After we got back to Missoula I dropped Temple off at her motel and drove down to Stevensville, then headed east toward the Sapphires and Nicki Molinari's ranch. I saw the next-door neighbor, the elderly preacher, raking out dead grass from the rain ditch in front of his church. I pulled my truck to the roadside and waved to him.
He wore bib overalls without a shirt and a coned-up straw hat. The choleric blazes in his neck and face looked like small tongues of fire on his skin. He leaned down to my window and I saw a raw knot the size of a duck's egg on his forehead.
"How are you doing today, sir?" I said.
"Cleaning up for our baptism services tomorrow evening. Back yonder in the creek. We do it the old-time way," he said.
"It's the only way to fly," I said.
"You're welcome to come," he said.
"I was baptized in a stream in the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma."
"I knowed it," he said.
"How's that?"
"River-baptized people got a mark. They look a person in the eye. Why you hanging around that greaser?"
"My work takes me into strange associations, Preacher."
"You carry a gun?"
"Sometimes."
"Stay away from that fellow, son. He's the devil's own."
The old man tapped my window with the flat of his hand and returned to his work.
I parked on the white gravel by the side of Molinari's house and started toward the front door. From the back I heard the spring of a diving board and a loud splash and the sound of women laughing. When I came around the corner of the house I smelled meat dripping into a hibachi and the drowsy, thick fragrance of a crack pipe and I saw Molinari swimming toward the shallow end of his pool while three suntanned women in bikinis and shades watched him from reclining chairs.
He walked up the tile steps of the pool, dripping water, his sex etched against his bright yellow trunks. He rubbed his head and face with a fluffy towel, and a woman handed him a glass of iced tea with a sprig of mint in it. He pushed his feet into his flip-flops while he drank and took my measure over his upended glass.
"Where you come from, people don't call first before they drop by other people's houses?" he said.
"Has Wyatt Dixon been around?" I asked.
"No. He better not, either."
"I interviewed a pedophile in Deer Lodge this morning. He was busted in Carl Hinkel's fro
nt yard."
Molinari wiped water off his brow and pitched his towel over the back of a chair.
"Take a walk with me," he said, glancing back at the women by poolside. He put his hand on my arm. "Tell me in like three sentences."
"This guy was nailed in Hinkel's yard. I think Hinkel is behind the kidnapping and sale of children to child molesters."
"So I'm glad to know this. But I'm a little tied up right now. A little two-on-one going, get my drift? If you see Cleo or Holly, don't be mentioning what you saw here. Anyway, come back tomorrow when I have more time."
"Fuck you."
"I can't believe there's a person like you standing on my property. You want me to remodel this guy, but you tell me in my face to get fucked? You know what I do to people who use that kind of language to me?"
"Tell it to your biographer."
"I'm glad you raised that subject. Xavier Girard just got the shit kicked out of him. Why is that, you ask. Because he shot off his mouth on a certain TV talk show."