He grinned and pushed his glasses up on his nose. "Littering," he said.

"Did you guys make Ellison for a snitch? Because if you had knowledge of what was going to happen to him, you've become an accessory," Temple said.

"Y'all are local cops who went down South and learned your accents?" he said. He pitched his head at his own joke.

"You seem like a smart young guy, Terry," I said. "Wyatt's been down at least twice. He'll probably go down again. You want to be his fall partner?"

"Y'all have a TV camera hid out in the bushes? I'd like to say hello to my mom," he said.

Temple looked at me, then began punching in numbers on her cell phone.

"Who you calling?" Witherspoon asked.

She didn't reply. She spoke into the cell phone and clicked it shut.

"Fish and Game will be here in a little while," she said. "You're right, Terry, I'm not a local cop. That means I really wish you'd wise off again so I can rip that grin off your face and shove your puny little ass into that bear barrel."

He pitched his head again, clearing his hair off his glasses, then cocked the knife over his shoulder and parked it solidly into the fence post. When he walked over to retrieve it, his profile jiggled with laughter.

That NIGHT I heard a vehicle grinding through the field behind Doc's house, then a rattling sound like rocks under the vehicle's fenders and a thud down in the trees by the river. I unlocked the front door and walked barefoot out on the porch. It was cold and the valley and cliffs were lighted by the moon, and I could see a sports utility vehicle high-centered on a sand spit in the river, the current riffling around its tires. A man waded from the driver's door toward the front of Doc's property.

The man stumbled and fell in the water but held aloft the square-shaped gin bottle he carried so it did not break on the rocks. He splashed up on the bank, his clothes and thick hair dripping with water and moonlight. Just before he tumbled into the grass and passed out I saw the bandaged hand and feral and besotted face of Xavier Girard.

I closed the door and slipped the bolt and went back to sleep and hoped the sun would rise on a better world for all of us.

Chapter 12

At first light I looked through my window and saw him on all fours, cupping water out of the river and sipping it from his palm. When I walked up behind him, he turned his head slowly, as though he were in pain. His face was gray with hangover, his eyes the color of iodine.

"How'd I get here?" he asked.

Smoke from Lucas's breakfast fire was blowing through the trees out onto the darkness of the water. Upstream I could see Lucas standing in the middle of the riffle, false-casting a dry fly under the overhang.

"Looks like you might have wanted to wash your Jeep," I said. I found a clean cup in Lucas's rucksack and filled it with coffee from the pot on the fire, then squatted down next to Xavier and handed it to him. "How's your hand?"

He looked at the dirty elastic bandage that hung from his fingers like strips of mummy cloth. "It doesn't feel good to be my age and wonder if you're anybody's punch," he said.

I shifted my weight on one haunch and picked up a small, flat stone and flipped it with my thumb into the current. "Why'd you come out here, sir?" I said.

"I don't rightly remember. It probably made a lot of sense last night," he said.

His face was dripping with river water and he blotted his mouth and forehead on his sleeve. His eyes were puffed, as though they had been stung with bees, his breath as dense as sewer gas.

"Have you ever thought about hitting one of those twelve-step meetings?" I said.

"They're full of drunks," he said.

"I guess that's a possibility," I said, my gaze focusing on nothing.

He sat on a rock and held the coffee cup to his mouth with both hands. He tried to drink but couldn't swallow. He pressed the back of his wrist to his forehead. His fingers were shaking.

"I talked with Holly about starting up a defense fund for Doc. She said it was none of our damn business," he said. The river was still in shadow, and he stared upstream at Lucas false-casting in the riffle, as though the image of a young man in hip waders silhouetted under the lighted canopy of the forest was a reminder of someone he might have known long ago.

"Maybe she has her reasons," I said.

He pitched the coffee from his cup into the rocks. "You see a gin bottle around here?"

"It's over there, in the grass."

He walked over to the bottle and picked it up and tightened the cap on it, then tilted it sideways, measuring its content.

"I'd better go now," he said.

"Come back anytime."

"Holly worries about finances. I've gone belly-up on a couple of deals. She always thinks we're going to take on legal liability. That's why she's a lot more conservative than I am," he said.

"Makes sense," I said.

"Forget I was here, will you, Mr. Holland?"

"No problem," I said, and watched him walk to his Jeep Cherokee, his fingers spidered around the square edges of the gin bottle. When he drove into the sunlight, grinding the gears, the skin of his face seemed to shrink at the hard, bright, lonely reality of the day that awaited him.

Later, I drove out to see Cleo at her place in the Jocko Valley. When I thumped across the cattle guard I saw Cleo's gay carpenter arguing with three men in a maroon Cadillac convertible. The carpenter wore a leather tool belt and no shirt; a ball-peen hammer hung loosely from his right hand. Farther up the dirt drive I could see Cleo standing on the porch of her house.

I got out of my truck and walked toward the convertible. It wasn't hard to make the men inside. They wore slacks with knife-blade creases and sport shirts unbuttoned at the top to show off their gold chains and chest hair, and radiated a visceral self-satisfaction. Their stares were invasive, vaguely contemptuous, devoid of all empathy. The man in back was eating the last of a hot dog. When he finished, he wiped the mustard off his mouth with a paper napkin and let the napkin blow away on the grass.

The carpenter grinned at me as I approached the convertible. He flipped the hammer into the air and caught it again and slipped the handle through a loop in his belt. His skin was bronzed and his hair gold from the sun.

"These fellows are just leaving. Cleo's up at the house," he said.

"I see," I said.

"They didn't like the welcome they got," the carpenter said.

I looked the carpenter flatly in the face. Don't crowd them, bud, I thought.

"Catch you later," he said to me, and walked back toward the barn where he had been working.

The driver of the convertible was a muscular, handsome man, with smooth skin and black hair that he combed straight back. He wore a bright yellow golf shirt, and when he had drawn his car abreast of me, he said, "You got a problem, too?"

"No, I don't think so," I replied.

"Your truck's in the road," he said.

"Just pull around on the grass," I said.

"Why you looking at me like that?" he said.

"You're Nicki Molinari."

"You know me from somewhere?"

"I used to work for the G. Your picture would float across my desk from time to time."

"Sorry the recognition isn't mutual. Now please move your fucking truck out of the fucking road."

"What's your business with Cleo, Nicki?"

"Where you get off calling me by my first name?"

"You're a famous guy. No offense meant. I heard you were doing a nickel in Terminal Island."

The man in the passenger seat started to get out. But Nicki Molinari raised his hand.

"Here's your lesson for the day, whatever your name is," he said. "If that broad is your regular pump, I feel sorry for you. Second of all, I'd better not see you again."