He seemed to have no sexual interest in either women or men. His pastime was his absorption with the Internet. He sat for hours in front of his computer, his features wrapped with the green glow of his monitor, while he tapped on the keys and addressed chat rooms filled with his admirers.
But she had seen one peculiarity in his commitment to his computer. In nice weather he left the door open to his little stone office, and anyone in the compound could see him at his desk, puffing clouds of white smoke from his cob pipe, his back as straight as a bayonet, while his fingers danced across the keyboard. But sometimes he would shut the door and slide the wood crossbar into place, and everyone understood that Carl was not to be disturbed.
Once a new member at the compound, a jug-eared kid just out of the Wyoming pen, called Shortening Bread behind his back because of his dark skin, wanted to curry favor with Carl and made lunch for him and carried it on a tray to the office. Unfortunately for Shortening Bread, Carl had not quite secured the crossbar on the door, and Shortening Bread worked his foot into th
e jamb and pushed the door back and started to step inside the office without asking permission.
Carl rose from his chair and flung the tray into the yard. When Shortening Bread broke into tears, Carl put his arm over his shoulders and walked with him around the compound, explaining the need for discipline among members of the Second American Revolution, reassuring him that he was a valuable man.
Sue Lynn got up from the couch and washed her face and walked down the slope to the river, then wandered along the bank to a shady copse of trees and sat down in the grass and watched the spokes of white light the sun gave off beyond the rim of the Bitterroots.
Then she heard the dirt bike go silent and the voices of Wyatt and Terry and she realized the two men were no more than twenty yards above her, behind a boulder, and Terry was sharpening his knife on a whetstone, probably spitting on it, as was his fashion, and grinding the knife in a slow, monotonous circle.
"She's got a mouth on her, I'll 'low that. 'Birth to a tumor'?"
"It's not funny, Wyatt."
"You ain't got to tell me. An Indian woman shouldn't be talking to a white man like that," Wyatt said, his voice suddenly somber.
"What are you gonna do about it?" Terry asked.
"Have a little talk with her."
"I want it to hurt."
"Oh, it will."
"Wyatt?"
"What?"
"I want to watch."
Sue Lynn sat in the shadows, bent forward, her stomach sick. Even in the coolness of the wind off the river she was sweating all over, a fearful sweat that clung to her skin like night damp. She remained motionless, afraid to get up or turn around. Then she heard Wyatt and Terry walking out of the trees toward the campground upstream, where Terry sometimes worm-fished with a handline behind a beaver dam.
When they were out of sight she ran for her uncle's windowless stock car that had no headlights. She fired up the engine and fishtailed across the gravel driveway in front of Carl's house and roared up the dirt road toward the highway that led back into Missoula, her heart pounding, the reflected images of Carl Hinkel and three of his subordinates staring at her like painted miniatures in the rearview mirror.
She stopped at Lolo, ten miles south of Missoula, and used a pay phone outside a cafe to call the contact number the Treasury agents had made her memorize. An unfamiliar voice answered, then the call was relayed to another location and she heard the voice of Amos Rackley.
"I can't take it anymore," she said. "Slow down. You can handle this."
"Carl knows.''
"You're having a panic attack. He doesn't know. He's not that smart."
"They're out there." "Out where?" he said.
A low-slung red car ran the yellow light at the intersection and she felt her heart stop. Then she saw the car was not Wyatt's.
"They're everywhere. They have radios in their cars," she said.
"Go to the meeting place on the Res. People will be waiting for you there. Now stop worrying. You did a good job."
"I never saw the guns." "So fuck it," he said.
She drove on through Missoula and caught the highway west of town that led to the Flathead Reservation. The Clark Fork of the Columbia River looked like a long, flat silver snake in the twilight.
The evening star had risen above the mountains when she drove up into the timbered hills above the Jocko River and pulled off the dirt road and parked by the abandoned sweat lodge on the creek bank. Twice on the highway she had seen cars pace themselves behind her, dropping back when she slowed, accelerating when she sped up. Then she had turned on to the Res and had lost them. But five minutes later, as she climbed into the hills, she had seen headlights down below, tracking across the same bridges she had crossed, following the same dirt roads she had driven.