'Walk with me, sir,' she said.
But she knew it was unraveling now, in the way that dreams take you in high-speed cars over the edges of canyons and cliffs.
Sammy Mace walked up behind her and punched her with one finger between the shoulder blades.
'No cunt talks to me like that. Hey, did you hear me? I'm talking here. Turn around and look at me,' Sammy said, and punched her again with his finger.
She slipped her baton from its ring and whipped it across Sammy's left arm. Even from ten yards away, Bunny Vogel said he heard the bone break.
Sammy's face went white with pain and shock. He cradled his arm against his chest, his mouth trembling. Then he extended his right hand, like an inverted claw, toward the man in the ponytail.
'Give it to me!' he said.
Mary Beth pushed Vernon Smothers away from her.
'Down on the ground, on your face! Do it, both of you, now!' she said to Sammy and the man in the ponytail.
Then she saw Sammy lunge toward his friend and try to pull a. 25-caliber automatic from a small holster inside the friend's coat. She swung the baton again, this time across the side of Sammy's face, and shattered his jaw. It hung locked in place, lopsided, blood that was absolutely scarlet issuing off his tongue. His glasses lay broken on the grass.
Sammy collapsed to his knees, then grabbed at her legs and at the nine-millimeter on her hip, while the man in the ponytail at first pushed her, then watched stupidly as his. 25 automatic fell from its holster into Sammy's lap.
The man in the ponytail tried to disentangle himself and back away while Sammy pulled the trigger impotently on the automatic and fought to get the safety off.
Mary Beth gripped her nine-millimeter with both hands but fired high with the first shot at Sammy Mace and hit the man in the ponytail in the groin. He stumbled away, his face rearing into the sky, his hands clutched to the wound as though he wanted to relieve himself.
Her second round entered Sammy's eye socket and blew the back of his head out on the grass.
Suddenly there was no sound in the skeet club except the wind fluttering an American flag on top of the pavilion. chapter twenty-five
It was hot that night, and still hot at false dawn, as though the air had been baked, then released again on the new day. I got a handful of molasses balls from the tack room and fed them to Beau in the lot, then turned him out and walked down to the river and watched the darkness go out of the sky. The current was dark green and swirling with froth from dead cottonwood trees that were snagged along the shore, and I could hear bream popping the surface where the riffle channeled under the tree trunks.
I tried to think clearly but I couldn't. I had stayed with Mary Beth until eleven last night. The man with the ponytail had lived three hours and died on the operating table. His name was Sixto Dominque, and his sheet showed only one felony conviction, for extortion in Florida, for which he had received a gubernatorial pardon. His wallet contained a permit for the. 25-caliber automatic.
'They thought they were in Dog Patch. They got what they deserved,' I told her.
'I should have hooked up Vernon Smothers and taken him to the cruiser and called for backup,' she said.
'Listen, Mary Beth, you're an officer of the law. When a lowlife puts his hand on your person during the performance of your duty, you bounce him off the hardest object in his environment.'
'I blew it.'
I offered to stay with her.
'Thanks, anyway. I've got to spend some serious time on the phone tonight,' she said. In the electric lighting of her apartment the color seemed washed out of her face, her freckles unnatural, as though they were painted on her skin.
'Don't drink booze or coffee. Don't pay attention to the thoughts you have in the middle of the night,' I said.
'Was it this way with you?'
'Yeah, the first time it was.'
'The first time?' she said.
My stare broke, and I tried not to let her see me swallow.
Now, the next day, I squatted on my boot heels in the grass and tossed pebbles down into the water on top of the submerged car that had once contained the bodies of two members of the Karpis-Barker gang, nameless now, buried somewhere in a potter's field, men who thought they'd write their names into memory with a blowtorch.
What was it that really bothered me, that hid just around a corner in my mind?
The answer was not one I easily accepted.
I had made a career of living a half life. I had been a street cop, a Texas Ranger, a federal prosecutor, and now I was a small-town defense lawyer who didn't defend drug traffickers, as though somehow that self-imposed restriction gave a nobility to my practice that other attorneys didn't possess. I was neither father nor husband, and had grown to accept endings in my life in the way others anticipated beginnings, and I now knew, without being told, that another one was at hand.
The sun broke above the horizon and was warm on my back as I walked toward the house. Then my gaze steadied on the barn, the backyard, the drive, the porte cochere, and two black sedans that shouldn't have been there.
I walked through the back porch and kitchen into the main part of the house, which Brian Wilcox and five other Treasury people were tearing apart.
'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I asked.
Wilcox stood in the middle of my library. Splayed books were scattered across the floor.
'Give him the warrant,' he said to a second man, who threw the document at me, bouncing it off my chest.
'I don't care if you have a warrant or not. You have no legitimate cause to be here,' I said.
'Shut up and stay out of the way,' the second man said. He wore shades and a military haircut, and his work had formed a thin sheen of perspiration on his face.
'Come on, Wilcox. You're a pro. You guys pride yourselves on blending into the wallpaper,' I said.
'You're interfering with a federal investigation,' Wilcox said.
'I'm what?'
'I think you've been running a parallel investigation to our own. That means there's probable cause for us to believe you possess evidence of a crime. Hence, the warrant. You don't like it, fuck you,' he said.
I used the Rolodex on my desk and punched a number into the telephone.
'I hope you're calling the judge. He's part Indian. His nickname is Big Whiskey John. He's in a great mood this time of day,' Wilcox said.
'This is Billy Bob Holland. I've got six Treasury agents ransacking my home,' I said into the receiver. 'The agent in charge is Brian Wilcox. He just told me to fuck myself. Excuse me, I have to go. I just heard glass breaking upstairs.'
The agent in shades picked up my great-grandfather's journal from a chair, flipped through it, and tossed it to me. 'Looks like a historical document there. Hang on to it,' he said, and raked a shelf of books onto the floor.
'That was the newspaper,' I said to Wilcox. 'It's owned by an eighty-year-old hornet who thinks fluoridation is a violation of the Constitution. Does the G still have its own clipping service?'
'You think you're getting a bad deal, huh? You cost us eight months' work. That's right, we were about to flip Sammy Mace, then you showed up. Plus your gal just got pulled out by her people.'
He looked at the reaction in my face, and a smile broke at the corner of his mouth.
'Her people?' I said numbly.
'Call her apartment. She's gone, bro. She got picked up in a plane at four this morning. She wouldn't survive an IA investigation,' he said.
I started to pick books off the floor and stack them on my desk, as though I were in a trance.
'You were a cop,' Wilcox said. 'You don't use a baton to bring a suspect into submission. You never deliver a
