to anyone.

But while she couldn't have realized it, she'd stabbed her finger right into that old wound. What I'd scarred it over with was really a patch rather than true healing-an illusion of freedom. It was the crutch I needed to get by, and it worked pretty well. I didn't often have to face a reminder that, at heart, I'd given up.

And with Celia on my mind anyway, it had triggered more thoughts of her. I knew she'd felt that same thing. We'd never talked about it, but it had been the basis of the bond between us. Her fantasies of a storybook life as Mrs. Pete Pettyjohn were her own crutch.

Maybe Pete had sensed this, and he hadn't been able to handle knowing that he wasn't enough for her, and that even if he bucked his mother's opposition and married Celia, the marriage would inevitably come crashing down. I'd come to wonder if in his black drunken depressions he'd seized on a way of sheltering them both in the only way he could see.

It was easy to imagine that death would be the cure.

The afternoon was clouding over with dark blue-gray strata, driven by an agitating breeze. At this hour the cemetery was deserted. A lot of people came out to pay their respects after church, but the rush was over. The headstones were mostly small and uniform, laid out in rows with military precision, an exactness found after life ended but rarely available during it. Many were decorated with flowers or wreaths, and some had carefully tended plants growing from the earth.

My father's had none of those things, and I felt a pang of shame. I hadn't been here for a while-more than a year, and now that I thought about it, closer to two. It wasn't a ritual that I observed on any particular dates. Sometimes it felt right, and at other times necessary. I stood there for a minute or so, then walked out into the bleak rolling prairie.

The old man had been like many others of his time and place, genial but distant. He'd grown up on a ranch, and in a way, he'd raised his family like we were stock. As long as things operated smoothly, he let us run, and he busted his ass to make sure we got all of what we needed and some of what we wanted. But like most of those men, he also had an iron-hard edge that you didn't want to cross. By and large, things operated smoothly.

Far and away the most serious time I ever saw that dangerous side of him was a couple of weeks after Celia died. I hadn't been sleeping well. Late on a Saturday night, I heard the house's front door close, the way it had the time she'd come home from her date and lain beside me. Half in a dream, I tiptoed down the hall to the top of the stairs.

My father was just about to walk out the door. He had his service pistol in his hand and was shoving it into his coat pocket.

He turned to look up at me. I'd seen him angry plenty of times, but this was beyond anger. There was a coldness in his eyes that froze me motionless.

Then his face softened-not with love, but with the wry understanding that he'd been caught. He put down the pistol, sat on the couch, and started taking off his boots. I went back to bed, scared and heartbroken. I didn't comprehend what I'd seen, but somehow it brought home the reality that she wasn't coming back.

As I'd gotten older, I had fit the incident into the overall scenario I constructed. It started with Celia informing Pete that she was pregnant. He knew his mother was dead set against marriage. That left him trapped between the two women in a vise of stress he couldn't handle. I could easily envision Celia taunting him as he waffled, and him losing his head like he had when he'd beaten me at her slight goading-except that this time, he took his rage out on her.

Then his wealthy, powerful family had stepped in to protect the son who carried their lineage and their hopes, quashing an autopsy because it would have shown her pregnancy and injuries not consistent with the supposed cause of death. Their consolation gift to her parents was really a buy-off.

My father had been gone from home all evening before I saw him with the gun-probably drinking. I had come to believe that he'd suspected the cover-up, and had decided to call on Pete or Reuben and find out the truth. But he'd seen me crouched on the stairs and turned back-not from fear of prison or even of getting killed, but from realizing that he still had his family to care for.

He didn't take well to being helpless, and he was stonewalled by powers that he couldn't counter without damaging our lives. The fight seemed to slip out of him after that, and more and more, it was like he was going through the motions. When he learned that he had terminal pancreatic cancer, he seemed almost relieved.

I had to admit that my scenario was pure speculation. I'd never found any tangible reason to believe anything other than that Celia had been thrown by a horse. And while Pete had sentenced himself and carried out the sentence, some part of me wished I'd never awakened that night and stopped my father from whatever truth he might have uncovered.

27

The Red Meadow was a no-frills blue-collar bar near the Labor Temple, with a clientele mostly of older men whose hairlines were compressed from wearing cowboy hats or hard hats or military helmets all their lives. It usually got busy at quitting time on weekdays, but right now there were maybe half a dozen regulars talking quietly at tables, holding off the drag of a Sunday afternoon. I liked the Red Meadow fine, but I tended toward places like O'Toole's that had more exotic aspects, such as women, and I came in here only once in a while after work.

Elmer hadn't yet arrived. The bartender, a spry gent of about sixty with a ducktail haircut and a neatly folded apron, greeted me with the old-time saloon keeper's question:

'What's yours, pard?'

It almost made me smile. I told him, laying down one of Balcomb's hundred-dollar bills. I'd brought along several of them, thinking I might have a chance to finish settling up with Sarah Lynn. I didn't want his money in spite of the bullshit he'd put me through, and I'd already decided that if the judge did drop my bail, I was going to send back whatever was left over. But he could damned well buy Elmer and me a few drinks, and I was going to set aside a few more for Slo and for Madbird.

The bartender got out a frosty can of Pabst, poured a generous shot of Makers Mark to go with it, and was just setting down my change when he looked sharply toward the door. His face was not happy. The rest of the room went quiet. I swiveled around.

Bill LaTray, my bail bondsman, was standing there with his granite stare fixed on me.

My feet just about left the floor, from the shock of seeing him, confusion about how the fuck he'd known where I was, and worry over what he wanted.

He didn't come inside and he didn't pay attention to anybody else-just jerked his head in summons and stalked out again.

The bartender's gaze swung back to me. It hadn't gotten any happier, and I realized he figured I was one of Bill's clients. I wanted to say, Wait, it's not what you think.

But it was.

I pushed a couple of dollar bills toward him for a tip.

'I'll be right back,' I said. I hoped to Christ that was true.

Bill was standing on the sidewalk when I stepped out, wearing his trademark caramel-colored leather coat. He looked like if you hit him with a baseball bat, it would break. His face was an exploded minefield of pockmarks and scars; his eyes were the color of mud. He had on some kind of cologne that got my own eyes watering from five feet away, which was where I stopped.

He cupped a match and lit a rum-soaked crook cigar, inhaling a drag that burned half an inch of it, then crushed the still flaring match between his blunt fingers.

'You blow town, it's gonna cost me twenty-five thousand bucks,' he said. 'You know what that means?'

'I'm not going anywhere. The charges are being dropped.'

'That ain't official till tomorrow. And I hear you got something else on the burner, a lot bigger. So let's get this straight-you're there at the courthouse first thing in the morning.'

I'd calmed myself a little by realizing that how he'd found me wasn't so mysterious. I'd driven past his pawnshop, only a few blocks away. That was one disadvantage of having a highly visible vehicle like mine. He must

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