"What were Lamar and Sue Lynn talking about?" I said.

"It didn't make no sense. Lamar was stoned. Something about kids," he said. "Look, man, I don't want to speak bad of the dead. The Mexican Mafia had a hit on the guy. He ratted out some people inside. So maybe they cooked him. That's their style. They'll Molotov a guy in his cell."

"You think Wyatt Dixon might have lit up his life?" I said.

He shut down the valves on the acetylene torch he had been using. He wiped the sweat and soot off his face with a rag.

"I ain't said nothing about Wyatt Dixon. I ain't even told you he was there."

"That's right. You haven't said a word about him. Where'd you get the Confederate flag on your wall?" I said.

"At the Indian powwow in Arlee. What do you care?" he said, irritably.

"Is Wyatt a bad dude?"

"I know what you're trying to do, man. This all started 'cause your friend's daughter pulled a train. The way I heard it, she invited them guys over and couldn't get enough. Flush it any way you want, chief, you either beat feet or I'm gonna fry up some Texas toast."

He popped his welding torch alight.

When I got back to Doc's place I saw an old sedan parked in the trees, down by the river. Its windshield and headlights had been removed, the body sprayed with gray primer, and two large numerals were painted in orange on the driver's door.

The back door of the house was open. I walked inside and saw Maisey in her bedroom, lying on her side, her back to me. The Indian girl named Sue Lynn sat on the mattress beside her, stroking Maisey's hair. The plank floor creaked under my foot, and Sue Lynn's face jerked toward me.

"What are you doing in here?" I said through the doorway.

"I came to see about the doctor. Is he going to be all right?" she said, standing up now.

"He's in the county jail, charged with murder. Does that sound all right?" I said.

"Don't talk to her like that, Billy Bob. She came here to help," Maisey said.

"She's buds with Ellison's motorcycle pals, Maisey," I said.

"What do you know?" Sue Lynn said.

"I think you're here for self-serving reasons," I said.

"Then sit on this," she replied, and raised her middle finger at me.

She tried to stare me down, then her eyes broke. She hurried out the far bedroom door into the living room and kept going, through the front screen and down the slope toward the riverbank. I went after her.

"Listen to me," I said. "I used to be a lawman. I think the G put you inside the Berdoo Jesters. You know who set fire to Ellison, don't you?"

She was standing in the shade of the trees, and her dark skin was freckled with the sunlight that shone through the canopy.

"You should have kept the doctor away from Lamar in the bar up at Lincoln. You wouldn't listen to me. This is all on you," she said.

"What's your last name?"

"Big Medicine."

"You're a Crow?" I said.

"How did you know that?" she said.

"One of the scouts for Custer at the Little Big Horn was a Crow Indian named Big Medicine. The scouts wanted to sing their death song before they rode into Sitting Bull's village. Custer accused them of cowardice and fired them. They were the only survivors of the massacre."

She began backing toward her automobile, her eyes fixed uncertainly on mine, as though I possessed omniscience or some form of magic. Even though the air was cool in the shade, there was a bright chain of sweat around her throat.

"The car belongs to a stock-car driver. It doesn't have lights. I have to get it back to the junkyard before sunset," she said.

"Wyatt Dixon is a dangerous man. Don't let those federal guys use you."

She felt behind her for the handle on the car door, then a moment of resolve, perhaps even cautious trust, seemed to form in her face.

"Say I do know some government fucks? Why would they be asking me if Lamar and the others have been in Kingman, Arizona?" she said.

"The men who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City hung around there at one time or another," I said.

Her lips moved silently, as though she were repeating the words to herself, as though the enormity of their connotation would not come into focus behind her eyes.

An attorney friend of Doc's filed a pro hac vice petition on my behalf, which would empower me to represent Doc on a one-case basis without passing the Montana bar exam. On Tuesday afternoon Doc was released from the county jail on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bond.

When we walked outside the sun was shining on the hills and the air smelled of freshly mowed grass and raindrops striking on warm cement.

"How about I buy you a dinner?" I said.

"Where's Maisey?"

"At the house."

"She didn't want to come with you?"

"I don't know much about these things, Doc, but I think rape is like theft of the soul. You've got to give her some time."

"Sure," he said, his eyes averted, his face empty. "Let's get some dinner."

THAT EVENING, at a university gathering, Xavier Girard gave a reading from his newest novel, one that some believed might win him his third Edgar Award. Students and faculty and local writers filled the room. Sitting in the middle of the audience was a man in skintight jeans and cowboy boots and a long-sleeve polka dot shirt buttoned at the wrists. He wore women's purple garters on his upper arms. He did not remove his wide-brim hat, even though the people behind him kept clearing their throats and leaning to the side to see around him.

He had arrived early, with an effeminate, longhaired youth whose smirk at his surroundings and flaccid muscle tone and lack of posture were in exact contrast to the hatted man's obvious physical power and lantern-jawed concentration.

The audience loved Xavier Girard. He was generous in spirit and irreverent toward stuffiness and convention. He was egalitarian and humble and acutely aware of propriety and language in the presence of women. He wore his own success and fame like a loose garment, and at signings charged books on his own account when a student or clergy person could not afford one. If he drank too much from the thermos of cold vodka by his elbow, his sin was a forgivable one, the alcoholic flush on his face a mask for the pain that only a poet felt.

His mouth was slightly bruised, his lip still puffed from his fight with Lamar Ellison, but his voice resonated through the room. He read the dialogue of his characters in peckerwood and Cajun accents; his eyes seemed to look directly at every one of his listeners, the iambic cadence of his descriptive passages like lines from a sonnet.

But when his eyes fell on Wyatt Dixon's, they held there, narrowing, the way a hunter's might when he sees an unexpected presence in a woods and realizes the nature of the game has just changed.

During the question and answer period that followed the reading, Wyatt Dixon's square, callus-edged hand floated into the air.

"Yes, sir?" Xavier said.

Dixon stood and removed his hat. "You, sir, are obviously a great writer and believer in the land of the free and home of the brave," he said. "In that spirit, can you tell me what is wrong with Americans running a gold mine on the Blackfoot River and providing jobs for other Americans?"

The room was silent. A couple of people turned and looked in Dixon's direction, then glanced away.

"We don't need cyanide in the river. Does that answer your question?" Xavier said.

"It surely does. I'm glad that's been explained to me. Thank you very much, sir," Dixon said. "Sir, could I ask you-"

A woman librarian picked up the microphone from the podium and, her lips brushing against the mike's surface, hurriedly said, "Mr. Girard will be signing books at the table in the back. In the meantime, everyone can help himself to the punch."