"You want a little soft-shoe? 'Cause this time I'm gonna take out all your teeth," Lamar said, and cocked back his boot.

Holly Girard seemed to float out of nowhere, holding a nickel-plated revolver with both hands, the tiny bones in her hands whitening behind the cylinder. Her dark blond tresses hung on her cheeks and her mouth was as red and soft-looking as a strawberry that he would have loved to burst against his teeth.

He stepped back from her, his palms raised upward. Three or four other people had walked out of the cottage behind her.

"It's over as far as I'm concerned. Your old man shouldn't have dissed me. You want to call the heat, I understand your point of view," he said.

That ought to leave a fishhook or two in her head, he thought.

But when he looked at her eyes, then at Xavier and the other people from the cottage, he realized they never heard him, that the loathing and disgust they felt for him was so great they viewed him as they would a voiceless obscenity trapped under a glass bell.

He walked away, toward his motorcycle, his hobnailed boots crunching on the gravel. When he turned around they were gone, back inside the cottage, probably dialing 911.

So what? He was probably better off in the can than back on the street. He fired up his Harley and roared down the asphalt.

Home was a one-room block house made of railroad ties and an open-air tin shed where he sometimes repaired motorcycles. But it was on the Blackfoot, right upstream from a bar that was surrounded by pine trees, and he could cross the water on a cable-hung walk-bridge and shoot deer and bear up a canyon just above the old railroad bed. This spring he had killed a black bear and had hung it by its hind legs from an engine hoist to dress it out, then had gotten drunk and let the meat spoil. The bear still hung in the shed, coated with blowflies, its smell rising up against the tin roof of the shed as the day heated.

He sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness of his cabin, stripped to the waist, and smoked a joint and drank a quart bottle of beer, then lay back on the pillow and went to sleep. Tomorrow was another day. The same sun would rise on the jail as on the river. You just stayed on the hucklebuck, man. It didn't matter where you did it.

In his dream he thought he heard the weight of the black bear swinging slightly from the engine hoist in the tin shed, then he awoke and realized someone was in the room with him.

A chain locked down across his throat, the links binding and cutting into his skin. Lamar pried at the chain with his fingers, but the dark figure who stood above him fitted a pipe over the boom handle, as a professional logger would, and squeezed down the boom, tightening it until saliva ran from both corners of Lamar's mouth.

Lamar heard the rattle of liquid inside a tin container, then a splashing sound on the floor. The unmistakable sharpness of paint thinner climbed into his nostrils. A match flared in the figure's hands and just briefly in the illumination Lamar saw a face that was both strange and familiar at the same time.

The fire spread under his bed in seconds. He thrashed his legs, twisting his head back and forth, and beat his fists against his own skull.

The fire swelled over him in a cone, and inside the flames he thought he heard a sound like blowflies and he saw himself, for just an instant, hanging upside down over a bright fissure in the earth he had long ago convinced himself did not exist.

Chapter 10

With the clarity of vision and singleness of purpose that seemed to characterize everything Sheriff Cain did, he arrested Doc Voss the next afternoon and lodged him in the county jail.

I went into the sheriff's office without knocking. He lowered the newspaper he was reading and looked at me over his spectacles.

"You grow up in a hog lot?" he said.

"What makes you think you can get away with something like this?" I said.

He took his feet off his desk. "Let's see if I understand you correctly," he said. "Putting a friend of yours in jail on a murder warrant is somehow outside my job description?"

"On what evidence?"

He yawned sleepily. "On a previous occasion he almost killed the victim in a bar. The victim later raped the suspect's daughter. The suspect, that's Dr. Voss I'm talking about, was in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and probably did things to human beings that would make most people vomit. If you were still a Texas Ranger, who'd you be looking at?"

"Because he was in Vietnam doesn't make him a murderer. What's the matter with you?"

"Did I mention that a bone-handled skinning knife with the doctor's fingerprints on it was found at the crime scene?" the sheriff asked.

I wanted to speak, to say something that would refute his words, but my throat was suddenly dry, my palms damp and stiff and hard to close.

"Shut the door after you leave," the sheriff said.

"Ellison was in Doc's house. He took the knife then. Were his prints on the knife?" I said.

"No."

I rubbed my forehead, trying to think.

"Look, Maisey said at least one of the men who raped her had gloves on. That was Ellison," I said.

"Good. Dr. Voss's defense attorney can say all that in court."

"Ellison was a snitch. His own people wanted him dead. Talk to the ATE," I said.

"I classify most of those federal boys as A.A. Which means I leave them alone," he replied.

I looked at him incredulously. "You're saying the feds are drunks?"

"Arrogant Asswipes. Now go piddle around on the trout stream or visit your friend up in the holding tank or whittle some shavings outside under a tree. To tell you the truth, son, my estimation of the Texas Rangers has plummeted."

I went out of his office, my ears ringing. But I couldn't let go of his remarks. I opened his door again and went back inside.

"I'm representing Dr. Voss. He's not to be questioned unless I'm present. I'm going to hang this case around your neck," I said.

"Damn, I wish you would. I hate this job," he said, and picked up his newspaper again.

It was Saturday and Doc's bail would not be set until his arraignment Tuesday afternoon. I rode the elevator up to the jail section of the courthouse with a deputy sheriff and waited in a small interview room until the deputy brought Doc down the corridor in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit.

"How about it on the cuffs?" I said to the deputy.

"They stay on," he answered, and closed the door on us.

"I'll get you out Tuesday, Doc," I said. Doc stood at the window, looking down on the maple trees along the streets. "How bad is this going to be?" he asked.

"You know that knife I gave you?"

"Yeah, I couldn't find it the other day."

"It was in Ellison's cabin. With your prints on it."

That's not good, is it?" He lifted his manacled wrists and propped them on the windowsill. The hills north of the train depot were green and domed against the sky and clumps of whitetail were grazing on the slopes.

"Take good care of Maisey, will you?"

"Doc, you didn't do it, did you?"

He started to answer, then stared out the window silently. His ill-fitting, orange jumpsuit looked like a clown's costume on his body.

By Monday afternoon I had read the homicide investigators' reports on Lamar Ellison's murder and had retraced Ellison's movements of Friday evening back to the tavern on the Blackfoot. I had also managed to interview a bartender at the tavern, Holly and Xavier Girard, and a biker who'd been at the table with Sue Lynn and Ellison.

The biker's name was Clell Miller and he ran a welding business in a tin shed on the west side of Missoula. He was shirtless and wore black goggles up on his forehead, and sweat ran down his torso into the underwear that was bunched out over the top of his jeans.