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“I don’t worry too much,” said Harvey. “I know you two fuckers.”

“What I do make you feel like this?” said Du Pré. “I only shoot that asshole shooting at me. Remember? I shoot me, too.”

“Oh,” said Harvey. “The brand inspection that went wrong.”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré. “I shoot me in the belly while I am being such a badass gunfìghter. Then I shoot at guy who is shooting at me and I am lucky and he is not. I shoot him right through the heart. I don’t even look at him, Harvey, I am just hoping to spoil his aim or something.”

“I wasn’t thinking about that,” said Harvey.

“Lucky, he fall and break his neck,” said Du Pré. “I am not there.”

“Whatever,” said Harvey wearily.

“OK,” said Du Pré. “This Simpson he fit that list that Pidgeon sent.”

“Sure,” said Harvey. “So does any other compulsive guy keeps his rig neat and does a good job and who is a very loud Christian.”

“But we don’t know the times so good,” said Du Pré.

“Bodies he out there months or years, no shit,” said Harvey.

“Hi-Line Killer,” said Du Pré, “he travels this Highway 2.”

“He’s got to be a truck driver,” said Harvey.

“Maybe a salesman,” said Du Pré.

“Big route,” said Harvey. “It’s two thousand miles one way.”

“I think that is Rolly,” said Du Pré. A big truck was coming up the far side of the hill to the west.

The square black cab lifted into view.

Rolly.

Du Pré and Harvey sat silent. The big truck was moving fast. Then Rolly began to slow it down. He choked back his speed and rolled into the parking area and stopped. The air brakes hissed and set and the big diesel popped at lowest idle.

Rolly sat in the cab for a couple minutes. When he dropped like a gymnast to the ground he had on his big black hat. He grinned at Du Pré and Harvey, and sauntered up.

“Mornin, Du Pré,” he said, eyes twinkling, “and Agent Wallace.”

“Rolly,” said Harvey, “don’t be a prick. I have a headache.”

“I got aspirin in the truck,” said Rolly.

“No,” said Harvey. “It’s bad for my stomach.”

Rolly grinned and he shook with silent laughter.

“You got something,” he said suddenly.

“We always hope that we do,” said Harvey.

Rolly nodded. He moved his chew of snoose a little in his cheek.

“I been thinking wrong all this time,” said Rolly. “You know. I thought it had to be a truck driver on the Hi-line, here. But now I don’t think so.”

Harvey looked at him.

“The places where the bodies were dumped,” said Rolly. “A truck would be too conspicuous. Have to leave it by the side of the road. It would be reported. Too obvious. Nope, it’s got to be someone else. Could be a salesman, or even some guy just likes to drive back and forth.”

“We checked all that,” said Harvey. “Looked for radiuses. There aren’t all that many places on the Hi-Line to gas up. Asked if there was anyone who fit that. Just a driver, always coming through. Course, we got a lot of names and leads, but they were all salesmen. Checked out all of the salesmen and none of their routes and times fit all the bodies. This guy at least pretty well displays his victims. We find some of them the morning after. No names came up in the soup.”

“You’ve been working?” said Rolly.

“Fuck you, Challis,” said Harvey. “I am ready for any suggestions.”

“Guy’s thought of about everything,” said Rolly.”He’d think of showing up at gas stations too often. Cafés. He’d be real careful.”

“No shit,” said Harvey.

“You got a profile?” said Rolly.

“Pidgeon’s sure the guy’s pissed. Abused child. He displays his victims. He may well have a juvenile record, but probably nothing else.”

“What I hear,” said Rolly, “is that the guy strangles. Often uses drugs. Lorazepam and alcohol. Big doses. Big deal. You can get benzodiazipines on the street like you can get peanuts in a ballpark. Booze is easy.”

Harvey nodded.

“Pinch is the gas,” said Rolly.

Harvey nodded.

“Guy’s got a van,” said Harvey, “and that van has a couple fifty-five-gallon drums in the rear. Plus the tank.”

Harvey looked at him.

“Fifteen hundred miles,” he said.

“He’ll get it filled,” said Rolly. “Has to. Oh, he can get a tank easy enough, that’s four hundred or so. But where does he go for a big fill? Got to be a farm. Got some cover anyway.”

“We thought of it,” said Harvey, “but thought it was too farfetched. I think what we thought of it was we couldn’t figure out how to find a hundred-gallon fill, one hundred thirty, when the guy didn’t want us to find it.”

“Or five, six fills in a big city, those gasamat places, move around. Kids in the booths are minimum wage and they don’t stay long.”

“And he wouldn’t fuck with the license plates,” said Harvey.

“Have to buy a lot of tires,” said Rolly.

“Yeah,” said Harvey. “Every fifty thousand miles he would. That’s a dozen full circles. He probably doesn’t do that many full circles.”

“More bodies the closer you get to Yakima,” said Rolly. “He favors the lee side of the Cascades.”

“We’re getting pretty specific,” said Harvey.

“Yeah,” said Rolly. “But what else works?”

Du Pré rolled a smoke. He looked off toward the south. The Wolf Mountains were down there, but the earth’s curve covered them.

I got that Simpson, Du Pré thought, it is him. But this guy, I got to hunt him. How do you hunt, the old way? You dream the deer and the deer come. You dream the buffalo and they come. You got to call them, then they come.

When we were trapping, did we dream the wolf? The marten? Them fisher cat? What they all do, that we dream them.

Du Pré rolled a cigarette.

Damn Benetsee.

I go to talk to Young-Man-Who-Has-No-Name.

Dream what it is that you hunt.

Du Pré lit his cigarette.

“I have one of those?” said Rolly.

Du Pré nodded.

D
U
P
RÉ WOKE IN
the night. Madelaine was sleeping hard, her breath soft and steady. She had an arm flung out, hanging off the bed. She often slept like that.

Du Pré slipped out of bed and he wrapped a robe around his body and he padded out to the back porch. The air was thick and smelled of lightning. Then there was a great flash above and the rain lashed down. Huge drops thick together. Lightning flashed. Du Pré saw a cat dash across the grass and dive under the garden shed.

He was half-asleep. The images burned in his brain from the faded flashes and he thought he saw Benetsee faint, white-haired, in the misty shadows among the elms and willows by the little creek.

Du Pré went out the back door and he squelched across the grass in his bare feet. He was soaked halfway there. He stepped into the line of trees and stopped on the bank of the little spring creek.

The lightning flashed so close overhead he crouched.

He was chilled. He went back to the house and he took the sopping robe off and he hung it on the back porch and he walked softly naked to the bathroom and he toweled himself off and he went to the kitchen and he rolled a cigarette and he sat there smoking. He was wide-awake after his cold shower.

He sighed. He poured some whiskey in a tumbler and ran tap water in the whiskey until it was very pale and then he drank the ditch down all at once. It bloomed in his stomach, hot.

Good that they got all the wheat in tonight, Du Pré thought. Now the crews will go a little east, some maybe north to Alberta.

The weather had been fine.

It was four in the morning. The crews would have closed the bar in Toussaint.

The tracking beeper Harvey had brought him from Washington lay on the kitchen table. Du Pré dressed, pocketed the beeper, and he went out and walked down toward the bar. He stumbled once in a pothole. His cowboy boots were slick on the gumbo. He came through the trees in the little park across from the bar. The motor homes were all dark, compressors whirring.

Simpson’s van was parked in the light from the spot on the front of the bar. Du Pré made his way round. He listened for dogs, but didn’t hear any.

When he got to the van he peeled the sheet of plastic from the beeper, exposing the sticky base. It was modeled to look like a gob of mud. Du Pré reached high inside a back wheelwell and stuck the little electronic device to the clean metal.

Damn Simpson, he probably scrub this by hand with his bifocals on, Du Pré thought. Maybe not.

He backed away and went back to Madelaine’s and he undressed and got into bed. He dozed for an hour and then he got up and made himself some breakfast and he ate and then he went out and got in his old cruiser. He switched on the tracking unit and a small green light came on. It showed Simpson’s van within six hundred yards of Madelaine’s, directly to the east. Du Pré nodded. The sun was rising that way.

OK.

Du Pré drove downtown and he parked beside the bar and he put the tracking unit on the transmission case and he lay down and he dozed.

The people in the motor homes came to life. Doors opened and shut. Engines caught. A couple of the motor homes lumbered out of the parking lot and went to the main street and then turned and headed out to the highway.

Simpson’s van was still there in the campground across from the bar.

Du Pré waited.

For an hour.

Simpson finally came out of the motor home he shared with two other men. One of the men joked with him through the door. Simpson was carrying a cup of coffee, a road cup, one with a narrow top and a wide base.

He got in his van and he carefully warmed it up. He checked the windshield wipers. He leaned out and fiddled with the rearview mirror.

Then he drove briskly out and turned toward the highway.

Du Pré waited for a few minutes. Then he followed. If Simpson went west, he was headed north. If east, east. South, south, but Du Pré didn’t think he would head that way.

Du Pré followed down to the intersection where Simpson would go either north or east. He went east.

There was no place to turn off that made any sense for the next hundred miles. Du Pré stayed twenty miles back. The green light was east of him. Simpson traveled at sixty-five miles an hour, exactly.

The liquid crystal display barely altered at all. Nothing out here. Once Simpson slowed down to thirty-five.

He find one cow on that road, thought Du Pré. About twenty miles he is either going to Miles City, or Plentywood.

Simpson took the road to Miles City. Du Pré followed five or six miles back. Simpson kept on at sixty-five.

Longest damn time I ever take, get to Miles City, Du Pré thought. Course I am not carrying a dead body I don’t want found, so I am careless with the law.

Simpson stopped at the north edge of Miles. City and he got gas. Du Pré waited by the road until Simpson moved again and then he drove on into town. Simpson was maybe a mile away, stopped. Du Pré got a tankful and he checked the oil and the belts on the engine and he shook his head when he spotted the hose that Simpson had stuck in his engine a few days before.

Me, I wonder he got an expensive set of black steel sockets, Du Pré thought.

Got maybe a folding rubber sheet in the back. Thick one. Blood-proof.

Got a box of small knives with leaf blades sunk in black plastic handles. Made in Taiwan.

Maybe got a box of earrings, rings, bracelets.

Crucifixes.

Maybe a map, got marks on it.

Take it out to jerk off to, those lonely nights.

I hope that I am right, Du Pré thought.

I don’t like them Christer sons of bitches anyway, they spend their time howling about love and meaning death.

Du Pré pissed and he went back out to his cruiser and he drove on into Miles City and he had a good lunch at a saloon, a prime rib sandwich and some beer, a good salad he made up himself from the offerings on a big steel cart.

He rolled a smoke and had it and then another. Had another beer.

He paid and left and he drove toward the place that the green light said Simpson’s van was parked at. It was in front of a church, a low cinder-block building. There was a big banner hanging from a side-wall which said “REVIVAL MEETING TONIGHT.”

Du Pré drove out to the airport and he found a rental-car place had two little old sedans in the lot. There was no one in the office. A sign on the counter said, “If you want a car, call 788-9081.”A telephone sat next to the sign.

A woman answered Du Pré’s call.

“I need to rent a car,” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll be right on down soon’s as I get the kids out the door to school. Lunch. About half hour.”

“OK,” said Du Pré.

“If you want a beer there’s some in a little icebox under the counter,” she said. “Just lift up the passage gate and go on round.”

“Thanks,” said Du Pré.

He found the beer and he sat and waited outside in the shade, smoking and sipping beer. The woman came and she rented him a little brown Colt for twenty-five dollars.

“Just gas it up before you bring it back, please,” she said, “or leave a few bucks if you don’t have time. Leave the keys on the counter.”

Du Pré nodded.

He went on into town in the little car. He stopped at a discount store and he bought a white straw hat and some big sunglasses and a loud silly shirt, one with huge tropical flowers on it in horrible colors.

I don’t look like no Métis, Du Pré thought, driving back by the church. I am not buying those sandals. Maybe I go, though, to this revival meeting.

He went back to the discount store and he bought some cheap baggy cotton pants in a pale tan and some dirty-looking running shoes.

Full service, Du Pré thought, they get your shoes dirty, too.

He bought some tailor-made cigarettes. A butane lighter. His shepherd’s lighter was unusual, length of rope and a striker.

I am some deep undercover, Du Pré thought. Feel like an asshole.

Bitch bitch bitch.

There was a big tent at the back of the church. Du Pré parked a ways away and he went to the tent and looked in.

Simpson and three other men were sawing boards and nailing together a stage. They worked quickly and competently.