James Burke - Heartwood

"I don't see no hawk," he said. Then his eyes dropped to the screen. "That's a hide scraper. It's worked all along the edge. A book at the library shows one just like this."

"It looks like you got a museum piece there, bud."

He rubbed the chert clean with his thumbs, then dipped it in the creek and dried it on his blue jeans.

"It's great to have this place to ourselves again, ain't it?" he said.

"Yeah, it is. You think you can handle one of those buffalo steaks and a blueberry milkshake?" I said.

We drove through the dusk toward the cafe where we ate breakfast each Sunday after Mass. Fireflies were lighting in the trees along the road, and there was a cool smell in the air, like autumnal gas, even though it was only late summer.

A restless, undefined thought kept turning in my mind, but I did not know what it was, in the same vague way I'd been bothered by the inconsistencies in Jeff Deitrich's threat against Esmeralda and Lucas. The road was uneven, and Pete's head bounced up and down as he looked out over the bottom of the window at the landscape.

"Are you gonna ask Temple to eat with us?" Pete said.

"I don't know if she's back from Bonham yet, Pete."

"I seen her car go in her driveway this afternoon."

"Are you sure?"

"I reckon I know her car. Was she supposed to call you or something?"

"She said if she got back early enough, she might join us out at the creek. Maybe she's a little tired."

"I hope I ain't said the wrong thing again."

"You didn't."

He was quiet a long time.

"What was that gangbanger's car doing in her backyard?" he asked.

I pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road. A semitrailer with its lights on went past me.

"Which gangbanger's car?" I said.

"That purple Mercury. The one owned by that guy Cholo," he said, his eyes threading with anxiety as he looked at the expression on my face.

I dropped Pete off at his house and headed up the dirt street, with Beau's trailer bouncing behind me.

Why hadn't I put it together? I asked myself. Ronnie Cruise's wetbrain friend, Charley Quail, had taken Cholo's car to Lucas's rented house in the western part of the county. When he discovered that Lucas and Esmeralda weren't living there, he had probably been told by someone to go to either my house or Lucas's stepfather's. He must have been driving down my road and seen Esmeralda leaving Temple's house after she had gone there with Lucas to string the Gibson guitar for Temple's father.

Charley Quail had assumed Temple's house was mine. He parked the Mercury there and walked down to the convenience store to catch the bus back to San Antonio, thinking he had done a fine turn for Ronnie Cruise.

I went through the stop sign at the end of Pete's street, crossed a wood bridge over a drainage ditch Uttered with trash and studded with wild pecan trees, and turned out onto the surfaced road that led by my house. The moon was rising now and the sun was only a dirty red smudge inside a bank of purple rain clouds in the west. Up ahead, I saw a plumbing truck parked on Temple's swale. I turned into the driveway and cut the engine. The lawn sprinkler was on and strings of water twirled in the glow of the bug lamp and clicked across the front steps and the hydrangeas in the flower beds. Behind me, I heard Beau nicker and his hooves scrape on the wood floor of his trailer.

The television was on in the living room, but the curtains were drawn. I walked up on the porch and tapped with one knuckle on the screen door. The air-conditioning unit in the window was roaring loudly, and I knocked again, this time harder.

"Temple?" I said.

There was no response.

"Temple? It's Billy Bob," I said, then walked around the side of the house and up the drive.

Temple's car was parked by the shed where her heavy bag was hung, and between the shed and her neighbor's cornfield I could see the dull maroon shape of Cholo's Mercury. The pecan tree above the shed filled with wind, and the heavy bag twisted slightly on its chain, its leathery surfaces glistening in the moonlight.

I leaned over and picked up one of Temple's speedbag gloves out of the dust. A smear of blood flecked with dirt had dried on the flat area that covered the knuckles.

I dropped the glove and walked up on the back screen porch and turned the knob on the door. The door was both key-locked and dead-bolted.

Then I heard voices from the cellar stairway, those of two men who were coming back up to the first floor. I stepped away from the back door and pressed close in to the wall. My hand ached for L.Q. Navarro's revolver.

"We got the wrong place, Johnny. It happens. Write it off."

"I told you, the bitch knows me. So we got to wipe the whole slate. We get those kids down here, then we go home."

"I'm the one she busted in the nose. I say we boogie."

"I'm gonna do the broad. You want, you can have seconds. But this is her last night on earth. Now give it a rest and fix some sandwiches."

"I'm getting thin. I need something."

"Check in her medicine cabinet. Maybe she's got some diet pills."

"You said it'd be clean, in and out. Just straightening out some punks, you said. She's a cop. We're gonna do her old man, too, a guy in a wheelchair? You know what'll happen if they get their hands on us?"

"Shut up."

The kitchen window was open and I could hear them pulling open drawers, rattling silverware, cracking the cap on a bottle of beer.

Get to a phone, I thought.

No, she could be dead before I got back.

I stepped off the porch, easing the screen shut behind me, and went through the shadows of the pecan tree into her father's old welding shed. On top of a workbench was a thick-handled, grease-stained ball peen hammer, with a head the size of a half-brick.

I went back down the driveway, crouching under the windows, and pulled open the storm doors on the cellar's entrance. The steps were cement and caked with a film of dried mud and blackened leaves. Through a broken pane in the main door I could see a lightbulb burning on the far side of a furnace and the silhouette of a figure whose mouth was taped and whose wrists were tied around a thick drainpipe that ran the length of the ceiling.

I stared impotently through the vectored glass at Temple's back, the exposed baby fat on her hips, the glow of her chestnut hair against the dinginess of the cellar. Only the balls of her bare feet touched the floor, so that her arms were pulled tight in the sockets and her shoulders were squeezed into her neck.

I opened my pocketknife and wedged it into the doorjamb, under the lock's tongue, and began to prise it back into the spring.

A shadow fell across the cellar's inside stairs, then Johnny Krause walked down the steps into the light, his brilliantined hair pulled behind his head in a matador's knot, a five-day line of blond whiskers along his jawbones. He drank from a long-necked bottle of beer and pressed the coldness of the bottle against the side of his face. He wore a short-sleeve Texas A amp;M workout shirt that molded against the contours of his torso.

"I'm not gonna let them two guys upstairs touch you. But you and me got a date," he said.

Two? Did he say two?

Johnny Krause set the beer bottle down on a chair and grinned and slipped his comb out of his back pocket. He placed the teeth of the comb under Temple's throat and drew them up to her chin. Then he touched her hair with his fingers and leaned close to her and kissed the corner of one eye.

His back was to me now, and I could see a small automatic, probably a. 25, stuck down in his belt.

"You want the tape off? Just blink your eyes," he said. "No? I'd like to kiss you on the mouth, hon. Get you off your feet. Come on, think about it."

He placed his hands on his hips.