James Burke: Cimarron Rose

'No.'

He shook his head, a sad, private thought in his eyes.

'Don't look at me like that,' I said.

'You were an assistant US attorney. Why'd you blow it?'

'Go to hell, Marvin.'

'Come in and eat,' he said.

'No.'

'Good night to you, then,' he said.

I walked across the grass to my car. The yard seemed filled with shadows that leaped and broke apart and reformed themselves in the wind. I looked back over my shoulder through the front windows of Marvin's house. He and his wife and children were seated at the dining room table, a chandelier dripping with light above their heads, their faces animated with their own company as they passed bowls of food back and forth to one another.

I woke before sunrise and fried eggs and ham in the kitchen and ate them out of the skillet with bread and a cup of coffee on the back porch. The dawn was gray and misty, the air so cool and soft that I could hear sound from a long way off-a bass flopping in the tank, the creak of the windmill shifting directions, a cowbell clanging on my neighbor's gate.

L.Q. Navarro was stretched out on the perforated, white-painted iron lawn bench under the chinaberry tree, his Stetson tilted sideways on his head, his cheek resting on one hand.

I tried to ignore him.

But when I closed my eyes he and I were on horseback again in a reed-choked muddy bottom across the border in Coahuila, our eyes stinging with sweat in the darkness, our noses and mouths filled with insects. Then the fusillade exploded all around us, from behind sandhills and scrub brush and mesquite and gutted car bodies, the muzzle flashes blooming in the dark, our horses caving under us as though they had been eviscerated.

But L.Q.' s mare labored to her feet again, a hole in her rib cage squirting blood like a broken pipe, and began galloping in terror up an arroyo, flailing her head against the collapsed reins. Then I saw L.Q.' s boot and roweled Mexican spur tangled in the stirrup and his body bouncing across the rocks, his arms folded over his head as the mare's iron shoes sliced the suitcoat off his shoulders.

My right arm felt dead, useless at my side, the upper bone snapped in two by a round that had struck it like a sharp, solitary blow from a cold chisel. I stood erect and fired and fired, until my nine-millimeter locked empty, then I dropped it to the ground and began firing my. 357 Magnum, not taking aim, the air crisscrossed with ricochets and toppling rounds that made a whirring sound past the ear or pinged out into the darkness like a broken spring.

Then I heard our attackers begin moving through the brush, the sand slicks, from behind the rusted car bodies, through the blackened greasewood and tangles of wire fence. I heard the man behind me before I saw him, his boots digging hopelessly for purchase into the soil as he slid down the arroyo. I turned just as his weight propelled him toward the bottom of the arroyo, the starlight glinting on the barrel of his rifle, and I pointed my revolver straight in front of me and squeezed off the last round in the cylinder, the hammer ratcheting back and slamming down on the cartridge before I recognized the thin, silvery tinkle of L.Q.' s Mexican spurs.

I pushed away the frying pan and coffee cup and wiped my mouth on a paper napkin.

' Why'd you pick up that damn rifle?' I said.

He adjusted his cheek on his palm and tipped back his hat. ' I dropped my piece. What was I supposed to shoot at them with, spitballs ?'

'They all made it back into the mountains. We lost you for nothing.'

' I wouldn't say that. I busted off my pocketknife in the guy I took the rifle from. It's that same dude we liked to smoked a couple of other times. I expect he took his next leak with one kidney.'

'You were sure a fine lawman, L.Q.'

He cut his head and grinned and stuck a long grass stem in his mouth.

I heard a car out front, then the doorbell ring.

'Come around back!' I shouted through the kitchen.

The deputy named Mary Beth Sweeney walked around the corner of the house, the sun like a soft yellow balloon at her back. L.Q. was standing under the chinaberry tree now, looking at her curiously. She walked right through him. His silhouette broke apart in a burst of gold needles.

I pushed open the back screen for her.

'How about a cup of coffee?' I said.

She stepped inside and took off her campaign hat. She pushed a curl off her forehead.

'This won't take long,' she said.

'Excuse me?'

'You jammed me up with the sheriff.'

'About the missing evidence?' I said.

'You violated a confidence, Mr Holland.'

'I didn't,' I said.

'Yeah? I think it's Bubba and Bubba lighting each other's cigars.'

'Who are you?' I said.

She fitted her hat on her head and let the screen slam behind her.

I followed her to her cruiser.

'You're wrong about this,' I said.

I watched her cruiser spin gravel onto the county road and disappear over a rise between two pastures filled with red Angus.

My law office was above the old bank on the corner of the town square. From my window I could see the iron tethering rings that bled rust out of the old elevated sidewalks, the hardware and feed stores that had gone broke, the tiny neon-scrolled Rialto theater that still showed first-run movies, the yellow tip of a Spanish-American War artillery piece under the live oaks on the courthouse lawn, the Roman-numeraled clock perched atop the third floor, where Lucas Smothers waited in a cell with a sociopath behind the wall on each side of him.

I sat at my desk with a cup of coffee and stared at the glass case on the wall where I had mounted Great-grandpa Sam's Navy Colt. 36 caliber revolvers and his octagon-barrel Winchester '73 lever-action rifle on a field of blue felt. I picked up the telephone and punched in the sheriff's office extension.

'My client hasn't been moved,' I said.

'Talk to Harley.'

'Harley's a sadistic moron.'

'You're starting to try my patience, Billy Bob.'

'Tell your scene investigator I'm going to fry his ass.'

'The missing beer cans or whatever?'

'That's right.'

'What would they prove, that a lot of people get drunk and diddle each other in that picnic ground?… Go to a head doctor while you still got time, son. I'm worried about you.'

I drove out to the clapboard, tin-roofed home of the victim, Roseanne Hazlitt. The aunt was a frail, wizened woman who snapped the screen latch in place as I stepped up on her tiny gallery. Behind her, the television set was tuned to a talk show on which people shouted and jeered at one another. An ironing board on a short stand was elevated in front of the couch. Through the screen I smelled an odor on her like camphor and dried flowers and sweat baked into her clothes by the heat of her work.

'You asking me to hep set that boy loose?' she said.

'No, ma'am. I just wondered if Roseanne had other friends she might have met sometimes at Shorty's.'

'Like who?'

'Like one she had reason to slap the daylights out of.'

'She never hurt nobody in her life. It was them hurt her.'

'May I come in?'

'No.'

'Who's them, Ms Hazlitt?'

'Any of them that gets the scent of it, like a bunch of dogs sniffing around a brooder house. Now, you get off my gallery, and you tell that Smothers boy he might fool y'all, he don't fool me.'

'You know Lucas?'

I drove back to Deaf Smith, parked my Avalon by the office, and walked across the street to the courthouse. I opened Harley Sweet's door without knocking.

'I want to see Lucas in private, in an interview room, and I don't want anybody disturbing me while I talk to him,' I said.

'I wouldn't have it no other way, Billy Bob.' He leaned back in his swivel chair, his jaw resting on his fingers, a shadow of a smile on his mouth.