Read Online Bitterroot by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online

pass and looked down the street, away from his angry stare.
    He pressed the ball of his thumb into my arm.
    “What would you do if she were your daughter? Don’t you lie, either,” he said.
    “Try to get the wrong thoughts out of my head,” I replied.
    “You and L.Q. Navarro stuck playing cards in the mouths of dead people,” he said.
    “They tortured a DEA agent to death. They threw down on us first.”
    “My daughter doesn’t count as much as a federal agent?” he said.
    “I think you’re working on a nervous breakdown, Tobin.”
     I walked away from him. Down the street a sheriff’s department cruiser pulled around the corner and approached us. Inside were the two deputies whom Doc had insulted earlier. One of them sat in back with a handcuffed man whose jaws were bright with gold stubble, his long, tangled hair tied up on his head with a bandanna that leaked blood above one eye. The deputy in back lifted the handcuffed man’s chin with a baton, as though displaying a severed head on a plate.
    “This is one of the guys who raped and sodomized your daughter. He fell down a fire escape while resisting arrest,” the deputy said. “Lamar, you got something you want to say to Dr. Voss?”
    “Yeah. My dick in your ear,” the biker named Lamar Ellison said out the window.
    “The standards in street mutts gets lower every day,” the same deputy said, shaking his head. He tapped on the seat for his partner to drive on.
    Doc stared at the rear window, his jawbone flexing.
    “They got one. They’ll get the others,” I said.
    “It’s not enough,” he replied.
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter
    7
     
     
    MAISEY CAME HOME from the hospital three days later. Doc tied balloons on the furniture in her bedroom and bought teddy bears and stuffed frogs and giraffes and a pink rabbit that was four feet tall and propped them up on her pillows, but his attempt at good cheer and optimism was like wind blowing through an empty building.
    Maisey’s eyes seemed possessed, haunted by thoughts she didn’t share. Her face jumped at sudden noises. Her breath was sour and funk rose out of her clothes. When her father tried to comfort her, she curled into a ball and pulled the bedcovers over her head, spilling the stuffed animals he had bought her on the floor.
    Through the doorway I saw Doc sitting on the side of the bed, his hand on his daughter’s back, staring into space. “What are we going to do, kiddo?” he said, more to himself than to her.
    The sun was above the mountain now, but the inside of the room was filled with a brittle yellow light that gave no warmth.
      At noon Cleo Lonnigan arrived in her truck and fixed lunch and drove into Bonner and bought a cake and a gallon of ice cream. Later she convinced Maisey to put on her quilted robe and fluffy slippers and to sit on the porch with her father while Cleo showed us what she could do with firearms.
    She took a holstered .22 revolver off the gun rack in her truck, buckled it on, and set three tin cans in a row against a dirt bluff, then walked back fifty feet and blew each can into the air, then nailed it again as it rolled down the embankment.
    “You want to give it a try?” she asked Maisey.
    “No. I don’t like guns,” Maisey said.
    “Sure?” Cleo said.
    “Yes. Thanks anyway. I just don’t like guns. I never did,” Maisey said, her eyes slightly out of focus, as though she were thinking of who or what she had once been. The wind blew her hair and made gray lines in her scalp. She stuck her hands inside the sleeves of her robe.
    I walked down to the dirt bluff and helped Cleo pick up the cans and place them in a paper sack.

“Good try,” I said.
    “She’s going to need some heavy counseling. I don’t think Doc has any idea what they’re in for,” she said.
    “Don’t underestimate him.”
    “You know what victim rape is?”
    “The system does it to her a second time?”
    She glanced toward the porch, where Doc and Maisey were sitting in the