Bitterroot by James Lee Burke Page B

thickness of his sidearm showing against the flap of his coat.
     
     
    I STAYED with Doc in the waiting room at St. Patrick’s in Missoula while he paced and hammered one fist on top of the other.
    “Slow it down, Tobin,” I said.
    He stopped pacing, but not because of me. He was listening to a conversation outside the door. Two uniformed deputies were enjoying a joke of some kind, one with coarse edges, a reference to sodomy, a laugh at the expense of a woman.
    Doc stepped out into the hall.
    “You guys have something else to do?” he said.
    “What?” one of them said.
    “We’re all right here,” I said, stepping into the deputy’s line of vision.
    One deputy touched the other on the arm, and the two of them walked back toward the hospital entrance.
    “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee across the street,” I said to Doc.
    “I’m going back to the emergency room,” he said.
    “They told you to stay out. Why don’t you let them do their job?”
    “You lecture me one more time, Billy Bob, and I’m going to knock you down,” he replied.
    I couldn’t blame him for his anger. He was a good man who loved his daughter, and the two of them had just stepped into the middle of an unending, degrading, and callous process that treats victims and family members as ciphers in an investigative file, rips away all vestiges of their privacy, and often inculcates in them the conclusion that somehow they are deserving of their fate.
    I left Doc alone and went outside into the darkness. The maple trees were in full leaf, the night air crisp and tinged with smoke from a grass fire on a hill. Children were riding bikes on a sidewalk and the sounds of a baseball game broadcast from the West Coast came through the open window of an old brick rooming house. It was a scene from the brush of Norman Rockwell. But inside the hospital Maisey Voss was plugged into a morphine-laced IV, her body strung with purple and yellow bruises that went into the bone, the fetid breath of her attackers still wrapped around her face like cobweb.
    A few feet away I saw L.Q. Navarro leaning with his back against the trunk of a maple tree, rolling a cigarette, his down-tilted Stetson and black suit silhouetted against the lighted entrance of the emergency room.
    “You don’t have anything to say?” I asked.
    “I’d head for the barn on this one,” he said.
    “That wasn’t ever your style, L.Q.,” I replied.
    “Doc fired them bikers up because he cain’t let go of his wife’s death.”
    “You don’t walk out on your buds,” I said.
    “He says he didn’t like Vietnam? Maybe dying has messed up my ability to remember things. I thought SEALs was volunteers.”
    I never could win an argument with L.Q. He twisted the ends of his cigarette and put it in his mouth and struck a kitchen match on the butt of his holstered revolver. His skin and mustache flared in the cupped flame of the match.
    “This one ain’t just about bikers. Why do you think the sheriff pointed you at that alcoholic crime writer and his wife, the actress, what’s that gal’s name, the one who snorts up coke like an anteater?” L.Q. said.
    “I stubbed my toe on that one, too.”
    “You gonna keep us here?”
    “I’ll let you know,” I said.
    He drew in on his cigarette and breathed the smoke across the tops of his fingers. His eyes were filled with a black luminescence, the ascetic, lean features of his face even more handsome in death. I thought I saw him grin at the corner of his mouth.
     
     
    A HALF  HOUR  LATER Doc Voss joined me outside.
    “They moved her upstairs. You want to hear what those bastards did to her?” he said.
    “I was a cop, Doc. I’ve been there,” I said.
    But he told me anyway. In physiological detail, his voice cracking in his throat, his palms opening and closing at his sides.
    “She’s alive, partner. A lot of predators don’t leave witnesses,” I said.
    “You’re pretty glib for a guy on the sidelines,” he said.
    I let it