BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (26 page)

'A greaseball out of Houston?'

'He's in town. I think you've stumbled into his
business interests. Maybe I'm wrong.'

He retrieved his bait out of the water and flipped
it in an arc back into the current.

'Fore you hit me, you said your daddy was a fine
man. That "fine" man run me off the job. Sixteen years old, carried me
out on the highway, told me to get out of his truck. Without no home,
food, people, nothing.'

'If he ran you off, you probably stole from him or
did worse. I suspect it was "worse".'

He was quiet a long time, smiling at nothing. Then
he said, 'You ever asked yourself why your daddy hepped out a jailhouse
kid like me?'

'He was kind to animals and white trash. That was
his way, Moon.'

'My hair is darker red than yours, but maybe that's
'cause my mama was a redhead. Think about it, boy. Your daddy ever
pipeline around Waco fifteen years or so before you was born?'

I got in the Avalon and drove back to the house and
called 911, a wave of nausea surging into the bottom of my throat.

By the time a deputy in a cruiser got to the house
and I went back down to the river with him, Moon had disappeared.

'What's wrong, Billy Bob?' Pete said later in the
kitchen.

'Nothing, bud. Everything's solid.'

Don't let Moon wound you, I told myself. That's his
power over people. He makes them hate themselves.

'You want some ice cream?' Pete asked.

'Not tonight.'

He continued to stare at me with a puzzled look,
then I heard Temple's car in the drive and a moment later Pete going
out the screen door for his ride back to her house.

It's the moment every decent cop
dreads. It comes
unexpectedly, out of nowhere, like a freight train through a wall.
Later, when you play the tape over and over again, seeking
justification, wondering if there were alternatives, you're left
invariably with the last frame on the spool, the only one that counts,
and it tells you daily what your true potential is.

Mary Beth went back on duty after only two days'
rest.

The 911 call reporting a trespasser and
disturbing-the-peace incident at the skeet club should have required
little more than the dispatch of a cruiser, perhaps a mediation,
perhaps escorting someone off the property or even putting him in jail
for twenty-four hours.

Vernon Smothers started looking for Jack Vanzandt at
his office, then his home and the yacht basin and the country club. It
was late afternoon when he found his way to the skeet club and parked
by the pavilion in front of the row of traps that sailed clay pigeons
toward a distant treeline.

Bunny Vogel saw him first, saw the energy in his
face that was like both anger and fear at the same time, and walked
from the pavilion to intercept him.

'You a guest here this evening, Mr Smothers?' Bunny
asked.

Vernon's khakis and denim shirt were pressed and
clean, his white straw hat tilted on the back of his head, his eyes
wide, unblinking. A heated, dry odor seemed to envelop his skin and his
clothes.

'You got to be a member or a guest, Mr Smothers. You
can go over to the clubhouse there and see about a
membership…'

'I see Emma Vanzandt there. Where's her husband at?'
Vernon said.

'Sir, I don't think this is a good idea. I'm sorry
for what happened to Lucas. I mean, I'm sorry for my part in
it…' He gestured in the air, then his voice trailed off.

Jack Vanzandt, Sammy Mace, and a middle-aged man
with a ponytail and thick lips and glasses that magnified his eyes
walked out of the squat, green building that served as a clubhouse and
approached the pavilion. Jack had the breech of a double-barrel shotgun
cracked open on his forearm.

Vernon put one hand on Bunny's shoulder and moved
him aside, as he would push open a door.

'I ain't up to no traveling shit storms today, Mr
Smothers. I got orders about—' Bunny began.

But Vernon was already walking away from him as
though he were not there.

Jack and Sammy Mace and the man with the ponytail
sat down at a plank table with Emma Vanzandt. None of them paid
attention to Vernon Smothers until he was three feet from their table.

'How you doin', Vernon?' Jack said.

'Your boy and his friends vandalized my house and
humiliated my son,' Vernon said.

'I don't think that's true,' Jack said.

'Go ask Bunny Vogel. He's the little Judas Iscariot
hepped Darl do it.'

Jack blew out his breath.

'This isn't the place for it. Come to my office,' he
said.

'I know you for the type man you are, Jack Vanzandt.
That man next to you is a goddamn criminal,' Vernon said.

'Hey! This is a private club here. You watch your
language,' Sammy Mace said.

'Get up, Jack,' Vernon said.

The man with the ponytail put his hand on top of
Jack's forearm. 'It's all right. I'll walk this guy to his truck. Is
that your truck there, big man?' he said.

'No,' Jack said. 'Listen, Vernon. Kids get into
trouble. It doesn't make it any better if the parents fight.
Now—'

Vernon reached out and, with the flat of his hand,
popped Jack on one cheek.

'You ain't no war hero. You just a rich man bought
all the right people,' he said.

'Jack, put an end to this,' Emma said.

But Bunny Vogel had already called the sheriff's
department, and Mary Beth's cruiser had been only two hundred yards
from the skeet club when the dispatcher's voice came over her radio.

She turned off the highway and drove onto the grass
almost to the pavilion, got out of her cruiser and slipped her baton
through the ring on her belt.

She went straight for the source of the problem,
Vernon Smothers.

'You're trespassing, sir… No, there won't
be any debate about it. You get in your truck and drive back on the
highway,' she said.

'Hey, we got the marines here,' Sammy Mace said.

'You shut up,' Mary Beth said.

'What?'
Sammy said.

'In your truck, Mr Smothers,' Mary Beth said.

'Hey, what'd you just say to me?' Sammy Mace asked.

'I said you stay out of this unless you want to go
to jail,' she replied.

Sammy opened his hands and made a shocked expression
to the man in the ponytail.

'You believe this broad?' he asked.

'Last chance,' Mary Beth said.

'You got no right to be impolite. We're not the
offending parties here,' the man in the ponytail said.

'We're out of here, Jack. Right now,' Emma said.

Mary Beth cupped her hand around Vernon's arm.

'Walk with me, sir,' she said.

But she knew it was unraveling now, in the way that
dreams take you in high-speed cars over the edges of canyons and cliffs.

Sammy Mace walked up behind her and punched her with
one finger between the shoulder blades.

'No cunt talks to me like that. Hey, did you hear
me? I'm talking here. Turn around and look at me,' Sammy said, and
punched her again with his finger.

She slipped her baton from its ring and whipped it
across Sammy's left arm. Even from ten yards away, Bunny Vogel said he
heard the bone break.

Sammy's face went white with pain and shock. He
cradled his arm against his chest, his mouth trembling. Then he
extended his right hand, like an inverted claw, toward the man in the
ponytail.

'Give it to me!' he said.

Mary Beth pushed Vernon Smothers away from her.

'Down on the ground, on your face! Do it, both of
you, now!' she said to Sammy and the man in the ponytail.

Then she saw Sammy lunge toward his friend and try
to pull a .25-caliber automatic from a small holster inside the
friend's coat. She swung the baton again, this time across the side of
Sammy's face, and shattered his jaw. It hung locked in place, lopsided,
blood that was absolutely scarlet issuing off his tongue. His glasses
lay broken on the grass.

Sammy collapsed to his knees, then grabbed at her
legs and at the nine-millimeter on her hip, while the man in the
ponytail at first pushed her, then watched stupidly as his .25
automatic fell from its holster into Sammy's lap.

The man in the ponytail tried to disentangle himself
and back away while Sammy pulled the trigger impotently on the
automatic and fought to get the safety off.

Mary Beth gripped her nine-millimeter with both
hands but fired high with the first shot at Sammy Mace and hit the man
in the ponytail in the groin. He stumbled away, his face rearing into
the sky, his hands clutched to the wound as though he wanted to relieve
himself.

Her second round entered Sammy's eye socket and blew
the back of his head out on the grass.

Suddenly there was no sound in the skeet club except
the wind fluttering an American flag on top of the pavilion.

It was hot that night, and still hot
at false dawn,
as though the air had been baked, then released again on the new day. I
got a handful of molasses balls from the tack room and fed them to Beau
in the lot, then turned him out and walked down to the river and
watched the darkness go out of the sky. The current was dark green and
swirling with froth from dead cottonwood trees that were snagged along
the shore, and I could hear bream popping the surface where the riffle
channeled under the tree trunks.

I tried to think clearly but I couldn't. I had
stayed with Mary Beth until eleven last night. The man with the
ponytail had lived three hours and died on the operating table. His
name was Sixto Dominque, and his sheet showed only one felony
conviction, for extortion in Florida, for which he had received a
gubernatorial pardon. His wallet contained a permit for the .25-caliber
automatic.

'They thought they were in Dog Patch. They got what
they deserved,' I told her.

'I should have hooked up Vernon Smothers and taken
him to the cruiser and called for backup,' she said.

'Listen, Mary Beth, you're an officer of the law.
When a lowlife puts his hand on your person during the performance of
your duty, you bounce him off the hardest object in his environment.'

'I blew it.'

I offered to stay with her.

'Thanks, anyway. I've got to spend some serious time
on the phone tonight,' she said. In the electric lighting of her
apartment the color seemed washed out of her face, her freckles
unnatural, as though they were painted on her skin.

'Don't drink booze or coffee. Don't pay attention to
the thoughts you have in the middle of the night,' I said.

'Was it this way with you?'

'Yeah, the first time it was.'

'The
first
time?' she said.

My stare broke, and I tried not to let her see me
swallow.

Now, the next day, I squatted on my boot heels in
the grass and tossed pebbles down into the water on top of the
submerged car that had once contained the bodies of two members of the
Karpis-Barker gang, nameless now, buried somewhere in a potter's field,
men who thought they'd write their names into memory with a blowtorch.

What was it that really bothered me, that hid just
around a corner in my mind?

The answer was not one I easily accepted.

I had made a career of living a half life. I had
been a street cop, a Texas Ranger, a federal prosecutor, and now I was
a small-town defense lawyer who didn't defend drug traffickers, as
though somehow that self-imposed restriction gave a nobility to my
practice that other attorneys didn't possess. I was neither father nor
husband, and had grown to accept endings in my life in the way others
anticipated beginnings, and I now knew, without being told, that
another one was at hand.

The sun broke above the horizon and was warm on my
back as I walked toward the house. Then my gaze steadied on the barn,
the backyard, the drive, the porte cochere, and two black sedans that
shouldn't have been there.

I walked through the back porch and kitchen into the
main part of the house, which Brian Wilcox and five other Treasury
people were tearing apart.

'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I asked.

Wilcox stood in the middle of my library. Splayed
books were scattered across the floor.

'Give him the warrant,' he said to a second man, who
threw the document at me, bouncing it off my chest.

'I don't care if you have a warrant or not. You have
no legitimate cause to be here,' I said.

'Shut up and stay out of the way,' the second man
said. He wore shades and a military haircut, and his work had formed a
thin sheen of perspiration on his face.

'Come on, Wilcox. You're a pro. You guys pride
yourselves on blending into the wallpaper,' I said.

'You're interfering with a federal investigation,'
Wilcox said.

'I'm what?'

'I think you've been running a parallel
investigation to our own. That means there's probable cause for us to
believe you possess evidence of a crime. Hence, the warrant. You don't
like it, fuck you,' he said.

I used the Rolodex on my desk and punched a number
into the telephone.

'I hope you're calling the judge. He's part Indian.
His nickname is Big Whiskey John. He's in a great mood this time of
day,' Wilcox said.

'This is Billy Bob Holland. I've got six Treasury
agents ransacking my home,' I said into the receiver. 'The agent in
charge is Brian Wilcox. He just told me to fuck myself. Excuse me, I
have to go. I just heard glass breaking upstairs.'

The agent in shades picked up my great-grandfather's
journal from a chair, flipped through it, and tossed it to me. 'Looks
like a historical document there. Hang on to it,' he said, and raked a
shelf of books onto the floor.

'That was the newspaper,' I said to Wilcox. 'It's
owned by an eighty-year-old hornet who thinks fluoridation is a
violation of the Constitution. Does the G still have its own clipping
service?'