“These murders?”

“Whatever it is, they’re not going to tell us. I don’t think they’re sharing information with Joe Bim Higgins, either.” I told Clete I’d been deputized by Higgins.

“What about me?”

“You weren’t here when he called,” I said.

“Cut it out, Streak.” He was spooning vanilla ice cream into a glass and pouring whiskey on top of it. “And stop giving me that look. Get yourself a Dr Pepper out of the refrigerator and don’t give me that look.”

“I don’t want a Dr Pepper.”

“Of course you don’t. You want a-”

“Say it.”

“Go to a meeting. I’ve got my own problems. I feel like I’ve got broken glass in my head. I porked the wife of a guy who had his face burned off. What kind of bastard would do something like that?”

“You’re the best guy I ever knew, Cletus.”

“Save the douche water for somebody else.”

He drank the mixture of Beam and ice cream down to the bottom of the glass, his brow furrowed, his green eyes as hard as marbles.

TROYCE NIX HAD no trouble finding the location of Jamie Sue Wellstone’s home in the Swan River country. The problem was access to it. An even greater problem was access to Jamie Sue.

He sat in the café that adjoined the saloon on Swan Lake and ate a steak and a load of french fries and drank a cup of coffee while he looked at the snow drifting over the trees and descending like ash on the lake.

“It always snows here in June?” he said to the waitress.

“Sometimes in July,” she replied. “You the fellow who was asking about Ms. Wellstone?”

“I used to be a fan of her music. I heard she lived here’bouts. That’s the only reason I was asking.”

The waitress was a big, red-headed, pink-complected woman who wore oceanic amounts of perfume. “People around here like her. She’s rich, but she don’t act it. Harold said if you wanted information about her to ask him.”

“Who’s Harold?”

“The daytime bartender. He was gone when you were here before.”

Troyce’s eyes seemed to lose interest in the subject. He dropped coins in the jukebox, had another cup of coffee, and used the restroom. When he sat back down on the stool, he felt the bandages on his chest bind against his wounds. He removed a black-and-white booking-room photo from his shirt pocket and laid it on the counter. He pushed it toward her with one finger. “You ever see this guy around here?”

She leaned over and looked at the photo without picking it up, idly touching the hair on the back of her head. “Not really.”

“What’s ‘not really’ mean?” Troyce asked.

The waitress took a barrette out of her pocket and worked it into the back of her hair. “You a Texas Ranger?”

“Why you think I’m from Texas?”

“You know, the accent and all. Besides, it’s printed on the bottom of this guy’s picture.”

“You’re pretty smart,” Troyce said.

“I’d remember him if he’d been in here.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because he’s almost as good-looking as you.”

Troyce slipped the photo back in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap. “What time you get off?”

“Late,” she said. “I got night blindness, too. That’s how come Harold drives me home. And if he don’t, my husband does.”

Troyce left her a three-dollar tip and took his coffee cup and saucer into the saloon and sat at the bar. Through the back windows, he could see the surface of the lake wrinkling in the wind and the steel-gray enormity of Swan Peak disappearing inside the snow. “Ms. Wellstone been in?” he said.

The bartender picked up a pencil and pad and set it in front of him. “You want to leave a message, I’ll make sure she gets it.”

“You’re Harold?”

“What’s your business here, pal?”

“This guy.” Troyce put the mug shot of Jimmy Dale Greenwood in front of him.

“You have some ID?”

Troyce took out his wallet. It had been made by a convict, rawhide-threaded along the edges, the initials T.N. cut deep inside a big star. Troyce removed a celluloid-encased photo ID and set it on the bar.

“This says you’re a prison guard,” the bartender said.

“I’m that, among other things.”

“This doesn’t give you jurisdiction in Montana. Maybe not a whole lot in Texas, either.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“I used to be a cop.”

“I think your waitress friend in there has seen this fellow. I’m wondering if you have, too.”

The bartender picked up the photo and tapped its edge on the bar, taking Troyce’s measure. The bartender’s pate was shiny with the oil he used on his few remaining strands of black hair, his shoulders almost too big for the immaculate oversize dress shirt he wore. His physicality was of a kind that sends other men definite signals, a quiet reminder that manners can be illusory and the rules of the cave still hold great sway in our lives.

“A drifter was in here a couple of times. He was asking about Ms. Wellstone. He looked like this guy,” the bartender said.

“You know where he is now?”

“No.”

“Does your waitress?”

“She’s not my waitress.”

Troyce smiled before he spoke. “I do something to put you out of joint?”

“Yeah, you tried to let on you’re a cop. We’re done here.”

ANYONE WHO HAS spent serious time in the gray-bar hotel chain is left with certain kinds of signatures on his person. Many hours of clanking iron on the yard produce flat-plated chests and swollen deltoids and rock-hard lats. Arms blanketed with one-color tats, called “sleeves,” indicate an inmate has been in the system a long time and is not to be messed with. Blue teardrops at the corner of the eye mean he is a member of the AB and has performed serious deeds for his Aryan brothers, sometimes including murder.

Wolves, sissies, biker badasses, and punks on the stroll all have their own body language. So do the head-shaved psychopaths to whom everyone gives a wide berth. Like Orientals, each inmate creates his own space, avoids eye contact, and stacks his own time. Even an act as simple as traversing the yard can become iconic. What is sometimes called the “con walk” is a stylized way of walking across a crowded enclosure. The signals are contradictory, but they indicate a mind-set that probably goes back to Western civilization’s earliest jails. The shoulders are rounded, the arms held almost straight down (to avoid touching another inmate’s person), the eyes looking up from under the brow, an expression psychologists call “baboon hostility.” The step is exaggerated, the knees splayed slightly and coming up higher than they should, the booted feet consuming territory in almost surreptitious fashion.

Every inmate in the institution is marked indelibly by it, and the mark is as instantly recognizable as were the numbers tattooed on the left forearms of the inmates in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The difference is one of degree and intention. Time in the system prints itself on every aspect of an inmate’s behavior and manner.

On Wednesday evening the weather was still cold, the air gray with rain, and at Albert’s ranch we could hear thunder inside the snow clouds that were piled along the crests of the Bitterroot Mountains. Albert asked me to take a ride with him to check on the new man he had hired to care for his horses in the next valley. He said the man’s name was J. D. Gribble.

Gribble’s cabin was little more than one-room in size, heated by a woodstove that he also cooked on. He was unshaved and wore jeans without knees and only a T-shirt under his denim jacket. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and kept his cigarette papers and tobacco and a folder of matches in a pouch on the same table where he ate his food. In his ashtray were paper matches he had split with his thumbnail so he could get two lights out of one match.

Albert and I drank coffee and condensed milk with the new man, then Albert went out to the barn to check on his horses. Through the window I could see lightning tremble on the sides of the hills, burning away the shadows from the brush and trees. The cabin windows were dotted with water, the interior snug and warm, still smelling of the venison the new man had cooked for his supper. In the corner was a twenty-two Remington pump, the bluing worn away, the stock badly nicked. He followed my eyes to the rifle.