Bitterroot (43 page)

But a strange sense of guilt and depression seemed to settle on me, and it had nothing to do with Dixon or Witherspoon. For the first time I knew with certainty why L.Q. Navarro’s spirit haunted me.

I had broken the troth the preacher had described to me when I was river-baptized in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. While I was still shivering inside my father’s old Army shirt, the preacher had leaned his long face through the truck window and had told me I never needed to be afraid again, that there was no mistaking the significance of the green-gold autumnal light that had broken like shattered crystal across my eyes when I was lifted gasping for breath from the stream. The burning in my skin was like no sensation I had ever experienced, as different from prior association as the landscape had become, the way the leaves of the hardwoods fluttered with red and gold, flowing for miles like a field of flowers, all the way up the slope to the massive blue outline of the Ozarks.

But fear that L.Q. and I would not prevail, that we would not be vindicated or avenged, got L.Q. killed in an insect-infested arroyo over amounts of narcotics that were minuscule in terms of the larger market, that probably did not change the life of one addict or put one dealer out of business. What a trade-off, I thought.

“I make you mad up there, throwing Holly Girard out?” Temple said behind me.

“No, not at all. You were eloquent,” I replied.

“So what are you thinking on?”

“Carl Hinkel’s gone missing. I know where he is.”

“Oh?”

“I made sure Nicki Molinari knew about Hinkel’s connection to the murder of Cleo Lonnigan’s son. Molinari’s going to use Hinkel to get his money back from Cleo. I think Molinari might let Cleo pop him.”

“It’s their grief,” Temple said.

 “Maybe.”

“Where you going?” she asked.

“To pull the plug on this if I can,” I said.

But there was no answer at Cleo Lonnigan’s house and her message machine was turned off. I went back outside and took L.Q.‘s revolver and a box of .45 rounds from Lucas’s tent and found Temple down by the river.

“Want a ride home?” I said.

“No. But I’ll go with you wherever it is that you and I need to go together,” she replied.

E DROVE out to the Jocko Valley and Cleo Lonnigan’s place, but she wasn’t home. I left a note inside her door that read:

Dear Cleo,

Do not go out to Nicki Molinari’s ranch, regardless of what you might consider the necessity of the situation. I’m contacting the sheriff and informing him I think Molinari is involved with a kidnapping. Eventually Carl Hinkel’s fate will probably be worse than anything you or I could design for him.

I wish you all the best,                                                 Billy Bob Holland

I got into the truck and used Temple’s cell phone to call 911. A dispatcher patched me in to the sheriff. Once again I had caught him on the weekend. I told him what I believed had happened to Carl Hinkel.

“You’re telling me it was Molinari grabbed him in front of that barbershop?” the sheriff said.

“Yes,” I replied.

“And you set it up?”

“Not exactly.”

“No, you set it up.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll pass on your information to the sheriff in Ravalli County.”

“When?”

“When I get hold of him. In the meantime I’d better not hear from you again till Monday morning,” he said.

I clicked off the cell phone and started the truck.

“I have a feeling the sheriff isn’t sweating the fate of Carl Hinkel,” I said.

“What do you want to do?” Temple asked.

“I have to go out there. I’ll drop you off at your motel.”

“Forget it,” she said.

We drove into the Bitterroot Valley, into its mead-owland and meandering river lined with cotton-woods and canyons that were like dark purple gashes inside the green immensity of the mountains in the west. Up ahead I saw four or five cars and a wrecker on the side of the road and a highway patrolman interviewing two people and writing on a clipboard.

One of the interviewees was Cleo Lonnigan. She seemed to recognize my truck as we sped past her. In my rearview mirror I saw her hand raised momentarily in the air, like someone trying to flag down a bus.

“You think she’d shoot Carl Hinkel?” Temple said.

“Maybe. It’s not easy to do when you have to look the victim in the eye.”

“Hinkel and Wyatt Dixon aren’t victims. I wish I’d been there when Terry Witherspoon was taken down from the tree. I had something I would have liked to say.”

“What?”

“He would have remembered it.”

We turned off the highway at Stevensville and drove through town toward the Sapphires. I pulled into the entrance of Molinari’s but stopped when I saw the preacher from next door standing on top of his church, an electric saw in his hand, staring at Molinari’s stucco house.

I got out of the truck and walked to the fence that separated the preacher’s and Molinari’s property.

“Anything wrong?” I said.

The preacher draped his saw across the crest of the roof and climbed down a ladder and walked toward me.

“There was a drunk man around here last night and again this morning. I think he was looking for that greaser. But he couldn’t raise nobody,” he said.

“What was he driving?” I asked.

“A Jeep Cherokee. He knocked down the mailbox.”

“Where’d he go?” I said.

“He come back a little while ago. That’s why I was trying to see what went on.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I heard about fifteen pops. They sounded like they all come from the same gun.”

I got back into the truck and started the engine and Temple punched in a 911 call to the Ravalli County Sheriff’s Department.

“Y’all going in there?” the preacher said.

“Yeah, I think we’d better.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, and went into his church house and came back out with a Bible. He climbed up into the bed of the truck and scrunched down like a squirrel and hit the cab with his fist.

We drove up to the stucco house and parked behind Molinari’s convertible and a white Cherokee. When we got out of the truck, our footsteps seemed as loud as rocks on slate. Out in a field an unmilked cow, its udder hard and veined, bawled in the wind. I picked up L.Q.‘s revolver from the seat and let it hang from my right hand. We walked through the arcade that fronted the house, past the ceramic urns spilling over with passion vine, around the side to the heated pool that looked like a chemical green teardrop.

“Good God,” Temple said.

A fat woman in a dress floated stomach-up in the pool, her face goggle-eyed beneath the surface, her blood already breaking up in the water. The man named Frank sat in a lawn chair, a cigarette burning in his lap, a small bullet hole above one eyebrow.

A second man, one I didn’t know, with a pink face and thinning blond hair, lay on the grass, as if he had curled up and gone to sleep, an exit wound in his neck. There were bees in the clover where he lay, and one of his hands twitched involuntarily. When I felt his throat he opened his eyes and tried to breathe and a hard piece of chewing gum fell out of his mouth.

The preacher squatted beside him and stared into his face. He patted the man’s chest with the tips of his fingers.

“You ain’t got to talk. I’ll say the words for you. You just pretend in your own mind they’re your words. ‘I commend my soul into the hands of the Lord.’ The prayer’s that simple, son. Don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing bad can happen to you now,” the preacher said.

Temple and I walked on into the backyard. The barn door was open and I could see Carl Hinkel tied to a chair inside the batting cage. The area around his feet was covered with scuffed baseballs. Hinkel’s face didn’t look human.

Xavier Girard sat on a plank table, drinking from a huge red plastic cup that rattled with ice and smelled of mint leaves and bourbon. His face was gloriously happy. A Ruger .22 automatic and two spare magazines lay next to his thigh. “Where’s Molinari?” I asked.

“In the shower. He almost made it to his clothes. He might have been trouble,” he replied.

“Did you kill Hinkel?” I said.

“You bet. In the ear. Twice.”

Xavier leaned forward and peered out the door at the preacher bending over the man on the grass. Xavier smiled fondly, then looked up at me and Temple, his eyes full of expectation, as though somehow he had liberated himself from all the baggage of a dull existence and he waited for us to usher him into his new life.

“Why’d you kill the woman?” Temple asked.

“Frank’s wife?” Xavier seemed to review a scene in his head. “Yeah, she got it, too, didn’t she? It’s hard to put the bottle down when it’s half full. What a rush. I’m still high.”

The wind fluttered the barn doors. The air was cool and filled with the smells of horses and alfalfa and distant rain in the mountains. I didn’t want to stand any longer among the creations of Xavier Girard’s alcoholic madness.

Xavier picked up his .22 and rested it on his thigh, the balls of his fingers rubbing the checkered grips.

“Molinari left you a message. He said, ‘Tell the counselor I’m square.’ What do you think he meant by that?” he said.

“You going to do anything else with that Ruger?” I said.

“I haven’t decided.”

“Yeah, you have,” I said. I gave L.Q.‘s .45 to Temple and wrapped my hand around Girard’s pistol and removed it from his grasp and pulled the magazine from the butt and ejected the unfired round in the chamber and sailed the pistol by its barrel into the barnyard. I stuck his spare magazines and the ejected round into my pocket and poured his booze and ice into the dust and set his empty cup next to him, then Temple and I walked back into the wind and sunlight and the rumble of thunder out in the hills.

“Don’t quote me about the rush. That was off the record,” Girard called out behind us.

TEMPLE AND I had to go into Hamilton with the Ravalli County sheriff, then we drove back to Doc’s place on the Blackfoot. Fires were burning in Idaho, and the western sky was red with smoke, but a sun shower was falling on the Blackfoot Valley and the light was gold on the treetops along the river and there were carpets of Indian paintbrush and lupine on the hillsides.

I wanted to scrub all the sounds and sights from Molinari’s ranch out of my mind. But I knew I would dream about dead people that night and the collective insanity that caused human beings to kill one another and justify their deeds under every flag and banner and religious crusade imaginable. Any number of people were probably delighted that Carl Hinkel and Nicki Molinari were dead, and each of them would find a way to say a higher purpose had been served. But I’ve always suspected the truth of the human story is to be found more often in the footnotes than in the text.

Carl Hinkel would be lionized in death by his followers, then replaced by someone just like him, perhaps someone who had already planned to assassinate him. Molinari was a passing phenomenon, an ethnic gangster caught between the atavistic bloodletting of his father’s era and Mob-funded gaming corporations in Chicago and Las Vegas that now operate lotteries and casinos for state governments.

If Nicki Molinari’s life and violent death had any significance, it probably lay in the fact that he had volunteered to fight for his country and had been left behind in Laos with perhaps four hundred other GIs, whose names were taken off the bargaining list during the Paris peace negotiations at the close of the Vietnam War.

But those are events that are of little interest today.

The only real winner in the mass murder committed by an Edgar Award-winning novelist was an individual whose name would not be reported in a news story. The man responsible for killing Cleo Lonnigan’s child had not only been tortured and executed, but Cleo now could keep the seven hundred thousand dollars her husband had stolen from Nicki Molinari and almost no one, including Xavier Girard, the shooter, would ever know the enormous favor the fates had done her.

Doc fixed a late supper for all of us and we ate in the kitchen, then I took a walk by myself along the river, through the lengthening shadows and the spongy layer of pine needles under the trees. The air was heavy with the smell of damp stone and the heat in the soil as it gave way to the coldness rising from the river. But I couldn’t concentrate on the loveliness of the evening. I listened for the sound of a car engine, the crack of a twig under a man’s shoe, strained my eyes into the gloom when a doe and a spotted fawn thudded up the soft humus on the opposite side of the stream.

Then I saw a track, the stenciled outline of a cowboy boot, in the sand at the water’s edge. It was too small to be either mine or Lucas’s, and Doc didn’t wear cowboy boots. I picked up a stone and cast it across the stream into a tangle of dead trees and listened to it rattle through the branches, then click on the stones below.

But there were no other sounds except the rush of water through the riffles and around the beaver dams and the boulders that were exposed like the backs of gray tortoises in the current.

The sky was still light but it was almost dark inside the ring of hills when I walked back to Lucas’s tent. He had built a fire and had turned on his Coleman lantern and was combing his hair in a stainless steel mirror that he had hung from his tent pole. His guitar case lay by his foot.

“Is Temple staying up here tonight?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“He’s out there, ain’t he?”

“Maybe. Maybe he holed up in a canyon and died, too. Maybe nobody will ever find him.”

“Doc propped his ‘03 behind the kitchen door,” Lucas said.

“Then Wyatt Dixon had better not get in his sights.”

“You aim to cool him out, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“You can go to church all you want, Billy Bob, but you don’t fool nobody. You get the chance, you’re gonna gun that fellow.”

“Would you hold it against me?”

He slipped his comb into his back pocket and picked up his guitar case and removed his hat from the top of the tent pole and put it on his head.