'You're wrong about this,' I said.

I watched her cruiser spin gravel onto the county road and disappear over a rise between two pastures filled with red Angus.

My law office was above the old bank on the corner of the town square. From my window I could see the iron tethering rings that bled rust out of the old elevated sidewalks, the hardware and feed stores that had gone broke, the tiny neon-scrolled Rialto theater that still showed first-run movies, the yellow tip of a Spanish-American War artillery piece under the live oaks on the courthouse lawn, the Roman-numeraled clock perched atop the third floor, where Lucas Smothers waited in a cell with a sociopath behind the wall on each side of him.

I sat at my desk with a cup of coffee and stared at the glass case on the wall where I had mounted Great- grandpa Sam's Navy Colt. 36 caliber revolvers and his octagon-barrel Winchester '73 lever-action rifle on a field of blue felt. I picked up the telephone and punched in the sheriff's office extension.

'My client hasn't been moved,' I said.

'Talk to Harley.'

'Harley's a sadistic moron.'

'You're starting to try my patience, Billy Bob.'

'Tell your scene investigator I'm going to fry his ass.'

'The missing beer cans or whatever?'

'That's right.'

'What would they prove, that a lot of people get drunk and diddle each other in that picnic ground?… Go to a head doctor while you still got time, son. I'm worried about you.'

I drove out to the clapboard, tin-roofed home of the victim, Roseanne Hazlitt. The aunt was a frail, wizened woman who snapped the screen latch in place as I stepped up on her tiny gallery. Behind her, the television set was tuned to a talk show on which people shouted and jeered at one another. An ironing board on a short stand was elevated in front of the couch. Through the screen I smelled an odor on her like camphor and dried flowers and sweat baked into her clothes by the heat of her work.

'You asking me to hep set that boy loose?' she said.

'No, ma'am. I just wondered if Roseanne had other friends she might have met sometimes at Shorty's.'

'Like who?'

'Like one she had reason to slap the daylights out of.'

'She never hurt nobody in her life. It was them hurt her.'

'May I come in?'

'No.'

'Who's them, Ms Hazlitt?'

'Any of them that gets the scent of it, like a bunch of dogs sniffing around a brooder house. Now, you get off my gallery, and you tell that Smothers boy he might fool y'all, he don't fool me.'

'You know Lucas?'

I drove back to Deaf Smith, parked my Avalon by the office, and walked across the street to the courthouse. I opened Harley Sweet's door without knocking.

'I want to see Lucas in private, in an interview room, and I don't want anybody disturbing me while I talk to him,' I said.

'I wouldn't have it no other way, Billy Bob.' He leaned back in his swivel chair, his jaw resting on his fingers, a shadow of a smile on his mouth.

Upstairs, inside the jail, the turnkey unlocked Lucas's cell. The man with the misshaped head and pot stomach in the cell to the right, whose name was Jimmy Cole, walked up and down, tapping his fists one on top of the other, oblivious to our presence. The man on the left, Garland T. Moon, sat naked on his bunk. He had been exercising, and he wiped the sweat off his stomach with a towel and grinned at me. His shrunken, receded left eye glistened with a rheumy, mirthful light.

The turnkey walked Lucas and me down a short hallway to a small windowless room, with a wood table and two wood chairs and a urine-streaked grated drain in the concrete floor.

Lucas sat down, one hand clenched on his wrist. He watched my face, then licked his lips.

'What's wrong, Mr Holland?'

'You led me to believe you didn't know Roseanne Hazlitt outside of Shorty's.'

'I didn't know her real good, that's all.'

'You're lying.'

'I drove her home a couple of times after Shorty's closed. We didn't go out reg'lar or nothing.'

'No, all you did was get in her pants.'

He swallowed dryly. There were discolorations in his cheeks, like small pieces of melting ice.

'You want to spend the rest of your life in Huntsville? You keep lying to me, and Marvin Pomroy is going to grind you into sausage… What are you hiding, Lucas?'

He stared fixedly at his hands, but his eyes seemed to be looking over a cliff into a canyon that had no bottom.

'She said she might be pregnant.'

'She wanted you to marry her?' I asked.

'No, sir. She said she was gonna fix some guy good. She said, 'I'm gonna show him up for what he is. People around here gonna be real surprised. I bet I can get my story on TV and make this whole town look like two cents.''

'Why didn't you tell me this?'

'Cause maybe that baby's mine. Maybe y'all would think I had reason to kill her 'cause I didn't want it.' He breathed through his nose and dug at a callus with his thumbnail, a hard light in his eyes.

'I've seen the autopsy, Lucas. She wasn't pregnant.'

'Then why-'

'She was probably late.'

He dropped his hands in his lap, his face empty, like someone whose head is filled with white noise.

'I got to get away from them two back at the cells,' he said.

'Don't pay attention to them.'

'They talk in the dark when nobody else ain't around… Last night Garland told Jimmy Cole, that's the one with the tattoos all over him, Garland says to him, 'Damn if that old woman didn't put me in mind of my mother. She was trussed up like a little bird behind the counter there, peeping up at me, scared to death, I declare she looked so pitiful she made me hurt. So I walked back to her and said, 'Lady, a good woman like you ain't deserving of the evil a man like me brings into the world,' and I put both my hands on her face and she wet her panties and died right there.'

'Mr Holland, they laughed so hard I had to wrap the mattress around my head to keep the sound out… Mr Holland?'

Ten minutes later I tapped on the frosted glass of Marvin Pomroy's office door.

'How bad you want to zip up the package on Garland T. Moon?' I said.

'What have you got?' Marvin said.

'Lucas can put a nail gun in Moon's mouth.'

Marvin made an indifferent face. 'So go on and tell me,' he said.

'What's on the table?'

'It's not a seller's market, Billy Bob. I've got a witness who saw Moon go into the store.'

'Forget your witness. I've got the confession.'

'You want to plea out?'

'Nope.'

'If it's what you say, maybe his bail can get cut in half… Maybe we can go south one bump on the charge.'

'Manslaughter, no rape.'

'Manslaughter, sexual battery.'

'Not good enough.'

Marvin scratched the back of his head.

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