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don’t call it the sword point for nothing, do they?”

CHAPTER FOUR
Long Story Short
    I t would be a stretch to call it a house. But then, Martha Ettinger thought, it would be a stretch to characterize the man who sat behind a feather-blown fly-tying bench on the porch a home owner. Until this summer, Sam Meslik had lived in a dilapidated trailer on three acres of cottonwood bottomland bordering Hyalite Creek. Dirt poor but land rich, he’d turned a dime on the place when a Kern County orange grove owner, looking for a place he could put his feet up for six weeks each summer and worry about something other than water rights and migrant labor, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Sam had immediately parlayed his windfall into this place on a bank overlooking the Madison River.
    â€œIs that beast of yours going to stay where he belongs?”
    â€œYou mean old Killer here?” Sam reached down to pat the broad head of the giant Airedale mix—“half terrier, half Hound of the Baskervilles,” as Sam liked to say—that was lying at his feet. “Why he wouldn’t hurt a mosquito.”
    â€œUh-huh.” Martha stepped out of the Jeep. She placed her hands on her hips and took in the shack, it was a shack, it said so in crudely painted letters above the porch: Fly Shack. Took in the dilapidated barn from Septembers when ranch owners traded their straw Stetsons for felts and brought the cattle down from the high pasture, instead of handing the reins to the ranch manager and packing the family off to Carmel. She glanced at Meslik’s trailered drift boat with a leaping rainbow trout painted on the bow. The bumper sticker on the back window of the old Nissan 4 X 4 read, I Don’t Care if You Flyfish.
    The fishing guide folded his hands under the fly-tying table.
    â€œTain’t riverfront,” he said, “but I got the trespass rights.” He jutted his chin toward the ribbon of current under the high bank. “I still have to use developed boat ramps for my ClackaCraft, but Stranny can slip his raft in right down there by the willows. Gives us an option no other guide outfit has on this part of the Mad.
    â€œSo where is Sean?”
    â€œHe’s on a fish-a-bout. I thought you two were like that.” Sam held two fingers pressed together. “Now that you’re neighbors and all.”
    â€œWe haven’t been keeping in regular touch. What’s a fish-a-bout?
    â€œIt’s like a fisherman’s take on a walkabout. You jump in the truck and take off fishing without knowing where you’re going. You know what I saw him do the Fourth of July? We were float tubing Henry’s Lake for the damsel fly hatch, right there where I got shot a couple years ago, and when we pull up on shore, Sean takes off his fly vest and finds he got water in the pockets and it’s shorted out his cell. I say these things are like Jesus after the cross, bury it in rice and it’ll resurrect. And he says, ‘Or I can do this.’ He sidearms the phone across the lake like a kid skipping a stone. Got a good half dozen bounces. You been inside that tipi? He’s got it fixed pretty nice.”
    Martha nodded. “Be a hell of a place to spend the winter, though he says he’s determined.”
    â€œThat’s something we agree on. So what I can do for you, Sheriff?”
    â€œDo you mind if I sit? I’ve been up all night.”
    â€œBe my guest.”
    He indicated a folding camp chair. “You know, you’re just the woman I wanted to see,” he said.
    Martha sat down, one eye on the Airedale. She arched her eyebrows. “How’s that?”
    â€œI’m called Rainbow Sam, right? It’s on my drift boat, it’s on my card, it’s like my business name. I even got a line of flies I tie and market here from the shop. ‘Rainbow Sam’s Skinny Minnows.’”
    â€œUm-hmm.” Martha examined the slim