“Answer my question. Why did they die?”

“Things happen inside the Wellstone house that nobody knows about. The girl, Cindy, tried to tell me something. I didn’t want to hear it. I was afraid. I hope she’ll forgive me.”

I tightened my hold on his neck and shoved his head harder into the grill. I could feel an even more dangerous level of anger rising inside me. “Don’t pretend you’re a repentant man. You molested that girl who was here, didn’t you?”

“She’s of legal age.”

I raised his head slightly and smashed it again into the grill.

“Yes, I slept with her,” he said. “I’m sorry for what I did. The gas is going to ignite and we’re going to die. Don’t do this. I’ll make it right. I’ll go away and you’ll never see me again. Whatever you want, just tell me and I’ll do it.”

I pulled him from the oven and turned off the gas feed to both the oven and the burner under the teakettle. Click was crying, his face trembling, tears coursing down his cheeks. A dark stain had spread through the crotch of his slacks.

“Get up,” I said.

When he didn’t move, I lifted him by the front of his shirt and threw him in a chair. “Who burglarized Seymour Bell’s house in Bonner?”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

There was a long silence. Outside, I could see the wind blowing in the trees that grew on a slope across the river. Sonny Click’s eyes followed my hand as I placed it behind my back. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Cops call this kind of gun a ‘drop.’ The numbers are acid-burned. It has no prints on it. It can’t be traced back to me. What did the intruder take from Seymour Bell’s house?”

He looked at me blankly, his mouth a round O. I forced the barrel of the thirty-two over his teeth and pulled back the hammer. His eyes bulged from their sockets as he stared up into my face. Then he began to tremble all over, his teeth clicking on the steel.

I said, “If you make me jerk the trigger, the round will punch a hole through the base of your skull.”

But by now he was shaking so badly he had to grip the sides of the chair to keep his upper torso stationary. He tried to speak and gagged on his words.

“Say it again,” I said, removing the pistol from his mouth.

“Nobody told me about a burglary. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and shoot me,” he said. “What kind of man are you? What kind of man would do this?”

“Somebody who’s too old and tired to care. Sayonara, Mr. Click. If you see me coming, cross the street.”

I walked back outside and let the door slam behind me. I could smell smoke from a forest fire in the wind and dust blowing out of a rain squall farther down the Clark Fork gorge. Had Click lied? Did he know more than he had told me? I doubted it. But it was his question to me that I couldn’t let go of. What kind of man was I? he had asked. My answer to him had been both facile and cynical. The fact was, in moments like these, I had no idea who actually lived inside my skin.

I FOUND AN A.A. meeting that afternoon in Missoula, but I did not introduce myself when the woman leading the meeting asked out-of-town visitors to do so. Nor did I speak during the meeting or afterward. I got caught in a traffic detour downtown and passed Stockman’s bar and a place called the Oxford and another bar called Charlie B’s and one called the Silver Dollar by the railroad tracks. Two Indians were sitting on a curb in front of the Silver Dollar, drinking from a flat-sided bottle wrapped tightly in a paper sack. They were half in shadow and half in sunlight, squinting up into the brightness of the afternoon, the reddish-amber tint of the liquor glinting like the flash of a stained diamond whenever they tilted the bottle to their lips.

I cleared my throat and swallowed and took a candy bar from the glove box and bit into it. Then I drove into the university district and parked in front of the church where Molly and I attended Mass when we were in Missoula. The priest was my age and had grown up in the smelter town of Anaconda. His ancestors had worked in the mines and had been members of the Molly Maguires and the IWW in an era when Irish working people had paid back in kind, sometimes with dynamite dropped in the bottom of the hole. We went into his office, one that looked out upon maple trees and shady lawns and big stone houses with huge blue spruces in the yards. I told him what I had done to the Reverend Sonny Click, sparing nothing, including the systematic degradation I had put Click through.

The priest was a tall, raw-boned man with an aquiline profile and a taciturn manner that belied his strong feelings, particularly about social justice. I thought I might get a free ride.

Wrong.

“I think you’re leaving something out,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“You’ve described what you did, but you haven’t talked about why you did it, Dave.”

“Click is a charlatan. He preys on young girls. He lied about knowing those two kids who were killed. He belongs to the bunch that Jesus recommended millstones for.”

Good try.

“Is that the only reason?” the priest asked.

I scratched my arm and looked out the window. “I wanted to tear him apart. Maybe I wanted to kill him. I don’t know what else to say, Father. I’ve done these kinds of things before. It’s an old problem.”

“What do you think the cause is?”

I did not want to answer the question. He waited a long time, then gave it up. “Well, neither of us is a psychiatrist.” He started to give me his absolution.

“I did it because I want to drink,” I said. “The desire is always there – in my sleep, in the middle of a fine day, in the middle of a rainstorm. It doesn’t matter, it’s always there.”

He nodded, his face empty, his eyes directed away from mine. The silence was such that my ears were ringing.

BUT MY EXPERIENCE with the Reverend Sonny Click wasn’t over. I had turned my cell phone off at the A.A. meeting and had left it off until I drove away from the church. When I turned it back on, I had a voice mail from Sheriff Joe Bim Higgins: “Call me when you get this message. This isn’t a request, either.” The message had been left only ten minutes earlier.

I punched in his callback number. “This is Dave Robicheaux,” I said.

“Where are you?” Higgins said.

“In my truck. By Christ the King Church.”

“I’m on my way to Rock Creek. I’ll meet you at Sonny Click’s house.”

“What for?”

“You’d better be there in twenty minutes, or you’ll be under arrest.”

I took him at his word. When I turned in to the Rock Creek drainage, I could see two Missoula County Sheriff’s Department cruisers parked in front of Click’s house. I also saw an ambulance parked on the yellow grass in the side yard.

Joe Bim Higgins walked toward me, his trousers stuffed inside his cowboy boots, his suit flecked with chaff blowing out of the field. The burned side of his face made me think of plaster that has dried unevenly on a wall. “What time were you out here?” he asked.

“Who says I was?”

“You want to be a smart-ass?”

“Midday.”

“What time, exactly?” he asked.

“Somewhere around one-thirty. I’m not sure.”

“The mailman says a guy answering your description left here at about a quarter to two. Would you say that’s correct?”

“I just told you.”

“Did you come back later in the afternoon?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“What’d you do to him?”

“Ask Click.”

“You want a lawyer? I think you and your friend Purcel should have a team of them to follow you around.”

“I lost control. If you want the details, get them from the good reverend. While you’re at it, ask him why he lied during a murder investigation.”

“I thought I had seen the whole cast of characters, but you and your fat friend take the cake.”

“I’m getting a little tired of this, Sheriff.”