their peers, the knowledge that the earth and all its gifts had been created especially for them.
He had never felt so miserable in his life.
After sunset and another pitcher of sangria, Darrel drove Greta back to her bungalow in the Bitterroot Valley. When she unlocked the front door, neither of them could believe what they saw. Every room was a shambles. The furniture was turned upside down, mattresses and upholstery slashed and gutted, drywall torn off the joists, desk and dresser drawers dumped, even all the canned goods in the pantry and frozen food in the icebox raked on the floor.
The alarm had never sounded because the home invader or invaders had come through the roof, first chopping a hole in it, then smashing a dead-bolted attic door into kindling. The level of violence done to the bungalow created in Darrel’s mind a perpetrator of immense strength and destructive energies, someone with tendons in his arms and hands like steel cable and with absolutely no sense of mercy or restraint at all.
Greta Lundstrum sat down in a deep chair and wept.
“When was the last time you saw Wyatt Dixon?” Darrel asked.
Chapter 10
Sunday morning, Amber Finley woke in Johnny’s bed and touched the place where he should have been but felt only the warm, empty space he had occupied. The Jocko Valley was still in shadow, the crest of the hills black- green against the light growing in the sky, the sound of the river loud on the rocks at the foot of the property. She and Johnny had slept with the windows open and the room was cold, and she wished he would come back to bed. In the kitchen she heard pans clanking on the stove and smelled coffee boiling and bacon frying in a skillet.
She raised herself up on her hands and yawned. “Johnny?” she said.
But there was no reply. She glanced down at his pillow, and in the indentation where his head had rested was a small blue-felt box. She picked it up and pried the top back on its spring. Inserted in a satin cushion was a gold ring with a tiny diamond mounted on it.
“I was going to surprise you with some apple flapjacks,” he said from the doorway, an apron tied around his hips, a spatula in his hand.
“Oh, it’s beautiful, Johnny,” she said.
“There’s a Methodist minister up at St. Ignatius who says he’ll marry us any day we want to set it up.”
“Let’s do it this week. Let’s do it tomorrow.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and slipped the ring on her left hand, his eyes lowered so she could not read them. “A couple of things we need to agree on,” he said.
“What?” she said, her face clouding.
“Your father has to know about it up front. I need to be there when that happens, too.”
“He doesn’t control my life. He doesn’t have anything to say about it.”
“He’s still your old man. He believes in what he does. He deserves to be treated with respect, don’t you think?”
She found his hand again and pressed it hard, then looked admiringly at her ring. “How’d you pay for it?”
“It’s called ‘credit.’ One other thing. If I go inside, we agree you can divorce me. In fact, I’d insist on it. I don’t want to create a jailhouse widow out of my best friend.” Johnny had small eyes, and they crinkled at the corners when he grinned.
“Don’t talk like that. Billy Bob is a good lawyer. We have a lot of friends who will stand up for you,” she said.
He stroked her hair and kissed her brow, then her mouth.
“I haven’t brushed my teeth,” she said.
He pressed her down on the pillow and kissed her mouth again, then the tops of her breasts and the long taper of her stomach and two red moles just below her navel. She curled her knees into him and held him across the back and put her face in his hair and bit his neck. She could feel her breath quicken and a flush spread through her thighs.
He sat up and took both her wrists in his hands. “I have to tell you something else,” he said.
The register in his voice had dropped, and she studied his eyes now because they, like his words, never lied to her. What she saw there made her ball her fists. “Say it, say it, say it,” she said.
“My dreams started again. Some of the stuff in them doesn’t make good sense. My uncle said my dreams would always be distorted, not clear like Crazy Horse’s were, because my mother was Salish and I’m only half Lakota.”
“You tear me apart when you talk like this.”
His eyes were still looking at her, yet she knew they were not seeing her but instead a vision inside his head. He swallowed and there was a dry click inside his throat. “Someone else is going to be killed, here, at my house. It’s a man. I think it could be me. Maybe making you my wife would be a selfish thing on my part.”
She put her arms around his neck and pulled him down close to her face. She started to speak, then simply held him as tightly as she could, gripping the hardness of his back, pulling at his apron and his belt buckle, aching to have him inside her before he spoke again and her heart burst.
Monday morning, Seth Masterson sauntered into my office and sat down in front of my desk, his long legs, as always, a problem, a tan rain hat perched on his knee. “How you doin’, bud?” he asked.
“I’m just fine, Seth. But Lester Antelope isn’t. He’s dead. My client Johnny American Horse isn’t doing too well, either. Unless I get some help, the D.A. is going to bury him alive.”
Seth twisted his head and glanced out the window at the maples puffing in the wind on the courthouse lawn, his expression neutral. “We’ve got a high-tech snitch in this area, a hacker we could have sent up but who we decided to leave on a short leash to help us out once in a while,” he said. “The problem with our snitch is he’s a wiseass and thinks he’s smarter than we are, so he’s not always truthful or forthcoming. You with me?”
“No.”
“A couple of Indians came to him with a bunch of floppy disks they couldn’t get into. Our snitch says he couldn’t find a way into them, either. We served search warrants on the Indians, but their houses were clean. You recognize the names of these guys?”
He slid his notebook across the desktop. I looked at the two names written on the top page and shook my head.
“They were friends of Lester Antelope,” Seth said. “I think they’re part of the bunch who broke into Global Research.”
“Why is a federal agency interested in a small research lab in the Bitterroot Valley?”
He hesitated a moment. “Global has some federal defense contracts,” he said.
“To do what?”
“It’s agricultural in nature.”
“I’ve got a problem with the way you do business, Seth,” I said. “Guys like me are allowed to know parts of things. A conversation with you amounts to other people answering your questions.”
He pulled on his ear. “I didn’t make myself clear. I think our snitch got into those disks. I think what he saw there scared the shit out of him. Listen, Billy Bob, those two killers American Horse waxed, Ruggles and Bumper? Don’t be deceived. There’s more of them out there. If that sounds funny coming from a federal agent, that’s the way it is.” He wrote a number on the back of his business card and flipped the card on my desk. “That’s my number at the Doubletree.”
He got up from the chair without saying good-bye and, gentleman that he was, fitted on his rain hat only after he had walked out the front door.
Agricultural in nature?
That evening, Darrel McComb got a visitor at his apartment he did not expect. Romulus Finley rang the bell, then began tapping impatiently with one knuckle on the door before Darrel could reach it.
“You got a few minutes, Detective?” he said.
“Sure,” Darrel said, stepping back from the open door.
Finley walked into the center of the room, turning in a circle, nodding approvingly. His cheeks were rosy from
