I pulled back the hammer to half-cock and opened the loading gate and rotated the cylinder so I could see the whorls of light in each empty chamber. Then I holstered the pistol again and wrapped the belt and buckle around the holster and stuck it in a paper bag and walked back up to my office.
Temple Carrol had called back and left a message with my secretary-Roy Devins, whom Garland T. Moon had mutilated, had checked out of the hospital, all bills unpaid, and was thought to have taken a Greyhound bus out of town.
I took L.Q.' s revolver home that afternoon and placed it in my desk drawer in the library and read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal.
August 14, 1891
The Rose of Cimarron and me went to Denver last week on the Santa Fe Railroad and took a room as man and wife in the Brown Palace Hotel, a building which is a marvel even for these modern times. Jennie could not get over riding up ten floors on an elevator, and the truth is neither could I. The lobby was filled with potted ferns and red- velvet chairs and settees that was brought from England and which Queen Victoria was said to have sat in. The dinner was prairie chicken stuffed with rice. They give us little bowls to wash our fingers in that Jennie thought was for soup. Later, we drank lemonade with mint leaves in it and ate oysters out of silver ice buckets and listened to the singer Lillie Langtry perform. Most of the guests seemed to be Republican business men. But they was a pretty good sort just the same.
Wyatt and Morgan Earp, Dallas Stoudenmire, Johnny Ringo, Joe Lefores, and the tubercular drunkard Doc Holliday have been here and have died or gone on to whatever places are left for their kind. The streets of Denver are lit with gas lamps, and gunmen and Indians and rowdy miners are not welcome. I don't think Jennie can see it though. Denver is not the future. It's the Cherokee Strip and her people and maybe even the likes of me that's the past.
I had a terrible lesson on the way back. A grass fire burned down the trestle over a gorge and we was stuck on the prairie for two days. We walked to a camp of Tonkawa Indians that stayed half-starved during the winter because the agents stole the money that was for their food. Jennie got a box of canning jars from the train and showed the squaws how to put up preserves. She looked right elegant in her long dress, boiling tomatoes on a stone oven and pouring the stew in glass jars with a spoon set inside so the glass didn't break from the heat. I thought maybe we might have an ordinary life after all, maybe up in Wyoming or Montana where nobody ever heard of the Doolin and Dalton gangs.
When we got back on the train I seen a dark smear on the floor by the woodstove, one that somebody had tried to scrub out of the grain with sand. I asked the conductor who had bled there. He said it was the wife of a railroad board member, and she had been shot to death when train robbers fired through the glass in the window three weeks ago.
Later Jennie asked me what I was studying on. I said, That collection of trash and lamebrains down the hillock from us has gone and killed an innocent woman.
She looked out the window, pouting, then said to me, The railroad stole the land from the Indians and I ain't a bit sorry for her. If this was the Lord pulling the veil from my eyes, the light has fairly withered an old man's heart.
A motorcycle turned into my drive, the engine popping and misfiring. I turned on the porch light and stepped outside. Lucas Smothers sat astride an old, low-slung Indian motorcycle with dented, purple fenders, his T-shirt and jeans streaked with grease. He cut the engine and grinned.
'You ever see one like this?' he asked.
'Sure, they're collector's items.'
'I'm gonna restore it. It's got a crack in the frame but I can braze it. The teacher at the high school body shop said I could use the equipment in the afternoon while they're still cleaning up.'
'Where'd you get it?'
'Darl Vanzandt.'
'Darl?'
Lucas's eyes went away from my face.
'He said he'd been going to church and trying to get right for the bad things he's done. What was I supposed to say, 'I don't want to have nothing to do with you'?'
'I think he'll hurt you.'
'By giving me an old bike?'
'Jimmy Cole was murdered on the Hart Ranch. You were probably right the first time. Darl and his friends found him hiding out there and killed him.'
He pressed his palm on his forehead, smearing grease in his hair.
'Everything I do is fucked up. I feel worse every time I come over here,' he said, his eyes glistening.
'Leave the bike here. I'll call his father and have it picked up.'
'Yeah, 'cause the product of your broken rubber cain't take care of hisself. Thanks, anyway,' he said.
He started the motorcycle, fed it the gas until the misfires became a dirty roar, then fishtailed off the gravel onto the county road, his hair whipping in the wind, his T-shirt pooling with air.
Way to go, Holland, I thought.
Mary Beth Sweeney called the next morning, just as I was about to leave for the office.
'Bunny Vogel got into it last night with a Mexican biker at Shorty's,' she said.
'Which biker?'
'No name. He took off before I got there. But it looks like the fight had something to do with Roseanne Hazlitt.'
'How do you know?'
'A couple of witnesses said the Mexican kid called Bunny 'spermbrain', then 'Roseanne's pimp.' That's when they went at it. They tore up most of the side porch.'
'Where's Bunny now?'
'I kept him downtown two hours, then kicked him loose. He's supposed to pay the owner half the damages.'
'You're a good cop, Mary Beth.'
'A good cop would take him to the Marine Corps recruiting station before he ends up in Huntsville. Have you ever been to California?'
'No, why?'
'These kids must go out there and take courses in how to screw up their lives.'
Bunny lived on the west end of the county, not far from a train siding, a shut-down cannery, and a string of abandoned and overgrown wood cottages that had been used by migrant workers during the 1940s. His house was sheathed in ancient grey Montgomery Ward brick and elevated on cinder blocks, but the floor had settled through the center, so that the outside covering had cracked like a dried husk, exposing the tar paper underneath. Bunny's '55 maroon Chevy, with the rolled white leather interior, was parked in the dirt yard, as incongruous as a color cutout pasted on a gray stage set, its green-tinted windows filled with reflections of clouds.
Bunny stood in the backyard, in a sleeveless red sweatshirt and running shorts and half-top cleats, flinging footballs through a rubber tire that hung on a rope from the limb of a hackberry tree.
'I heard you got put in the bag last night,' I said.
'Word gets around.' He picked up another football from an orange crate and fired a bullet pass through the tire. It landed on a grassy knoll and rolled toward the train tracks.
'Who was the biker?'
'Just a greaseball who wants to take down a swinging dick in Shorty's. I ain't a swinging dick. But that's what the greaseball wants to think.'
'He called you a spermbrain?'
'Yeah, I think that's what he said.' He shook his hair back on his shoulders and flung another football at the tire. This time it caromed off the rim.
'He's the same guy who picked up Roseanne at the Dairy Queen, isn't he? The one you took her away from?'
'Maybe.'
'Something bothers me, Bunny. Roseanne slapped you the night she was attacked. I think it was for
