Bitterroot by James Lee Burke Page A

embarrassment.
     
     
    DOC AND I dropped Cleo at her car by the ice cream parlor, then drove up the Blackfoot River toward his house. We turned off the highway north of Potomac, rumbled across the log-and-cable bridge onto the dirt road, and drove along the edge of a dry creek bed that was white and dusty and webbed with algae under the moon.
    Doc kept squinting his eyes through the front window.
    “That looks like a fire,” he said.
    “Where?”
    “Through the trees. You see it?” he said.
    “No,” I said, irritably, and used the electric buttons on the door to roll down all the windows in the truck. “You smell any smoke?”
    “None,” he said.
    “Then for God’s sakes, shut up. I don’t want to hear any more doom and gloom. If just for five minutes. Okay, Doc?”
    We went across a cattle guard and drove down the two-track lane through the meadow behind his house. I had been right. There was no fire in the vicinity. Instead, Doc’s yard was filled with emergency vehicles whose flashers lit the front porch of the house and the trees and the pebbled bank of the river and the current that flowed through the boulders with the dull red glow of a smithy’s forge.
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter
    6
     
     
    A FEW MINUTES LATER I watched the paramedics carry Maisey on a gurney to the back of an ambulance and place her inside. The night air was cold and a paramedic had pulled a blanket to her chin. Her face was turned from me, but I could see a marbled discoloration on her neck, like the shape of a hand. A sheriff’s deputy wearing latex gloves came out of the house carrying a vinyl garbage bag that contained Maisey’s jeans and torn blouse and undergarments.
    Doc climbed into the back of the ambulance with her and looked back at me, his face like I’d never seen it before.
    “I’ll follow y’all to the hospital,” I said.
    He didn’t answer. A paramedic closed the door and the ambulance turned around in the yard and drove back through the meadow toward the gate and the dirt road. The engine made no sound, and I could hear the grass that grew along the two-track lane brushing against the ambulance’s undercarriage.
    “Your friend is having a bad night, so I don’t hold his rudeness against him,” the sheriff said. “But I’m gonna tell you what I told him, and you can repeat it to him in the morning. There were three bikers.”
    He held up three fingers in front of me.
    “One way or another we’ll nail them. That means your friend takes care of his daughter and I take care of the law. You hearing me on this?” the sheriff said.
    “Yeah, I am, Sheriff. What bothers me is it’s the same bullshit I ran on crime victims when I knew the perps would probably skate,” I said.
    “I don’t care for your manner, Mr. Holland, but I’m gonna let that go … We talked to the boy she was with earlier. The kids told Dr. Voss they were going to a movie. But that wasn’t the real plan. After you and the doctor left, they thought they’d have a little private time together. Except they had a fight at some point and the boy went home. I say ‘at some point,’ do you follow me?”
    “They were in the sack?” I asked.
    “Neither one is willing to say that, but that’d be my guess.”
    “So even if you nail the bikers, their attorney will put it on Maisey’s friend?”
    “You’re a defense lawyer. Do you know an easier client to get off than a sex predator?”
    “I couldn’t tell you. I don’t take them.”
    “You damn shysters take anybody with a checkbook,” he said.
    Then he shook his head as though taking himself to task. “Look, back in the 1860s the Montana Vigilance Committee lynched twenty-two murderers and highwaymen,” he said. “They bounced them off cottonwood trees and barn rafters all over the state. I guess it could make a man yearn for the good old days. But this ain’t them. You tell that to Dr. Voss for me.”
    Try telling him yourself, bud, I thought as he walked away from me, the