'There's a lady knocking on your back door, Billy Bob,' he said.
I turned and looked toward the house. She wore a white skirt and blouse and a wide hat with flowers on it, and even at a distance I could almost feel the electricity,in her movements, the anger in her balled fist as she continued, unrelentingly, to knock on the screen door.
'Is it that government lady who used to come out?' Pete asked.
'No, I'm afraid it's a walking neurosis by the name of Emma Vanzandt.'
He mouthed the words walking neurosis to himself.
Then Emma saw me and got in her car and drove around the barn and out to the tank. She stepped out of the car and stood at the bottom of the levee, her ankles and knees close together, her face strangely composed, like that of a person who lives with ferocious energies that she can call upon whenever necessary.
'I wanted to say something to you at your home, so you'd know my words weren't spoken to you as a result of a chance encounter,' she said.
'I've never underestimated your sense of purpose, Emma.'
'You've ruined my marriage and destroyed our family. I don't blame you for wanting to get your son off, but at heart you're a voyeur with the instincts of a garbage rat. The fact that we've had you in our home fills me with a level of disgust that's hard to express.'
'How about the dues other people have paid for you, Emma? Lucas and Roseanne Hazlitt and Bunny Vogel? Don't their lives mean anything?'
'Bunny Vogel is an overall-and-denim gigolo. I never met your son. And I gave Roseanne Hazlitt a job in our church's store. Does that answer your question?'
'Jack was in business with Sammy Mace. Y'all are friends of Felix Ringo. Why don't you check out this guy's record? I heard him tell a story about wiring up somebody to a telephone crank.'
'I have nothing else to say to you, sir. You're an ill-bred, disingenuous, violent man. You live in the West End where you can pretend you're otherwise. I just feel sorry for those who are taken in by you.'
Her eyes lingered on Pete with a look of both pity and disdain.
Then she got in her car and realized she had removed the keys from the ignition and had placed them either on the seat or the dashboard. She stuck her fingers down the cracks in the seat, searched along the back floor, felt over the top of the dashboard, stirred through the coins and litter inside the pocket of the console. Her fingers started to tremble and lines appeared in the caked makeup on her brow like string in wet clay and her breath speckled her lips with saliva.
I picked up the keys off the ground and handed them to her through the window.
'Garland Moon's off his chain. If y'all sicked him on Bunny or me through Felix Ringo, you'd better hire some private security,' I said.
She was hunched over the wheel, twisting the key in the ignition, her eyes manic with rage and humiliation.
'I'm going to have the skin peeled off your body in strips,' she said.
She dropped the car in reverse, knocked me aside with the open door, and gouged a huge divot out of the levee with the back bumper. Then she corrected the front wheels and pressed the accelerator to the floor and scoured mud and shredded grass into a green balloon behind her car.
I walked down the levee with my pole and stood above a cluster of lily pads and bounced a worm up and down on the bottom, my scalp tightening with the tangle of thoughts in my head.
'That lady didn't have the right to say them kind of things to you,' Pete said.
'When you're a cop, or sometimes a lawyer, you serve up people's lives on a dung fork, Pete. They usually deserve it, but it's never a good moment.'
'I wouldn't pay that lady no mind. You're the best friend I ever had, Billy Bob.'
'That man who came by y'all's house and looked in your mom's window?'
The expression went out of his face, as though he had remembered a bad dream that should not have been part of the waking day.
'I gave him a beating, then turned him loose on somebody else. Maybe on that woman who just left,' I said.
Pete looked at me, then averted his eyes. His mouth was parted, his cheeks gray.
'You done that?' he said.
The Conquistador Apartments were built of white stucco and blue tile on the highway that led to San Antonio. The gardens around the pool and the outside wall were overlaid with gravel and planted with Spanish daggers, cactus, crown of thorn bushes, and mimosa trees, which gave it a hot, arid appearance out of context with the surroundings. It was built during the oil boom of the 1970s, and the people who stayed there seemed to have no geographical origins. They wore lizard-skin boots, vinyl vests, turquoise jewelry, hand-tooled belts, and cowboy hats with a feather in the band, as though they had stopped at a roadside souvenir shop outside Phoenix and taken on a new identity. They could have been drug traffickers or owners of fast-food chains. The swimming pool was always iridescent with a residue of suntan lotion and hair gel.
I used the building directory to find Felix Ringo's apartment, which was located off an arched flagstone walkway. No one answered the bell and I could hear no movement inside. I slipped a screwdriver in the jamb, pried the bolt out of the wood, pushing it back into the lock's mechanism, then threw my shoulder into the door and snapped it free.
The apartment was furnished with heavy, hand-carved oak chairs and tables and cabinets, the windows covered with blue velvet drapes, the thermostat set below sixty degrees. Even when I turned on the lights the rooms seemed dark, the cracks around the curtains as bright as tin. An acrylic painting of a picador with his lance embedded in the pack of muscle behind a bull's neck hung over the water bed. In the drawer of the nightstand were a.25-caliber automatic, four boxes of condoms, a velvet rope, a jar of Vaseline, and a spring-loaded, leather-encased blackjack that was shaped like a darning sock.
I told myself I had broken into a man's apartment to see justice done, perhaps even to see Felix Ringo in custody so he would not become the victim of Garland T. Moon. But that was not the reason. Even inside the refrigerated gloom of the apartment, I could still see the muzzle flashes of guns blooming in the darkness down in Coahuila, hear the labored breathing of L.Q. Navarro's wounded horse, see L.Q. stirrup-dragged across the rocks and cactus.
Men like Felix Ringo did the jobs for the forces of Empire that no government ever acknowledged. They went to special schools and carried badges and were endowed with marginal respectability, but their real credentials lay in their bottomless cruelty. And no matter what explanations they offered others for their behavior, each of them daily fed his perversity like a gardener tending a hothouse filled with poisonous flowers.
Political assassins always kept journals; sadists kept trophies, and they never strayed far from them.
I found the box at the bottom of a desk drawer. It was made of sandalwood, fitted with gold hinges and hasps, fastened with a soft bungi cord. A wood tray divided into compartments was inset in the top of the box. It contained military decorations, a sergeant's chevrons, gold teeth, polished finger bones, empty shell casings, a switchblade knife with a green serpent inlaid in the handle, a long strip of black hair wrapped inside a plastic bag.
Under the wood tray was a thick pack of pornographic photos held together with a rubber band. They were yellow with age, mounted on cardboard, and featured Orientals involved in every possible sexual act and position. But it was not these that shocked or sickened the sensibilities. The bottom of the box was layered with Polaroid color photos that made the eye film, the hand vaguely soiled at the touch: a freshly dug pit in front of which four peasant men and a woman stood bound and blindfolded; a man on his knees with his thumbs tied behind him, a disembodied arm pointing a pistol behind his ear; a man with a pesticide sack over his head, hung by his arms between two stone walls; grinning enlisted men posing at the end of a dirt street littered with bodies that had started to bloat; a woman strapped in a chair, her face and shirtless upper torso streaked with blood.