James Burke: Heartwood

"Greenbaum? What's he got to do with anything?" Earl said.

"Run your bullshit on someone else," I said.

I walked across the street toward my office. When I looked back, Earl and Peggy Jean were arguing across the top of their car.

Temple Carrol was waiting inside my office.

"What's wrong?" she asked. She wore a pair of jeans and a silver belt and a yellow cotton pullover.

"We need to find out more about Earl Deitrich's finances. See if he's filed an insurance claim," I said.

"The Deitrichs stoke you up out there?"

"No."

"Is it true you and Peggy Jean were an item?" She straightened her shoulders, her hands in her back pockets, her eyes not quite focusing on mine.

"I thought we were. I didn't know a whole lot back then," I replied.

"Don't let a prissy buttwipe like Deitrich get to you."

"He doesn't."

"Oh, I can see that," she said.

"I told him the witnesses I'd use against him. Not too cool," I said.

She kept her expression flat and let her eyes slip off my face.

"Why would he try to involve me in his real estate and tax problems down in Houston?" I said.

"He wants to buy your good name." When I didn't reply, she said, "He hangs heads on walls. You were in the saddle with his wife. Stop thinking like a tree stump."

Two days later the sheriff, Hugo Roberts, telephoned the office and asked me to walk across the street. "What for?" I asked.

"Got a man in here tells quite a story. Maybe you ought to hear it, counselor," he said.

"I'm busy, Hugo," I said.

"You gonna be a lot less busy when this ole boy blows your defense for Wilbur Pickett out the water." He was still laughing, wheezing with pleasure, when he hung up the phone.

The sheriffs office was behind the courthouse in the original sandstone and log jail that had been built when Deaf Smith was a frontier village in the 1870s. Hugo Roberts had not been elected but promoted into the office after his predecessor was murdered with an ax last year. He was pear-shaped, potbellied, and smoked constantly, even though one of his lungs had already been surgically removed. When I entered his office, the air was layered with smoke, the light through the windows a sickly yellow. Hugo sat behind a huge oak desk; the log walls were festooned with antique guns and the black-and-white photos of convicts our county had sent to Huntsville for electrocution or death by injection.

Hugo leaned back in his swivel chair, one booted leg on his desk, and aimed a finger at a tall, rawboned man with sideburns and a drooping left eyelid who sat in a straight-back chair with a straw hat hooked on one finger.

"This here is Bubba Grimes," Hugo said. He sucked on his cigarette and blew a plume of smoke into the air. "Picked up Bubba for smashing beer bottles against the side of Shorty's last night. Why would you do something like that, Bubba?"

"Hell, I don't know. Seemed kind of dull. The music on the jukebox would make a corpse stop up his ears," the man named Grimes said. His skin was grained and coarse and it creased like a lizard's when he grinned.

"Tell Billy Bob what you told us," Hugo said, and rested his eyes on me with anticipation.

"Ain't much to it. Last Thursday I got a call from Wilbur Pickett. He said he had a mess of bearer bonds he wanted to get rid of. Said he was calling from the IGA pay phone by his house," Grimes said.

"Why would he call you in particular?" I asked.

"I do a few investments for folks, mostly for working people don't trust banks or brokerages. Not the kind of transaction Pickett had in mind, though. That's what I told him, too-to take his business somewheres else," Grimes said.

"We already checked with the phone company. There was a call made Thursday afternoon from the IGA to Mr. Grimes's home in Austin," Hugo said.

Grimes wore alligator boots, western-cut, striped slacks, and a dark blue shirt with roses sewn on it. The skin around his drooping left eye looked dead, like a synthetic graft, and I couldn't tell if the eye had vision in it or not.

"I know your name from somewhere," I said.

"I'm a pilot. Out of the country most of the time. I doubt we've met," he replied.

"It'll come to me," I said.

"Billy Bob was a Texas Ranger and an assistant U.S. attorney. Got a memory like flypaper," Hugo said. A column of dirty sunlight fell on his desk. His hand, which was round and small and the color of a cured tobacco leaf on the blotter, cupped a cigarette whose smoke leaked through his fingers. He grinned at me, his lips purple in the gloom, his eyes full of gloat.

I pulled open the door and stepped back out into the afternoon breeze and dappled shade and closed the door behind me and heard the metal tongue on the latch fall into place. The breeze felt wonderful in my face. Then I remembered the name. I pushed the door open again. The glare fell like a dagger across Grimes's face.

"You were mixed up with a televangelist preacher and the Contras down in Nicaragua. You were shot down dropping supplies to them," I said to Grimes.

"I told you, boy's an encyclopedia of worthless information," Hugo said.

"Then you made the news again. Flying for the same preacher in Zaire. Except you were diverting mercy flights to his diamond mines," I said.

"I bet a local jury will get on this like stink on shit," Hugo said.

"They sure will. That's where all Earl Deitrich's money comes from," I said.

Hugo's cigarette paused halfway to his mouth, the smoke curling upward like a white snake.

Early the next morning the air was unseasonably cold and a milk-white fog blew off the river and hung as thick as wet cotton on the two-acre tank behind my barn. As I walked along the levee I could hear bass flopping out in the fog. I stood in the weeds and cast a Rapala between two flooded willow trees, heard it hit the water, then began retrieving it toward me. The sun looked like a glowing red spark behind the gray silhouette of the barn.

I felt a hard, throbbing hit on the lure. I jerked the rod up to set the treble hook, but the lure rattled loose from the bass's mouth, sailed through the air, and clinked on the water's surface. Behind me I heard someone tapping loudly on my back door, then a truck engine grinding past the barn and through the field toward me.

Wilbur Pickett got out and walked up the levee in a pair of khakis and cowboy boots and a denim jacket cut off at the armpits.

"They're flopping out there, ain't they?" he said.

"There's a pole and a coffee can of worms by that willow," I said.

"Lordy, this is a nice place. I aim to have one like it someday," he said, squatting down to thread a night crawler on his hook.

"You doing all right?" I said.

He swung the cork and weighted line out into the fog.

"My wife sees pictures in her head. It scares me sometimes. She says you got dead people following you around," he said.

"I don't see any."

"She said these are people you killed down in Old Mexico. I told her I never heard no such thing." He looked straight ahead, a nervous flicker in the corner of his eye.

I reeled in my line and rested my rod against the trunk of a redbud tree. I watched a cottonmouth moccasin swimming through the shallows, its body forming and re-forming itself like an S-shaped spring.

"Billy Bob?" Wilbur said.

"They were heroin mules. They got what they deserved," I said.

"That don't sound like you."

"I've got to get to work," I said.

He rubbed his palm on his forehead, and his eyes searched in the fog, as though looking for words that weren't part of his vocabulary. I saw his throat swallow. "She says you're a giver of death. She says it's gonna happen again."

"What will happen again?"

"She says there's spirits that want revenge. It's got to do with human heads in a garden in Africa. It don't make no sense. I ain't up to this. I ain't never hurt nobody. I don't want to have nothing to do with this kind of stuff," he said.