“How about a military record?”

“None.”

“Did he ever live in Texas?”

I heard her leafing through some papers. “He owns a company in Houston and one in Dallas,” she said.

“When he mentioned my father’s death, he said my father would be mighty proud of me.”

“Like he was home folks?” she said.

“That’s right.”

“According to a feature on him in The Washington Post, he was born in Minneapolis and grew up there and in Milwaukee. The article says his father was a hardware store owner and his mother a school-teacher. Except I couldn’t find any records on the family in either city.”

“What’s his connection to Finley?”

“A friend and campaign contributor, as far as I can see.”

“Do you have any idea what Global Research does?”

“They have lots of government contracts. Some of them have to do with genetically altered foods. Some of their other dealings are anybody’s guess. They’re a high-security outfit. It’s amazing their facility was successfully burglarized…Did you just hear something on your line?”

“Yeah, I think we’re tapped,” I said.

“Tapped?” she said.

“Tapped,” I said.

THAT SAME DAY Johnny American Horse and two of his workers were putting in a rail fence on a new dude ranch out on Highway 12, not far from the Idaho line, when a panel truck stopped in a rooster tail of dust and the driver, an unshaved man wearing aviator’s shades, slacks, and a dirty white shirt, got out and approached Johnny with a grin at the corner of his mouth. “Got some sportsman’s hardware to sell before I move out to California,” he said.

“Like what?” Johnny said.

The driver threw open the back door of the truck, exposing at least a dozen shotguns and rifles that were laid out on a blanket. “I’ll sell them individual or the whole bunch. Dirt cheap, brother. I’ll take pretty near any offer,” he said.

Johnny shook his head and went back to setting a post in a hole and packing crushed rock around it.

“How about you fellows?” the man asked the two white boys working with Johnny.

“Johnny doesn’t pay us that kind of money,” one of them replied.

The boys laughed. The driver of the panel truck picked up an AR-15 that was wrapped in an oilcloth, released the magazine, and pulled back the bolt to show the gun was empty. Instead, a shell ejected from the chamber. “Damn, my nephew left a round in there,” he said.

Johnny picked the shell out of the dirt and threw it inside the truck. The man held out the rifle for Johnny to examine it. “Three hundred dollars,” he said.

“It’s worth six, easy,” Johnny said.

“You know your guns.” The man tossed the rifle to Johnny.

Johnny caught it in one hand, then walked to the back of the panel truck and set the rifle down on the blanket. “I’ve said no to you once. Hate to say it again,” he said.

“No offense meant. A guy’s got to try,” the man said.

Johnny and his two employees watched the man drive away, the dust from the truck blowing across a field of timothy. The man stopped at a crossroads where several land surveyors were eating their lunch under a tree and began making the same presentation to them. Johnny lost interest in the gun seller and went back to work.

TWO DAYS LATER, a Thursday, Darrel McComb was in a bad mood. Wyatt Dixon had just checked himself out of the hospital, against medical advice, and the hospital had not informed Darrel, as it had been instructed. Also, Wyatt had continued to stonewall the investigation into the identity of his assailants, speaking in disjointed hillbilly song lyrics, treating the detectives to his idiot’s grin and feigning incredulity at the detectives’ wisdom.

The nurses and pink ladies puffed his pillows and brought him soft drinks and outdoor magazines from the gift shop and extra desserts from the dining room. In turn, he signed autographs for them as well as the plaster casts of other patients. Darrel tried to explain to the head nurse that Wyatt Dixon was a recidivist whose brain belonged in a jar of alcohol. She replied, “I don’t believe that at all. If he’s done anything bad, he’s already paid his debt to society. Why don’t you people leave him alone?”

Later that afternoon Darrel drove up to Dixon’s place on the Blackfoot, but no one was at home and Dixon’s truck was gone. The neighbor on the opposite side of the river said he believed Wyatt was at a revival up at the Indian reservation.

“Dixon at a revival?” Darrel said.

“That’s right.”

“This man is a criminal.”

“He’s a polite man who always tips his hat to my wife. Why don’t you flatfeet stop picking on him?” the neighbor said, and slammed the door in Darrel’s face.

Darrel drove up to the Indian reservation in the Jocko Valley. It wasn’t hard to find the revival. Between a grove of cottonwood trees and a small rodeo arena and pavilion where the annual summer powwows were held, a huge, open-air striped canopy flapped gently in the warm breeze, the mountains blue and jagged in the distance. Darrel parked his unmarked car in the shade of the cottonwoods and watched the people who were arriving for the revival. They were both Indian and white, poor, uneducated, with the distorted physiques of people who ate the wrong food and had the wrong habits. He wondered how people who had already been so badly treated by life could allow what little they had to be taken from them by charlatans.

He could not shake the vague sense of anger that seemed to foul his blood. Why did Wyatt Dixon bother him so much? Because he had beat the system and was back on the street, lauded by people who had no idea of the man’s violent history? Yes, that was part of it. But in his heart Darrel knew Wyatt Dixon bothered him for other reasons as well, ones that went to a central dilemma in Darrel’s life. Darrel himself, lawman and soldier, had recruited men like Dixon for military and political operations that were shameful and dishonorable in nature. The qualifications for the job had always been simple: the recruits needed only to be disposable and totally devoid of humanity. Darrel had been their mentor, feeding them patriotic Valium when in reality the men Darrel reported to would not spit on them if they were burning to death.

The sky was yellow in the west, filled with dust and rain, the air smelling of mown hay and the watermelons someone was splitting apart on a wood table. The tent was filling now, a preacher mounting a stage above the rows and rows of folding chairs. Then Darrel saw Wyatt Dixon working his way on crutches down the aisle toward a chair an usher was unfolding especially for him. Dixon wore a shirt emblazoned with blue and white stars and steel-colored eagles with thunderbolts in their talons, one dark blue pants leg split up to the hip to expose the plaster cast on his thigh. He was gripping his hat between his fingers and the handle of his crutch, his mouth like a slit in his face.

Darrel got out of the car and took a seat at the back of the tent. Next to him a tall man, wearing sandals and eyeglasses that hung on a velvet cord around his neck, was setting up a tape recorder.

“What’s going on?” Darrel asked him.

“I’m a professor at the university. I have permission to be here, if that’s what you mean,” the tall man replied.

No, that’s not what he had meant, but he didn’t pursue it. The preacher introduced himself as Elton T. Sneed, then immediately went into a histrionic sermon that Darrel could only associate with an epileptic seizure. But the preacher’s performance, the Appalachian accent and heated gasping for breath at the end of each sentence, was nothing compared to what Darrel saw and heard next.

One by one people rose from their seats at the front of the tent and began to rant and shake, their faces lifted skyward, their eyes closed as though they were experiencing orgasm. But the sounds or words coming out of their throats were like none Darrel had ever heard. Wyatt Dixon rose, too, wobbling into the aisle on his crutches, his chin jacked in the air, a staccato stream of unintelligible language rising from his throat louder than anyone else’s.