"Sounds like an accident to me," I said.

"Except he wasn't carrying no fishing gear, never owned a fishing license, and was never known to fish. Also, most sane people don't wear chest waders in July."

"Well, we'll all try to feel as bad as possible about his passing, Sheriff."

"I love to hear you talk, Mr. Holland. Every time you open your mouth I'm convinced this is indeed a great country, that absolutely any little dimwit can become an attorney. Tell Dr. Voss to call me before I come out here and put him in handcuffs."

I watched his cruiser drive across the field behind the house, then disappear down the dirt road. A half hour later my head was still pounding with his remarks. I called him at his office.

"Did you bother to check out this kid Terry Witherspoon?" I asked.

"The voyeur? Yeah, I did. He says he never looked in Maisey Voss's window and was never on her property."

"What did you expect him to say? Did you lift any prints off that gas can?"

"Lab work on peeping Tom complaints? Yeah, we got time for that. When we ain't busting up crack labs and trying to keep them goddamn Crips out of here."

"I really don't like being your straight man, Sheriff."

"Son, you were born for it. Lord God, I wish you people would move to Los Angeles," he said, and hung up.

Temple Carrol picked me up at Doc's house the next morning, and we drove into Missoula for breakfast. She wore khakis and scuffed boots and a yellow pullover, and because of her short height she steered with her chin tilted slightly upward. She was one of those women whose contradictions made both her admirers and her adversaries misjudge her potential.

Her eyes were a milky green that changed color when she was angry, as though dark smoke swam inside them, and she had a distracting habit of chewing gum or piling her hair on top of her head while I talked to her, as though she were not listening. Then I would discover days later she could repeat a conversation back to me, word for word, and accurately correct my own memory of it.

She kick-boxed on a heavy bag every day at a gym in Deaf Smith and could touch the floor with the flats of her hands. She was often dirty from work in her garden, the seat of her shorts grass-stained, her hair full of leaves, her body glowing with sweat and the smell of crushed flowers. She cared nothing for other people's opinions, thought politics were foolish, kept guns all over her house, and fed every stray animal on the west side of the county. Anyone who mistook her eccentricities for weakness and crossed a line with her did so only once.

As I looked at the pinkness of her skin, the baby fat on her arms, the way a strand of her chestnut hair kept blowing in her eye, I wanted to touch her, to place the back of my hand on the heat of her cheek, to rest my arm across her shoulders. As she drove along the river, through the blueness of the morning, her profile and the angle of her mouth contained all the innocence and loveliness of a high school girl waiting to be kissed, and I felt ashamed of my own impulses and all the times I had been cavalier about her loyalty and friendship.

But try as I might, I always did or said the wrong thing with Temple Carrol.

"You have a reason for staring at me?" she said.

"Sorry," I said.

"I get the feeling you're in a confessional mood about something," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"I was jogging by the campus yesterday. I happened to see you on the roof of a house with another man."

"Really?" I said.

"The postman told me that's the home of a Catholic priest. Are we using the clergy again to rinse out our latest affair?"

"How about some slack, Temple?"

"I'd like to break your damn neck," she replied, and gave me a look. "I interviewed your Dr. Pisspot yesterday. You can really pick them."

"You did what?"

"I went out to Cleo Lonnigan's house. God's gift to the Red Man. She seems to think she glows with blue fire."

"You shouldn't have done that."

"She thinks those bikers killed her child. That makes her a viable murder suspect. By the way, I wouldn't waste my energies being protective of her. She seems to put you on a level with the Antichrist."

"I shouldn't have gotten involved with her. It was my fault. She's not a bad person."

"I don't think you're chivalric, Billy Bob. You're just real dumb sometimes," she said. When she looked at me the milky green color of her eyes had darkened but not with anger. The depth of injury in them, like a stone bruise down in the soul, made me swallow with shame.

ve minutes after I returned to Doc's the phone rang in the living room.

"Hello?" I said.

"Where have you been?" Cleo Lonnigan's voice said.

"Out."

"Then why don't you get a message machine?" she asked.

"Because it's not my home."

"Did you send that nasty little bitch up to my ranch?" she said.

"What did you say?"

"Ms. Carrol. Is she house-trained?"

"You keep your mouth off her, Cleo."

"Do you think you can take a woman to bed and then just say, 'Drop dead, I'm busy color-matching my socks right now'?"

"Good-bye, Cleo. You're an amazing woman. I hope I never see you again," I said, and gently hung up the phone.

I went outside so I would not have to hear the phone ring when she called back.

I WALKED through the cottonwoods and aspens on the riverbank. The river was in shadow under the canopy, but the sun had risen above the ridge and the boulders in the center of the current were steaming in the light. I saw L.Q. Navarro squatting down on his haunches in the shallows, scraping a hellgrammite off the bottom of a rock with the blade of his pocketknife. The bottoms of his suit pants were dark with water, his teeth white with his grin. He threaded the hellgrammite onto a hook that hung from a fishing pole carved out of a willow branch.

"The last couple of days been bard on your pride?"

"You might say that."

"Next time that ATF agent smarts off, you bust his jaw. I never could abide them federal types."

"What am I going to do with Cleo Lonnigan?"

"Get out of town?"

"That's not funny."

"It wasn't meant to be."

Then his attention wandered, as it often did when I imposed all my daily concerns upon him. His hellgrammite had slipped off the hook in the current, and he waded deeper into the water, into the shade, and lifted up a heavy rock from the bed and set it down on top of a boulder and scraped another hellgrammite from the moss-slick underside.

"Hand me my pole, will you, bud?" he said.

I picked up the willow branch he had shaved clean of leaves and notched at one end for his line and walked into the stream with it. The current, filled with snowmelt, climbed over my knees and struck my genitals like a hammer. The sunlight had gone and the tunnel of trees suddenly seemed as cold as the grave.

I realized L.Q. was looking beyond me, at someone on the bank. Then L.Q. was gone and in his place a huge hatch of pink and dark-winged salmon flies churned over the current.

"You always get in the water with your clothes on, Mr. Holland? Hand me your stick and I'll pull you out," Nicki Molinari said from the bank, his cigarette smoke leaking like a piece of cotton from his mouth.