town, dressed in plastic cowboy boots, white pleated slacks, a form-fitting sleeveless undershirt, costume jewelry on his hands and wrists and neck. He wandered among the cars in the parking lot, gregarious, avuncular, a paper shell of french fries in one hand, a frosted Coke in the other. He worked his way into groups of teenagers, as though he were an old friend, and told obscene jokes that made their faces go slack with disgust.
Then Bunny Vogel's '55 Chevy, with a girl in the front passenger seat, and Darl Vanzandt and another girl in back, cruised the lines of parked cars and backed into an empty space twenty feet from Moon.
He walked to their car, bent down grinning into the windows, his face lighted with familiarity.
'Who's that in there?' he said.
Inside the car, they looked at one another.
'How about we go for some beers? Maybe I score a little muta?' he said.
'We don't know you, man,' Darl said.
'You kids got a look in your eyes tells me y'all don't care y'all end up in the gutter or not… I'm a student of people. I want to know where that look comes from. Let's make it scrambled eggs at my place.'
'I just washed my car. Get your fucking armpits off the window,' Bunny said.
A few minutes later every car in the drive-in had burned rubber out onto the highway and left Garland T. Moon standing alone, with his french fries and frosted Coke, amid the litter in the parking lot.
The next day Jack Vanzandt was among a foursome on the ninth green at the country club when a man in a cream-colored suit, a Hawaiian shirt printed with flowers that could have been shotgun wounds, and brand-new white K-Mart tennis shoes with the word JOX emblazoned across the tops, strolled up from the edge of the water trap, his wisps of red hair oiled on his scalp, and said, 'Excuse me, sir, I'd like to talk with you over at the Shake 'n' Dog about a mutual interest we got… Say, this is a right nice golf range, ain't it? I been thinking about getting a membership myself.'
Garland T. Moon was in the holding cage on the first floor, by the elevator shaft that led up to the jail. He had stripped off his coat and shirt, and was standing barechested in his slacks and JOX running shoes, his hands hooked like claws in the wire mesh.
'What kind of bullshit are you up to, Moon?' I said.
'I got 'em by the short hairs.'
'Oh?'
'That little puke Darl Vanzandt done Jimmy Cole, thinks he's some kind of Satanist? I got news for y'all, there's people that's the real thing, that's made different in the womb, it's in the Bible and you can check it out. You getting my drift, boy?'
'Why'd you want to see me?'
'Tell his father I want a hunnerd-thousand dollars.'
'Tell him yourself.'
'Don't walk away from me… You gonna do what I tell you whether you like it or not. I can give testimony I heard Lucas Smothers confess to raping and killing that girl in the picnic ground.'
'Have you been in a mental asylum?'
'Where I been is in this tub of nigger bathwater when I was fifteen years old.' His mouth puckered into a peculiar grin, red and glistening, flanged with small teeth.
'It's the town, isn't it, not me or Lucas or some peckerwoods who worked you over with a cattle prod,' I said.
'You know the old county prison north of the drive-in restaurant? Forty-one years ago two gunbulls put me over an oil drum every Sunday morning and took turns. Tore my insides out and laughed while they done it… Y'all gonna get rid of me the day you learn how to scrub the stink out of your own shit.'
I turned and walked back toward the entrance.
'You won't pick up a gun 'cause you killed your best friend! I got the Indian sign on you, boy!' he called at my back.
Marvin Pomroy waited for me outside. He was a Little League coach, and because it was Saturday he wore a pair of seersucker slacks and a washed-out golf shirt without a coat. But, as always, not a hair was out of place on his head, and his face had the serenity of a thoughtful Puritan who viewed the failure of the world through Plexiglas.
I told him what Moon had said.
'Why does he seem to have this ongoing obsession with you?' he asked.
'You got me.'
'You never ran across him when you were a Ranger or prosecutor?'
'Not to my knowledge.'
Down the street a construction crew was fitting a steel crossbeam into the shell of a building and a man in black goggles was tack-welding a joint in a fountain of liquid sparks.
'What kind of vocational training did Moon get inside?' I asked.
'He picked cotton. That's when he wasn't in lockdown… Why?'
'Moon's an arc welder. So was my father.'
'Big reach.'
'You got a better one?' I asked.
Late that evening the sheriff parked his new Ford pickup at his hunting camp above the river. He was proud of his camp. The log house on it was spacious and breezy, with cathedral ceilings, lacquered yellow pine woodwork, a fireplace built from river stones and inset with Indian tomahawks and spear points recovered from a burial mound, stuffed tarpon and the heads of deer and bobcats mounted on the walls and support beams, a green felt poker table cupped with plastic trays for the chips, a freezer stocked with venison and duck, ice-cold vodka and imported beer in the refrigerator, glass gun cases lined with scoped rifles.
He showered and dried off in the bathroom, then walked naked into the kitchen and opened a bottle of German beer, turned on the television set atop the bar, and punched in the number of an escort service in San Antonio on his cordless phone.
From the kitchen window he could see the sun's last fiery spark through the trees that rimmed the hills above the river, the gray boulders that protruded from the current, his dock and yellow-and-red speedboat snugged down with a tarp, the flagstone terrace where he barbecued a whole pig on a spit for state politicians who introduced him with pride to their northern friends as though he were a charismatic frontier reflection of themselves.
Not bad for a boy with a fourth-grade education who could have ended up road-ganging himself.
The sheriff had always said, 'We all work for the white man. You can do it up in the saddle with a shotgun, or down in the row with the niggers. But there's no way you ain't gonna do it.'
The woman who answered the number in San Antonio said his visitor would be there in two hours.
The sheriff drank the last of his beer and let the foam slide down his throat. His massive torso was ridged with hair, his back and buttocks pocked with scars from the naked screws on football shoes that had thundered over his body when he had played defensive lineman in a semipro league at age nineteen. He peeled the cellophane off a cigar, lit it, wet the match under the faucet, and dropped it into a plastic-lined wastebasket under the counter. Then he seemed to have turned from the sink, perhaps when a shadow fell across his neck and shoulders.
The ax was one he recognized. It had rested on a nail in the shed above his woodpile. He had honed it on a grinding stone until its edge looked like a sliver of ice.
The first blow was a diagonal one, delivered at a downward angle. The blade bit into the sheriff's face from below the left eye to the right corner of the mouth.
That was the first blow. The others were struck along a red trail from the kitchen to the gun case in the living room, where the sheriff gave it up forever and lay down among the stuffed heads that had always assured him he was intended to be the giver of death and never its recipient. chapter sixteen
Sunday morning, before the sun was above the hills, I watched from behind the crime scene tape while the paramedics rolled the sheriff's body on a gurney to the back of an ambulance. Marvin Pomroy nudged me on the arm, then walked with me toward my Avalon.
'You got any thoughts?' he asked.
'No.'
'He was dead at least two hours before the hooker got there. The intruder could have cleaned the place out. But he didn't. So it's a revenge killing, right?'
