Then the lead car turned into Lucas's drive, followed by the others, and fishtailed across the damp lawn, scouring grass and sod into the air, crunching the sprinkler, ripping troughs out of the flower beds.
One girl jumped from a car, a metallic object in her hand, and bent down below the level of the bedroom window. He heard a hissing sound, then saw her raise up and look at him. No, that wasn't accurate. She never saw him, as though his possible presence was as insignificant as the worth of his home. Her face was beautiful and empty, her mouth like a pursed button.
'What are y'all doing?' he said, his voice phlegmy in his throat.
If she heard him, she didn't show it. Her skin seemed to flush with pleasure just before she turned and pranced like a deer into the waiting arms of her friends, who giggled and pulled her back inside the car.
By the time Lucas and his father got outside, the caravan was far down the road, the headlights dipping over a hill.
Lucas could see the girl's footprints by the water faucet under his window. The ground was soft and muddy here, and the footprints were small and sharp edged and narrow at the toe, and it was obvious the girl had tried to stand on a piece of cardboard to keep the mud off her shoes. Written in red, tilted, spray-painted letters below Lucas's screen was the solitary word loser.
That same day I drove out to the Green Parrot Motel, a pink cinder-block monstrosity painted with tropical birds and palm trees and advertising water beds and triple-X movies. The desk clerk told me Garland T. Moon was next door at the welding shop.
The tin shed had only one window, which was painted over and nailed shut, and the walls pinged with the sun's heat. Garland T. Moon was stripped to the waist, black goggles on his eyes, arc-welding the iron bucket off a ditching machine. The sparks dripped to his feet like liquid fire. He pushed his goggles up on his forehead with a dirty thumb and wiped his eyes on his forearm. His smile made me think of a clay sculpture that had been pushed violently out of shape.
'Were you out at my house two nights ago?' I asked.
'I got me a parttime job. I don't run around at night.'
'I think either you or Jimmy Cole hurt my horse.'
'I was out a couple of nights. The other side of them hills. There's all kind of lights in the clouds. You ever hear of the Lubbock Lights, them UFOs that was photographed? There's something weird going on hereabouts.'
'I've rigged two shotguns on my property. I hope you don't find one of them.'
'You don't have no guns. I made a whole study of you, Mr Holland. I can touch that boy and I touch you. It's a sweet thought, but I ain't got the inclination right now.'
'Jimmy Cole's dead, isn't he?' I said.
He pulled a soot-blackened glove from his hand one finger at a time.
'Why would a person think that?' he asked.
'You don't leave loose ends.'
'If I was to come out to your place or that pup's with a serious mind, y'all wouldn't have no doubt about who visited you… You cain't do nothing about me, Mr Holland. Don't nobody care what happens to crazy people. I know. I majored in crazy. I know it inside and out.'
'Crazy people?'
'I heard the screw say it in the jail. You're queer for a dead man. You're one seriously sick motherfucker and don't know it.'
He started laughing, hard, his flat chest shaking, sweat rolling through the dirt rings on his neck, the wisps of red hair on his scalp flecked with bits of black ash.
I picked up Mary Beth Sweeney at her apartment that evening and we drove down the old two-lane toward the county line. She wore a pale organdy dress and white pumps and earrings with blue stones in them, and I could smell the baby powder she used to cover the freckles on her shoulders and neck.
Twice she glanced at the road behind us.
'You having regrets?' I asked.
Her eyes moved over my face.
'I don't think your situation is compromised. The sheriff's corrupt, but he's not Phi Beta Kappa material,' I said.
'What are you talking about?'
'I think you work for the G,' I said.
'The G? Like the government?'
'That's the way I'd read it.'
'I'm starting to feel a little uncomfortable about this, Billy Bob.'
She gazed out the side window so I couldn't see her expression. We crossed the river and the planks on the bridge rattled under my tires.
'My great-grandfather's ranch ran for six miles right along that bank,' I said. 'He used to trail two thousand head at a time to the railhead in Kansas, then he gave up guns and whiskey and became a saddle preacher. His only temptation in life after that was the Rose of Cimarron.'
'I'm sorry. I wasn't listening,' she said.
'My great-grandpa… He was a gunfighter turned preacher, but he had a love affair with an outlaw woman called the Rose of Cimarron. She was a member of the Dalton-Doolin gang. He wrote in his journal that his head got turned by the sweetest and most dangerous woman in Oklahoma Territory.'
'I'm afraid you've lost me,' she said.
I tried to laugh. 'You're a fed. This county's got a long history of political corruption, Mary Beth. There're some violent people here.'
'How about the prosecutor, Marvin Pomroy?'
'He's an honest man. As far as I know, anyway. Are you FBI?'
'Can we forget this conversation?' she said.
I didn't answer. We pulled into a Mexican restaurant built of logs and scrolled with neon. I walked around to the passenger side to open the door for her, but she was already standing outside.
The hills to the west were rimmed with a purple glow when I drove her back home. During the evening I had managed to say almost nothing that was not inept and awkward. I turned into her apartment building and parked by the brick wall that bordered the swimming pool.
'Maybe I should say good night here,' I said.
'No, come in for a drink.'
'I've made you uneasy. I don't want to compound it.'
'You're patronizing me… I don't understand you, Billy Bob. You quit a career as a law officer and then as an assistant US attorney to be a defense lawyer. You like putting dope mules back on the street?'
'I won't handle traffickers.'
'Because you're a cop. You think like one.'
I heard cars behind me on the road, the same two-lane that I could follow, if I were willing, into Val Verde County and beyond, across the river, into an arroyo where horses reared in the gunfire and a man in a pinstriped suit and ash gray Stetson and Mexican spurs grabbed at his breast and called out to the sky.
We were outside the car now. My ears were popping, as though I were on an airplane that suddenly had lost altitude.
I heard myself say something.
'I beg your pardon?' Mary Beth said, her mouth partly open.
My face felt cold, impervious to the wind, the skin pulled back against the bone. Like the penitent who refuses to accept the priest's absolution through the grilled window inside the confessional, I felt the words rise once more in my throat, as in a dream that knows no end.
'I killed my best friend. His name was L.Q. Navarro. He was a Texas Ranger,' I said.
Her lips moved soundlessly, her eyes disjointed as though she were looking at a fractured image inside a child's kaleidoscope.
At noon the next day I walked from my office to the pawnshop down the street from the health club. The three-hundred-pound black woman who owned it, whose name was Ella Mae, wore glass beads in her hair and a white T-shirt that read: I Don't Give a Fuck-Don't Leave Home Without American Express.
On the wall behind the counter were scores of guns and musical instruments. I pointed at one.
'Can you give me a good deal, Ella Mae?' I said.
'Honey, if we was back in the old days, I'd pay to pick your cotton. That's the truth. Wouldn't put you on,' she said.