Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'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.

Upstairs, inside the jail, the turnkey unlocked Lucas's cell. The man with the misshaped head and pot stomach in the cell to the right, whose name was Jimmy Cole, walked up and down, tapping his fists one on top of the other, oblivious to our presence. The man on the left, Garland T. Moon, sat naked on his bunk. He had been exercising, and he wiped the sweat off his stomach with a towel and grinned at me. His shrunken, receded left eye glistened with a rheumy, mirthful light.

The turnkey walked Lucas and me down a short hallway to a small windowless room, with a wood table and two wood chairs and a urine-streaked grated drain in the concrete floor.

Lucas sat down, one hand clenched on his wrist. He watched my face, then licked his lips.

'What's wrong, Mr Holland?'

'You led me to believe you didn't know Roseanne Hazlitt outside of Shorty's.'

'I didn't know her real good, that's all.'

'You're lying.'

'I drove her home a couple of times after Shorty's closed. We didn't go out reg'lar or nothing.'

'No, all you did was get in her pants.'

He swallowed dryly. There were discolorations in his cheeks, like small pieces of melting ice.

'You want to spend the rest of your life in Huntsville? You keep lying to me, and Marvin Pomroy is going to grind you into sausage… What are you hiding, Lucas?'

He stared fixedly at his hands, but his eyes seemed to be looking over a cliff into a canyon that had no bottom.

'She said she might be pregnant.'

'She wanted you to marry her?' I asked.

'No, sir. She said she was gonna fix some guy good. She said, "I'm gonna show him up for what he is. People around here gonna be real surprised. I bet I can get my story on TV and make this whole town look like two cents."'

'Why didn't you tell me this?'

'Cause maybe that baby's mine. Maybe y'all would think I had reason to kill her 'cause I didn't want it.' He breathed through his nose and dug at a callus with his thumbnail, a hard light in his eyes.

'I've seen the autopsy, Lucas. She wasn't pregnant.'

'Then why—'

'She was probably late.'

He dropped his hands in his lap, his face empty, like someone whose head is filled with white noise.

'I got to get away from them two back at the cells,' he said.

'Don't pay attention to them.'