That evening she showed her P.I. badge to the deputy sheriff standing guard in front of Michael Charles Ruggles’s hospital room.
“You can’t come in,” he said.
“Really?” she said, flipping open her cell phone. “Let’s call the sheriff so you can tell him you’re countermanding his permission. He’s at the county commissioners’ meeting now.”
The nurse had left the blinds open inside the room so the man in bed could see the blue light in the evening sky and the rooftops of the town and the chimney swifts that swooped and darted above the trees. His head was propped up on the pillow, one cheek heavily bandaged; an IV was clipped to an index finger. When Temple entered the room, he tried to push himself higher up in the bed in order to look at her more directly. His face winced peculiarly at the effort, as though the tissue were dead and had been touched alive by electrical shock.
“Looks like you’re doing pretty good for a guy who has forty stitches in his cheek and two stab wounds in the chest,” she said.
“Who the hell are you?” he said.
“Gal who doesn’t want to see it put on the wrong guy. You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”
“Answer the question, bitch.”
Temple held a capped ballpoint and a yellow legal pad in her hands, the cover folded back as though she were about to start taking notes. She sat down in a chair by the bed, placed the ballpoint in her shirt pocket, and closed the legal pad. She looked idly into space a moment.
“Let me line it out for you,” she said. “You tried to whack out a Native American political leader. You tried to do it in the middle of a United States government reservation, which shows how smart you are. You also managed to do these things in the geographical center of all political correctness, Missoula, Montana.
“So what does that mean? you hurriedly ask yourself. It means either the FBI is going to prove it’s an equal opportunity law enforcement agency by jamming a mile-long freight train up your ass, or you’ll do state time in Deer Lodge, where the bucks will take turns shoving something else up your ass.”
“That’s an entertaining rap you do. I like it,” he said.
“You’re going down for an attempted contract hit, Michael. That’s probably worth twenty years here. You want to take that kind of bounce to protect some rich guy?”
“Michael’s my first name. I use my middle name. Everybody calls me Charlie. Charlie Ruggles.”
“You’re looking at double-digit time, Charlie. Your bud gave you up in the O.R. They didn’t tell you?”
He looked at the light in the sky, then turned his head toward the nightstand, where a glass of ice water sat with a straw in it. “I can’t reach over to pick it up,” he said.
Temple lifted the glass to his mouth and held it there while he drew through the straw. She could feel his breath on the back of her wrist, his eyes examining her face.
“Thanks,” he said. “You got nice tits. Are they implants or the real thing?”
THAT NIGHT THE MOON was full above the valley and there were deep shadows inside the fir trees on the hill behind our house. Temple had been quiet all evening, and as we prepared to go to bed she put on her nightgown with her back to me.
“You still thinking about Ruggles?” I said.
“No, not Ruggles.”
She sat on the side of the bed, looking out the window. I placed my hand between her shoulder blades. I could feel her heart beating. “What’s the trouble?” I asked.
“Johnny American Horse is a professional martyr. He’s going to hurt us,” she said.
“I don’t read him that way.”
“That’s why he comes to you and not somebody else.”
“He’s our friend,” I replied.
She peeled back the covers and lay down, the curvature of her spine imprinted against her nightgown.
“Temple?” I said.
“Ruggles is a Detroit button man. So was the other guy. Johnny has to know who sent them.”
I couldn’t argue with her. Maybe in some ways Johnny was enigmatic by choice. People who claim mystical powers don’t spend a lot of time feigning normalcy at Kiwanis meetings. But I still believed Johnny was basically honest about who he was.