He drove his car to the restroom area, blowing his horn to discourage Dixon’s revivalist friends who had started to reenter the building. He hit the redial button on his cell phone and heard Fay’s voice on the other end. “I’m bringing him in. I’ll do the paperwork in the morning,” he said.

“You’re not doing this on my authorization,” she said.

“This guy is a menace. Are you going to back my play or not?”

“Come in tomorrow morning and we’ll talk. In the meantime, I don’t want-”

He snapped the cell phone shut, parked the car, and opened the back door so he could move Dixon quickly into the car and lock him to the D-ring inset in the floor before Dixon’s friends could cause more trouble. He entered the restroom, then stared dumbfounded at Wyatt relieving himself in the trough, one manacle hanging from his wrist. The iron pipe to which he had been hooked up lay on the floor like a broken pugil stick, each end festooned with a chunk of concrete or cement.

Wyatt shook himself off and put his equipment back in his pants. Blood was leaking from the gauze and plaster on his thigh. “Best whiz I ever had,” he said, his face beaming with visceral satisfaction.

THAT NIGHT, Darrel McComb ended up in a skin joint and got drunker than he had ever been in his life. The early dawn found him on Greta Lundstrum’s doorstep, sick and trembling, afraid he would continue drinking through the day but even more afraid that he would get sober and have to look at himself in the hard light of day. The eastern sky was the color of a Tequila Sunrise, the mountains quaking with lightning. He sat on the steps and removed his piece from his clip-on holster and held it in both hands between his legs. He closed his eyes and imagined himself fitting the barrel between his teeth, touching the roof of his mouth, the astringent taste of gun lubricant mixing with his saliva.

Did Valhalla lie on the other side or only a great blackness? His life was a joke, hardly worth sustaining. One round fired upward into the brain would scroll his name on the wall, then it would be over.

Or perhaps he might take a few people with him. Behind him, he heard the door open.

Chapter 13

THAT SAME FRIDAY morning, as I headed to work, I saw Seth Masterson’s Cherokee parked on the side of the dirt road that led from my house onto the state highway. The driver’s door was open and Seth was behind the wheel, eating breakfast out of a McDonald’s container. The sun had just tipped the mountains on the east side of the valley, and the light looked like a tiny pink flame inside the needles of the ponderosa tree he had parked under.

I pulled behind him and got out.

“You talk to American Horse and the Finley girl about giving up the computer disks they stole from Global Research?” he asked.

“No,” I replied.

He nodded, his impatience undisguised. He wiped his mouth with a crumpled paper napkin and dropped it into his plate. “Mind telling me why not?” he said.

“Because I’ve talked to Johnny about it before. He’s not going to give up his friends or tell them what to do.”

“Don’t tell me those Indians creeped that place without his permission. The girl’s dirty, too. You know it, Billy Bob.”

“You want to send her and Johnny a message, go do it yourself.”

He poured his coffee into the dust and set the empty container on the floorboards of his vehicle. He stared at the coffee soaking into the dirt. “You used to be a good cop. Maybe you ought to rethink who your friends are,” he said.

“Sorry you feel that way, Seth.”

He shut the door and drove perhaps ten yards down the road, then stopped and got out, the vituperative moment gone. He had put on a tan cap with a green big-mouth bass imprinted on it and the cap’s bill darkened the upper half of his face, but I could tell he was smiling. “My wife and I have a cabin west of Walsenburg. Come down sometime and help me deplete the rainbow population,” he said.

AROUND 9 A.M. that same day, Darrel McComb sat in an uncomfortable chair, staring across the desk at Fay Harback, trying to take shallow breaths through his nose so the alcohol deep down in his lungs did not blow into her face. He had showered at Greta’s, shaved with her leg razor, and used her toothbrush to scrub the taste of tequila out of his mouth, then had driven at high speed through traffic in order to reach the office with a semblance of punctuality. But his jaws were nicked, his eyes scorched, and his shirt and suit smelled as though they had been pulled from a dirty clothes hamper.

“You busted Dixon, then turned him loose?” Fay said.

“Not exactly.”

“Then explain what exactly you did, please.”

“I drove him to the emergency room at St. Pat’s and left him with the docs. I told him we wanted better cooperation from him, but he was free to go from the hospital. Look, Fay-”

“No, you look, Darrel. I think you need to go on the desk or get some counseling. It wouldn’t hurt if you checked out a Twelve-Step group, either.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Sorry, I forgot that the odor in here is from the rug-cleaning service.”

Only two hours earlier, he had entertained thoughts of killing himself and perhaps others as well. Now he sat hunched in a chair like a chastened schoolboy. His shoes were scuffed, one of them untied, crossed on top of the other. He straightened his spine, took out a handkerchief, and blew his nose. At that moment he would have traded ten years of his life for a Vodka Collins. “A university professor was up at the revival. He said Dixon was speaking in the language Jesus used,” Darrel said.

Fay propped her elbows on her desk blotter and rested her chin on the backs of her hands. When he looked into her eyes, he saw only pity and sadness there, and he felt a balloon of anger bloom in his chest, squeezing his heart. Weevil-like motes seemed to swim through his vision. “I’m telling you what the professor said. I don’t need any skepticism out of your office. I don’t need any Twelve-Step meetings, either. I’m a good cop,” he said.

“Go home, Darrel.”

“This all started with American Horse.”

“It started when you almost beat him to death with a blackjack. You want to get some sleep, or do you want me to call the sheriff?”

“The FBI isn’t in Missoula to help us. They’re here to shut down the investigation. That’s how it works. We’re little people and we’re in somebody’s way. Even Wyatt Dixon has that much figured out. I helped kill hundreds of innocent people. They were all Indians. I know how it works out there.”

His words sounded as though someone else were speaking them, as though he were in a windowless room full of white noise and a mechanical presence inside himself was playing a tape he allowed himself to hear only in his sleep. He looked at the blank stare on Fay Harback’s face, then opened his mouth to clear the popping in his ears.

“Darrel-” she began.

“Leave me alone,” he said, knocking the chair askew as he went out the door.

HE SIGNED OUT of the department, claiming a doctor’s appointment, went to his apartment, ate six aspirin and one hit of white speed, showered for the second time that morning, and put on fresh clothes. He tried to file and categorize his thoughts, put the previous night into perspective, and somehow get a handle on it; but he couldn’t. He had seriously blown out his doors, gotten drunk in a topless bar, and passed out with his face in a puddle of spilled booze.

He remembered a stripper and bouncer putting his coat on for him and helping him into his car, then leaving him alone in the empty parking lot, barely able to start the engine. Greta had taken him in, gotten his gun away from him, then had led him to her bed like a sexual beggar. Knowing full well she was involved with a criminal enterprise and that ultimately she planned to use him, he let her climb on top of him and haul his ashes, even though it was obvious that she could barely abide his breath and the stink of nicotine that rose from his hair and skin.