Bitterroot

by James Lee Burke

  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.

  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.

  Chapter 26

  "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 in
to 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.

  "You were hiding on the side road."

  "I wasn't," he said, crinkling his nose under his glasses, waiting to see if she would refute the lie. When she didn't she could see the vindication grow in his face. "Your father attacked me in front of all those people at the concert. I took you home that night when the football players were going to hurt you. I got in a lot of trouble with Wyatt over that."

  "You buried a woman alive. You're disgusting. Get out of here," she said.

  "You don't know what you're saying. That Indian bitch caused all this."

  "Caused what?" Maisey said, then realized she had stepped into the trap of arguing with a person who had probably never told the truth about anything in his life.

  "She got those federal agents killed. They're gonna blame Wyatt or me. Everything's coming apart. I had a lot of plans," he said. Then he seemed to grow more passionate, more unjustly injured, his eyes magnifying behind his glasses. "I bought a camera. I want to take pictures of you. Down on the river."

  The fact that he was speaking intimately to her, as though she were part of his world, made her stomach turn. She rushed inside the store and got a basket and pushed it down the aisle, trying to concentrate on the list in her hand.

  Out in the parking lot Terry Witherspoon stood by Doc's truck, chewing on a hangnail, glaring at the traffic.

  "Is everything all right, miss?" the butcher said. He was an Indian, wrapped around the middle with a red-stained apron.

  "Yes. Fine," she replied.

  "You know that fellow out there?" he asked.

  "Not really."

  "He was in here once before. That's why he's not in here now. You let me know if he bothers you," the butcher said.

  Fifteen minutes later she wheeled her basket loaded with sacked groceries back into the parking lot. Terry Witherspoon was waiting for her, tossing his head to clear a strand of hair from his glasses.

  "When I saw you through the window, in the shower that night, you were as beautiful as a movie star," he said. When she didn't answer he started to lift one of the sacks from the basket.

  "Don't touch that," she sai
d. "I want to help you."

  "Don't put your hands on our food. Get away from my basket."

  The wind blew his hair across his glasses. He continued to stare at her as though he could not assimilate what he was being told. Then he said, "Shit on you."

  She loaded her groceries into the bed of the pickup, trying to ignore the closeness of his body and the smell of deodorant that rose from his clothes. She got into the truck and started the engine, but Witherspoon remained standing by her window.

  "I can't see the street," she said.

  "I should have let Wyatt bust you. You're just a little whore. That's why you were hanging out in that bar. You wanted more of what Lamar and the others gave you. Lamar said you gave good head."

  She ground the transmission and tried to swing out on the street, but the guards were up at the train crossing and traffic had backed up across the entrance to the parking lot.

  Witherspoon got behind her and began blowing his horn and smashing his bumper against hers, much harder than she thought a low-centered car would be able to do. Then she realized pieces of pipe were overwelded, like gridwork or a battering ram, on the front of his car. Witherspoon snugged the bumper against the rear of the truck and slowly accelerated and starting pushing her into the street. His back tires burned black strips on the asphalt and spun circles of smoke under the fenders, but the truck was wobbling on the frame now, the back wheels losing purchase, Maisey's foot slipping on the brake. All the while Witherspoon kept his palm clamped down on his horn button.

  Even if she made it out into the traffic without being hit she knew he would follow her all the way home, tailgating and cutting her off, trying to force her into the path of oncoming traffic.

  Go inside and get the butcher, she thought.

  Like hell.

  She pulled into the street, glancing once in her rearview mirror. Witherspoon was looking right and left, waiting for an opportunity to floor the accelerator after her. He never realized the seriousness of his presumption until it was too late.