We walked Beau down the hard-packed dirt street, along the edge of the rain ditch, to the cafe and ate supper.
But I didn't tell Pete the rest of the story, nor have I ever told anyone all of it, at least not until now-the weeks of treatment in Uvalde and Houston for the wound in my right arm, the bone surgery, the morphine dreams that at first leave you with a vague sense of unremembered sexual pleasure, followed by a quickening of the heart, flashes of light on the edges of your vision, like gunfire in darkness, a feeling in the middle of the night that you are about to be violated by someone in the room whom you cannot see.
After the hospitals, I went back across the river, without a badge, into the arroyo where we were ambushed and the town south of it where three of our adversaries-psychotic meth addicts who would later be killed by federates-had celebrated L.Q.' s death in a whorehouse, then down into the interior, across dry lake beds and miles of twisted moonscape that looked like heaps of cinders and slag raked out of an ironworks, into mountains strung with clouds and finally a green valley that was glazed with rain and whose reddish brown soil was lined with rows of avocado trees.
I thought I had found the leader, the man L.Q. had taken the rifle from.
The owner of the only bar in the village thought for a moment about my offer, then picked up the fifty-dollar bill from the counter and folded it into his shirt pocket. He was a big man with a black beard, and part of his face was covered with leathery serrations like dried alligator hide.
'See, I was a migrant labor contractor in Arizona. That's where I first seen this guy. I think he was moving brown heroin on the bracero buses. Pretty slick, huh? Yeah, I don't owe that guy nothing. Come on back here, I'll show you something,' he said.
The bar was a cool, dark building that smelled of beer and stone, and through the front door you could see horses tied to a tethering rail and the late sun through the long-leaf Australian pines that were planted along the road.
We went out the back door to a small cottage that was built of stacked fieldstones and covered with a roof of cedar logs and a blackened canvas tarp. The bartender pushed open the door, scraping it back on the stone floor.
'That was his bunk. Them stains on the floor, that's his blood. The guy don't got no name, but he got plenty of money. Puta too. A couple of them,' the bartender said. 'They told me they didn't like him, he talked about cruel things, made them do weird stuff, know what I mean?'
'No.'
'He must have been in the army, maybe down in Guatemala, he done some things to the Indians… Here.'
The bar owner picked up a bucket by the bail, walked outside with it, and shook it upside down. A broken knife blade and a spiral of bloody bandages tumbled out. He flipped the knife blade over with the point of his boot.
'That's what the doctor took out of him. Got to be a macho motherfucker to carry that and still have puta on the brain,' he said.
'Where'd he go?' I could feel my heart beating with the question.
'A plane picked him up. Right out there in them fields… This guy killed somebody who was your friend?'
'Not exactly.'
'Then I'd let it go, man. He told them two girls, his puta, he wired up people to electrical machines… You want your money back?'
'No.'
'You don't look too good. I'll fix you a rum and something to eat.'
'Why not?' I said, looking at the mist on the avocado orchards and a torn purple and yellow hole in the clouds through which the man without a face or name had perhaps disappeared forever. chapter fifteen
The next morning was Saturday, a blue-gray, misty, cool dawn that brought Mary Beth Sweeney to my back door at 6 a.m., still in uniform from the night shift, her thumbs hooked into the sides of her gunbelt.
I held open the screen. 'Come in and join Pete and me for breakfast. We're fixing to go down to the river in a few minutes,' I said.
She removed her hat, her eyes smiling into mine.
'I'm sorry for the other night,' she said.
'You got to try some of Pete's fried eggs and pork chops. They run freight trains on this stuff, isn't that right, Pete?'
He grinned from behind his plate. 'I always know when he's gonna say something like that,' he said.
We rode down the dirt track in my car to the bluffs. The water in the river was high and slate green, tangled with mist, the current eddying around the dead cottonwood trees that had snagged in the clay.
Five feet under the surface was the top of an ancient car, now softly molded with silt and moss. In the winter of 1933 two members of the Karpis-Barker gang robbed the bank in Deaf Smith and tried to outrun a collection of Texas Rangers and sheriffs' deputies from three counties. Their car was raked with Thompson machine-gun bullets, the glass blown out, the fuel tank scissored almost in half. My father watched the car careen off the road, plow through the corn crib and hog lot, then ignite with a whoosh of heat and energy that set chickens on fire behind the barn.
The car rolled like a self-contained mobile inferno across the yellow grass in the fields, the two robbers like blackened pieces of stone inside. The ammunition in their stolen Browning Automatic Rifles was still exploding when the car dipped over the bluffs and slid into the river. It continued to burn, like a fallen star, under the water, boiling carp that were as thick as logs to the surface.
Today the car was a home to shovel-mouth catfish that could straighten a steel hook like a paper clip.
Mary Beth got out of the Avalon and stretched and hung her gunbelt over the corner of the open door. She watched Pete baiting his hook down on the bank, as though she were forming words in her mind.
'The man at my apartment, his name's Brian. I was involved with him. But not anymore. I mean, not personally,' she said.
'Take this for what it's worth, Mary Beth. Most feds are good guys. That guy's not. He put you at risk, then he tried to lean on me.'
'You?'
'I suspect y'all are DEA. The FBI doesn't send its people in by themselves.'
'Brian leaned on you?'
'Tried. This guy's not first team material.'
Her eyes were hot, her back stiff with anger.
'I have to make a phone call,' she said.
'Stay here, Mary Beth.'
'I'll walk back.'
I took her gunbelt off the corner of the door.
'Nine-Mike Beretta,' I said.
'You want to shoot it?'
'No.' I folded the belt across the holster and handed it to her. The nine-millimeter rounds inserted in the leather loops felt thick and smooth under my fingers. 'I don't mess with guns anymore. Take my car back. Pete and I will walk.'
Then she did something that neither Pete nor I expected. In fact, his face was beaming with surprise and glee as he looked up from the bank and she hooked one arm around my neck and kissed me hard on the mouth.
That afternoon the district attorney, Marvin Pomroy, rang me at home.
'We've got Garland Moon in the cage. He wants to see you,' he said.
'What's he in for?'
'Trespassing, scaring the shit out of people. You coming down?'
'No.'
'He's into something, it's got to do with the Vanzandt family. Anyway, we've got to kick him loose in another hour. So suit yourself.'
The previous night, Garland T. Moon had showed up first at Shorty's, then at the drive-in restaurant north of
