But my thoughts on the subject are cheap in design and substance. It’s easy to be facile about law enforcement. The truth is the good guys are understaffed, overworked, underfunded, and out-gunned. Most of the time the bad guys win, or if they do take a fall, it’s because a wrecking ball swings into their lives for reasons that have nothing to do with jurisprudence. If you have ever been a victim of violent crime, or if you have been threatened by deviates or sadists-and by the latter I mean wakened by anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night, surveilled by people you’ve never seen before, forced to take public transportation because you’re afraid to start your car in the morning-then you know that what I’m about to say is an absolute fact: You’re on your own.

Law enforcement agencies don’t prevent crimes. With good luck, they solve a few of them. In the meantime, if violent and dangerous people intend to do you injury, your own thoughts become your worst enemies. The morning might start with sunshine and birdsong, but by noon it’s usually filled with gargoyles.

I walked around the house aimlessly, trying to chase down each of my thoughts and hold it in a bright place in the center of my mind, face it down fair and square. But it was to no avail. Thunder ripped across the sky and rain pounded on the roof and swept in sheets across the hillside. Through the kitchen window I thought I saw L. Q. Navarro standing among the fir trees, wearing his pin-striped suit and ash-colored Stetson, his face lit briefly by a flicker of lightning.

Take this guy Mabus off at the neck. Smoke him and put a throw-down on the body and buy your wife a trip to Hawaii, he said.

I wish I could, L.Q.

Don’t think about it, just do it. Everybody dies. You want this guy to kill your wife or unborn child or Lucas? Take care of your own and screw the rest of it.

That easy, huh?

There’s nothing wrong with this guy Mabus a two-hundred-and-thirty-grain brass-jacketed hollow-point wouldn’t cure.

But I did not listen to L.Q.’s words. Instead, I found Karsten Mabus’s business card, the one he had given me with his home telephone number written on the back. I hesitated only a moment, then punched the number into the phone, thereby beginning the commission of the most cowardly act of my life.

“Hello?” he said.

“It’s Billy Bob Holland, Mr. Mabus.”

“How you doin’?”

“I don’t want my wife or boy or unborn child hurt.”

“I don’t, either. But why are you telling me this?”

“Call your guys off. I don’t have the goods from the Global Research boost.”

“Mr. Holland, I couldn’t care less about that stuff. Look, can you and your wife come out to dinner this evening? I realize it’s late notice, but-”

“Johnny American Horse dumped a metal box of some kind on my property. But I don’t have it and neither does Johnny or his wife, Amber. Wyatt Dixon found it and has it in his possession.”

My own words sounded strange and apart from me, separate from my life and the person I thought I was.

“Can you please tell me who in the Sam Hill Wyatt Dixon is?” Mabus asked.

“Leave Wyatt alone and he’ll probably blow out his own doors. But whatever you do, just stay away from us,” I said.

“At this point, gladly, sir. I guess I have a great personal flaw, Mr. Holland. I’m obviously a terrible judge of character,” he said, and hung up.

Chapter 22

IT WAS STILL raining when Johnny was wheeled in a chair down a corridor to the X-ray room by a nurse and the U.S. marshal, who ate a candy bar while he talked. Before leaving the room, Tim cuffed Johnny’s right wrist to the arm of the wheelchair.

“You’ll be back in your room before lunchtime. If you want, I can get you an extra dessert from the cafeteria,” Tim said.

Johnny didn’t answer. Out in the hallway the painters were erecting a scaffolding against the wall.

“Did you hear me?” Tim said.

“Sorry, I got a toothache,” Johnny said, touching his jaw.

“If I don’t cut down on my sugar, that’s what I’m gonna have,” Tim said.

“We need to take some pictures now. There’s a waiting room to your left, just past the double doors,” the X-ray technician said.

“Take good care of my man here,” Tim said. He walked down the corridor and through the double doors, nodding to the painters as he passed.

“You have any pain in your left arm?” the technician said.

“None,” Johnny replied.

“Did you feel a break in it?”

“No.”

“I guess the government just likes to be careful. How’s the wound progressing?” the technician said.

“Fine. You guys did a good job.” Johnny pressed his fingers against his jaw and cleared his throat.

“Well, let’s get you done here,” the technician said.

“I hate to tell you this, but I got to use the toilet real bad,” Johnny said.

“I wish you’d told the marshal that.”

“Just wheel me over to the restroom. I’m not going anywhere,” Johnny said, clinking the handcuff chain tight on the arm of the chair.

The technician took Johnny across the corridor and watched him fold up the wheelchair, work his way awkwardly into a stall, his right wrist still cuffed to the chair arm, then ease down on the toilet seat. “I’ll come back in a few minutes,” the technician said.

When Johnny heard the door click shut, he removed the paper clip from his mouth, straightened it, and inserted it into the lock on his handcuffs. It took him less than thirty seconds to spring the curved steel tongue that Tim had crimped into his wrist. Behind the door of the next stall he found a painter’s cap and pair of coveralls hanging on a hook. He ripped off his hospital gown, pulled on the coveralls, and fitted the cap down on his head. He stepped out into the corridor just as the painters were passing by.

The last man in line was an Indian who was struggling with a rolled tarp that sagged heavily across his shoulder. Johnny picked up the end of the roll, dropped it on his shoulder, snugging the side of his face against the canvas, and walked out the front door of the hospital into the rain-swept breadth of the outside world.

But what Johnny saw was more than simply the outside world. The building and sidewalks and cars and telephone wires were gone. Under an ink-wash sky he saw hills that had turned the bright gold of haystacks in late summer, the fir trees and ponderosa pine like miniature forests in the saddles. He could see black-horn buffalo grazing in the grass along the river, and he could see lightning in the clouds beyond the hills where the four points of the wind and the Everywhere Spirit made their home. He saw muscular fish that were the dull tint of dried blood working their way up a stream, beating themselves to death on the rocks in order to lay their roe and hold their claim on the earth. He saw bears, mustangs, deer, elk, and winged creatures that lived under the great bowl of heaven the Everywhere Spirit had made with His hands and filled with both sun and rain in order to bring life to the corn and the grass, and in the midst of all this he saw thousands of wickiups whose lodge skins were painted with the signs of the moon and the passing of the seasons, and he knew these presences had long ago been ingested by the great vastness of the Everywhere Spirit and they now lived inside Him, as they lived inside Johnny’s sleep, and hence they could not die.

And more important than all these things, he saw his wife, Amber American Horse, wearing the white buckskin dress of the Indian woman who had guided him through the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the purple glass beads that were shaped like teardrops on the fringe of her dress tinkling in the wind, her hand beckoning, as though both she and Johnny were about to embark on a journey from which neither of them would return.