“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice dropping in register, a cold hand squeezing at her heart.

“It’s all a matter of choice. You want to believe you can walk away with half of our wealth. You also want to believe you can walk away with all your knowledge about how things really work, how we jerk around others, how our enterprises are nothing like they seem. Pick up the dice and drop them in the cup. Everyone should have a second chance. It’s easy enough. You’re a brave girl. Shake the cup and rattle them out on the felt.”

She looked into the moral vacuity of his eyes and for the first time felt genuine mortal fear of the man she had married. She started to speak, but her words caught in her throat.

“A country-and-western band should be entertaining the folk at Yellow Bay,” Leslie said. “We can watch the folk at work and play in the fields of the Lord. It’s Saturday night for the folk, and their messianic songstress will be there to brighten their lives.”

“I think you’re going to hell,” she said.

“We already live there, my dear. You just haven’t realized it.”

He reached out with his mutilated hand and touched little Dale’s cheek.

CHAPTER 28

AFTER THE CARGO van stopped, someone slid open the side door, and Candace felt a rush of cool air and mist in her face. Through the loose space in the tape, she saw a framed-up two-story building, half of it walled with logs. A yellow backhoe was parked in the trees, its lights on, a pile of dirt glistening by the steel bucket. A work-booted man in a rumpled black suit walked heavily across the clearing and grabbed Jimmy Dale Greenwood by the shirt and the back of his belt and dragged him across the ground to the edge of a pit. Then he used one foot to shove him over the edge.

The three men who had kidnapped and bound Candace were still inside the vehicle, smoking cigarettes, uncomfortable with what they were becoming witness to, trying to figure out a way to extricate themselves and still get paid by their employer.

“Put her in the house,” the driver said.

“What for?” Layne, the blond man, said.

“We don’t know what for. That’s the point,” the driver said. “Let’s put her in the house and get out of here. We delivered the Indian. That was our job. We didn’t see the rest of it. The girl brought herself here. It’s not on us.”

“What about el geeko?” Layne said.

“What about him?” the driver asked.

“We just gonna drive off?” Layne said.

Candace could hear the men in front turning around in their seats to visually confirm the naked fear they had heard in Layne’s question. The man in the front passenger seat said, “Yeah, just drive off. What, you worried about our friend’s feelings out there?”

“I’m for it if you guys are,” Layne said. “I was just saying…”

“Saying what?” the driver asked.

“That guy has got a long memory.”

Candace could hear no sound in the van except the drumming of the rain on the roof.

“Put her in the house, Layne,” the driver said.

“Me?” Layne said. “Put her in there yourself. I ain’t touching her.”

But their argument was moot. The man in the rumpled suit returned to the van and lifted Candace up like a bale of hay by the twine. He carried her to the edge of the pit and swung her out into space, where for a moment she saw the sheen of the fir and pine trees in the lights of the backhoe, just before she plummeted into the pit.

She thudded on top of another body, her bones jarring inside her. She thought she had landed on Jimmy Dale Greenwood, but he was lying against the wall of the pit, his face turned from her, his hands jerking furiously against the tape that was still cinched around his wrists. Then she realized a third person, someone she didn’t know, was in the pit with them.

The mist was drifting down into the excavation in the lights of the backhoe. The person she had landed on was a man. His face was staring straight into hers, and neither his eyes nor his mouth were taped. His hair was brown and shaggy, like dark straw piled on a scarecrow’s head. She was perhaps six inches from him, and she kept expecting him to blink, to send her a signal of some kind, to show recognition of their common humanity and plight, maybe even to give her a glimmer of hope.

Then she saw the dark hole in his hairline, and she realized his eyes hadn’t blinked, that his slack jaw and his parted mouth were not those of a man preparing to whisper a secret to her. Below one of his eyes was a chain of scar tissue, the socket recessed, mashed back into the skull. Where had she seen him?

At the Wellstones’ front gate, she told herself. They had killed their own security guard.

“We figure we’ll head on out,” she heard Layne say.

“No, you won’t,” the black-suited figure standing by the lip of the pit replied.

“Our work is done, bub,” Layne said.

“What’d you call me?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re saying I’m nothing?”

“No, I didn’t say that.”

“Then what did you say?”

“I called you ‘bub.’ It’s just a word.”

“Then you won’t mind taking it back.”

“So I take it back. It’s just a word. No offense meant.”

“Where’s that leave you now?”

“Say again?”

“It leaves you back where you started when you were telling me you’re about to head out. Is that where you are? You’re heading out?”

“Not necessarily.”

“That’s what I thought. What’s my name?”

“I don’t know your name.”

“So you thought that gave you the right to call me ‘bub’?… Don’t turn your back on me. What’s my name?”

“It’s ‘sir,’ if that’s what you want.”

“No, what’s my name?”

“It’s ‘sir.’”

“You’d better get out of the rain. You’re going to catch cold. Your nose is already running.”

The dirt under the dark-suited man’s boots sifted down on top of Candace’s head. She stared helplessly at Jimmy Dale Greenwood’s back. He had stretched the tape on his wrists to the point where he could get an index finger under the adhesive and start working it down over one thumb. High above her, she saw lightning flare inside the thunderheads, like a match igniting a pool of white gasoline.

CLETE AND I should have taken my pickup truck and not the Caddy. Most hillside roads in Montana were cut years ago by logging companies and left unseeded and at the mercy of the elements. With the passage of time, they had become potholed, eroded, strewn with rocks and boulders and sometimes fire-blackened trees that had washed out of the slopes. The Caddy bounced into a hole and went down on the transmission. When Clete tried to shift into reverse, we heard a sound like Coca-Cola bottles clanking and breaking inside a steel box. The Caddy would not budge in reverse and was high-centered and couldn’t get out of the hole by going forward.

Clete looked glumly through the windshield. The road wound higher and higher through the trees, with water rilling down the incline. We saw no sign of a structure of any kind, much less a lodge under construction.

“What a mess,” he said. “Maybe this isn’t even the right road.”

“When we first turned off, I thought I saw headlights behind us. Maybe it was Troyce Nix,” I said.

“If it’s Nix, he’s coming up the road on the braille system. There’re no headlights behind us.”

“I saw them, Clete.”

“Okay, you saw them. We shouldn’t have listened to Jamie Sue. This is three monkeys fucking a football.”

“Why don’t you get out of your bad mood?” I said.

“My bad mood? Look at my car. It’s probably impaled. The transmission is frozen in low. My paint job probably looks like a herd of cats used it for a scratching post.”

“We’ll get the jack out and bounce the car out of the hole. We’ll just keep bouncing it in a circle until we can point it back down the road.”