roller his daughter gives good head. I've had better, but she's got promise. If I get horny, I might give her another tumble. Have a nice day."

  "You're not a smart man."

  The line went dead.

  I went into the living room. Doc was rubbing oil into a pair of lace-top boots by the fireplace.

  "Who was that?" he asked.

  "One of those motorcycle boys."

  He rubbed another layer of oil on a boot and turned the boot over in his hands and looked at it.

  "You reckon they'll be back around?" he said.

  "If they think they can blindside you," I replied.

  He wiped the excess oil off his boots with a rag and looked idly out the window, his thoughts masked.

  I SPLIT WOOD on a chopping stump in back. The morning had grown warm and I was sweating inside my clothes. It had snowed up high during the night and the newly fallen snow was melting in the trees on the ridges, and there was a dark sheen on the pine and fir needles. I whipped the ax through the air and felt it rip cleanly through a chunk of dry larch. The ax handle was solid and hard inside my hands, and in minutes the ground around the stump was littered with white strips of kindling.

  I held the ax blade flat against the stump with my knee and filed it sharp, then attacked another pile of wood.

  My head was singing with blood, my palms tingling. I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro up on the edge of the tree line, his coat hitched back of his revolver, and I knew what was really on my mind.

  The adrenaline rush that came with the smell of gunpowder and horse sweat during our raids down into Coahuila had the same residual claim on my soul that heroin has on an intravenous addict's. In my sleep I desired it in almost a sexual fashion. It drove me to the grace and loveliness of women's thighs. It made me yearn for absolution and kept me in the Catholic confessional. It made me sometimes sit in the darkness with L.Q.'s blue-black custom-made.45, its yellowed ivory grips like moonlight between my fingers.

  I went into the house and showered inside the tin stall and kept my head under the hot water for a long time. There was an old bullet wound, like a putty-colored welted star, on top of my foot, and another on my arm and another on my chest, two inches above the lung. I never associated them with pain, because I had felt only numbness when I was hit.

  In fact, the memories they caused in me had never given me trepidation about mortality. Instead, they reminded me of a potential in myself I did not wish to recognize.

  I started to comb my hair, but Maisey's robe hung over the only mirror in the room. I removed it and put it on a clothes hanger and hooked the hanger on top of the closet door. The robe was pink and covered with depictions of kittens playing with balls of string. I tried to imagine what Doc was feeling, but I don't believe that anyone could, not unless he has looked into his daughter's eyes after she has been systematically degraded by subhumans whose level of cruelty is in direct measure to their level of cowardice.

  My hair was reddish-blond, like my father's, but there were strands of white in it now, and neither time nor experience had taught me how to deal with the violent legacy that my great-grandfather, Sam Morgan Holland, a besotted drover and gunfighter and Baptist preacher, had bequeathed his descendants.

  I had admonished and cautioned Doc, but in truth I felt Maisey's attackers were born for a cottonwood tree.

  I DRESSED in fresh clothes and slipped on my boots and went back into the living room. Doc was scraping the ashes out of the fireplace with a small metal scoop and dropping them into a bucket that he covered with a lid each time the ashes puffed into the air.

  "The older you get, the more you look like your dad. He was a good-looking fellow, wasn't he?" Doc said.

  "Family trait," I said.

  He wiped soot off his face with his sleeve and grinned. He waited for me to speak again, reading my expression with more perception than made me comfortable.

  "I thought I might go into town," I said.

  "What for?"

  I cleared my throat slightly.

  "If Cleo's not at the clinic, I thought I might invite her to lunch," I said.

  "You took her to the rodeo, didn't you?"

  "I guess I did."

  "You want some advice? Most of us have fond memories of first love because it was innocent and we didn't exploit it to solve our problems. Later on we use romance like dope. Headstones don't keep people in the grave and neither does getting laid," he replied. He turned his back on me and scraped a load of black ash from the firestones and dropped it into the bucket.

  "That's a little bit strong, Doc."

  I thought he would turn around and grin again and perhaps indicate some f
orm of apology.

  But he didn't.

  When I drove into the Jocko Valley the meadows and hillsides were covered with sunlight, but the sky in the north had turned the color of scorched tin, and I could see lightning pulsing in the clouds above the ridgeline.

  Just as I turned off the main road I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a low-slung red car behind me, one that was coming too fast, drifting across the center line, as though the driver were bothered by the fact there was an obstruction in his path. I remembered having seen, or rather heard, the same car earlier back in Missoula, when the driver had roared onto the 1-90 entrance ramp. The car didn't turn with me and instead kept going on the main road. A woman in the passenger's seat looked back at me blankly, her hair whipping across her mouth.

  I drove through the gated entrance to Cleo's place and stopped by the barn. A bare-chested carpenter, who had the suntanned good looks of a Nordic sailor, was working on the roof. He told me Cleo was not home, that she was with some of her patients.

  "At the clinic?" I said.

  He slipped his hammer into a loop on his belt and spread his knees on the spine of the roof and pointed to a dirt road that disappeared into trees on an adjoining hill.

  "She makes house calls. You'll know when you're there," he said.

  "How's that?" I said.

  "Some people take care of stray cats. Cleo's special, the best damn woman in these parts, buddy," he replied, almost like a challenge.

  I drove back out the gate and up the dirt road into the shade of the trees. Halfway up the hill I saw an unpainted house back in a clearing and Cleo's skinned-up truck parked in the yard.

  The yard was littered with flattened beer cans, chicken feathers that had blown from a butcher stump, washing machine and car parts, even a toilet bowl that lay incongruously on its side by an outdoor privy. A trash fire was burning in back of the house, and the wind blew the smoke through the back windows and out the open front door. I stepped up on the porch and saw Cleo in the kitchen, spooning oatmeal out of a pan to three small Indian children at the table.