T Parker - The border Lords

"I congratulated him on rescuing the boy and he got very defensive about his astonishing good luck."

"Well, he's a lucky one," she said quietly. The smile was gone and Hood saw wear on her face.

Bradley sat down and took up the Gibson and took the high E string from its envelope and worked it into place.

Hood looked at Erin while she told him about the upcoming Erin and the Inmates tour. She was a trim redhead, pretty in an open and forthright way. Blue eyes and a smile that made you smile. Raised mainly in Texas, four years older than Bradley. But her easy good humor didn't prepare Hood for the stark emotions of her lyrics or the fragile beauty of her music. She seemed wiser than her years and this impressed and intrigued Hood. He was eight years older and somehow looked up to her. So it angered him to think that Bradley Jones was leading a double life just as his mother had led, and was less than truthful with this woman. And it angered him to suspect with good reason that Bradley had used her as an alibi for a murder. He sometimes wished that he had met her first, one of the several moot wishes of his thirty-two years.

"… then there's the Broken Spoke in Austin, the West End in Dallas and we've got two shows in Houston but I'm not sure where, then on to New Orleans and Miami and on up the East Coast. We've got twenty-eight shows in thirty days. No rest for this little band."

"I'll catch the Belly Up show in Solana Beach."

"You better. Bring that pretty doctor with you in case you need medical attention."

"Looked like she could cure about any ailment you might have, Hood," said Bradley.

Bradley tightened up the E string and attempted to tune the guitar by ear while Erin squinted, pained by the sound of his crude aural approximations. Then he picked the opening nine notes of the "Dueling Banjos" and offered a brain-damaged smile.

"Honey? You're more than a little flat there and it's making my scalp crawl." Hood heard the edge in her voice.

"No. I've got perfect pitch." Bradley pouted and clunkily strummed the first chords of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

Erin put her hand over the hole of the guitar and the chords died against her fingers. "Come on, men, let's get a beer and set on the porch." They sat three across on a picnic bench in the shade of the porch. Dogs lay strewn about, panting. Erin absently picked the Hummingbird and told Hood about getting a guitar made by a fella back in Texas, would take him almost four months to do it but he hadn't even started yet. He made them for Clapton and Sting and James Taylor and pretty near all the stars. Only reason he'd make hers was one of her brothers knew him. Hood listened and looked out at the rolling hills and the green oaks with their branches overgrown to the ground and their afternoon shadows flat and blue on the tan grass.

"Have you seen Mike Finnegan lately?" Hood asked.

"He and Owens pop up at the L.A. clubs sometimes," said Erin. "Weird people. It's been months. Why?"

"He keeps popping into my mind. I'd like to talk to him."

"About what?" asked Bradley.

"Why do you care?"

" 'Why do you care?' You're sounding like that prying old woman again, Charlie."

"Knock it off, you drooling primates," said Erin. "We don't have any way to get hold of Mike, do we, honey? I know I don't."

"I don't, either," said Bradley. Then he stood and stepped around a big husky and hopped the porch railing to the ground. The dogs all rose and stampeded down the steps after him, the terriers barking.

"Charlie, throw me your keys. I want a look under the hood of this thing."

Bradley caught the keys just before a leaping Labrador retriever could close its mouth on them.

Hood sat back down on the bench. He thought of the strange conversation he'd had with Mike Finnegan, about a year and a half ago, in Imperial Mercy Hospital down in Buenavista. He was in a full-body cast and his broken jaw was wired, but his words were clear:

… Charlie, you are just the kind of person I would love to form a relationship with. It likely wouldn't happen-you're much too strong-willed and law-abiding for the likes of me. Unless, of course, there was something you wanted very, very badly. Something I could help you with…

"Anyway, the next time you see Mike, give him my numbers."

She looked at Hood with a small smile. "Not so you can find Owens?"

"Not Owens. Mike."

"She's one spooky beauty."

"That she is."

"Damaged goods, Charlie. Stay away from her. That's my decision."

"There you go again, giving me advice I didn't ask for."

"I gave advice to all my brothers, older and younger. When I love someone I feel the need to run their lives."

Bradley had the hood of the Camaro up and he stood looking down at the engine as if it were a chessboard. He wiggled the fan belt and a battery cable and swung the dipstick out over the gravel so it wouldn't drip on the car. "You don't love Hood. You love me."

"There are different kinds of love, Bradley."

"You run natural or synthetic in this car, Charlie?"

"Synthetic."

"Why did I even ask? She doesn't love you."

"She just said she did."

"I do love you, Charlie. No matter what he says."

Bradley held up the stick to the light. "About due for a change, Hood. Looks like you got at least four thousand on this stuff."

"Thirty-two hundred is what's on it."

Bradley swung a drip onto the gravel, then slid the stick back in. He banged the hood closed and wiped his hands together, then on his jeans. "I couldn't love a man who doesn't keep his engine oil clean."

He unhooked the cell phone from his belt and walked out into the barnyard.

There was a long silence. "How are you?" asked Hood.

"I'm okay. It's all good."

"I worry when I hear that sentence."

"Bradley's trying to do a good job at the deputy work. He… takes it seriously. Looks forward to it."

"I'm glad to hear that."

"I mean, we all make our mistakes, right?"

Hood said nothing but she offered no explanation.

"You still don't trust him, do you, Charlie? But you like him. You see something of yourself in him. And something of his mother."

"I owe him. I hurt his chances in life when I took up with Suzanne."

"You don't get to take any blame for what happened to her, Charlie. Suzanne was hell-bent and she got unlucky."

He nodded.

"Something's changing," she said. "I don't know what it is but I'm changing."

Hood considered this. Her words were an eerie echo of Sean and Seliah Ozburn's. "Explain that if you'd like."

"I can't. I have nothing firm to report."

"Good change or bad?"

"It feels like both. Maybe it's two different changes."

"I'll be your ears anytime, Erin."

"I'm seeing that he's like his mother. More and more."

Hood tried to find the right words but he couldn't. "If you know something-"

"God, Charlie, I married him and I love him."

"Love him all you want. But don't take a fall for him."

"You're trespassing."

"I didn't see the sign."

"I don't think you miss much. You just blunder in anyway."

"Man, that's the truth, Erin."

Hood watched a flock of gnatcatchers swoop in unison into the oak tree. They vanished into the leaves but he saw the flicker of tails and wingtips. He set his empty bottle on the deck and stood. She rose and hugged him with one arm, the other hand clamped to the neck of the Gibson.

"If I run across Mike Finnegan, I'll tell him you want to talk."

"I'd appreciate that."

"I really don't like or trust that man."

"Don't ever change."

"I just told you I was changing."

"Well, okay. But not too much."

"See ya, Charlie."

Hood waved to Bradley and got into his Camaro. He swung a turn and rolled down the dirt driveway, glasspacks rumbling and the dogs setting up a dust storm behind him.