was the fact that the environs on which the club was built were part of the old Outlaw Trail, which had run from the Hole in the Wall Country in Wyoming all the way to the Mexican border. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Kid Curry and Black Jack Ketchum and Sam Bass and the Dalton Gang had probably all ridden it. Thirty years before, wagon tracks that had been cut into the mire of clay and mud and livestock feces during the days of the Chisholm and Goodnight-Loving trails were still visible in the hardpan. When the topography was reconfigured by the builders of the club, the hardpan was ground up by earth-graders and layered with trucked-in sod and turned into fairways and putting greens and sand traps and ponds, for the pleasure of people who had never heard of Charles Goodnight or Oliver Loving or Jesse Chisholm and couldn’t have cared less about who they were.
Deputy Sheriff Felix Chavez was twenty-seven years old and had four children and a wife he had married when she was sixteen and he was twenty. He was devoted to his family and loved playing golf and remodeling and improving his three-bedroom house. He was also a master car mechanic and a collector of historical artifacts and military ordnance. Because he often swung his cruiser off the main road and patrolled the country-club parking lot without being asked to do so, the management allowed him to use the driving range free whenever he wished, although the gesture did not extend to the links or access to the Ninth Hole. The consequence was that no one paid particular attention to him on the cloudy afternoon when he parked his cruiser by the clubhouse and got out and watched the golfers teeing off or practicing on the putting green. Nor did they think it unusual that Felix strolled through the lot, either checking on a security matter or enjoying a breezy, cool break in the weather. The drama at the club came later in the day, and Felix Chavez seemed to have no connection to it.
Temple Dowling was on the driving range with three friends, whocking balls in a high arc, his form perfect, the power in his shoulders and thick arms and strong hands a surprise to those who noted only the creamy pinkness of his complexion and the baby fat under his chin and his lips that were too large for his mouth. The coordination of his swing and the whip of his wrists and the twist of his hips and buttocks seemed almost an erotic exercise, one that was not lost on others. “Temp, you’re the only golf player I ever saw whose swing could make the right girl cream her jeans,” one of his companions said.
They all roared, then sipped from their old-fashioneds and gin gimlets and turned their attention to the two- inch-thick bloodred steaks Temple had just forked onto the barbecue grill.
“What was that?” said one of the friends, a man with hair like an albino ape’s on the backs of his wrists and arms.
“What was what?” Dowling said. He looked around, confused.
“I don’t know,” his friend said. “I thought I saw something. A red bug.”
“Where?”
The friend rubbed at one eye with his wrist. “I probably looked into the sun. I think I need new contacts.”
“It looked like it was fixing to crawl in your collar,” another man said.
Temple Dowling pulled his shirt loose from his slacks and shook it. “Did I get it?”
“Nothing fell out.”
“It wasn’t a centipede, was it?”
“It was a little round bug,” said the man with white hair on his arms.
Temple Dowling straightened his collar. “Screw it. If it bites me, I’ll bite it back,” he said. His friends grinned. He picked up a fork and turned the steaks, squinting in the smoke. “Right on this spot, before this was a country club, my father had a deer stand where he used to take his friends. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I snuck off to it and shot a nine-point buck with my twenty-two. Except I gut-shot him. He took off running, just about where that water trap is now. I had to hit him four more times before he went down. I was so excited I pissed my pants. I showed my father what I’d done, and he dipped his hand in the deer’s blood and smeared it on my face and said, ‘Damn if I don’t think you’ve turned into a man. But we got to get you a thirty-thirty, son, before you shoot up half the county.’”
“Were you and your father pretty close, Temp?”
“Close as ice water can be to a drinking glass, I guess.”
Dowling’s companions nodded vaguely as though they understood when in fact they did not.
“My father had his own way of doing things,” he said. “There was his way, and then there was his way. If that didn’t work out, we did it his way over and over until his way worked. No man could ride a horse into the ground or a woman into an asylum like my old man.”
The others let their eyes slip away to their drinks, the steaks browning and dripping on the fire, the golfers lifting their drives high into the sunset, a skeet shooter powdering a clay pigeon into a pink cloud against the sky. At the club, candor about one’s life was not always considered a virtue.
“On your shirt, Temp,” said the man with white hair on his wrists and arms. “There. Jesus. ”
Dowling looked down at his clothes. “Where?”
One man dropped his gimlet glass and stepped away, his eyebrows raised, his hands lifted in front of him, as though disengaging from an invisible entanglement that should not have been part of his life. The two other men were not as subtle. They backed away hurriedly, then ran toward the Ninth Hole, coins and keys jingling in their pockets, their spiked shoes clicking on the walkway, their faces disjointed as they looked back fearfully over their shoulders.
Out on the county road, one hundred yards away, Felix Chavez walked from an abandoned mechanic’s shed to an unmarked car, threw a rifle on the backseat, and drove home to eat dinner with his family.
Hackberry was dozing in his chair, his hat tilted down on his face, his feet on his desk, when the 911 call came in. Maydeen and Pam and R.C. had stayed late that afternoon. Maydeen tapped on Hackberry’s doorjamb. “Temple Dowling says somebody put a laser sight on him at the country club,” she said.
“No kidding,” Hackberry said, opening his eyes. “What would Mr. Dowling like us to do about it?”
“Probably bring him some toilet paper. He sounds like he just downloaded in his britches,” she replied.
“Maydeen-”
“Sorry,” she said.
“Is Mr. Dowling still at the club?”
“He’s in his cottage. He says you warned him about Jack Collins.” She looked at a notepad in her hand. “He said, ‘That crazy son of a bitch Collins is out there, and you all had better do something about it. I pay my goddamn taxes.’”
“Is there any coffee left?” Hackberry asked.
“I just made a fresh pot.”
“Let’s all have a cup and a doughnut or two, then R.C. and Pam and I can motor on out,” Hackberry said. He stretched his arms, his feet still on his desk, and tossed his hat on the polished tip of one boot. “I’d better take down the flag before we go, too. It looks like rain.”
“You want me to call Dowling back?”
“What for?”
“To tell him y’all are on your way.”
“He knows our hearts are in the right place,” Hackberry replied.
Forty minutes later, it was misting and the clouds were hanging like frozen steam on the hills when Hackberry and Pam arrived at the club in one cruiser and R.C. in another. Temple Dowling met them at the door of his cottage, a drink in his hand, his face splotched, his eyes looking past them at the fairways and trees and the shadows that the trees and buildings and electric lights made on the grass. The wind toppled a table on the flagstones by the swimming pool, and Temple Dowling’s face jumped. “What kept y’all?” he said. “Who’s this woman Maydeen?”
“What about her?”
“She told me to fuck myself, is what’s about her.”
Hackberry stared at him without replying.
“Come inside. Don’t just stand there,” Dowling said.
“This is fine.”
“It’s raining. I don’t want to get wet,” Dowling said, his gaze focusing on a man stacking chairs behind the Ninth Hole.
“R.C., go up to the clubhouse and see what you can find out. We’ll be here with Mr. Dowling. Let’s wrap this up as soon as we can.”
