Free Specimen Song by Peter Bowen

“My partner here finds you holding on to a horse, belonging to the rider who spotted Annie McRae’s body. Where were you when you saw the horse?”
    “I am onstage, playing with a Cajun band,” said Du Pré.
    “Before that?”
    “I am onstage, playing my Métis music.”
    “What’s a Métis?”
    “Red River breeds,” said Du Pré. “We are mostly Canadian. Voyageurs were Métis. Cree, Chippewa, Ojibwa, French, some little English. We come down to Montana after the second rebellion, in 1886.”
    “Fascinating.”
    She stood up.
    “Thank you,” she said. “We’ll look hard at this Chase character. Get hold of Samantha Ford.” She glanced at Rollie, who went out of the room.
    “We’re going to get some dinner,” said Bart, standing up. He bowed to Detective Sergeant Leuci. “Would you care to join us?”
    “Who’re you?” said Leuci.
    “Bart Fascelli,” said Bart, “and please go get your fucking coat.”
    Leuci stared at him for a minute, she shrugged.
    She nodded. She went out into the hall, in the next door, and came back.
    “No place too fancy,” she said, “or folks might think I’m corrupt.”
    Bart offered her his arm gallantly. She took it and they went out the door.
    “We have been abandoned and forgotten,” said Lawyer Foote. “They will go to some nice place. It’s McDonald’s for the help.”
    “We could catch them,” said Du Pré.
    Foote shook his head. Then he shook his finger.
    They both laughed.
    When they got out of the building, the limousine was gone. Foote waved down a cab.
    They had barely enough money between them to pay the cabbie off when they got to the hotel.
    Midway through dinner, the hotel manager sidled up to Foote and gave him a plain white envelope. Foote thanked the man, getting up to do so. He sat back down, peered into the envelope, and counted out three thousand dollars in hundreds. He handed them to Du Pré.
    “Well,” said Foote, “I think we should go. The plane can always come back for Bart when Bart surfaces.”
    “Why all this money?” said Du Pré.
    “The rude prick pays,” said Foote, taking a bite of his fish.

CHAPTER 15
    T HAT WOULD BE THE best thing for Bart,” said Madelaine when Du Pré described his disappearance. “Kinda rude for him to go off like that, though.”
    “He’s handicapped,” said Du Pré.
    “Huh?” said Madelaine.
    “He’s a rich kid,” said Du Pré. “They are handicapped. People always do for them, you know. Some of their wires never get hooked up.”
    “I think I chew his ass hard he get back here,” said Madelaine.
    Du Pré grinned. Poor Bart. Madelaine’s ass-chewings were artful. As a mother, she got lots of practice. She was fond of Bart, so she would do a good job, too.
    It had frosted hard and the trees and bushes had started to turn. The wind smelled of fall, late in coming this year.
    Du Pré heard the distant boom of a shotgun. The grouse season was open. Couple weeks, the season would open for pheasants and ducks. The wild turkeys in the river bottoms. Du Pré thought maybe he’d hunt for a turkey this year. He’d written off and gotten a turkey call from some fellow in New Hampshire. Beautiful thing, in an oiled leather case, Du Pré had played with it. You scraped a dingus on the side of the call and the thing scrawked and gobbled.
    I hope Benetsee don’t see this, Du Pré had thought. He put the call away.
    Something nagged at the back of Du Pré’s mind, nibbled in the shadow—on that long trip through the dark green forest, over the clear water, on the route of Du Pré’s blood, one stream of which ran all the way to France. Something. Once when he was young, he had shot a bear. He’d been too excited and he’d wounded the animal, not killed it. When his father, Catfoot, shot something, it dropped, and he had told Du Pré to wound an animal was not to respect it.
    Du Pré had been alone. He waited for the animal’s wound to stiffen and then he tracked the bear, a good-sized black