I pulled Terry Witherspoon to his feet and shoved him toward the woods and kicked him in the tail-bone.

"Get out of here," I said.

"I live here," he said, his breath hiccupping in his throat.

"That doesn't matter. Get out of my sight until I'm gone."

He backed away from me, hooking on his glasses crookedly, then turned and hurried into the forest, the dead rabbit coated with dust and blood, swinging stiffly against his thigh.

I drove back into Missoula and used a pay phone to call the sheriff at his office. There was no answer. I called the 911 dispatcher.

"It's Sunday. He's not in his office today," she said.

"Give me his home number."

"I can't do that."

"This is about an attempted homicide. I'll give you my number. I'll wait by the pay phone."

"Sir, you'd better not be jerking people around," she replied.

But she pulled it off. Five minutes later the pay phone rang.

"Go up to Terry Witherspoon's shack on the river. There's a roll of half-burned pipe tape by the trash barrel in back. Get there before he finishes destroying it and I bet it'll match the tape that was used to tie up Temple," I said.

"You tossed his place?" the sheriff said.

"No, I tossed Witherspoon."

"I think you just managed to blow it for everybody. It's Sunday. I have to get a hold of a judge and a search warrant."

"I need directions to Nicki Molinari's dude ranch," I said.

"You're about to start a second career, son. Convict cowboy over at Deer Lodge. The place is full of smart asses who got their own mind about everything. You'll fit right in," he replied.

BUT ACTUALLY I didn't need the sheriff's directions to find the Molinari ranch. Previously the sheriff had mentioned it was outside Stevensville, twenty-five miles down in the Bitterroots. On Monday, I drove to Stevensville and stopped at a barbershop in an old brick building on the main street and went inside. Two barbers were cutting hair while a third customer, an old man with his trousers tucked inside his boots, read a newspaper, his elbows on his knees, his face scowling with disapproval at the news of the day.

"Could you tell me where Nicki Molinari lives?" I asked.

Both the barbers turned their backs on me and went on snipping and combing hair as though they hadn't heard me. The customers in the barber chairs cut their eyes at me, then looked straight ahead.

But the old man had lowered his newspaper and was staring at me with the intensity of a hawk sighting in on a field mouse from a telephone line. His skin looked like it had been cured in a smokehouse, his clothes soaked in a bucket of starch and flat-ironed on his skinny frame. A cross was embroidered with gold thread on the pocket of his white snap-button shirt, and there were choleric blazes in his throat, as though heat were climbing out of his collar.

"You a pimp?" he asked.

"Sir?" I said.

"I asked if you're a procurer, one of them that brings women out to that greaser's ranch." His accent was Appalachian, West Virginia or perhaps Kentucky, a wood rasp being ground across a metal surface.

"No, sir. I'm an attorney."

"Is there a difference?" he said.

"Thanks for y'all's time," I said, and went back out on the street.

But the old man followed me out on the sidewalk. The Sapphire Mountains rose up behind him, their green slopes the texture of velvet, the crests strung with clouds.

"What's your business with that gangster?" he asked.

"As you imply, sir, it's my business."

"No, it ain't. He's my neighbor. I run a church. Now I got a shitpot of criminals and whores swimming naked in a pool within view of our services."

"I guess what I aim to do is mess up Nicki Molinari's day any way I can."

When he grinned he showed two teeth that stood up in his gums like slats.

"Drive straight toward the Sapphires. The China-Polish hogs are mine. The Cadillacs and the naked whores throwing beach balls on the lawn are his," he said.

The ranch owned by Nicki Molinari and his friends looked out of place, out of sync with itself, as though it had been designed and put together by someone who had toured the West and wasn't quite sure what he remembered about it.

The house was Santa Fe stucco, with shady arcades and tile walkways and big glazed urns spilling over with flowers. An antique freight wagon sat by the driveway, as though announcing a historical connection to the past. A half dozen horses, their backs rubbed with saddle sores the size of half dollars, stood listlessly in a lot that was nubbed down to the dirt, while rolled hay lay humped and yellow in the fields. A swimming pool the color and shape of a chemical green teardrop steamed in the cool air next to a new log barn that housed no animals or farm machinery but an enclosed batting cage with an automatic pitching machine inside.

I pulled into a gravel parking area on the side of the house. Molinari shut down the pitching machine and opened a door in the batting cage and came toward me, dressed only in tennis shoes and knee-length socks and cutoff sweatpants that were hitched tightly into his genitalia.

"Am I gonna have trouble here?" he said. "Call somebody if you feel uncomfortable," I replied.

"If I call anybody, it'll be for an ambulance. You're starting to be a nuisance."

"You bashed Cleo Lonnigan's carpenter. I got picked up for it. While I was in jail, a friend of mine was buried alive by Wyatt Dixon."

His eyes fixed on mine, as though reading significance in my words that only he understood. He scratched at a pimple on top of his shoulder.

"I'm sorry about the carpenter, but it's not on me. Cleo is sitting on money that don't belong to her. I told you, the people her husband stiffed give out motivational lessons nobody forgets. Her husband didn't learn that lesson, either, and it got him and his kid killed," he said.

He squeezed the pimple until it popped, then brushed at his skin.

"Save the shuck for your hired morons. My friend and I took your weight. That means if Wyatt Dixon comes around my friend again, I'm going to be out to see you," I said.

"Right," he said, and looked off into the breeze. His skin was olive-toned and looked cool and taut in the sunshine. "You want to hit some in the cage?"

"No."

"Don't go, man. What do you think of Xavier Girard as a writer?"

"Why?"

"Because he's writing my life story. Because I've told him stuff I don't tell everybody."

"What stuff?"

"You asked me once how I got out of Laos. I rode out on the skid of a helicopter. Except I pushed another guy off the skid. A GI. At five hundred feet." His eyes left mine, then came back and refocused on me again. His face seemed to energize, as though the answer to all his questions lay within inches of his grasp. "After you capped your friend, that other Texas Ranger, you saw a shrink?"

I wanted to simply walk away, to pretend I was above his inquisition and his criminal level of morality. He waited, his face expectant. A woman with dyed red hair came out of the house and got into a convertible with a bright white top and began blowing the horn at him.

"Shut up that damn noise!" he yelled at her, then turned back to me. "How'd you get that guy off your conscience?"

"I didn't. I never dealt with it. I feel sorry for you," I said.

"You never dealt-" he said, then stopped and pressed his fingers in the center of his forehead, his mouth open slightly, as though he were fingering a tumor or perhaps recognizing a brother-in-arms.

That same day Carl Hinkel drifted his single-engine plane on currents of warm air above the Bitterroot River and landed on a freshly mowed pasture at the rear of his ranch. As soon as Wyatt Dixon stepped from the passenger door, he was arrested by two sheriff's deputies. But before they could cuff him he peeled off his T-shirt and shook it loose from his hand like a stripteaser on a stage. The veins and tendons in his upper torso looked like the root system in a tree.