Free Bitterroot by James Lee Burke Page A

I turned off the main road I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a low-slung red car behind me, one that was coming too fast, drifting across the center line, as though the driver were bothered by the fact there was an obstruction in his path. I remembered having seen, or rather heard, the same car earlier back in Missoula, when the driver had roared onto the 1-90 entrance ramp. The car didn’t turn with me and instead kept going on the main road. A woman in the passenger’s seat looked back at me blankly, her hair whipping across her mouth.
    I drove through the gated entrance to Cleo’s place and stopped by the barn. A bare-chested carpenter, who had the suntanned good looks of a Nordic sailor, was working on the roof. He told me Cleo was not home, that she was with some of her patients.
    “At the clinic?” I said.
    He slipped his hammer into a loop on his belt and spread his knees on the spine of the roof and pointed to a dirt road that disappeared into trees on an adjoining hill.
    “She makes house calls. You’ll know when you’re there,” he said.
    “How’s that?” I said.
    “Some people take care of stray cats. Cleo’s special, the best damn woman in these parts, buddy,” he replied, almost like a challenge.
    I drove back out the gate and up the dirt road into the shade of the trees. Halfway up the hill I saw an unpainted house back in a clearing and Cleo’s skinned-up truck parked in the yard.
    The yard was littered with flattened beer cans, chicken feathers that had blown from a butcher stump, washing machine and car parts, even a toilet bowl that lay incongruously on its side by an outdoor privy. A trash fire was burning in back of the house, and the wind blew the smoke through the back windows and out the open front door. I stepped up on the porch and saw Cleo in the kitchen, spooning oatmeal out of a pan to three small Indian children at the table.
    “Hello?” I said, and tapped on the jamb.
    She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist and looked at me through the gloom.
    “How’d you know where I was?” she asked.
    “Your carpenter.”
    But she was preoccupied with her work and was not looking at me now.
    “Okay, you guys wash your dishes when you’re finished,” she said to the children. “Can you do that? Your grandmother is going to be here soon. My friend and I are going to wait outside. What are we doing Saturday?”
    “Going to the movies!” the children shouted together.
    A moment later Cleo and I walked out into the yard. The sun was gone, and a heavy, gray mist was moving across the trees at the top of the mountain and raindrops were striking like wet stars on the dirt in the clearing.
    “Their mother is nineteen. Nineteen, with three kids. She’s in the Missoula jail right now. She gave up glue sniffing for the joys of crystal meth,” Cleo said.
    “How long has it been out here?” I asked.
    “Three years, maybe. The California gangs brought it into Seattle and Spokane, then it was everywhere.”
    My eyes drifted to her mouth, the mole on her chin, the way the wind blew her hair on her cheek. A middle-aged Indian woman driving a rusted junker that had no glass in the front windows pulled into the yard and went into the house. She nodded at Cleo but ignored me.
    “That’s the grandmother?” I asked.
    “There’s a likelihood she’ll be a great-grandmother at fifty,” Cleo said.
    “Take a ride with me,” I said.
       “Where to?”
    “Anyplace you want to go.”
    She looked at me for a long moment.
    “You a serious man, Billy Bob?” she asked.
    “You can always run me off.”
    She looked at the torn shreds of cloud swirling just above the tops of the trees and said, “I’ll leave my truck at the clinic. I have to be back there by three.”
    I opened her truck door for her. When I closed it, my fingers touched the top of her hand.
    “Your carpenter says you’re special,” I said.
    Her eyes seemed to reach inside mine, as they