'Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you,' I said, getting up from the counter stool. 'Is Ronnie a pretty good friend of yours?'
'He was my mechanic. He pulled me out of a fire. You one of them people been giving that boy trouble?' he said.
When I got to my house ten minutes later, expecting to see Cholo's car, the driveway was empty. I looked inside the barn, then behind it, chickens scurrying and cackling in front of me. But there was no sign of the '49 Mercury. The windmill swung suddenly in the breeze, the blades clattering to life, and a gush of water spurted out of the well pipe into Beau's tank.
31
The next afternoon Pete and I loaded Beau in his trailer and hooked the trailer onto my truck, and went to look for arrowheads in the ravine where Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump had once hidden in a cave.
The sun was still high in the sky and the cliffs were yellow with sunshine, the air heavy with the smell of the pines that dotted the slopes. I shoveled silt from the edge of the creekbed onto a portable seine with an army- surplus E-tool while Pete picked flint chippings and small pieces of pottery off the screen.
'I heard a schoolteacher in the barbershop say we ain't supposed to do this,' Pete said.
'This stuff is washed down from a workmound or a tepee ring. It doesn't hurt anything to surface-hunt,' I replied.
'Is digging with a shovel surface-hunting?'
'Matter of definition,' I said.
'How you know there wasn't a tepee ring right here?' he asked.
'Would you build your house where a creek could flow through it?' I said. 'Say, look at that pair of hawks up in the redbuds.'
When he turned his head and stared up the slope into the trees, I took a flat, fan-shaped piece of yellow chert with a sharply beveled edge from my pocket and tossed it onto the screen.
'I don't see no hawk,' he said. Then his eyes dropped to the screen. 'That's a hide scraper. It's worked all along the edge. A book at the library shows one just like this.'
'It looks like you got a museum piece there, bud.'
He rubbed the chert clean with his thumbs, then dipped it in the creek and dried it on his blue jeans.
'It's great to have this place to ourselves again, ain't it?' he said.
'Yeah, it is. You think you can handle one of those buffalo steaks and a blueberry milkshake?' I said.
We drove through the dusk toward the cafe where we ate breakfast each Sunday after Mass. Fireflies were lighting in the trees along the road, and there was a cool smell in the air, like autumnal gas, even though it was only late summer.
A restless, undefined thought kept turning in my mind, but I did not know what it was, in the same vague way I'd been bothered by the inconsistencies in Jeff Deitrich's threat against Esmeralda and Lucas. The road was uneven, and Pete's head bounced up and down as he looked out over the bottom of the window at the landscape.
'Are you gonna ask Temple to eat with us?' Pete said.
'I don't know if she's back from Bonham yet, Pete.'
'I seen her car go in her driveway this afternoon.'
'Are you sure?'
'I reckon I know her car. Was she supposed to call you or something?'
'She said if she got back early enough, she might join us out at the creek. Maybe she's a little tired.'
'I hope I ain't said the wrong thing again.'
'You didn't.'
He was quiet a long time.
'What was that gangbanger's car doing in her backyard?' he asked.
I pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road. A semitrailer with its lights on went past me.
'Which gangbanger's car?' I said.
'That purple Mercury. The one owned by that guy Cholo,' he said, his eyes threading with anxiety as he looked at the expression on my face.
I dropped Pete off at his house and headed up the dirt street, with Beau's trailer bouncing behind me.
Why hadn't I put it together? I asked myself. Ronnie Cruise's wetbrain friend, Charley Quail, had taken Cholo's car to Lucas's rented house in the western part of the county. When he discovered that Lucas and Esmeralda weren't living there, he had probably been told by someone to go to either my house or Lucas's stepfather's. He must have been driving down my road and seen Esmeralda leaving Temple's house after she had gone there with Lucas to string the Gibson guitar for Temple's father.
Charley Quail had assumed Temple's house was mine. He parked the Mercury there and walked down to the convenience store to catch the bus back to San Antonio, thinking he had done a fine turn for Ronnie Cruise.
I went through the stop sign at the end of Pete's street, crossed a wood bridge over a drainage ditch Uttered with trash and studded with wild pecan trees, and turned out onto the surfaced road that led by my house. The moon was rising now and the sun was only a dirty red smudge inside a bank of purple rain clouds in the west. Up ahead, I saw a plumbing truck parked on Temple's swale. I turned into the driveway and cut the engine. The lawn sprinkler was on and strings of water twirled in the glow of the bug lamp and clicked across the front steps and the hydrangeas in the flower beds. Behind me, I heard Beau nicker and his hooves scrape on the wood floor of his trailer.
The television was on in the living room, but the curtains were drawn. I walked up on the porch and tapped with one knuckle on the screen door. The air-conditioning unit in the window was roaring loudly, and I knocked again, this time harder.
'Temple?' I said.
There was no response.
'Temple? It's Billy Bob,' I said, then walked around the side of the house and up the drive.
Temple's car was parked by the shed where her heavy bag was hung, and between the shed and her neighbor's cornfield I could see the dull maroon shape of Cholo's Mercury. The pecan tree above the shed filled with wind, and the heavy bag twisted slightly on its chain, its leathery surfaces glistening in the moonlight.
I leaned over and picked up one of Temple's speedbag gloves out of the dust. A smear of blood flecked with dirt had dried on the flat area that covered the knuckles.
I dropped the glove and walked up on the back screen porch and turned the knob on the door. The door was both key-locked and dead-bolted.
Then I heard voices from the cellar stairway, those of two men who were coming back up to the first floor. I stepped away from the back door and pressed close in to the wall. My hand ached for L.Q. Navarro's revolver.
'We got the wrong place, Johnny. It happens. Write it off.'
'I told you, the bitch knows me. So we got to wipe the whole slate. We get those kids down here, then we go home.'
'I'm the one she busted in the nose. I say we boogie.'
'I'm gonna do the broad. You want, you can have seconds. But this is her last night on earth. Now give it a rest and fix some sandwiches.'
'I'm getting thin. I need something.'
'Check in her medicine cabinet. Maybe she's got some diet pills.'
'You said it'd be clean, in and out. Just straightening out some punks, you said. She's a cop. We're gonna do her old man, too, a guy in a wheelchair? You know what'll happen if they get their hands on us?'
'Shut up.'
The kitchen window was open and I could hear them pulling open drawers, rattling silverware, cracking the cap on a bottle of beer.
Get to a phone, I thought.
