Tommy Lee knew that somehow he could make words come out of his mouth that would show the hatted figure he was no threat to anyone, that in the big scheme of things his worst offenses were only those of a motorized goof, a harmless, good-natured little guy the swinging dicks took care of. What did this guy in the hat want? Why didn't the guy say something? Tommy Lee's skin felt as if it were being peeled off his face.

He couldn't keep his thoughts straight. In his mind he saw the farm in Georgia where he had grown up, a girl who had asked him to dance with her at a high school prom, a red molten sun descending into the Gulf of Mexico. He wanted all these things back in his life and would pay any price to return to them. If he could only make that happen, he would correct all the wrongs he had done and make amends to every person he had ever harmed.

If only the hatted figure with the shadowed face would please point the revolver somewhere else.

He had almost formed the sentence that would contain all those thoughts when the pistol barrel exploded with light and sound and the copper-jacketed round punched a neat hole through the right lens of his glasses and blew a single spurt of blood out the back of his head onto the grass.

Chapter 13

Sheriff J. T. Cain knocked on Doc's door early the next morning.

"Where were you last night?" he said.

"Here," Doc said.

"All night?"

"Yeah, I was here all night."

"Doing what?" the sheriff said.

"Sleeping."

"You vouch for that?" the sheriff said to me.

"What's this about, Sheriff?" I said.

"Nothing much. Another dead man. Step out here, please," he said to me.

I followed him to his car. The sun wasn't up yet, and fog rose off the boulders in the river and hung in the trees. The sheriff stood with his hands on his hips, his cowboy hat slanted on his head, his wide red tie clipped to his shirt.

"That man in there didn't leave the house last night?" he asked.

"To my knowledge, no."

"To your knowledge, huh? Take a ride with me."

"What for?"

"You defense lawyers spend too much time in your office. I want you to see the handiwork of our shooter."

I got into his car and we rode west of Missoula, up the long grade toward the Idaho line. The mountains were green with Douglas fir, the crests tumbling higher and higher against a salmon-colored sky. Then the Clark Fork dropped away in the canyons below us and finally disappeared from view altogether.

We went through the little town of St. Regis, then turned off the four-lane under a train trestle and entered a hollow traversed by a dirt road that was dotted with clapboard houses on each side. The yards were strung with washlines and littered with debris, like a scene out of Appalachia.

The sheriff had said very little during our journey.

"See all that old growth timber up there? That's the way it used to be everywhere," he said. "We didn't have cyanide in the river and runoff from the clear-cuts destroying the spawning beds. We didn't have no Aryan Nation or Christian Identity or militia people coming in here from Idaho, either. You know why they like it up here in the woods?"

"They're cowards. They fear blacks and Jews and locate in places where they'll never have to face them on equal terms."

He turned his head and stared at me and almost drove us off the road.

"Damn, son, you may have more sense than I give you credit for," he said.

The coroner had been late in arriving at the crime scene and was just finishing his work. Two paramedics were waiting by the road with a gurney. An empty black body bag lay unzippered on top of it.

The impact of the round had blown Tommy Lee Stoltz off the porch and into the yard. A roll of toilet paper from the box of groceries he had been carrying had bounced down the steps and rolled back under the porch into a pool of brown water. Stoltz lay on his back, staring at the sky, his shattered glasses crooked on his face. The right lens was embedded in the eye socket, coated with blood.

The sheriff from Mineral County stooped under the front door and walked out on the porch and looked at me and Sheriff Cain. He had a broad stomach and red face and graying blond hair and mustache. He wore a sheep-lined vest and a blue baseball cap with the letters MCSD on it.

"Who's he?" he said to Cain.

"An ex-Texas Ranger along for the ride. What have you got?" Sheriff Cain said.

"A neighbor heard the shot and looked out the window and saw somebody in a hat and a long coat with a chrome-plated pistol. We didn't find any brass, so the shooter picked it up or he was using a revolver. I don't think we'll get much from ballistics. The exit wound and the splatter tell me that round's way up on the hillside somewheres. This one of the guys you pulled in for questioning in the Voss rape?"

"Yep," Sheriff Cain said.

"Where was the girl's father last night?"

"He says he was at home," Sheriff Cain said.

"You believe him?"

"I haven't decided," Sheriff Cain said.

"J.T., you quit running these morons into my jurisdiction," the Mineral County sheriff said.

"You folks got a lot more room over here," Sheriff Cain said.

The Mineral County sheriff lit a pipe and smoked it out on the road while the paramedics loaded the body into an ambulance. I was beginning to look at Sheriff Cain in a new light.

"Why'd you introduce me as an ex-Ranger and not as Doc Voss's attorney?" I asked.

"I felt like it. What do you think Stoltz got hit with?" he said.

"Something big. Probably with a jacket on it."

"A.44 Magnum?"

"Maybe."

"Dr. Voss has got one registered in his name."

"There're.44 Magnums all over this state." And in my mind's eye, I saw the heavy, chrome-plated revolver that Cleo Lonnigan had used to threaten Nicki Molinari at her house. "You really figure Doc for this?"

The sheriff squinted at the sun breaking over the top of the hollow and chewed on the end of a toothpick until it was flat.

"Whoever killed Stoltz just wanted him dead. The person who killed Lamar Ellison wanted him to suffer first. I think we got two different perpetrators," the sheriff said.

"I think you're an intelligent man."

"Your friend ain't off the hook. Come on, let's eat breakfast. I been up since four. I got to find me another job. This morning my old woman told me I'm the reason our grandkids are ugly," he said.

"Doc didn't kill Ellison, Sheriff."

"How do you know?"

"He would have made Ellison fight for his life. Then he would have cut him from his scrotum to his throat."

"That'll make a fine defense, won't it?" he replied.

Friday evening Lucas walked up from his tent on the river and took a shower in Doc's house and was combing his hair in the mirror when I inadvertently opened the bathroom door on him. His cheeks glowed with a fresh shave and his back was white and cuffed with sunburn around the neck.

"Where you headed, slick?" I asked.

"To see Merle Haggard. He's playing at a place called the Mule Palace. You ever been there?" His words were hurried, as though he wanted to distract me from an impending question.

"No, I've never been there. Who you going with?"

"Sue Lynn Big Medicine."

"Tell me, bud, did you come all the way up here to see how much grief you could get into?"

"Since you're already pissed off at me, can I share something else with you?"

"What might that be?" I said.

"I need to borrow your truck," he replied.

Ten minutes later I watched him shine his boots on the porch and slip them on his feet and walk back down to the tent and put on a long-sleeve white cowboy shirt embroidered with roses and his wide-brim cream-colored straw hat, with a scarlet cord around the crown, and climb into my truck and start the engine.