Bitterroot by James Lee Burke

don’t you?” the agent named Amos Rackley said.
    “Yes, sir,” I said.
    “I think he’s a hard guy,” the agent in the passenger’s seat said to the driver. The hair on the back of his neck was shaved neatly above his collar, his skin pink, his jawline well defined.
    “You talking about me?” I said.
    “Your jacket says you were investigated for capping some Mexicans across the border. The Mexican authorities claimed they were wets wandering around in the desert,” he said, turning his head so I could hear his words.
    I leaned forward in my seat. “I remember some guys shooting at me down there. It’s kind of fuzzy, though. I got hit twice. Maybe that’s why my recall isn’t as good as it should be,” I said.
    “He’s a fast thinker, too,” the agent in the passenger’s seat said to the driver.
    “That’s enough, fellows. Pull in there,” the agent named Amos Rackley said. He got out on his side of the car and waited for me to join him.
    He put on his sunglasses and stared at the sunlight on the river’s surface, then took them off again.
    “You see the trout feeding in the shade? You can always see them better with dark glasses on. They cut the glare off the water,” he said. He looked at me. “You’re not interested in fish?”
    “Yeah, I am.”
    “You got to forgive Jim. He lost some friends in the Oklahoma City bombing,” Rackley said.
    “A guy named Wyatt Dixon followed me up here. He’s bad news,” I said.
    “You got that right. But that’s our worry, not yours.”
    “Then get him out of my life—”
    He raised the ball of his index finger at me before I could continue.
    “Jim wasn’t the only one who lost friends at Oklahoma City. You quit the Justice Department. You don’t have a vote in what we do. If one of our people gets hurt because you’ve got your nose in the wrong place, I’m going to break it off,” he said.
    He got back into his car, and the three agents drove away. I stared after them, my face tight and insentient, as though a cold wind had just died and left my skin dead to the touch.
    I went to the restaurant where I was supposed to meet Cleo but she wasn’t there and she didn’t answer her phone, either. I waited an hour, then drove back up the Blackfoot to Doc’s house. I went to bed without seeing either Doc or Maisey and dreamed of Texas and a field of bluebonnets in which a white stallion splattered with blood tried to mount a mare that turned and bit him in the forequarters.
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter
    9
     
     
    IN THE MORNINGI discovered that Cleo had left three messages on Doc’s answering machine. The messages said only that she had gotten to the restaurant late and did not explain why. I called her at home.
    “It was Lamar Ellison. I’d gone up to the Indian family’s house to check on the children. He followed me,” she said.
    “Ellison? Why’s he coming around you?” I said.
    “I don’t know. I saw him on his motorcycle out on the road. The Indians don’t have a phone. I couldn’t get back to the house. It was awful,” she said.
    “Did he do anything?”
    “No, he just sat out there in the twilight, looking up and down the road. Then he left.”
    “I’m coming out,” I said.
    “No, I have to go to work. I’ll call you this afternoon.”
    “Cleo—”
    “I’m sorry. I have to go. I didn’t sleep much last night.”
    “Does this have anything to do with your son?”
    “How would I know? I just hope this man Ellison dies a horrible death. I hate him,” she said.
     
     
    I WENT outside and lifted my fly vest and canvas creel off a wood peg on the front porch and put on my hip waders and drove my truck along the dirt road to a spot on the river that was seldom fished. I walked a quarter of a mile through woods and down a soft, green slope where huge gray boulders seemed to grow out of the soil like mushrooms without stems. I waded into the river, which was ice-cold from the melt and lack of sunlight, and fished a deep