She got into the shower and stayed under the hot water until her skin was red. When she toweled off, the window was clouded with steam and she thought she saw a bear's paw push and flatten against the glass. She wrapped the towel around her head and approached the window, leaned one way and then the other in order to see outside, then used her arm to wipe a swath through the moisture on the glass.

The face of a young man stared back at her. He wore glasses and his eyes traveled the length of her nakedness and his mouth formed a red oval as though he wanted to speak.

From the living room I heard her scream, then the sound of feet running outside. I pulled Doc's sporterized '03 Springfield from the gun rack and went out the front door and around the side of the house. Dry lightning jumped between the clouds and the valley floor turned white. I saw a slender man run past the barn, toward the river.

I slid a round into the chamber and locked down the bolt, wrapped the leather sling around my left arm, and put the Springfield to my shoulder. I aimed through the iron sights, leading the target just slightly, waiting for lightning to leap between the clouds again.

Maybe he had seen me, because he seemed to know that someone had locked down on him. He jumped a rock fence like a deer, then zigzagged across a field, glancing back once as though a round was about to nail him between the shoulder blades. When the clouds pulsed with lightning I saw the reflection on his glasses, his brown hair, his body that was as lithe and supple as a young girl's.

I swung the rifle's sights ahead of him and fired a single round that whined off a rock into the darkness.

The running figure disappeared into the trees.

Maisey came out on the porch in her robe, the towel still wrapped on her head.

"He was at the bathroom window. He was watching me take a shower," she said.

"Did you recognize him?" I asked.

"The glass was steamed over. I saw him for just a second."

"Maybe he just wandered in off the highway," I said, my eyes avoiding hers. I ejected the spent shell from the rifle and pressed down the rounds in the magazine with my thumb and slid the bolt over them so the chamber remained empty, then propped the rifle against the porch rail and traced the footprints of the voyeur from the bathroom window back to a rick fence he had climbed through by the barn.

A fuel can lay on its side by the bottom rail of the fence, leaking gas into the mud.

I called the sheriff's department. A half hour later a tall, overworked deputy with a black mustache walked with me out to the fence and looked down at the can and then at the house. His breath fogged in the dampness of the air.

"He didn't come here to borrow gas. The can's almost full. He was watching the girl through the window?" he said.

"Yes."

"It looks like he was going to torch your house and got distracted. I'd say you're lucky."

"I don't think the Voss family feels lucky, sir," I said.

"No offense meant. Some people around here would have shot him and drug his body through the door. Who do you think he was?"

"Y'all got a file on a kid from North Carolina by the name of Terry Witherspoon?"

Wednesday morning Doc answered the cordless phone in the kitchen, then handed it to me and walked out of the room.

"I'm trying to figure out what your idea of a relationship is. I'm sure the problem is mine," Cleo's voice said.

"I'm sorry?"

"Just for a minute, can't you lose that obtuse attitude?"

"I haven't called you? That's what we're talking about?"

"What do you think?" she asked.

"I figured I'd struck out."

"Maybe you decided you'd just find another chickie and cut a new notch on your gun."

"I don't think that's a real good thing to say, Cleo."

"Then maybe we need to have a serious talk."

"What do you call this?" I said.

"Come to the house."

"I have an appointment at the sheriff's office."

"Screw your appointment," she said.

"I'm going to hang up now. Good-bye, Cleo."

I eased the receiver down in the cradle, my skin tingling, as though I had just walked through a cobweb.

Doc WAs BOARDING an Appaloosa and a thoroughbred for a neighbor. I went outside and propped my forearms across the top rail of the rick fence that enclosed the horse lot and began to shave an apple with my pocketknife. The barn was made of ancient logs that were soft with decay. Through the open back doors I saw both horses walk out of the pasture, through the cool darkness of the barn, their hooves powdering dust in the air, sawing their heads as they approached the fence.

I quartered the apple and fed pieces to each of them with the flat of my hand. Inside the barn, his pinstripe suit and ash-gray Stetson slatted with sunlight, I saw L.Q. Navarro perched atop a stall, idly spinning the rowel on a Mexican spur.

"You're getting sucked in, bud," he said.

"With Cleo?"

"I'm talking about these skinheads and bikers. Doc was trying to shut down that gold mine. Now he's charged with murder and you're rolling in the dirt with a collection of tattooed pissants whose mothers was probably knocked up by a spittoon."

"I didn't have much selection about it, L.Q."

"That's what we told each other when we was blowing feathers off them Mexican drug mules."

"Anything else you want to tell me?"

He flicked the rowel on the spur and lifted his eyes.

"I'd sure like a couple of ice-cold Carta Blancas," he said.

I WENT BACK up on the front porch, where Doc was trying to tie a blood knot in a tapered leader. But it was obvious he could not concentrate on the task at hand. He squinted at the tippets, missed threading a nylon tip through a loop, then gave it up and dropped the leader on top of a cloth creel by his foot.

"Can you show me all the information you have on that mining company?" I said.

"What for?"

"They have a vested interest in seeing you jammed up."

"I remodeled Lamar Ellison's face in that bar. I got my daughter raped. I thought I was through with free-fire zones. Instead, I carried one back from Vietnam."

"Don't put this on yourself, Doc."

"That stuff you want is out in the barn. You can burn it when you're finished," he said.

I spent the next two hours rooting through the cardboard boxes that Doc had stuffed with news clippings and documents on extractive industries in Montana. File folders filled with aerial photographs showed miles of clear-cuts and once-virgin wilderness areas that had been turned into stump farms or chemical soup. Networks of creeks that fed the upper Blackfoot River looked like gangrene in living tissue. The cumulative damage wasn't just bad. It numbed the mind.

The corporation name that recurred again and again was Phillips-Carruthers, old-time union busters whose goons had once loaded Wobblies onto cattle cars and transported them in 115-degree heat into the Arizona-New Mexico desert and left then locked inside without water for two days. Those who didn't die or end up in Yuma Territorial Prison as syndicalists thought twice about trying to shut down a Phillips-Carruthers mine again.

How far would a bunch like this be willing to go in order to get Doc off the board?

I heard the tinkling sound of roweled spurs on the plank floor of the barn and looked up and saw L.Q. Navarro peering over my shoulder.

"There's a story in there about Woody Guthrie and his buds going up against that company in 1947," he said.

"These are the guys we love to hate. It's too easy, L.Q.," I said.

"John D.'s hired thugs killed my grandmother at the Ludlow Massacre in 1914. Wasn't no mystery to it," he said.