He had inherited the office after his predecessor fell off a barn roof and broke his neck. Joe Bim rolled his own cigarettes when no one was looking and wore his trousers stuffed inside Mexican cowboy boots, the kind stenciled up the sides with red and green flower petals. He had been at Heartbreak Ridge, and one side of his face was wrinkled like old wallpaper from the heat of a phosphorous shell that had exploded ten feet from the edge of his foxhole. He wore an oversize felt western hat of the kind Tom Mix had worn and seemed to care little about either his image or his political future.

In the early A.M. we thought dry lightning had ignited a fire on the far side of the ridge behind Albert’s house. But when I walked out on the porch, the sky was clear, the stars bright, and there was no trace of smoke in the air. Then we realized we were seeing the lights of emergency vehicles wending their way through the Douglas fir trees and ponderosa pines and that a helicopter was sweeping the canopy with a floodlight from the far side of the ridge.

At sunup Joe Bim Higgins’s cruiser pulled into Albert’s drive. Fifteen minutes later, the two of them drove to our cabin and tapped on the door. Molly was still in her bathrobe. I went out on the porch in the coldness of the morning and closed the door behind me. A helicopter swept by overhead, its searchlight off now, scattering the horses in the pasture.

Joe Bim was smoking a hand-roll, its tip wet with saliva. He asked if I had seen any activity on the hill behind Albert’s house two nights previous.

“I didn’t see anything. Maybe I heard a vehicle,” I said.

“What time?”

“After midnight. I didn’t pay it much mind,” I said.

“Know what kind of vehicle?” he asked.

“A car.”

He wrote on a notepad. “You didn’t think that was unusual?” he said, not looking up.

“Some loggers from the Plum Creek Company have been working up there,” I said.