'You all right?' he asked, and cupped his hand on my bare shoulder. I could feel the heat and oil in his skin, as though he were rubbing a layer of fouled air into my pores.
Don't let it happen, I told myself.
'Sorry we tossed your house,' he said.
'Forget it.'
'About Mary Beth…'
'Yes?'
'She'll come for you a second time, but you have to stay on top. There's something about the missionary position with her. She just can't get over the crest when she's sitting on you.'
I caught him right below the bottom lip, saw his teeth bare and his mouth go out of shape with the blow; then I drove my fist into his eye socket, hooked him with my left in the nose and hit him again in the mouth. His knees buckled and his head bounced off a fence rail. I felt him try to grab my waist as he went down, his eyes wide with fear, like those of a man who realizes he has slipped forever off a precipice, and I knew the old enemy had once more had its way and something terrible was happening in me that I couldn't stop.
He was at my feet now, his face strung with blood, his tie twisted backward on his neck, his chest laboring for breath.
Then among the thud of Beau's hooves, I saw Felix Ringo running at me through the tunnel of light inside the barn, simultaneously pulling back the slide on his nine-millimeter, his hat blowing off his head.
'You wasn't born, gringo. You was picked out of your mother's shit. This is for them people you killed down in Coahuila,' he said.
My hands felt swollen and useless at my sides, my chest running with sweat in the wind, the spilled water bucket ballooning in the dust by my feet. I could hear the blades on the windmill clattering like a playing card clipped inside whirling bicycle spokes. Felix Ringo extended the nine-millimeter in front of him with both hands, crouched in a shooter's position, as though he were on a practice range, and flipped off the butterfly safety with his thumb.
Temple Carrol stooped under the top fence rail, ripped L.Q. Navarro's revolver from the holster I had hung on a fence post, and screwed the barrel right behind Ringo's ear. She cocked the hammer, locking the cylinder in place.
'How your pud hanging, greaseball? You want to wear your brain pan on your shirt?' she asked. chapter twenty-nine
There was no false dawn the next morning. The sky was a black lid above the velvet green crest of the hills, the clouds veined with lightning. I opened all the windows and let the smell of ozone and wind and distant rain fill the house. Mary Beth called while I was fixing breakfast.
'Where are you?' I asked.
'At the hotel downtown.'
'When did you get in?'
'Late. I went right to bed.'
'I could have picked you up.'
'You mean if I'd called?'
'No, I meant-'
'My schedule's not too predictable these days.'
'I just didn't know when you were coming. That's what I meant.'
'I heard about you tearing up Brian. What started it?'
'The conversation got out of hand.'
'He won't file charges. His career's unraveling on him. He's one step from Fargo, North Dakota, already.'
I felt my palm squeeze involuntarily on the telephone receiver.
'Can you take a cab out to the house? We can drive back into town together,' I said.
'I have a bunch of incoming calls,' she said.
'I see.'
'Some people in my office weren't comfortable with me coming back here.'
'Yeah… I understand. I appreciate your doing it.'
I felt foolish and stupid, a mendicant holding a telephone to his ear as though it were a black tumor.
'When do I testify?' she asked.
'Probably this afternoon. Mary Beth, is it the career? Or am I just the wrong man for you?'
'I don't know how to say it, Billy Bob.'
The house seemed to fill with the sounds of wind and silence.
'You always think of yourself as an extension of your past,' she said. 'So every new day of your life you're condemned to revisiting what you can't change.'
'I'll be at the office directly if you have a chance to drop by,' I said.
After I replaced the receiver I walked to the library window and looked at the darkness over the hills. The pages of my great-grandfather's journal fluttered whitely in the rush of wind through the screen. The silence in my head was so great I thought I heard the tinkling of L.Q. Navarro's roweled spurs.
An hour later Mary Beth walked from the hotel to my office. She wore a pink suit and white blouse with a purple broach and looked absolutely beautiful. But if I had expected to mend my relationship with her at that moment, the prospect went out the window when Temple Carrol came through the door thirty seconds later.
The three of us were standing in a circle, like people who had met inconveniently at a cocktail party.
'Y'all know each other, of course,' I said.
'Sure, the lady who pops in and out of uniform,' Temple said.
'Excuse me?' Mary Beth said.
'Billy Bob kicked the ass of a federal agent. Has he told you about it?' Temple asked.
'No. Why don't you?' Mary Beth said.
'I don't remember the details very well. I was more worried about the Mexican dirtbag, what's his name, Felix Ringo, the greaseball who fronts points for y'all, he tried to use the situation to cap Billy Bob. A great guy to have on a federal pad,' Temple said.
Mary Beth turned toward me. 'I didn't know that,' she said.
I pulled up the blinds loudly on a sky that swirled with storm clouds. The wind gusted under the trees on the courthouse lawn and blew leaves high in the air. 'Let's talk about our agenda today,' I said.
But agenda was the wrong word. The prosecution's case was not a complex one. Lucas Smothers was found passed out thirty feet from the homicide victim. He was sexually involved with her. He feared she carried his child. His semen, no one else's, was inside the victim's vagina. The pathologist would testify the damage to the genitalia indicated the assailant was probably driven by sexual rage. Lucas himself had told the arresting officers he had no memory of his actions after he had taken off his trousers in the pickup truck. Finally, Lucas had lied and denied even knowing Roseanne Hazlitt's last name.
But my problem was not with any evidence or possible testimony I had learned about in discovery. Instead, I had the brooding sense the loaded gun, the one pointed at Lucas's heart, was in my hand, not Marvin Pomroy's. But I didn't know what to do about it.
That afternoon Marvin rested his case, and while the rain drummed on the trees outside the window, I called Hugo Roberts to the stand.
His sheriff's uniform was freshly pressed, his brass name tag full of light on his pocket, an American flag sewn on the sleeve, but an odor of cigarettes and hair tonic and antiperspirant radiated from him as though it were sealed in his skin. He looked at the jury and spectators and at Marvin Pomroy and at the rain clicking on the windowsills, at virtually everything around him except me, as though I were of little consequence in his day.
'Your unit was the first one to arrive at the crime scene, sheriff?' I said.
'Yeah, I patrolled that area for the last couple of years. While I was a deputy, I mean.'
'Have you run a lot of kids out of there?'
'Yeah, after dark, when they don't have no business being there.'
I picked up a vinyl bag from the exhibit table and removed five Lone Star beer cans and two dirt-impacted wine bottles from it.
'Are these the cans and bottles you recovered at the crime scene, sir?' I asked.
