He eased his transmission out of park and drove around my truck, across the cattle guard, and onto the county road. When I pulled into Cleo's yard, she walked down the steps toward me, but her eyes were still on the convertible that was now disappearing over a rise.

"What's with the greaseballs?" I said.

"You know them?"

"Every DEA agent in the country knows who Nicki Molinari is. You didn't answer my question. Why are they here?"

"They claim my husband owed them money,"

"What did you tell them?"

"To get out."

"Why would your husband owe them money?"

"I don't care and I don't want to know."

"These aren't guys you just run off."

"I just did. I stuck a gun in his face. He looked bad in front of his men, so he tried to give Eric a hard time. You want to come in or not?"

"I thought you might want to go to lunch,"

"I can fix something if you're hungry," she said, her voice flat, disinterested, her eyes lingering on the dust cloud left by Nicki Molinari's convertible.

"This isn't quite what I had in mind, Cleo."

"What?" she said, her attention refocusing itself on my words.

"No, I'm not hungry. I thought you might be. Maybe I should go."

"Will you just come in, Billy Bob?" she said, and pulled me by the arm, either out of irritation or conciliation, I didn't know which.

A chrome-plated.44 Magnum revolver rested on a table in the hallway.

"Just a minute," she said, and picked up the revolver and entered the den and opened a felt-backed glass gun cabinet where at least two dozen antique and modern pistols were hung. She flipped open the cylinder on the Magnum and dumped the cartridges into her palm, then fitted the Magnum on its hooks and closed the glass doors.

"What a collection," I said.

"They were my father's. He was career Army. He wanted a son."

"He taught you to shoot?"

"I taught myself. You want a roast beef sandwich?"

"Sure," I said.

On the way out of the den I saw on top of a bookcase a framed photograph of a little boy. He wore a cowboy hat and sat atop a Shetland pony. The pony was eating out of a bucket, and the little boy's legs were too short to reach the stirrups. The boy was holding on to the pommel as though he were frightened by the distance to the ground.

I followed Cleo into the kitchen.

"Why so quiet?" she asked.

Greaseballs in her front yard, her suppressed rage and grief over a murdered child, compassion for a rape victim and destitute Indians, a personality that blew hot and cold with the moment. I couldn't begin to express my thoughts.

"My son's staying out at Doc's. I'd like for you to meet him," I said.

But she made no reply.

I stood next to her at the drainboard. Through the window the Douglas fir trees on the hill crest looked hard and perpendicular against the sky. I placed my hand on her back. "You have to be at the clinic this afternoon?" I said.

"Not really."

"You have any other commitments?" I said, touching her hair.

"I have a lot of chores to do," she said.

I nodded and took my hand away.

"You interrogated me, Billy Bob. I don't care for it," she said.

"Nicki Molinari is a dope dealer and a degenerate. He not only kills people, he has them taken apart."

"You don't have to tell me that. My husband brought him to our house. He used our phone to have a chippy delivered to his motel."

It was not a time to say anything else. In fact, I was tired of playing the fool's role. I picked up my hat and left. When I was driving back out the front gate, I saw her in the rearview mirror, standing in the doorway, her dress blowing across her thighs.

I WENT BACK to Doc's and found Lucas sitting on the front steps, playing his guitar. It was a Martin HD-28, one I had given him for his birthday. The lightest touch of the plectrum on the strings resonated out of the box with the deep, mellow quality of sound that might have been aged in oak.

"Here's one I bet you don't know," he said. Then he began to sing,

"I'm an old log hauler,

I drove a big truck.

I shot the pinball machine,

But it caused me bad luck.

All I ever made

On a pinball machine

Was four katty-corners,

Then I'd miss the sixteen."

He rested his arm across the top of the Martin, careful not to scratch the finish with the button on the cuff of his denim shirt.

"That's one of them old ones," he said.

"Really?" I said, trying not to smile at what he considered old. "Where is everybody?"

"Doc and Maisey had a fight. I don't know where he went, but she took off with some high school boy.

Does Maisey act kind of funny for a girl who's been raped?" he said.

"How's that?"

"The way she was dressed and acting. Hoop earrings, fire-engine makeup, one of them bras that-" His eyes went away from mine, as they always did when he felt he had to protect me from his generation's knowledge of the world.

"That what?" I said.

"It don't exactly signal a guy to keep his big-boy in his britches."

"That's how it works, Lucas."

"What works?" he asked.

"Rape victims want to show they still have control. So they try to fly back through the candle flame."

He seemed to study the thought, his fingers chord-ing without sound on the neck of the guitar. "An Indian gal was looking for you," he said.

"Sue Lynn?"

"She didn't say. She has blond streaks in her hair. What's the deal on her?" He threaded his plectrum through the strings at the top of the guitar neck and adjusted his straw hat and gazed abstractly at the river.

"Why?" I said.

"No reason. She said she liked country music. I was showing her some chords."

"I'd leave her alone."

"She seemed pretty nice."

"She hangs with some bad dudes. Why not keep things simple and enjoy the trout fishing?"

He fed a stick of gum into his mouth and nodded his head slowly, as though humbly agreeing with a profound statement.

"That's how come you been milking through Doc's fence?" he said.

I walked on inside the house and hung my hat on a wood peg and poured a glass of iced tea in the kitchen. Through the front door I could see him putting his guitar inside its case, tucking the cloth strap around its edges, gum snapping in his jaw, his eyes bright with a thought he couldn't handle. He got up from the porch step, the guitar case still open, and came inside.

"I didn't mean to say that."

"I asked for it."

He grinned and spun his hat on his finger. "Who am I to argue with superior minds?" he said.

Temple Carrol had been told the juvenile file on Wyatt Dixon's knife-throwing friend, Terry Witherspoon, had been sealed. But there was another avenue. Temple had written down the name of the small town in western North Carolina where Witherspoon had been convicted, and I called the sheriff's department in the county seat there and asked to talk with any officer on duty who handled juvenile cases.

My call was transferred to a detective named Benbow.

"Terry Witherspoon's a suspect in a murder investigation in Montana?" he said.

"Not exactly."

"Sounds a mite vague, Mr. Holland. Regardless, his records were sealed a long time ago. For all I know they were destroyed when he reached legal age."

"You know him?" I asked.

"I wish I didn't."

"Give me a thread," I said.

"You say you were a Texas Ranger?"

"Yes, sir."

I waited.

"Then you know the rules. Wish I could help," he said, and hung up.

But a half hour later he called back.

"I can't tell you anything about the records the court has sealed. We clear on that?" he said.

"You bet."

"But I can tell you about suspicions I have that never became part of a formal investigation. A year ago we had a bomber hid out in these mountains. I think Terry was bringing him food. I don't have any evidence to prove that. But I've known Terry since he was seven years old, and he's the meanest little shit I ever came acrost."