The retired janitor called in the report on his Honda at 10:26. The report of a burning automobile by the side of the highway was called in anonymously at 10:49. Two minutes later Mary Beth had hit her siren and emergency flasher and was headed full-bore for the overpass.
As she approached from the south, she saw three males in silhouette inside the chain-link archway, possibly kids who had climbed the overpass to better see the fire that had spread from the stolen car into an adjacent field.
She saw the three figures turn and run to the far side of the overpass, her blue, white, and red flasher whip off the support walls on each side of her, then an object that came from above, out of the darkness, that seemed to have no source or context.
The thieves had probably taken the seventy-pound block of concrete from the site of a demolished building. It was rectangular in shape, jagged on each end, spiked with twisted steel rods that protruded from the concrete like handles.
It exploded through the center of the front window, gutting the dashboard, raking the twelve-gauge pump shotgun out of its locked holder, blowing glass and electrical dials and radio parts into the backseat, embedding in the wire-mesh screen behind the front seat like a cannonball.
The cruiser spun sideways, its tires scorching black lines across the asphalt, an ambulance behind it swerving out of control into the center ground to avoid a collision.
A paramedic was the first person to the cruiser. When he opened the door, Mary Beth's campaign hat rolled out on the grass, the crown marbled with blood.
chapter twenty-three
The next morning I got off the hospital elevator on the fifth floor and started through the waiting area toward the nurses' station. Brian Wilcox and two other federal agents came around the corner at the same time.
'I don't believe it. Like a fly climbing out of shit every place I go,' he said.
'I don't want to 'front you today, Brian.'
'What makes you think you can call me by my first name?'
He wore a blue suit and tie and white shirt. His hair had the dull sheen of gunmetal, with silver threads in the part. He stood flat-footed in front of me, heavy, solid, his shoulders too large for his suit. The cleft chin, the cologned, cleanly shaved jaws, the neatness that he wore like a uniform, did not go with the expression in his eyes.
'Let me by, please,' I said.
'She's in that room because those kids went through her to get to you.'
'If they did, Garland T. Moon put them up to it.'
'Same problem. You can't stay out of his face. But other people end up in the barrel.'
'Moon wandered into something out at the old Hart Ranch. He's just not sure what it is. But you probably know all this. Run your game on somebody else.'
I started past him, but he grabbed my arm. I flung it away and felt my fingers accidently hit his chest. His face flared and he grabbed at me again, with both hands, his chin raised, his teeth bared. I shoved him away and stepped back, raising my arm in front of my face, then the other two agents were on him, splaying their hands against his chest.
'Get going,' one of them said over his shoulder.
'The problem's not mine.'
'Don't fool yourself, ace,' he replied.
Mary Beth was sitting up, with a pillow behind her back, when I entered her room. Her right arm was bandaged, the skin purple and red between the strips of tape, swollen tight and hard against the dressing like a wasp sting. Her hair was tied on top of her head with a bandanna to keep it off the dressing where a steel rod had incised the scalp almost to the bone.
'You look good,' I said.
'Sure I do.'
'When can you go home?'
'Today. There's no big damage done.'
She wore no makeup, and in the slatted sunlight through the window her face looked opaque, as though it hid thoughts she herself had not dealt with.
'Did you sleep last night?' I asked.
'Yeah, some.'
'When I was shot, I couldn't close my eyes without seeing gun flashes again. That's the way it is for a while.'
Her gaze roved over my face and seemed to go inside my eyes.
'What is it?' I asked.
'The other day you said you didn't know who I was,' she said. 'My father was a motorcycle cop in Oklahoma and a high sheriff in Kentucky. He was a good man, but he had a special hatred for sex predators. He killed two of them after they were in custody.'
'They weren't trying to escape?'
'What are the odds of a cop having to shoot an escapee on two occasions?'
'Seems like old history, Mary Beth.'
'He hated those men because a degenerate got in our back window when I was three years old.'
My eyes shifted off her face.
'He died going in a house after a serial rapist. At night, without backup, with a "throw-down" taped to his ankle. You figure out what the plan was,' she said.
'You blame yourself?'
She thought about it. 'No,' she said. 'But you're not going to use me to take down Garland Moon or Darl Vanzandt or whoever it is you're thinking about.'
'I just ran into Brian Wilcox. If that guy's the cavalry, I think we're all going to be wearing Arrow shirts.'
She smiled in spite of herself. I sat on the edge of her bed and picked up her hand. I touched the freckles on her face. 'Pete and I'll take you home today, then bring supper over,' I said.
She rested her head on the pillow and squeezed the top of my arm.
The man who had replaced the murdered sheriff was named Hugo Roberts. If you asked him how he had made his living the last thirty years, he would answer, 'I ain't spent a whole lot of time in the private sector.' He'd been a county road hack, a deputy sheriff, a city patrolman, a bailiff, a jailer, and some said a volunteer on a firing squad in Utah. He was shaped like a lean pear and smoked constantly, even though he had already lost one lung and wheezed like a leaking inner tube when he talked.
He sat at the corner of the old sheriff's desk, flipping ashes into the spittoon, his narrow shoulders hunched into the cigarette smoke that swirled about his head.
'Did I lock up Darl Vanzandt? Do bears shit in the woods? Does my wife read the Bible all night and tell me I'm the reason our kids are ugly?' he said. 'Hell, yes. What else you want to know, Billy Bob?'
'Where's Darl now?'
'I had the little fucker shot.'
'Give it a break, Hugo.'
'All we got on him is some roofies. Far as I know, they're not even illegal.'
'Roofies?'
'Rohypnol. Ten times stronger than Valium. It's made overseas for insomnia. It tends to show up in date rape cases. How long you been gone from law enforcement?'
'Is he upstairs?'
'Get real, Billy Bob. His old man was down here with his lawyer at six this morning. I cain't charge him. The black man owned the stolen vehicle didn't get a license number and never saw a face… Look, I ain't sure myself it was Darl. There's a mess of customized cars hereabouts that same shade of red.'
'How many of them are owned by people like Darl Vanzandt?'
He spit, then wiped his mouth on his palm.
'Know and prove ain't a difference I should have to explain to a lawyer,' he said.
'I think the county found the right man for the job, Hugo.'
'The air-conditioning unit in here does about as much good as an ice cube on a woodstove. Make sure you close the door snug on your way out,' he said.
It was noon and the sun was white and straight up in the sky when I got home. I went into the library and took L.Q.' s revolver out of the desk drawer. I opened the loading gate, clicked back the hammer to half-cock, and rotated the cylinder until the empty sixth chamber came back under the hammer again.
Great-grandpa Sam carried his Navy.36s down to the bluffs on the Cimarron when he burned out the Dalton-Doolin gang and never had to pop a cap, I told myself.
'Wrong way to think, bud,' L.Q. Navarro said behind me.