“I’m taking your weight,” I said.

“For what?”

“You found the goods from the Global Research robbery. But some guys think I’ve got them and they’re coming down on my family to get them back.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“I’m in a bad mood, Wyatt. I don’t have a lot to lose at this point, get my meaning? You think you’re about to make the big score with the Global goods? Is that why you’re hanging with the Deer Lodge alumni in there?”

“I wouldn’t say that too loud if I was you.”

“You turn the goods over to the Feds or Karsten Mabus’s people, I don’t care which.”

“I thought you was a smart man, but I’m revising my opinion downward. I got a buddy to bust into them files. The day that Mabus fellow gets them files back, I’m a dead man and so are you.”

“Call The Washington Post or The New York Times. I’ll help you.”

“Yeah, they’ll run with that one-stolen goods turned over to them by an ex-con with a homicide in his jacket and a lawman who killed his best friend.”

“Nobody can accuse you of an excess of sentiment,” I said.

He tucked his shirt into his jeans, his mouth twisted into a button. “I’m always on the receiving end of your insults, counselor. It gets to be a drag.”

“What’s in those files?” I said.

“Stuff about anthrax, Ebola virus, mustard gas, the Black Death. I done told you before, I ain’t got the education or the experience to deal with a man like Mabus. But the two of us can come up with a plan. It takes smarts to whip the devil.”

“Let’s keep it simple and save the Bible lessons for your study group in there. You dump the goods. End of story.”

“No, you listen to me,” he said, pointing a finger at my face. “Them three ex-fellow travelers of the Lost Highway in the sweat lodge? The Indian took two rounds from a.357 Mag and crawled a half mile in a hunnerd-degree desert to kill the man done it to him. The tall fellow who looks like a big Q-Tip done hits for the Aryan Brotherhood in Quentin and Folsom. Each one of them teardrops tattooed on his eyes is for a man he done for free, just a favor for the AB. The iron man you seen in there, one with the crazy look in his eyes, has done committed crimes both inside and outside you don’t want to even know about.

“What I’m saying to you is men like that, men like me, ain’t no threat to the likes of a Karsten Mabus. A man like you is. If I had your education, I’d own this whole fucking state.”

“You’re mistaken, Wyatt.”

He picked up his canes and stared at the river, the trees bending in the breeze on the hillside, the smoke that mushroomed into the sky as yellow as sulfur. His eyes looked prosthetic, impossible to read, the crow’s-feet at the edges like artistic brushstrokes that were intended to give his face the human dimension it lacked. “When I first come out of the pen, I wanted to hurt you for what you done to me,” he said.

“Let’s stick to the subject,” I said.

“Not hurt you like you think. I wanted to get close to you and bring you down to where I was, make you into the very kind of man you hated. I figured that was about the worst thing I could do to anybody on earth. Anyway, that was then, this is now. It’s gonna take the two of us to shovel Karsten Mabus’s grits in the stove. Get used to the idea.”

“I dimed you with the Feds this morning.”

“You’re too late. They tore my place apart yesterday. They ain’t found squat on a rock, either.”

I gave up. He was impervious to both my questions and insults, even my admission that I had informed on him. But there was still one other question I had to ask him. “Were y’all talking in tongues earlier?”

“Why you want to know?”

“Because I think you’re psychotic. That and the fact you’re injured is the only reason I don’t break your jaw.”

“You done let me down, Brother Holland. I figured you for more sand. Anyway, time for my chemical cocktail,” he said. He fitted on a peaked, slope-brimmed hat and hobbled toward the church on his canes, the pupils in his eyes like broken drops of India ink.

Chapter 21

DARREL MCCOMB did not know how he would do it, but one way or another he was going to get even. The Feds had treated him like the best-dressed man of 1951, Greta Lundstrum had played him, his own department had dumped him, Fay Harback had dimed him with I.A., and a jailhouse dickwad like Wyatt Dixon had sucker-dropped him with a replica of an antique rifle.

In addition, he’d almost been killed trying to save Seth Masterson’s life, and the upshot had been an official reprimand and a departmental suspension. The ultimate irony was that he was probably the only cop in Missoula County who knew the score on the Global Research break-in. Or at least he knew most of the score. There was one element about the break-in and its aftermath that he didn’t like to think about, primarily because even consideration of the idea put him in a league with a psycho-ceramic like Dixon.

Greta had set him up the night a hit team had descended on Dixon’s place; she had not only known he would be on the premises, she knew there was a good chance he would be taken out along with Wyatt. But instead, the lowlifes had walked into a firestorm. In fact, Darrel had to give Dixon credit; when it came to inflicting carnage on the enemy, Dixon had no peer. What troubled Darrel was not Dixon’s humiliation of him but instead the possibility that Dixon’s perverse religious views had credibility.

On two occasions Darrel had noticed a red mark underneath Greta’s right arm, one she had tried to dismiss as a horsefly bite, an explanation that in itself was a problem: Greta wasn’t a horsewoman and had no interest in animals or being around them.

Blow it off. Maybe she found a lump she doesn’t want to talk about, he told himself. He wondered if he was starting to lose his sanity or, more specifically, if his own head hadn’t become a dark box where his worst enemies were his own thoughts.

Keep the lines straight, he thought. Dixon was nuts, Greta was a Judas, and the judicial system in this country sucked. That’s all he had to remember: meltdowns were meltdowns, women screwed you in more ways than one, the system copped pud, and good guys like Rocky Harrigan led us away from ourselves.

But the bump under her arm wasn’t put there by a horsefly. The lie wasn’t even close. He had touched the swollen place while they made love; it was hard, configured like a midsized, calcified boil. Why hadn’t she gone to a doctor and had it treated?

He had deliberately not confronted Greta about her betrayal. He still believed she was an amateur, and as such he had known her defenses and denial and explanations would be in place in the immediate aftermath of her treachery. But silence and unpredictability unnerved amateurs far more than confrontation did. You waited and let them think they had skated, then you dropped the whole junkyard on their heads. Usually, they crumpled like a piece of paper thrown on hot coals.

On the evening of the same Monday I had gone to see Wyatt at his church, Darrel dropped in on Greta at her bungalow without notice.

She opened the door, her hair unbrushed, her face stark, without makeup, her big eyes unblinking, her level of discomfort crawling on her skin.

“Where have you been, stranger?” she asked, her smile like a rip in a clay mask.

“Hanging out, watching a lot of baseball, staying out of the smoke. See, I’m suspended without pay, which is the same as being fired, so I got a lot of time on my hands and I thought I’d drive down and check out how things are with you. So how’s it goin’?”

He walked into the living room without being invited.

“I was starting to get a little worried about you,” she said. “I called a couple of times but your message machine must have been off. You been all right?”