right. Johnny might pull us down with him.”
She pressed her face next to mine. “Listen to me, Billy Bob. You tell the FBI to screw themselves. Nobody threatens us,” she said.
I turned and looked into her eyes. They were milky green, the color of the Guadalupe River in summer, sometimes with shadows in them, the way the river was when it flowed under a tree. “You’re special,” I said.
She pulled her nightgown over her knees and sat on top of me, then leaned down and kissed me on the mouth. I cupped her breasts, then heard her say “Wait.” She worked her gown over her head and I put her nipples in my mouth and ran my hands over her baby fat and felt my own hardness touch her stomach.
I rolled on top of her, then she reached down and held me with her hand and placed me inside her, her knees widening, her face turned to one side, her eyes closing, then, slowly, her mouth puckering as though she were warming the air before she breathed it. Her skin was moist and pink in the glow of the moon through the window, then she began to come and I felt as though the two of us were dropping down inside a well that swirled with starlight at the bottom.
She held me tighter, then even tighter than that, and made a sound in my ear that was like the cry of the loon, and I was sure in that moment no evil would ever touch our lives.
Chapter 6
On Tuesday morning, when Johnny was about to be transported from the hospital to face the trumped-up attempted assault charges filed against him by Darrel McComb, he was formally placed under arrest for the murder of Charlie Ruggles and taken in handcuffs to a cell at the county jail. I caught Fay Harback at the coffee stand by the back entrance of the courthouse. “No,” she said, raising her hand prohibitively. “I don’t want to see you.”
“This is bogus, Fay. You’re being a dupe,” I said.
“How would you like to have this coffee thrown in your face?”
“My client is the victim, not the perpetrator. You’re helping a collection of assholes gang up on an innocent man.”
“Did I ever tell you, you make my blood boil? I want to hit you with a large, hard object,” she said. People were starting to stare now. “Come outside.”
We went through the big glass doors onto the lawn. It was cold in the shade of the building and the grass was stiff with frost. “Which collection of assholes are you talking about?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s beautiful. You just slander people in public without knowing why?”
“The Feds are involved in this stuff. An agent tried to warn me off last night.”
“Let me make it simple for you. American Horse’s tennis shoes matched a perfectly stenciled impression on the floor right next to Charlie Ruggles’s bed.” She raised a finger when I started to speak.
“Hear me out. Your client not only left behind a signature with his foot, he dropped a Jiffy Lube receipt on the floor. It has his name on it and his fingerprints. We found a pair of greens in a service elevator. They smelled of booze.”
“How could Johnny have gotten past the guard at the door? All the deputies know him,” I said
For just a second, no more than a blink, I saw the confidence weaken in her eyes. “The deputy went to help an elderly man use the bathroom. It’s not his fault,” she replied.
“Who said it was?”
“Johnny was in a bar down the street from the hospital. He’s a mercurial, unpredictable man. He killed Ruggles. There’s no conspiracy here,” she said.
“Hell there’s not.”
She looked into space, as though my words contained a degree of credibility which, for reasons of her own, she would not acknowledge. “I do my job. I don’t always like it. Don’t ever try to embarrass me in front of people like that again,” she said.
That afternoon, I visited Johnny at the lockup. We sat at a wood table in a small room that contained a narrow, vertical slit for a window, through which I could see the old buildings and brick streets down by the train yards. Johnny wore a bright orange jumpsuit with the word JAIL lettered in black across the back.
“How do you explain the Jiffy Lube receipt and the prints of your tennis shoes in Ruggles’s room?” I said.
“Somebody must have taken the shoes out of the house and put them back later. The receipt for the oil change was in my pickup.”
His eyes wandered around the room. I touched him on the wrist to make him look at me. “You get pretty swacked Saturday night?” I said.
“No.”
“No blackouts?”
“Amber was with me all night. We were at the Ox, Charley B’s, and Stockman’s. I went down to Red’s for a few minutes to meet a guy who wants to buy my truck. But he wasn’t there.”
“You went to Red’s by yourself?”
“Like I said.”
“Has a Fed named Masterson been in here?”
“No. Who is he?”
“Johnny, nobody wants to believe in conspiracies anymore. People want to trust the government. They don’t want to believe that corporations run their lives, either. But everything you do and say sends them another message. You hearing me on this?”
“Not really,” he said.
They’re going to burn you at the stake, I thought. I banged on the door for the turnkey to let me out.
“You still my attorney?” Johnny said.
“Nobody else will hire me,” I replied, and winked at him.
Darrel McComb belonged to an athletic club downtown, one frequented primarily by middle-class businesspeople during their lunch hour or just before they drove home from work. But Darrel did not go to the club for the tanning services it offered or for the state-of-the-art exercise machines most members used while they read magazines or watched a television program of their selection, the audio filtering through the foam-rubber headsets clamped on their ears. Darrel was there to clank serious iron, benching three hundred pounds, curling forty-pound dumbbells in each hand, the veins in his muscles rippling like nests of purple string.
He also liked to smack the heavy bag, getting high on his own heated smell, diverting an imaginary opponent with a left jab, then ripping a vicious right hook into the place where his opponent’s rib cage would be, under the heart, driving his fist so deep into the leather the bag rattled on its chain.
But on that particular Tuesday evening Darrel was disturbed for reasons he couldn’t adequately explain. As he sat in the steam room by himself, he experienced a sense of depression about his life and about who he was that few people would understand.
Not unless they had grown up abandoned by their parents in a town that was hardly more than a dusty crossroads inside several million acres of Nebraska wheat. Not unless at age fifteen they had blown an orphanage where the kids scrubbed floors with rags tied on their knees. Not unless they had piloted Flying Boxcars through AK-47 ground fire with a guy named Rocky Harrigan.
Rocky was a legend. He had dog-fought the Japanese in the skies over the Pacific, made airdrops to the Tibetan Resistance, and lit up the Pathet Lao with fifty-gallon drums of gasoline mixed with Tide laundry detergent. Then, in the mid-eighties, Rocky had hooked up with a CIA front in Fort Lauderdale, telephoned his young friend Darrel McComb, who was spraying crops and dodging power lines in Kansas, and invited him to join the fun down in Central America.
But planes crashed, names spilled into headlines, and the era of Ronald Reagan came to an end. Darrel McComb always believed he had shared a special moment in history, one whose complexities and dangers few people were aware of. The Iron Curtain had collapsed, hadn’t it? American companies were opening textile mills and creating jobs in Stone Age villages where Indians still lived in grass huts, weren’t they? None of that would
