"Dancing, the last time I saw her."
"You were an officer of the federal court. You know how our operations work. You know the danger that certain individuals are exposed to. Where's your judgment, man?"
I set the Styrofoam cup down on the bench and stood up. My khakis and leather jacket and boots were powdered with dust, my body sore and stiff all over from the fight at the concert.
"Y'all are still after the Oklahoma City bombers. You don't care about the rape of a teenage girl. You don't care about the assault on my son's person. You lost friends in the Murrah Building and I can understand the feelings you have now. So I don't want you to take it personally when I tell you to go play with your pencils and stay out of my life."
He bit his lip and looked down the corridor at nothing, then fixed his eyes on me again.
"You know what I wish, Mr. Holland? That I could forget who I was for just ten minutes and stomp the living shit out of you," he said.
Two NIGHTS LATER Doc was in Missoula, buying groceries, when an electric storm rolled up the Blackfoot canyon. Bolts of lightning crashed on the ridges above the house, bursting ponderosa trees into small fires that flared and died in the rain. Then the storm passed and the rain stopped and black clouds sealed the sky, flickering with lightning that gave no thunder. Just above the river, the mountainsides were hung with mist, the air sweet with smoke from wood-stove pine.
Bears had been in the garbage before sunrise that same day and had pushed against the windows with their paws, trying to slide the glass. Now a sow and two cubs came down out of the trees on the far side of the river and waded into the shallows and crossed the deepest part of the current by jumping from boulder to boulder until they lumbered belly-deep into the water on the near side and walked dripping up the bank past the garden.
Maisey went into the bathroom and undressed for her shower, then heard the garbage cans rattle. She rubbed the moisture off the window glass and looked out at the log barn and saw the bears ripping the bungee cords off the garbage can tops and pulling the vinyl bags out with their teeth. One of the cubs dug into a split bag and flung the garbage backward through his hindquarters.
She got into the shower and stayed under the hot water until her skin was red. When she toweled off, the window was clouded with steam and she thought she saw a bear's paw push and flatten against the glass. She wrapped the towel around her head and approached the window, leaned one way and then the other in order to see outside, then used her arm to wipe a swath through the moisture on the glass.
The face of a young man stared back at her. He wore glasses and his eyes traveled the length of her nakedness and his mouth formed a red oval as though he wanted to speak.
From the living room I heard her scream, then the sound of feet running outside. I pulled Doc's sporterized '03 Springfield from the gun rack and went out the front door and around the side of the house. Dry lightning jumped between the clouds and the valley floor turned white. I saw a slender man run past the barn, toward the river.
I slid a round into the chamber and locked down the bolt, wrapped the leather sling around my left arm, and put the Springfield to my shoulder. I aimed through the iron sights, leading the target just slightly, waiting for lightning to leap between the clouds again.
Maybe he had seen me, because he seemed to know that someone had locked down on him. He jumped a rock fence like a deer, then zigzagged across a field, glancing back once as though a round was about to nail him between the shoulder blades. When the clouds pulsed with lightning I saw the reflection on his glasses, his brown hair, his body that was as lithe and supple as a young girl's.
I swung the rifle's sights ahead of him and fired a single round that whined off a rock into the darkness.
The running figure disappeared into the trees.
Maisey came out on the porch in her robe, the towel still wrapped on her head.
"He was at the bathroom window. He was watching me take a shower," she said.
"Did you recognize him?" I asked.
"The glass was steamed over. I saw him for just a second."
"Maybe he just wandered in off the highway," I said, my eyes avoiding hers. I ejected the spent shell from the rifle and pressed down the rounds in the magazine with my thumb and slid the bolt over them so the chamber remained empty, then propped the rifle against the porch rail and traced the footprints of the voyeur from the bathroom window back to a rick fence he had climbed through by the barn.
A fuel can lay on its side by the bottom rail of the fence, leaking gas into the mud.
I called the sheriff's department. A half hour later a tall, overworked deputy with a black mustache walked with me out to the fence and looked down at the can and then at the house. His breath fogged in the dampness of the air.
"He didn't come here to borrow gas. The can's almost full. He was watching the girl through the window?" he said.
"Yes."
"It looks like he was going to torch your house and got distracted. I'd say you're lucky."
"I don't think the Voss family feels lucky, sir," I said.
"No offense meant. Some people around here would have shot him and drug his body through the door. Who do you think he was?"
"Y'all got a file on a kid from North Carolina by the name of Terry Witherspoon?"
Wednesday morning Doc answered the cordless phone in the kitchen, then handed it to me and walked out of the room.