J.D. raised his brows. “It’s after one in the morning.”

“She’s a night owl. A man has to appreciate each woman for her own qualities. This one’s got some pretty good qualities,” he said nodding. Willie Nelson as Chief Dan George. Wisdom in a Waylon Jennings T-shirt. “That little blonde-bet she’s got some good qualities too. She’s got a look about her. Maybe you oughta find out.”

J.D. worked his jaw a little, chewing back the desire to tell Chaske to mind his own business. The usual rules had never applied to Chaske. He claimed his ties to the ancient mystics let him live on a different plane. That or what he put in those little cigarettes.

“She’s just passing through, Chaske. Anyway, I got no time. Someone’s gotta keep this place hanging together. Near as I can figure out, that’s the only reason I was born,” he said, wincing a little at the bitterness that crept in around the edges of his voice. “To keep the Rafferty name on the deed.”

“Kinda hard to do if there’s no Raffertys after you,” he pointed out. He turned his profile to J.D. once again and stared off across the ranch yard and beyond, his gaze seeming to encompass the whole of Montana.

“Man can’t own the land, you know,” Chaske announced. “Man comes and goes; the land will always be here. White men never figure that out. All we own are our lives.”

Everything he left unsaid pressed down on J.D.’s shoulders, forcing a sigh out of him. He was too tired to argue philosophy, too exhausted to defend the principles of tradition or try to impress Chaske with a white man’s code of honor and responsibility. There was no impressing Chaske; he was above it all on his plane with the mystics.

“Damn pretty night,” the old man said, pointing at the sky with a thrust of his chin. “Look at all those stars.” He glanced at J.D., his small, dark eyes glowing with amusement. “Good night for night owls.”

Then he was gone and J.D. was left with the night and the stars all to himself. Alone. The way he was meant to be, he told himself. Tough guy. Didn’t need anyone. Never had.

You lying dog.

Townsend sat at his desk, oblivious of the swath of galaxy that stretched across his windows like a sequined band of black velvet. He was shaking. He was sick. His tongue felt like a bloated eel in his mouth. He could barely breathe around it without gagging and choking. His nose ran in a continuous stream of thin, salty mucus. Tears leaked from his eyes, burning the lids raw. A drift of cocaine glowed against the dark wood of the desk. He had lost track of how much he had used and how much he had wasted, sweeping it into the leather wastebasket as he sobbed. Amid the fine white powder lay a revolver.

It was a Colt Python.357. A six-shooter with a huge barrel. Pathetically phallic, but then he was a pathetic man. Fifty-two years old, a straight arrow trying to swing with the hip crowd, falling in lust with a woman young enough to be his daughter. He had bought the gun to impress Lucy. Lucy, his obsession, his demon. Everything had happened because of her. She had led him down the yellow brick road to Oz and on to hell.

Just that morning he had thought he might climb out of the pit. He thought he might be able to salvage something of his life. Get free of the slime, cleanse himself, start fresh. But no. Another of the leeches had tried to hook on to him. He could never be free of it. Not now. Especially not now.

The fat lawyer-Daggrepont-was dead. He hadn’t meant to kill him. They had stood on the riverbank, talking, birds singing above the rushing sound of the water. The sun shone down. The mountains thrust up around them as they stood in the emerald velvet valley. All that beauty… and Daggrepont, ugliness personified, a fat, grotesque pouch of greed, avarice shining in his magnified eyes…

… Knew a little something about Lucy and him… ought to be worth a dollar or two… not greedy, just wants his due for holding his tongue…

One minute he was just standing there, listening to the music of Montana while that toad spewed poison and called it a “business arrangement,” “an understanding between gentlemen.” The next minute he’d had his hands buried in the wattle of fat around Daggrepont’s throat. He had watched as if from outside his body, as if the hands choking the man belonged to some anonymous third party.

Choking, choking, choking. Daggrepont’s eyes rolling behind the thick lenses of his glasses, his tongue thrusting out of his mouth as his grotesque face flushed purple. Townsend heard shouting, a long, loud roar that might have come tearing from his own throat or been inside his own mind. He didn’t know, couldn’t tell.

Some small shard of sanity pierced his brain, and his hands let go. He thrust himself away from the lawyer, hurtled backward as if he were being jet-propelled down a tunnel. But Daggrepont went on choking, eyes rolling, tongue lolling. His face was the color of an eggplant. Foam frothed out of his mouth and he fell onto the bank, his arms and legs jerking wildly. Townsend stood watching, hallucinating that his arms had stretched to nine feet long and his thumbs were still pressing against the fat man’s windpipe.

Daggrepont tried to stand. Couldn’t control his body. Fell into the water among a stand of cattails and rushes.

Run. His first thought had been to run. But as he sped in his Cherokee toward his cabin, other thoughts shot across his mind in bright, hot arcs. Evidence. There would be evidence. Tire tracks. There would be tire tracks. And footprints. Marks on the dead man’s throat. Evidence hidden somewhere tying Lucy to Townsend to Daggrepont. There would be no simple explanation to hide the truth this time. Even in this wilderness a coroner would know the marks of strangulation.

It was over. There would be no redemption. No rebirth. The grime of this life he had fallen into would never come off. It was like ink, like grease, and every move he made, every thought he had, smeared it over more of his soul. He was ruined, thanks to Evan Bryce and Lucy-the devil and his familiar.

There was no turning back. The truth enveloped him like a cold black shroud, like the big black night sky of Montana. A sky with no heaven above it. As black as death.

With one trembling hand he lifted the receiver off the phone and punched the button to speed dial Bryce’s number. With the other he reached for the Python.

The stars were like promises in the sky. Bright and distant. Well out of his reach. Too far off to chase away the darkness. Around him the night was matte black, electrically charged. The hair on the back of his neck and on his arms rose up like metal filings dancing beneath the magnetism of the moon.

… Dancing beneath the moon. As the blonde danced down the slope. She swayed from side to side, hair spilling in her wake. A wave of silk. Moonlight silvering her skin, glowing in her eyes, glowing through her wounds. Del rolled back behind the tree and squeezed his eyes shut so hard that color burst behind his lids, red and gold like the flash of rockets over the rice paddies. He could feel the concussion of the blasts against his skin. The smell of napalm and the putrid-sweet stench of burning, rotting flesh seared his nostrils.

Then he opened his eyes and the ’Nam was gone. The breeze cooled the sweat on his skin, filled his head with the scents of pine and damp earth. The war was gone. He held his rifle against him like a lover and brushed his lips against the oiled barrel. An absent kiss, a superstitious reflex, as if the gun had chased away his ghosts.

A high, keening wail skated across his eardrums, like fingernails on a chalkboard. The old ghosts were gone. New ones took their place. The blonde danced through his nights like a siren beckoning him to crash on the jagged rocks of madness. Panic rose up in his throat and numbed the side of his face like a wash of novocaine. She was there to steal his mind, to steal his land, to steal his family. She ran with the tigers. She died and rose again. A mythic creature.