BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (31 page)

He pushed his plate away with the heel of his hand,
his eyes blinking.

'The tape simply shows the world she lived in,
Lucas,' Temple said. 'Dope and booze and getting it on with lots of
guys. We're not knocking her. That's just the way it was.'

'She might have done all them things you say, but
that don't mean she wasn't a good girl,' he said.

'That's true. But somebody else killed her, Lucas.
Maybe his face is on that tape,' I said.

His right hand was clenched on the back of his left
wrist. His throat was splotched with color.

'I ain't going along with this,' he said.

'Excuse me?' I said.

'I was sleeping with Roseanne and told you I didn't
hardly know her. That makes me a liar and a coward. I ain't gonna get
myself off by seeing her tore down in front of all them people.'

'You really want to go to prison? Is that what
you're telling me?' I said.

'Maybe I deserve to be there.'

'What?' I said.

'You say Darl doped me. Maybe I was just drunk. I'll
never know the truth about what I done that night.'

He was bent over in the chair, his head hung
forward. The glare through the blinds made strips of light on his back.

'Lucas, we need to clear something up here. There's
only one person in this room running your defense,' Temple said.

But I motioned at her with two fingers. She looked
at me with a puzzled expression, then chewed on the corner of her lip
and stared silently out the window.

That evening I took off my shirt and
hung it on a
fence rail and raked out the chicken run and horse lot and dumped a
load of manure and decayed straw in the compost pile, then filled a
bucket with water from the windmill pipe and began digging a line of
postholes so I could reset the rail fence and enlarge the lot for Beau.
It was a lovely evening. The sun had dipped below the hills, its last
rays breaking into pink wagon spokes against the sky. The wind was
blowing in the trees and I could smell wildflowers in the fields and
bream spawning under the lily pads out in the tank. I almost didn't
hear Brian Wilcox's car crunching up my drive.

He got out of the car and walked through both sets
of barn doors into the lot. Behind him, I could see the Mexican drug
agent, Felix Ringo, sitting in the passenger seat of the car, the
window down to catch the breeze, his tropical hat on the back of his
head.

Wilcox's mouth was painted with an ironic smile.

'You hang a revolver on a fence post while you
work?' he said.

'Some guys blindsided me out here one night. I hate
repeat situations,' I said.

'You know what quid pro quo is, right, one thing for
another?… I'm doing you a big one, Holland, but I want
something in return.'

'Go fuck yourself.'

'That's kind of what I expected from you, but here
it is, anyway. Mary Beth is coming back to give you the testimony you
need, but you'd better not drag your shit into our investigation again.'

'Meaning?'

'Our sun-darkened friend out there in the car is a
valuable man. He doesn't get compromised.'

I pulled the handles of the posthole digger out of
the hole and knocked the dirt free from the blades, then tipped more
water from the bucket into the hole.

'Nothing to say?' Wilcox asked.

'Yeah, that guy was at the School of the Americas at
Fort Benning. Their graduates have a funny way of showing up in death
squads and torture chambers.'

'So maybe I don't like putting my fingers in bean
dip. But the object is to make the case, right? All you've got to worry
about is leaving us out of your trial.'

Behind him, I saw Felix Ringo get out of the car and
walk toward us.

'When's Mary Beth coming?' I asked.

'I thought I'd get your attention this
time… Tonight, probably.'

'I don't think you arranged this at all. I think
she's coming on her own.'

He pinched a breath mint out of roll and slipped it
in his mouth.

'You're quite a guy,' he said.

Temple Carrol's car came up the drive
and pulled
around Wilcox's, disappeared beyond the side of the barn, then stopped
by the windmill.

Felix Ringo walked up to Wilcox, ignoring me. He
smoked a cigarette in a gold holder without removing it from his lips.
'You finished talking here? I got to shower and meet a lady for
dinner,' he said.

I heard Beau's hooves thudding behind me. I turned
and saw him spooking back against the fence rails, walleyed, his head
tossing.

I stared at Felix Ringo. 'He knows you,' I said.

Ringo curved his fingertips into his sternum.

'Your horse knows me?' he said, his mustache winking.

'Beau never forgets children or a bad person. You've
been here before, haven't you?' I said.

'I been here before? The horse knows I'm a bad guy
or something, 'cause he's got this kind of computer memory?' Ringo's
fingers gestured impotently in the air.

'You were one of the guys who attacked me. I thought
the guy had a gold tooth. But it was your gold cigarette holder I saw.'

Ringo removed his tropical hat, with the green
plastic window in the brim, and wiped out the inside with a
handkerchief.

'I'll be in the car,' he said to Wilcox. 'This guy
here, he's got a disease in his thinking, like clap or something. I
don't want to be hearing it no more.'

He walked back through the open barn doors, the wind
billowing his loosely buttoned shirt. The butt of a black automatic was
pushed down in the back of his trousers.

'You got the wrong man. Felix works for us,' Wilcox
said.

'That's the problem,' I said.

I thudded the blades of the posthole digger into the
hole and expanded the handles and turned them in a circle, the grain of
the wood twisting against my calluses. I could feel the sweat in my
eyebrows, my heart beating in my chest.

Brian Wilcox continued to stare at me, his mouth
still painted with that ironic smile.

'So maybe this is the last time I see you,' Wilcox
said.

He's going to do it, I thought.

I lifted the posthole digger free and rinsed the
blades in the bucket of water. The wind popped in my ears, as though it
were filled with distant pistol reports. I opened and closed my mouth
and pressed with one thumb under my right ear.

'You all right?' he asked, and cupped his hand on my
bare shoulder. I could feel the heat and oil in his skin, as though he
were rubbing a layer of fouled air into my pores.

Don't let it happen,
I told
myself.

'Sorry we tossed your house,' he said.

'Forget it.'

'About Mary Beth…'

'Yes?'

'She'll come for you a second time, but you have to
stay on top. There's something about the missionary position with her.
She just can't get over the crest when she's sitting on you.'

I caught him right below the bottom lip, saw his
teeth bare and his mouth go out of shape with the blow; then I drove my
fist into his eye socket, hooked him with my left in the nose and hit
him again in the mouth. His knees buckled and his head bounced off a
fence rail. I felt him try to grab my waist as he went down, his eyes
wide with fear, like those of a man who realizes he has slipped forever
off a precipice, and I knew the old enemy had once more had its way and
something terrible was happening in me that I couldn't stop.

He was at my feet now, his face strung with blood,
his tie twisted backward on his neck, his chest laboring for breath.

Then among the thud of Beau's hooves, I saw Felix
Ringo running at me through the tunnel of light inside the barn,
simultaneously pulling back the slide on his nine-millimeter, his hat
blowing off his head.

'You wasn't born, gringo. You
was picked out of your mother's shit. This is for them people you
killed down in Coahuila,' he said.

My hands felt swollen and useless at my sides, my
chest running with sweat in the wind, the spilled water bucket
ballooning in the dust by my feet. I could hear the blades on the
windmill clattering like a playing card clipped inside whirling bicycle
spokes. Felix Ringo extended the nine-millimeter in front of him with
both hands, crouched in a shooter's position, as though he were on a
practice range, and flipped off the butterfly safety with his thumb.

Temple Carrol stooped under the top fence rail,
ripped L.Q. Navarro's revolver from the holster I had hung on a fence
post, and screwed the barrel right behind Ringo's ear. She cocked the
hammer, locking the cylinder in place.

'How your pud hanging, greaseball? You want to wear
your brain pan on your shirt?' she asked.

There was no false dawn the next
morning. The sky
was a black lid above the velvet green crest of the hills, the clouds
veined with lightning. I opened all the windows and let the smell of
ozone and wind and distant rain fill the house. Mary Beth called while
I was fixing breakfast.

'Where are you?' I asked.

'At the hotel downtown.'

'When did you get in?'

'Late. I went right to bed.'

'I could have picked you up.'

'You mean if I'd called?'

'No, I meant—'

'My schedule's not too predictable these days.'

'I just didn't know when you were coming. That's
what I meant.'

'I heard about you tearing up Brian. What started
it?'

'The conversation got out of hand.'

'He won't file charges. His career's unraveling on
him. He's one step from Fargo, North Dakota, already.'

I felt my palm squeeze involuntarily on the
telephone receiver.

'Can you take a cab out to the house? We can drive
back into town together,' I said.

'I have a bunch of incoming calls,' she said.

'I see.'

'Some people in my office weren't comfortable with
me coming back here.'

'Yeah… I understand. I appreciate your
doing it.'

I felt foolish and stupid, a mendicant holding a
telephone to his ear as though it were a black tumor.

'When do I testify?' she asked.

'Probably this afternoon. Mary Beth, is it the
career? Or am I just the wrong man for you?'

'I don't know how to say it, Billy Bob.'

The house seemed to fill with the sounds of wind and
silence.

'You always think of yourself as an extension of
your past,' she said. 'So every new day of your life you're condemned
to revisiting what you can't change.'

'I'll be at the office directly if you have a chance
to drop by,' I said.

After I replaced the receiver I walked to the
library window and looked at the darkness over the hills. The pages of
my great-grandfather's journal fluttered whitely in the rush of wind
through the screen. The silence in my head was so great I thought I
heard the tinkling of L.Q. Navarro's roweled spurs.

An hour later Mary Beth walked from
the hotel to my
office. She wore a pink suit and white blouse with a purple broach and
looked absolutely beautiful. But if I had expected to mend my
relationship with her at that moment, the prospect went out the window
when Temple Carrol came through the door thirty seconds later.

The three of us were standing in a circle, like
people who had met inconveniently at a cocktail party.

'Y'all know each other, of course,' I said.

'Sure, the lady who pops in and out of uniform,'
Temple said.

'Excuse me?' Mary Beth said.

'Billy Bob kicked the ass of a federal agent. Has he
told you about it?' Temple asked.

'No. Why don't you?' Mary Beth said.

'I don't remember the details very well. I was more
worried about the Mexican dirtbag, what's his name, Felix Ringo, the
greaseball who fronts points for y'all, he tried to use the situation
to cap Billy Bob. A great guy to have on a federal pad,' Temple said.

Mary Beth turned toward me. 'I didn't know that,'
she said.

I pulled up the blinds loudly on a sky that swirled
with storm clouds. The wind gusted under the trees on the courthouse
lawn and blew leaves high in the air. 'Let's talk about our agenda
today,' I said.

But
agenda
was
the wrong word.
The prosecution's case was not a complex one. Lucas Smothers was found
passed out thirty feet from the homicide victim. He was sexually
involved with her. He feared she carried his child. His semen, no one
else's, was inside the victim's vagina. The pathologist would testify
the damage to the genitalia indicated the assailant was probably driven
by sexual rage. Lucas himself had told the arresting officers he had no
memory of his actions after he had taken off his trousers in the pickup
truck. Finally, Lucas had lied and denied even knowing Roseanne
Hazlitt's last name.

But my problem was not with any evidence or possible
testimony I had learned about in discovery. Instead, I had the brooding
sense the loaded gun, the one pointed at Lucas's heart, was in my hand,
not Marvin Pomroy's. But I didn't know what to do about it.

That afternoon Marvin rested his case, and while the
rain drummed on the trees outside the window, I called Hugo Roberts to
the stand.

His sheriff's uniform was freshly pressed, his brass
name tag full of light on his pocket, an American flag sewn on the
sleeve, but an odor of cigarettes and hair tonic and antiperspirant
radiated from him as though it were sealed in his skin. He looked at
the jury and spectators and at Marvin Pomroy and at the rain clicking
on the windowsills, at virtually everything around him except me, as
though I were of little consequence in his day.

'Your unit was the first one to arrive at the crime
scene, sheriff?' I said.

'Yeah, I patrolled that area for the last couple of
years. While I was a deputy, I mean.'

'Have you run a lot of kids out of there?'