and worked them off her hips and stepped out of them. Behind her, I could see clouds racing across the land, blooming with quicksilver, splintering the hills with electricity.
She turned away from me briefly, unhooked her bra and slipped off her panties, then sat on the edge of the mattress, pulled the sheet away from my body, and lay against me. I tried to turn on my shoulder so that I faced her, but again I felt a muscular spasm seize my lower back and send a pain through my thighs that made my mouth drop open.
'Don't move,' she said, and spread her thighs and sat on top of me, her arms propped on each side of me. She smiled down into my face. The freckles on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts looked like tiny brown flowers. I traced my fingers around her nipples and took them in my mouth, then felt an unrelieved hardness and desire in my loins that I couldn't contain, that was like an envelope of heat glowing off of iron, that ached to enter her softness and the beauty and charity of her body, which gave satisfaction and sanctuary long before orgasm.
'I'll be here for you,' she whispered, her lips against my cheek, her passion so genuine and pure that I knew secretly, as all men do, I was undeserving of it. chapter eighteen
Early the next morning, I put ice on the tubular swelling along the side of my head and went to a doctor for the muscle spasms in my lower back. He showed me a set of exercises that involved lying on the floor and raising the knees to the chest and sitting in a chair and touching the floor while I sucked in my stomach. I was amazed to find that a level of pain that had been so intense could drain out of my body like water, at least temporarily.
'Whenever you feel the pain, do the exercise. You'll be fine. Just avoid any sudden movement in your back,' the doctor said. He took a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket. 'You want a prescription?'
'No, thanks.'
'It's light stuff.'
'It always is.'
'Tell me you're not still six-parts Baptist, Billy Bob.'
Later, I went to the health club and sat in the steam room, then showered and walked to Marvin Pomroy's office in the courthouse.
'We put out a bulletin on the three guys but we didn't have much to go on,' he said.
'Anybody question Moon about the sheriff's murder?' I asked.
'I don't see him as a strong suspect.'
'Moon was in the old county prison when the sheriff was a roadbull,' I said. Marvin was tilted back in his swivel chair.
The connections didn't come together in his face. 'Moon said a couple of guards sodomized him on an oil barrel. He said they did it to him every Sunday morning.'
'You're saying the sheriff was a pervert?'
'I don't know anything he wasn't.'
'If Moon's got a hard-on for the whole county, why does he wait forty years to come back and do a number on us? I think the sheriff was killed for other reasons,' Marvin said.
'Some people might call an ax across the face an indicator of revenge.'
But I could tell he was thinking of something else. He took off his glasses and polished the lenses with a piece of Kleenex. He fitted them back on his nose, his face blank, as though debating whether to expose the feelings he usually kept stored in a private box. His hair was so neat it looked like fine strands of metal on his head.
'I couldn't sleep last night,' he said. 'What those guys tried to do to you… I'd like to catch up with them on a personal basis.'
'It's not your style, Marvin.'
'You don't get it. I'm a law officer in a county that's probably run by the Dixie Mafia. I just can't prove it.'
I walked back across the street to the office and took the mail out of the box in the first-floor foyer. The foyer was cool and made of stucco and tile and decorated with earthen jars planted with hibiscus. Mixed in with the letters and circulars was a brown envelope with no postage, addressed to me in pencil.
For some reason-its soiled surfaces, the broken lettering, a smear of dried food where the seal had been licked-it felt almost obscene in my hand. I didn't open it until I was inside my office, as though my ignoring it would transform it into simply another piece of crank mail written by a dissatisfied client or a convict who thought his personal story was worth millions in movie rights. Then I cracked it across the top with my finger, the way you peel back a rotted bandage.
Inside was a Polaroid picture of Pete on the playground at the Catholic elementary school. The penciled page ripped out of a cheap notebook read: 'This was took this morning. When we get finished carving on him, his parts will fit in your mailbox.'
I called the principal at the school. She was a classic administrator; she did not want to hear about problems and viewed those who brought them to her as conspirators who manufactured situations to ruin her day.
'I just saw Pete. He's in the lunchroom,' she said.
'I'll pick him up at three. Don't let him walk home,' I said.
'What's wrong?'
'Some people might try to hurt him.'
'What's going on here, Mr Holland?'
'I'm not sure.'
'I'm aware you pay his tuition and you're concerned for his welfare, but we have other children here as well. This sounds like a personal matter of some kind.'
'I'll call you back,' I said. I hung up and punched in Temple Carrol's number.
'We need to throw a net over Roy Devins,' I said.
'What happened?'
I told her about the visit of the three men to my house the previous night.
'They knew about my rope-dragging Devins out of the bar. Devins was in the sack with Pete's mother. She's a drunk and gets mixed up with bikers and dopers sometimes.'
'You told this to Marvin?'
'What's he going to do? Half the cops in the county are on a pad. He's lucky he hasn't been assassinated.'
'Look, don't handle that letter. If we can lift some prints, Marvin can run them through AFIS. I'll get back to you.'
I closed the blinds and sat in the gloom and tried to think. These were the same men who thought they could terrorize Moon and run him out of town, except he turned the situation around on them and mutilated Roy Devins. But why put heat on Moon? Because he'd been out at the Hart Ranch? Who were they?
L.Q. Navarro sat in a swayback deerhide chair in the corner, one foot propped up on the wastebasket. He kept throwing his hat through the air onto the point of his boot, gathering it up, and throwing it again.
' Time to go to the bank,' he said.
'I figured that's what you'd say.'
'You just gonna study on it?'
'I gave it up, L.Q. It got you dead.'
'Them that won't protect their home and family don't deserve neither one. That's what you used to tell me.'
'Maybe I aim to cool them out. Maybe that's what's really on my mind.'
' Come on, bud, that little boy cain't be hanging out in the breeze, not with some rat-bait writing letters about killing him. If it was me, I'd blow that fellow's liver out and drink an ice-cold Carta Blanca while I was at it… Sorry, my way of putting things probably ain't always well thought out.'
I went downstairs to the bank, then into the vault where the safety deposit boxes were kept. I carried my rental box into a private enclosure and set it on a table and opened the hinged lid. Lying amidst my childhood coin collection and my father's Illinois pocket watch was L.Q.'s holstered double-action revolver. The steel had the soft sheen of liquorice; the ivory handles seemed molded into the steel, rather than attached with screws, and age had given them a faint yellow cast, as though the layer of calluses on L.Q.'s palm had rubbed its color into them.
