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?'
'You think you're getting a bad deal, huh? You cost us eight months' work. That's right, we were about to flip Sammy Mace, then you showed up. Plus your gal just got pulled out by her people.'
He looked at the reaction in my face, and a smile broke at the corner of his mouth.
'Her people?' I said numbly.
'Call her apartment. She's gone, bro. She got picked up in a plane at four this morning. She wouldn't survive an IA investigation,' he said.
I started to pick books off the floor and stack them on my desk, as though I were in a trance.
'You were a cop,' Wilcox said. 'You don't use a baton to bring a suspect into submission. You never deliver a blow with it above the shoulders. They'd crucify her and drag her people into it with her.'
'I can't stop what you're doing here. But somewhere I'm going to square this down the line,' I said.
'Yeah, that's going to be a big worry of ours,' Wilcox said.
The man in shades began rifling my desk. He removed L.Q. Navarro's holstered.45 revolver and flipped open the loading gate on the brass bottom of a cartridge.
I fitted my hand around his wrist.
'That belonged to a friend of mine. He's dead now. You don't mind not handling it, do you?' I said, and squeezed his wrist until I saw his lips part on his teeth and a look come into his eyes that his shades couldn't hide.
'We're done here,' Wilcox said, raising his palm pacifically. 'Don't misunderstand the gesture, Holland. Touch a federal agent again and I'll put a freight train up your ass.'
I waited for her call, but it didn't come.
I worked late at the office that day. Through the blinds I could see the sun, like a burning flare, behind the courthouse and the tops of the oak trees. At just after seven Temple Carrol came by.
'I'll buy you a beer,' she said.
'I still have some work to do.'
'I bet.' She sat with one leg on the corner of my desk. She lifted her chestnut hair off her neck. 'It's been a hot one.'
'Yeah, it's warming up.'
'She blew Dodge, huh?'
'I don't know, Temple. Not everybody reports in to me.'
'You want to talk business, or should I get lost?'
I pushed aside a deposition I was reading and waited.
'I took Jamie Lake shopping for some clothes that make her look half human,' she said. 'At first she's looking at these see-through things and I tell her, "Jamie, it might be the nature of prejudice and all that jazz, but tattoos just don't float well with juries."
"Oh I get it," she says. "Upscale people tell the truth. Trailer court people lie. Wow! Tell me, which kind was that needle-dick polygraph nerd who was trying to scope my jugs?".
'I say, "We do what works, kiddo."
'She goes, "There's nothing like being sweet, is there? I once told a narc, 'Gee, officer, I wouldn't have smoked it if I had known it was harmful to my health.' He was such a gentleman after that. He took it out of his pants all by himself."