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“You hungry?” said Du Pré.

“Starved,” said Harvey. “I can’t eat before I fly. After, I am ravenous. I escaped the fiery splat once more.”

Susan poured Du Pré a drink. She looked at Harvey.

“Hmmmm,” he said. “Bloody Mary?”

Susan nodded. Du Pré tilted his head toward the book she kept tabs in. She would write the drinks down.

Damn, Du Pré thought, I must pay my tab, can’t remember when I did that last.

Harvey went off to get a plate of food.

“Susan,” said Du Pré, “I pay my tab?”

“You got money on it,” said Susan.

“Damn Bart?” said Du Pré.

“Lips are sealed, Gabriel,” said Susan. “I think you still got a thousand in credit.”

Bart, sure enough.

“Look,” said Susan, “Bart’s frustrated. He wants to do something about all this horror. He just came in and slapped the money down and he cleared off all the tabs. People he doesn’t even know.”

“Well,” said Du Pré, “I guess he don’t know all the people make the money for him, either.”

Susan laughed.

“Benny’s coming along pretty quick,” she said. “Had a fight out on one of the ranches, some pair of kids with a combine crew got into it. One kid hit the other with a wrench.”

Du Pré nodded.

“One got hit had to be taken to the hospital, then flown down to Billings. Head injury. Don’t know how bad, but it must be pretty bad. Anyway, Benny had to arrest the other one and book him.”

So he can sit on his ass, jail, wonder if it is manslaughter or just assault he is guilty of. Everybody wonder that until the guy in the hospital either makes it or he does not.

Mrs. Morissette began to shriek. Several women went to her and they held her. She wailed.

That bitch don’t even really mean it, Du Pré thought.

Madelaine looked over at Du Pré, then up to the ceiling.

OK, thought Du Pré, I am right, once.

Harvey was sitting at a table far away from the knot around Mrs. Morissette. He was eating like he hadn’t for days.

Him probably not eat for days. Pretty brave guy, fly when it do that to him, Du Pré thought, me, I just have the shits bad for three days before I got to fly. It don’t bother me.

I don’t like this twentieth century. Won’t like that twenty-first one, either. I am sure of it.

Madelaine left the little group and she came over and she put her arms around Du Pré and she kissed him.

“You bring back that ugly Blackfeet,” said Madelaine.

“Had to,” said Du Pré. “I was the only car there.”

“You think his dick is as big as I hear?” said Madelaine.

Du Pré shrugged.

“OK,” said Madelaine. “I just wondered.”

Du Pré shrugged.

“Maybe I dance with him,” she went on.

Du Pré smelled the wine on Madelaine’s breath.

She is some upset, he thought.

She is angry, me, because she is angry about poor little Barbara Morissette.

That son of a bitch doing this, he is spoiling a lot.

Du Pré sipped his drink.

B
OOGERTOM SQUINTED AT
the hot noon sun riding high across the sky. The sky was white with dust and heat. The light was tight and tough. It bleached out all the colors and the clouds of chaff blowing off the big combines glinted like flakes of metal in the air.

“One hot bastard,” said Booger Tom.

Du Pré nodded. He had spent a lot of time harvesting and he didn’t remember it fondly. The Saturdays in the bars after he had been paid off were fun, other than the two times he had been arrested along with the rest of the crew.

Some of them tough little Montana towns did that. Peel your summer wages in fines for disorderly conduct and run you out of the county.

Summer wages.

“I never did this,” said Harvey. “I was always brown-nosing so I could go to summer school. I hate
the
outdoors. It’s dirty. Bugs fuck in it. Not a good address.”

Booger Tom looked at Harvey and he grinned.

“Got to get you up on a horse,” he said.

“A horse?” said Harvey, eyes wide in horror.

“Yeah,” said Booger Tom. “Like the ones you done rode in the rodeo. Quit pissin’ on my boots, callin’ it a rainstorm. I know who you are.”

“Who is he?” said Du Pré.

“He rodeoed some,” said Booger Tom. “Pretty good, too.”

“I hated it,” said Harvey.

Du Pré laughed.

“Well,” said Harvey, “I needed a scholarship so I could go to college and rodeo …”

“Got ya laid more often than football,” said Booger Tom. “I known you bastards all of my life.”

The big combines were rolling on, blades slowly pushing the stalks of grain into the cutters.

Then one of them jerked abruptly.

They could hear a deep whannnnggggg over the roar of the engines.

The combine stopped.

Steam shot out of the engine.

“Shit,” said Booger Tom. He was looking off toward the west. The sky was clear. “It’s gonna rain round midnight. Shit. Got to get that damn grain in.”

Someone from the combine crew was loping over the huge field to a pickup truck. They climbed in the cab and picked up the radio mike and talked.

“Damn downtime costs one-fifty an hour,” said Booger Tom.

“Lawyers cost more than that,” said Harvey.

Booger Tom snorted.

“So what are we doing today?” said Harvey. “I get to meet that guy who’s out at Benetsee’s?”

“Sure,” said Du Pré. “We maybe get some lunch and then we can go, sure.”

He led Harvey and Booger Tom into Bart’s house.

The refrigerator was chock full of smoked salmon, pâté, caviar, and salad stuff. Some good wines, white ones, chilled. Bart didn’t drink but he knew what went with what.

“My my,” said Harvey. “Two months of my pitiful salary is sitting in that refrigerator. Those are two-kilogram tins of Beluga. Cherkassy. I never even heard of Cherkassy. The salmon comes from England, I bet.”

“Iceland,” said Du Pré.

“Oh,” said Harvey, “great. Any capers?”

Du Pré sighed and he opened a cupboard and took out a tall narrow bottle.

“The guys at the office will never believe this,” said Harvey. “I think I saw an open bottle of Graves in there.”

Du Pré fished it out.

“I think I’ll have a baloney sandwich,” said Booger Tom.

“I get a hamburger later,” said Du Pré.

“Barbarians,” said Harvey, dipping a water biscuit into the caviar.

“Fish slime,” said Booger Tom.

“The two of you can fuck off and go outside you don’t like it,” said Harvey, “but I will eat like a hog in peace. Or death.”

“C’mon, Du Pré,” said Booger Tom. “I got some ham and … you know, food over to my place.”

They went out the back door and toward Booger Tom’s little cabin. It was the oldest building on the ranch, perhaps a century old.

Tom opened the sagging door and he and Du Pré went in to a boar’s nest. Saddles on trees, horsehair ropes and hackamores, racks of guns, and the stink of old unwashed socks.

“Awful, ain’t it?” said Tom. He led Du Pré back outside and to a small brown clapboard building twenty feet away.

A little cookhouse.

It was spotless. A pump by the sink, a big old Clarion woodstove. A stainless steel monitor top refrigerator.

Tom brought out ham and mustard and he took bread out of a breadsafe and plates—battered blue enameled tin ones—out of the standing cupboard.

They ate in the shade behind the cookhouse, under the hanging runners of a weeping willow. A little creek purled by the picnic table.

“Fish eggs,” said Booger Tom. “And Frog piss.”

Du Pré laughed. So much for Bart’s two-hundred-dollar-a-bottle wine. Frog piss.

“He’s all right, that Harvey,” said Tom. “I remember him from Rapid City, maybe. Took a dive into a chute to try to save a rider who’d gone under a Brahma. Saved the guy, too. Broke Harvey’s arm, though, put him out of the money.”

Du Pré nodded.

Tom dug four beers out of the creek and they each had two of them.

“Beer’s a better kind of cold out of a crick,” said Tom.

They ate and drank and smoked.

The day stayed hot.

They ambled back to Bart’s.

Du Pré looked out in the field. The combine had a couple men on it, and there was another man in mechanic’s coveralls leaned into the engine compartment. He reached a hand back and another man handed him a tool.

Du Pré looked at the dark green van.

The guy who saved my ass, up north, there. Simpson.

Everything was dusty. The van was spotless. The dark windows gleamed.

Du Pré rolled a cigarette.

“You be careful with that,” said Booger Tom.

Du Pré nodded. He smoked the cigarette and then he crushed it with his bootheel.

“Think I’ll walk out there, see what they are doing,” he said.

“Too damn hot,” said Booger Tom. “I’ll let you.”

“Tell Harvey I be right back,” said Du Pré.

Du Pré climbed through the fence across the road and he walked through the chaff and broken stalks toward the down combine. The other one had kept going. Two idle trucks sat at the edge of the field. The drivers were sleeping in the shade.

Du Pré’s boots crackled on the dry stalks. The stalks were slippery. He had to lean a little forward and walk on the balls of his feet to keep his balance.

A magpie flew past, low.

Only damn bird I ever saw tail was longer than it is, maybe a peacock, thought Du Pré.

Simpson pulled his head out of the engine compartment of the combine. He pulled a red rag from his coveralls and he wiped the sweat from his forehead. He said something to the man who had handed him the tool and the man went back to the van and he opened the rear doors and he climbed inside. He was in there for only a moment and then he got out carrying a red metal case and a paper sack.

Simpson took the case and he opened it and selected a socket and he took something out of the paper sack and he leaned back in the engine compartment.

He stayed hunched over for ten minutes.

Du Pré could see him straining as he heaved on the wrench.

He came out and wiped his forehead again.

Du Pré was standing very near.

He watched as Simpson made some minor adjustments.

Simpson signaled the driver to try it.

The starter ground and the engine caught and the exhaust stack belched black smoke.

The driver revved the engine.

Simpson reached back in the engine compartment and then he stood back and nodded and he closed the cover. Flipped the latches on.

The driver gave him a thumbs-up.

Simpson and his assistant took the tools back to the van. Simpson got in and he waited for the assistant to hand him tools. He stowed them.

The assistant walked away.

Simpson got out. He saw Du Pré and he waved and smiled.

He went round to the driver’s door of the van and he got in and he drove off.

Du Pré watched him go.

Du Pré walked slowly back to Bart’s house. The trip back seemed a lot shorter.

Harvey was sitting on the porch, drinking a glass of white wine.

“What’s up?” he said to Du Pré.

Du Pré shrugged.

“W
E DID THAT,” SAID
Harvey. “We hired psychics. What we may or may not have found out I couldn’t really tell you. Sometimes we’d think that they’d been helpful, but, then, we’d run probability studies and it could as easily have been chance. You know, the old cop method. You spread enough glue around and your fly will step in it. You look at enough evidence, ten thousand things, and you find one thing that starts a chain of deductions. My math isn’t good. We hired mathematicians. The Bureau doesn’t like to talk about it. Truth is, though, that serial killers are the same and not the same, and that they are largely fairly stupid and survive a while because they are unpredictable. The ones worry me are the smart ones. About as many, proportionately, as there are very smart people. Not many. Not many. And it’s hard enough to catch the dumb ones. Maybe we never caught a smart one. Maybe we just never did.”

“Yah,” said Du Pré. “Well, how ’bout astrologers?”

“Oh, yes,” said Harvey.

“I am kidding,” said Du Pré.

“I’m not,” said Harvey. “We did. I remember one woman … I liked her. She was very humble and sweet and smart. She said it was a mistake to think that astrology delivered truth as it was a mistake to think that the Bible does. The truths in both were poetic. They were both ways of looking at the world that was not rational. That astrology was a means of interpreting lives and fates. But that to try to jam it into a box was foolish. She said in her world, the serial killers and certain other people—we call them sociopaths—were called “elementals.” They were all by themselves. They were unable to grasp that there was anything in all the world but them. That the world existed to please them. And that they could charm but never love. They are all pretty charming. I thought she was nuts, until I remembered that I never had one of these assholes in hand but that they tried to charm me. Tried to explain away what had happened. Even to convince me that what had happened actually didn’t. And for them it didn’t happen.”

“Shit,” said Du Pré. “Your damn elementals just sound like most teenage kids.”

“That’s a bit harsh,” said Harvey.

Du Pré shrugged.

Harvey looked away.

“All right,” he said. “Teenage kids are like that, but only some of the time. They learn. They grow up. Sociopaths don’t.”

“You know,” said Du Pré, “trouble with words like that is that if you can pronounce them you think you know what they mean. And if you think that you know what they mean, you think that you know something.”

“Jesus,” said Harvey. “You studying philosophy these days?”

“No,” said Du Pré. “I am just talking bullshit.”

They were sitting at a picnic table at Raster Creek, waiting on Rolly Challis.

“Here I am, a good FBI man, talking bullshit with a loose cannon who I will probably have to arrest later on waiting on a bank robber I couldn’t catch,” said Harvey, grinning. “The smile is just for jollies.”

“Harvey,” said Du Pré, “how many these dead women we talking about? Eh? Lot of them. Me, I just am going to make it stop. I don’t embarrass you. You worry too much.”