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It was warm inside the cottonwoods, and insects were worrying my neck and eyes, a shaft of sunlight shining into my eyes. I sat down on the leather seat, inside the coolness and leather comfort of the limo. The perfume of the two young women smelled like flowers in a garden. “Can you handle another client?” he said.
“I’m a one-loop operation. You need a firm,” I replied.
He laughed. “I like the way you talk, Mr. Holland. I’d rather pay you six percent on those ranch sales than a bunch of fraternity fellows in Denver.”
I realized he was offering me a situation worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not eventually millions. I started to speak, but he cut me off. “I’ll tell you a fairly well known secret. Terrorists will attack us again. Every government official and everyone in federal law enforcement knows it. It will be large scale and aimed at another American city, perhaps several of them. When that happens, half of the West Coast will want to migrate to small towns in Montana, Idaho, and Utah. What do you think the value of this property will be then?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m not a speculator, Mr. Mabus. On that note I’m going to thank you for your offer and say good-bye.”
“What can I say?” he said, lifting his hands in good-natured surrender. “Have a fine day. I admire your principles. My guess is you’re a hell of a guy.”
He shut the car door behind me, then rolled down the window on its electric motor and snapped his fingers several times at the men who had stopped my truck. They climbed wordlessly into their vehicles and drove away, the dust from their wheels floating back into my face.
Chapter 15
I SHOULD HAVE SEEN it coming, or at least given more consideration to Darrel McComb’s prediction about Joh
One week after the Fourth of July, charges were filed on Joh
Government helicopters buzzed the treetops in the high country for four days and agents on horseback threaded their way up rock-strewn ravines, only to find dead campfires, a hand line and fishing hook by a frozen lake, the cleated tracks of alpine shoes through a griz feeding area, a sweat lodge knocked together from fir boughs and blackened stones.
But it was not a safe bet Joh
Amber denied any knowledge of where he might be. She was held forty-eight hours in an isolation cell as a possible accomplice and questioned repeatedly by both FBI and ATF agents while her and Joh
Six days after Joh
“Join me?” he said.
“Thanks, I’m meeting someone,” I lied, and sat down at the counter. I picked up a menu and began to read it.
“Too bad you got screwed on that bail deal,” he said.
I set the menu down and looked at him in the mirror. He had gone back to eating his food. I turned around on the stool. “Which bail deal?” I said.
“You didn’t know? Those Indian bondsmen Joh
When I got home that afternoon, I could hardly face Temple.
“We’ll owe two hundred thousand dollars?” she said.
“If Joh
“This can’t be happening to us.”
“I checked with the court. The bond was never transferred. I called these Indian bondsmen five times. Their secretary kept telling me she had given them my messages but they’d been chasing down a bail skip in Butte. I drove up to the res and found one of them in a bar. He denies knowing anything about Joh
“Why did Joh
“He thought we were. That bondsman was lying. Somebody got to him.”
“I think Joh
“I doubt if he knows this has happened, Temple.”
“How could he? He’s camping in the mountains while we’re about to lose our home.”
She went into the kitchen and started preparing supper. It was 7 P.M. Thursday, the one evening of the week during summer we always saved to attend the open-air dance in the park by the river. This particular evening a bluegrass group was playing, and a late afternoon shower had dropped the temperature ten degrees and filled the air with the smell of flowers and lawn sprinklers striking warm cement. But in the kitchen I heard Temple slam a cabinet door and clang a skillet on the stove, then make a grunting sound as she struggled with a can opener, just before slicing her hand.
I turned off the stove and ran tap water over her hand. In her anger she tried to resist my help, but I held on to her, gathering her against me, pressing my face in her hair, holding her tight, even when she hit me in the back and sides with her fists, the cut on her thumb streaking my shirt with blood.
ON SATURDAY, LUCAS came to the house, a torn envelope and a sheet of gold-and-silver-embossed stationery in his hand. “I cain’t figure this. Don’t them people know how to run their own business?” he said.
I took the letter from his hand and read it, then put it in my back pocket. I tried to keep my face empty. “I’ll give them a call Monday,” I said.
“How can they give me a scholarship, then take it back because I’m an out-of-state student? My application already said I was from out of state. It’s like they’re calling me a liar.”
“There’s a guy around here by the name of Karsten Mabus. He’s a donor to this educational foundation. I think he’s trying to squeeze me by going through you,” I said.
“What’s he want from you?”
“It has to do with Joh
“Well, throw that damn letter away. I wouldn’t use the sonofabitch’s money to wipe my-”
“I’ll call Monday.”
He studied a distant place on the hill across the road, his thumbs hitched in his pockets, his brow furrowed under the brim of his hat. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes vexed, but I knew his disappointment would not last. Lucas was endowed with both a childlike i