“He’s got a knife. He took the car keys and run up the hill,” she said.

Wyatt walked out onto the grass. He gazed up the hill and at the trees and at the birds singing in them and at the steam rising off the river. Dry thunder rippled across the sky. He watched his Appaloosa in the railed lot in back of the house. The Appaloosa was eating grass through the fence, tearing it out in divots. “Where’s the baby at?” Wyatt said.

“In my car. I ran away. I was scared,” she said.

“Your baby is in the car and your old man is up on that hill and you’re here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I ain’t no ‘sir.’ I tell you what. I got to take a shower. Bring your baby to the house and I’ll drive y’all into Missoula. I’ll leave the door unlocked. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear no more yelling or carrying on out here.”

He closed the door in her face.

The woman walked back down the road and around the bend the road made between two wooded hills. Wyatt stood among the water-damaged furniture in his living room, tossing a cell phone and catching it in his palm. She was a half-breed, he thought, one he had seen somewhere before. A truck stop outside Billings or Bozeman? He wasn’t sure. Truckers called them pavement princesses. This one looked more like Native America’s answer to the Bride of Frankenstein, he thought.

But the important fact was that she hadn’t asked him if he had a cell phone, even though it had been sticking out of his jeans pocket in full view. He flipped open his cell and brought up the numbers he kept in the memory bank. He looked at my number, pushed the dial button, then thought about it a moment and killed the call. He slipped the cell back in his pocket and went upstairs to the shower.

He turned on the water and put his hand inside the spray until steam began to drift out the open window. He pulled off his T-shirt and hung it on the outside doorknob, brushed his teeth in the basin, and spit. When he looked into the mirror, his own face reminded him of the edge of a hatchet. Through the window he heard his Appaloosa nicker in the lot.

THE TWO KILLERS, whose names were Tex Barker and Lynwood Peeples, worked their way down the slope through fir trees until they hit the dirt road. They moved quickly through the blueness of the dawn, into the lee of the house, flattening themselves against the side wall so they would not be seen from a window. They could hear the shower running upstairs and see steam floating through a screened window into the wind. They began working their way toward the back door while Wyatt Dixon’s Appaloosa spooked in circles.

When they entered the kitchen, the firebox in the stove was glowing, the circular iron lids immaculately clean with heat. A plate of flapjacks, eggs, and toast and a full pot of coffee sat on the table. The shorter man, Tex Barker, whose gnarled brow was too long for the rest of his face, snapped on a stun gun, and an electric thread danced between the two prongs on the end. His partner, Lynwood, carried a.22 Ruger semiautomatic in one hand and in the other a cloth bag framed with wood hasps and a wood handle, one similar in design to a nineteenth-century carpetbag. The two men began walking up the stairs toward the sounds of water drumming on the sides of a tin shower stall.

At the top of the stairs they could see a T-shirt hanging on the outside knob of a door that was half opened on the bathroom. Tex Barker was in the lead, the stun gun tingling with power in his palm. Then Barker felt his partner grab him by the back of his belt. He turned and stared at him.

“His food’s getting cold on the table. Something’s wrong,” Lynwood whispered.

“What did you say?” Tex asked.

Lynwood was starting to back down the stairs, his cloth bag rubbing heavily against the wall.

“No. We take him,” Tex said hoarsely.

But Lynwood wasn’t listening. Force the play, just do it, Barker thought, and charged ahead to the top of the stairs, his stubby thighs knotting like a dwarf’s.

“Howdy doodie, boys?” Wyatt Dixon said, stepping out from a bedroom doorway and swinging a cast-iron skillet squarely into the center of Tex Barker’s face.

Barker crashed backwards into his partner, his nose broken and streaming blood. Lynwood Peeples tried to raise the Ruger and fire, but the iron skillet came down on his forearm, snapping something inside, and he felt his fingers straighten like useless sticks and heard the gun clatter to the foot of the stairs. Wyatt swung the skillet into Peeples’s mouth, splitting his lip, then down on the crown of his skull and the back of his neck. Peeples and Barker both rolled to the bottom of the stairwell, but Wyatt followed them down and swung again, this time catching Peeples on the elbow when he tried to protect his face with his arm.

Each blow snapped off teeth at the gumline, sent bruises all the way into the bone, slung blood on the walls. With one hand Wyatt picked up Peeples by his collar and shoved his face down on a stove lid and held it there. Barker was rolled up into a ball, but while Peeples screamed and fought to get loose from Wyatt’s grasp, Barker managed to pull a stiletto from his jeans and flick it open. He stabbed the blade deep into Wyatt’s thigh, just before the skillet came down again and almost ripped Barker’s ear from his head.

Barker fell out the door into the backyard, with Peeples tumbling right on top of him, the side of his face blistered and puckered from his chin to his hairline. Wyatt pushed open the screen and stepped down hard onto the grass, the stiletto embedded almost to the handle in his thigh, his pants leg painted with blood all the way to the heel of his boot. But Wyatt no longer had the skillet in his hand. Instead, he held what looked like an antique rifle, one with a big hammer on it and long-distance, elevated sights. When Peeples tried to get to his feet, Wyatt butt-stroked him alongside the head, then drove the butt of the rifle into his kidney.

And all the while Wyatt’s eyes showed neither pain nor anger, like two pieces of glass with a black insect trapped inside each one. At that moment Barker was sure he was about to die. Then he saw Wyatt waver and lose balance temporarily, his eyes close and his mouth form a cone, as though a wave of nausea had suddenly washed through his vitals.

Barker rose to his feet, then pulled Peeples up from the grass by one arm. The two of them hobbled down the road like men who had been broken on the wheel, holding each other erect, streaked with blood, looking behind them, their faces twitching with shock and fear. Wyatt fell against the fence railing of his horse lot and pulled back the hammer on the working replica of his Sharps buffalo rifle. But the mountain crests and the fir trees on the slopes and the cottonwoods along the river tilted sideways, and he fell backward on the ground as though someone had severed all the motors that went to his legs.

He pulled the cell phone from his blue jeans pocket and pushed the redial button, then lay back in the coolness of the grass, the cell phone against his ear, the sky and the clouds whirling above him.

“Howdy doodie, Brother Holland?” he said after he got me on the line.

“What is it this time, Wyatt?” I said.

“I’m up here on the Blackfoot. Beautiful morning, counselor. But I think I might be bleeding to death,” he said, and passed out.