If indeed I was smarter than my son, I thought, why did I feel I had just been had?

When I walked up the slope, Doc opened the front door and tossed me the portable phone.

"Tell this guy to work on his speaking skills. He's a little incoherent," he said.

"Which guy?"

"The sheriff."

I put the receiver to my ear.

"Hello?" I said.

"What'd be say?" the sheriff asked.

"Sorry, I wasn't listening," I replied.

"Then you'd better listen to this. We just pulled Terry Witherspoon out of a tree. He's alive but that's about all. His back's broken. Guess who did it to him?"

"Wyatt Dixon?"

"Witherspoon left a knife blade in Dixon's chest. He says Dixon has plans for you and the Voss girl and Ms. Carrol."

"Thanks for telling us."

"You're responsible for all this bullshit, Mr. Holland. I hope you can sleep at night."

"Like a stone. Good-bye, sir," I said, and clicked off the phone.

But my lie hung in my throat.

An hour later Holly Girard drove a hand-waxed, fire-engine-red Corvette across the field behind the house and came to a stop two feet short of the front steps and got out and slammed the door behind her. Her hair was blown into a tangle on her head, her face red with windburn around her brown-tinted aviator's glasses.

"Has Xavier been here?" she said.

"Not to my knowledge," I said.

"Go inside and ask Doc and Maisey."

"Pardon?"

"Do I have to say it more slowly so you understand? Go inside and find out if that drunk idiot has been here."

"No, he hasn't. I can't think of any reason he'd want to come out here, Ms. Girard."

"He went up to the set of my new picture and accused the director of being a money launderer for

Nicki Molinari. He had a gun with him. He starting screaming about protecting the river. I may be fired off my own picture."

"A gun?"

"Oh, you are listening."

"I'd appreciate it if you'd take your anger out on somebody else."

"You twerp," she said, and went past me and into Doc's house.

Doc was reading in a chair by the window, his granny glasses down on his nose. His eyes lifted up into Holly Girard's.

"Eventually the poor, self-deluded weakling I married will be out here. That's because you've been stoking him up ever since you moved to Montana and he can't pee in the morning without first praising the noble Dr. Voss. If you don't call the sheriff the minute you see him, your troubles with rapists will be the least of your problems," Holly said.

Doc folded his book and removed his glasses and dropped them into his shirt pocket and gazed at her face.

"I'm really sorry to hear you take that point of view, Holly," he said.

"You and your friends are so smug, with your books that nobody reads. Did you ever have to make a payroll or tell people they were laid off because of a revolution in Malaysia?" she said.

He started to reply when Temple came out of the kitchen.

"Doc and Billy Bob are gentlemen. I'm not. Get out of here, you stupid bitch," she said, and shoved Holly Girard through the door.

I WA L K E D down in the trees by the river and sat on a pink and gray rock above a pool filled with cotton-wood leaves that had turned yellow and sunk to the bottom. I had lied to the sheriff about my peace of mind. The fact was I got no rest, not with L.Q.'s wandering spirit, not with the anger and the thirst for blood and vengeance that was like a genetic heirloom in the Holland family.

Witherspoon and Dixon deserved whatever happened to them, I told myself. Their violence lived in them like a succubus; I wasn't the catalyst for it. The law had failed Maisey; it had failed Doc; in a way it had failed Sue Lynn Big Medicine. Sometimes you had to shave the dice or be consumed by the evil that society or government, for whatever reason, allowed to exist.

My carefully constructed syllogism almost had me out of the woods.

But a strange sense of guilt and depression seemed to settle on me, and it had nothing to do with Dixon or Witherspoon. For the first time I knew with certainty why L.Q. Navarro's spirit haunted me.

I had broken the troth the preacher had described to me when I was river-baptized in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. While I was still shivering inside my father's old Army shirt, the preacher had leaned his long face through the truck window and had told me I never needed to be afraid again, that there was no mistaking the significance of the green-gold autumnal light that had broken like shattered crystal across my eyes when I was lifted gasping for breath from the stream. The burning in my skin was like no sensation I had ever experienced, as different from prior association as the landscape had become, the way the leaves of the hardwoods fluttered with red and gold, flowing for miles like a field of flowers, all the way up the slope to the massive blue outline of the Ozarks.

But fear that L.Q. and I would not prevail, that we would not be vindicated or avenged, got L.Q. killed in an insect-infested arroyo over amounts of narcotics that were minuscule in terms of the larger market, that probably did not change the life of one addict or put one dealer out of business. What a trade-off, I thought.

"I make you mad up there, throwing Holly Girard out?" Temple said behind me.

"No, not at all. You were eloquent," I replied.

"So what are you thinking on?"

"Carl Hinkel's gone missing. I know where he is."

"Oh?"

"I made sure Nicki Molinari knew about Hinkel's connection to the murder of Cleo Lonnigan's son. Molinari's going to use Hinkel to get his money back from Cleo. I think Molinari might let Cleo pop him."

"It's their grief," Temple said.

"Maybe."

"Where you going?" she asked.

"To pull the plug on this if I can," I said.

But there was no answer at Cleo Lonnigan's house and her message machine was turned off. I went back outside and took L.Q.'s revolver and a box of.45 rounds from Lucas's tent and found Temple down by the river.

"Want a ride home?" I said.

"No. But I'll go with you wherever it is that you and I need to go together," she replied.

e DROVE out to the Jocko Valley and Cleo Lonnigan's place, but she wasn't home. I left a note inside her door that read:

Dear Cleo,

Do not go out to Nicki Molinari's ranch, regardless of what you might consider the necessity of the situation. I'm contacting the sheriff and informing him I think Molinari is involved with a kidnapping. Eventually Carl Hinkel's fate will probably be worse than anything you or I could design for him.

I wish you all the best, Billy Bob Holland

I got into the truck and used Temple's cell phone to call 911. A dispatcher patched me in to the sheriff. Once again I had caught him on the weekend. I told him what I believed had happened to Carl Hinkel.

"You're telling me it was Molinari grabbed him in front of that barbershop?" the sheriff said.

"Yes," I replied.

"And you set it up?"

"Not exactly."

"No, you set it up."

"Okay."

"I'll pass on your information to the sheriff in Ravalli County."

"When?"

"When I get hold of him. In the meantime I'd better not hear from you again till Monday morning," he said.

I clicked off the cell phone and started the truck.

"I have a feeling the sheriff isn't sweating the fate of Carl Hinkel," I said.

"What do you want to do?" Temple asked.

"I have to go out there. I'll drop you off at your motel."

"Forget it," she said.

We drove into the Bitterroot Valley, into its mead-owland and meandering river lined with cotton-woods and canyons that were like dark purple gashes inside the green immensity of the mountains in the west. Up ahead I saw four or five cars and a wrecker on the side of the road and a highway patrolman interviewing two people and writing on a clipboard.