BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (24 page)

While I was reading from my
great-grandfather's
journal, a retired school janitor and his wife were parking their car
in front of their home in Deaf Smith's black district. It was a Honda,
one they had bought used three years ago through a finance company and
had just made the final payment on the previous week.

The thieves who boosted it that night slim-jimmed
the door, broke the steering wheel lock, and wired the ignition in less
than three minutes. By the time the retired janitor, who heard the
snapping sound of the wheel lock through the window of his second-story
bathroom, could get down the stairs to the front door, his Honda was
speeding through the intersection at the end of the block, followed by
what he described as a 'hot rod car got a shine like a red candy apple.'

The thieves parked the stolen car in the grass by
the four-lane divided highway outside of town, then squirted a can of
lighter fluid over the upholstery and tossed a burning truck flare
through the open window. The flames rippled along the fabric like
strips of warm color from a chemical rainbow, then the wind swirled the
fire in a vortex that flattened against the headliner and curled out
over the roof, consuming the seats, popping the front windows into Coke
bottle glass on the hood.

The thieves waited on the pedestrian overpass,
drinking from quart bottles of beer, passing a joint back and forth
while the Honda burned a hundred yards north of them. One of them took
time to urinate against the abutment that supported the chainlink
archway overhead, one that the thieves sliced open with bolt cutters by
the north rail so the peeled-back wire could not be seen by a car
approaching from the south.

Mary Beth patrolled this same section of highway
around 11 p.m. every night she was on duty. She usually cruised through
the drive-in restaurant just outside the city limits, the parking lot
at Shorty's, the picnic area by the river where Roseanne Hazlitt was
attacked, then made a U-turn through the center ground at the county
line, just north of the overpass.

The retired janitor called in the report on his
Honda at 10:26. The report of a burning automobile by the side of the
highway was called in anonymously at 10:49. Two minutes later Mary Beth
had hit her siren and emergency flasher and was headed full-bore for
the overpass.

As she approached from the south, she saw three
males in silhouette inside the chain-link archway, possibly kids who
had climbed the overpass to better see the fire that had spread from
the stolen car into an adjacent field.

She saw the three figures turn and run to the far
side of the overpass, her blue, white, and red flasher whip off the
support walls on each side of her, then an object that came from above,
out of the darkness, that seemed to have no source or context.

The thieves had probably taken the seventy-pound
block of concrete from the site of a demolished building. It was
rectangular in shape, jagged on each end, spiked with twisted steel
rods that protruded from the concrete like handles.

It exploded through the center of the front window,
gutting the dashboard, raking the twelve-gauge pump shotgun out of its
locked holder, blowing glass and electrical dials and radio parts into
the backseat, embedding in the wire-mesh screen behind the front seat
like a cannonball.

The cruiser spun sideways, its tires scorching black
lines across the asphalt, an ambulance behind it swerving out of
control into the center ground to avoid a collision.

A paramedic was the first person to the cruiser.
When he opened the door, Mary Beth's campaign hat rolled out on the
grass, the crown marbled with blood.

The next morning I got off the
hospital elevator on
the fifth floor and started through the waiting area toward the nurses'
station. Brian Wilcox and two other federal agents came around the
corner at the same time.

'I don't believe it. Like a fly climbing out of shit
every place I go,' he said.

'I don't want to 'front you today, Brian.'

'What makes you think you can call me by my first
name?'

He wore a blue suit and tie and white shirt. His
hair had the dull sheen of gunmetal, with silver threads in the part.
He stood flat-footed in front of me, heavy, solid, his shoulders too
large for his suit. The cleft chin, the cologned, cleanly shaved jaws,
the neatness that he wore like a uniform, did not go with the
expression in his eyes.

'Let me by, please,' I said.

'She's in that room because those kids went through
her to get to you.'

'If they did, Garland T. Moon put them up to it.'

'Same problem. You can't stay out of his face. But
other people end up in the barrel.'

'Moon wandered into something out at the old Hart
Ranch. He's just not sure what it is. But you probably know all this.
Run your game on somebody else.'

I started past him, but he grabbed my arm. I flung
it away and felt my fingers accidently hit his chest. His face flared
and he grabbed at me again, with both hands, his chin raised, his teeth
bared. I shoved him away and stepped back,
raising my arm in front of my face, then the other two agents were on
him, splaying their hands against his chest.

'Get going,' one of them said over his shoulder.

'The problem's not mine.'

'Don't fool yourself, ace,' he replied.

Mary Beth was sitting up, with a
pillow behind her
back, when I entered her room. Her right arm was bandaged, the skin
purple and red between the strips of tape, swollen tight and hard
against the dressing like a wasp sting. Her hair was tied on top of her
head with a bandanna to keep it off the dressing where a steel rod had
incised the scalp almost to the bone.

'You look good,' I said.

'Sure I do.'

'When can you go home?'

'Today. There's no big damage done.'

She wore no makeup, and in the slatted sunlight
through the window her face looked opaque, as though it hid thoughts
she herself had not dealt with.

'Did you sleep last night?' I asked.

'Yeah, some.'

'When I was shot, I couldn't close my eyes without
seeing gun flashes again. That's the way it is for a while.'

Her gaze roved over my face and seemed to go inside
my eyes.

'What is it?' I asked.

'The other day you said you didn't know who I was,'
she said. 'My father was a motorcycle cop in Oklahoma and a high
sheriff in Kentucky. He was a good man, but he had a special hatred for
sex predators. He killed two of them after they were in custody.'

'They weren't trying to escape?'

'What are the odds of a cop having to shoot an
escapee on two occasions?'

'Seems like old history, Mary Beth.'

'He hated those men because a degenerate got in our
back window when I was three years old.'

My eyes shifted off her face.

'He died going in a house after a serial rapist. At
night, without backup, with a "throw-down" taped to his ankle. You
figure out what the plan was,' she said.

'You blame yourself?'

She thought about it. 'No,' she said. 'But you're
not going to use me to take down Garland Moon or Darl Vanzandt or
whoever it is you're thinking about.'

'I just ran into Brian Wilcox. If that guy's the
cavalry, I think we're all going to be wearing Arrow shirts.'

She smiled in spite of herself. I sat on the edge of
her bed and picked up her hand. I touched the freckles on her face.
'Pete and I'll take you home today, then bring supper over,' I said.

She rested her head on the pillow and squeezed the
top of my arm.

The man who had replaced the murdered
sheriff was
named Hugo Roberts. If you asked him how he had made his living the
last thirty years, he would answer, 'I ain't spent a whole lot of time
in the private sector.' He'd been a county road hack, a deputy sheriff,
a city patrolman, a bailiff, a jailer, and some said a volunteer on a
firing squad in Utah. He was shaped like a lean pear and smoked
constantly, even though he had already lost one lung and wheezed like a
leaking inner tube when he talked.

He sat at the corner of the old sheriff's desk,
flipping ashes into the spittoon, his narrow shoulders hunched into the
cigarette smoke that swirled about his head.

'Did I lock up Darl Vanzandt? Do bears shit in the
woods? Does my wife read the Bible all night and tell me I'm the reason
our kids are ugly?' he said. 'Hell, yes. What else you want to know,
Billy Bob?'

'Where's Darl now?'

'I had the little fucker shot.'

'Give it a break, Hugo.'

'All we got on him is some roofies. Far as I know,
they're not even illegal.'

'Roofies?'

'Rohypnol. Ten times stronger than Valium. It's made
overseas for insomnia. It tends to show up in date rape cases. How long
you been gone from law enforcement?'

'Is he upstairs?'

'Get real, Billy Bob. His old man was down here with
his lawyer at six this morning. I cain't charge him. The black man
owned the stolen vehicle didn't get a license number and never saw a
face… Look, I ain't sure myself it was Darl. There's a mess
of customized cars hereabouts that same shade of red.'

'How many of them are owned by people like Darl
Vanzandt?'

He spit, then wiped his mouth on his palm.

'Know and prove
ain't a difference I should have to explain to a lawyer,' he said.

'I think the county found the right man for the job,
Hugo.'

'The air-conditioning unit in here does about as
much good as an ice cube on a woodstove. Make sure you close the door
snug on your way out,' he said.

It was noon and the sun was white and
straight up in
the sky when I got home. I went into the library and took L.Q.' s
revolver out of the desk drawer. I opened the loading gate, clicked
back the hammer to half-cock, and rotated the cylinder until the empty
sixth chamber came back under the hammer again.

Great-grandpa Sam carried his Navy .36s down to the
bluffs on the Cimarron when he burned out the Dalton-Doolin gang and
never had to pop a cap, I told myself.

'
Wrong way to think, bud
,'
L.Q. Navarro said behind me.

'
All right, I'll bite
,' I
answered.

'You don't tote it as a fashion statement.
The other guy's got to know you cain't wait to use it. Elsewise, it's
got the value of tits on a boar hog'

I eased the hammer down, locking the cylinder, and
slipped the barrel back into the holster.

'You know what's really fretting you?
'
he said.

'Why don't you tell me, L.Q.?'

'It ain't that I got shot accidentally.
It's because you believe it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been
down in Coahuila vigilanting them dope mules.'

I kept my back to him. The sky outside was hot and
bright, and dust was blowing in gray clouds out of the fields.

'Hey, the blood lust wasn't yours, bud; it
was mine. I loved flushing them out of the poppies and blowing feathers
when they ran. It could have been you instead of me,'
he
said.

'The new sheriff's corrupt.'

'That's like going to the whorehouse and
saying the place is full of whores.'

'
Everything was straight lines in
Coahuila. It was us against them, and at sunrise we added up the score,'
I said.

L.Q. didn't answer. I turned and looked at him. He
stood with one arm propped against the bookshelves, staring at his
foot, the brim of his Stetson shielding his face.

'You don't usually lack for words,'
I said, my throat burning at what I knew was coming next.

'We mortgaged tomorrow for today, bud.
Even for me, that thought is about like swallowing a piece of barbed
wire,'
he replied.

He walked toward the doorway, his back to me, his
hands on his hips, splaying his coat out. I raised my hand to speak,
then he was gone into the hallway and I heard the wind fling open the
front door and fill the house with a creaking of boards and wallpaper.

I parked my Avalon behind the tin shed
where Garland
T. Moon worked as a welder and entered through the back door. The heat
inside was numbing. A propane-fed foundry roared in one corner, a
cauldron of melted aluminum wedged in the flames. Moon wore sandals
without socks and a pair of flesh-colored gym shorts that were molded
against his loins. He was bent over a machinist's vise, cutting a chunk
of angle iron in half with an acetylene torch, his back spiderwebbed
with rivulets pf sweat.

He heard me behind him, screwed down the feed on the
torch, and pulled off his black goggles with his thumb. Dirty strings
of soot floated down on his head and shoulders. His eyes dropped to my
belt. He pulled at his nose.

'You come here to gun me?' he said.

'What's your hold on these kids?'

'It ain't no mystery. Cooze and dope. The high
school clinic already gives them the rubbers. I just introduce them to
what you might call more mature Mexican women.'

'You're a genuinely evil man, sir.'

'You got to stick a gun down in your britches to
tell me that?' He laughed to himself and wiped his hands with an oil
rag. The muscles in his stomach looked as hard as corrugated metal.
'You got your ovaries stoked up 'cause them boys poured cow shit on
your son?'

'They almost killed a deputy sheriff last night.'

He picked up a can of warm soda from the workbench
and drank, his throat working smoothly, his gaze focused indifferently
out the door on the river.

'The doctors said I was supposed to be dead eight
years ago. Said I was plumb eat up with cancer. I smell death in my
sleep. It comes to somebody else first, better them than me,' he said.
He wiped his armpits with the rag and threw it on the floor.