Bitterroot

Chapter 24

In the grayness of the following dawn I sat by Lucas's fire on the riverbank and listened to Sue Lynn tell her story. The wind blew ashes out of the fire ring and they settled on her shoulders and in her hair like snowflakes. While she spoke she squeezed one hand on top of the other and her eyes seemed to look into a place that neither Lucas nor I occupied.

"Are you going to wear a wire?" I asked.

"No, not around Carl. He scares me. Even more than Wyatt does. He's a lot smarter than Wyatt," she answered.

"I think it's time you got out from under these guys, Sue Lynn," I said.

"Why did Mr. Rackley want to know about the guns?" she said.

"If you saw automatic weapons in Hinkel's house, Rackley could get a warrant and hit the place. You didn't see any heavy stuff in there?"

"There's a rack of guns in the basement. Bikers call them 'pogo sticks,'" she said.

"Those are either M-16s or AR-15s. The AR-15s are legal. The others aren't. You're not sure which they are?" I said.

"I think that gun stuff is for dipshits," she said. She stood up from the rock she was sitting on and looked into the mist that shrouded the trees and at the river that flowed like satin over the boulders in the deepest part of the current.

"Lucas, I could never drink coffee without a little milk in it. Do you mind?" I said.

"Since you put it as subtle as a slap in the face with a dead cat, no, Billy Bob, I don't mind," he replied, and rose to his feet and walked up the bank and across the porch into Doc's house.

"Your little brother was abducted and murdered, wasn't he?" I said.

She stood above me, one foot resting on a rock, her thumbs in her pockets. I could see the pulse beating in her throat.

"Who told you that?" she said. "The night Lamar Ellison died, he was marinated on beer and weed in a tavern up the Blackfoot. He had a blackout of some kind and said something that made you very angry."

"I don't remember that," she said. "Doc goes on trial in a couple of weeks. Do you think he should be on trial, Sue Lynn?"

"I came here because Lucas asked me to. Stop questioning me. You're not a policeman."

"Doc's inside. Come on in and talk with him." Her eyes were watering now. She stepped away from the fire and pretended that smoke had gotten in them. She wiped her nose on her wrist.

"You know what it's like to have no choices, to be used by everybody around you, to have nobody care when your little brother is killed? Have you ever lived like that, Mr. Holland? Tell me," she said.

Later, I sat with Temple Carrol at a picnic bench in a city park fringed with maple trees and read through the material she had amassed on Carl Hinkel.

"Where'd you get all this stuff?" I said.

"It's not hard. There're a half-dozen organizations that track people like Hinkel. Besides, he can't wait to get in front of a camera or a microphone," she said.

His record was one of failure on every human level: he had been a low-level operator in the Vietnamese black market; his three marriages had ended in divorce; he had been denied tenure as a communications professor in a South Carolina community college; the state of Georgia had put him out of business for operating a scam that involved selling fraudulent home warranty policies to working-class people.

But he was to discover the enormous potential of the Internet. Not only could he create an electronic recruiting magnet for racists and psychopaths, his self-published books and pamphlets inculcating the hatred of the government and Jews, homosexuals, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics found a huge mail-order audience. The more grim his perspective became, the more his constituency became convinced his voice was the one they had waited to hear all their lives.

He held televised news conferences in front of his ranch and claimed the CIA was making nocturnal flights over his home with black helicopters and that Belgian troops, working for the United Nations, were being trained in the Bitterroot Mountains for a takeover of the United States.

The fact that he obviously had symptoms of schizophrenia did nothing to dampen his newfound success. He actually addressed the Montana state legislature and went to Washington and was welcomed in the offices of at least two U.S. congressmen.

But Hinkel's history was a predictable one and was of little help to me in my preparation for Doc's defense. It was an entry at the bottom of a report and an attached news article sent to Temple by a Klan-watch group in Atlanta that caught my eye. A pedophile who was wanted on state charges had been arrested five years ago in Hinkel's yard. Hinkel had claimed he didn't know the man and in fact thanked the authorities for arresting him.

I circled the entry on the page and pushed it toward Temple.

"Does anything else about child molestation show up in this guy's past?" I asked.

"None that I know of. Why?"

"I'm not sure." In the center of the park was a cement wading pool and a fountain and children were playing in it, and out on the street a man was selling ice cream out of cart with a blue umbrella on top of it.

"There's something else on your mind you're not telling me about, isn't there?" Temple said.

"Quite a few things."

"Start with one."

"Early yesterday I tried to bushwhack Wyatt Dixon."

"Say again?"

"I got downwind from him while he was running a chain saw and put four rounds past his head. He didn't see me but Terry Witherspoon did. Those ATF guys know about it, too."

She propped her head on her fingers and looked at me with her mouth open. Then she took her hand away from her brow and her eyes searched mine.

"Why?" she said.

"A guy like that deserves it."

"Don't lie," she said.

"Come on, I'll buy you a Popsicle."

"You thought I was going to do it. That's why, isn't it?"

"You think too much, Temple," I said, and began putting away her papers and file folders into her nylon backpack.

She was standing next to me now and I could smell the sun's heat on her skin and the perfume on her neck. There was a flush in her cheeks, a different light in her eyes.

"Look at me," she said.

"What?"

She pushed several strands of hair out of her face, a smile tugging at the edge of her mouth. But she didn't speak.

"Would you say what's on your mind?" I said.

"I guess I'll just have to keep an eye on you, that's all," she replied.

That EVENING Lucas borrowed my truck to go to work at the Milltown Bar. When he picked up Sue Lynn at her uncle's house he didn't make it out of the driveway. Amos Rackley and the agent named Jim pulled their car at an angle across the entrance, their brights burning into Lucas's face, and approached both sides of the truck.

"What's with you guys?" Lucas said.

"We just need a minute of Sue Lynn's time," Jim said, and reached through the window and turned off the ignition.

"Maybe she doesn't want to talk to you," Lucas said.

"Trust me, she does. Step out of the truck. I'll give you a cigarette. Would you like that?" the agent said, and winked. He squeezed the handle of the door and eased it open.

Lucas stepped down on the gravel, feeling belittled, unsure why, unsure what to do about it. The sun was down, the sky purple, the air cold and bitter with the smell of diesel off the highway. Jim wore jeans and a beige sports coat and had a blood blister on the bridge of his nose.

"Walk over here with me," he said, turning his back, clicking on a pen light with his thumb and focusing the beam on some photographs he held in one hand. "This will interest you."

Lucas stared down at the photos of Sue Lynn and himself coming out of a supermarket, sitting in her uncle's car, entering the Milltown Bar, undressing on a blanket by a stream.

"You guys are real shits," Lucas said.

Jim put a filter-tipped cigarette in his mouth but didn't light it.

"I heard you play at the Milltown Bar. You want some advice? Lose the Indian broad. It's a matter of time till she goes into the system. Number two, I don't blame you for being pissed off. Nobody wants a telescopic lens focused on his bare ass while he's getting his ashes hauled. But you're taking your old man's fall, kid."

"You're talking about Billy Bob?"

The agent blew his nose into a Kleenex and looked at a drop of blood on it.

"He messed up his career. He's got a store-front law practice in a shithole. You think it's a mystery why he runs around trying to fuck up a government investigation? I'd use my head," the agent said.

"Billy Bob's got a nice office on the town square. People respect him. That's more than I can say about some folks," Lucas replied.

"You see Treasure of the Sierra Madre?" the agent said. "Humphrey Bogart plays this worthless character named Fred C. Dobbs. He's always saying, 'Nobody's putting anything over on Fred C. Dobbs.' What do you think that line means? I never really figured it out."

But Lucas's attention was now fixed on Sue Lynn and the other federal agent, Amos Rackley. Rackley had opened the back door of his car for her and Sue Lynn was getting inside.

Lucas started toward them, but Jim stepped in front of him and spread his fingers on Lucas's chest, pressing slightly, his face only inches from Lucas's. In the headlights of the car the shape of his head seemed like a manikin's.

"She's coming voluntarily. Don't mix in it," the agent said.

"Sue Lynn?" Lucas called out.

But she didn't answer. Jim backed away from Lucas, one finger pointing at him.

"Keep in mind what I said. Hey, stop squeezing your Johnson. We're gonna bring her back," he said.

Lucas returned my truck keys the next morning and sat at the plank table in the kitchen and drank coffee and looked out the window at the frost high up on the mountain.

"Don't worry about her. She's a smart gal," I said.

"I went by her uncle's after I got off work. They hadn't brought her back," he said.

"She was involved with these Treasury guys before you met her, Lucas. She hung out with bikers. She was there when they stuck up a general store and post office on the Res."

"I don't like it when you talk that way, Billy Bob."

"Sue Lynn's history is her own. I didn't make it up."

"That agent said the same thing about you."

"Maybe you should listen to him."

Lucas got up from the table and threw his coffee out the back door. Then he washed the cup in the sink and set it in the dry rack.

"You hurt people when they try to stand up for you. But I don't hold it against you. It's just the way you are. You ain't never gonna change, Billy Bob," he said.

He fitted on his hat and went outside, past the side window, his head bent forward, his face as sharp as an ax blade in the wind.