The fourth book in the Billy Bob Holland series

Once again I would like to thank my wife, Pearl, and our children, Jim, Jr., Andree, Pamala, and Alafair, for all the help and support they have given me over the years. I would also like to thank Father Jim Hogan and Father Ed Monroe for their friendship along the way, and I’d like to mention my ongoing debt of gratitude to all the librarians and booksellers who have promoted my work without ever asking for any type of thanks.

Lastly, I owe a tip of a battered hat to my old Montana compadre Paul Zarzyski for the Larry Mahan quote.

God be blessed for all dappled things.

MY LAW OFFICE was located on the old courthouse square of Missoula, Montana, not far from the two or three blocks of low-end bars and hotels that front the railyards, where occasionally Johnny American Horse ended up on a Sunday morning, sleeping in a doorway, shivering in the cold.

The city police liked Johnny and always treated him with a gentleness and sense of fraternity that is not easily earned from cops. He had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in Operation Desert Storm, and some cops said Johnny’s claims that he suffered Gulf War syndrome were probably true and that he was less drunk than sick from a wartime chemical inhalation.

More accurately, Johnny was a strange man who didn’t fit easily into categories. He lived on the Flathead Reservation in the Jocko Valley, although his name came from the Lakota Sioux, and his relatives told me he was a descendant of Crazy Horse, the shaman and chief strategist for Red Cloud, who actually defeated the United States Army and shut down the Bozeman Trail in Red Cloud’s War of 1868.