Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'I want to hire you. To file a suit. They took a cattle prod to me. They put it all over my private parts,' he said.

'My client's deposition has no meaning for you now. You're home free on murder beefs in two states. I wouldn't complicate my life at this point.'

'That little bitch they planted in the cell, what's his name, Lucas Smothers, he told y'all a mess of lies. I never had no such conversation with Jimmy Cole. I been jailing too long to do something like that.'

I looked at the backs of my fingers on top of the desk blotter. I could hear the minute hand on my wall clock click into the noon position. Outside the window, the oak trees were a deep green against the yellow sandstone of the courthouse.

'Don't misjudge your opponent, sir,'

'I said.

'I know all about you. But you don't know the first thing about me. Me and my twin brother was in a place where they switched your legs raw just because you spilled your food on the floor. You ain't gonna find that on a rap sheet. When he was nine years old they pushed epilepsy pills down his throat till he choked to death. You doubt my word, you go look in the Waco Baptist Cemetery.'

'You're a sick man.'

'There's some that has said that. It never put no rocks in my shoe, though.'

I got up from my chair and walked to the door and turned the key in the lock.

'Get out,' I said.

He remained motionless in the chair, his face looking away from me, the back of his neck flaming with color. He mumbled something.

'What?' I said.

He didn't repeat it. When he walked past me, his eyes were fixed straight ahead, a single line of sweat glistening on the side of his face like an empty blood vein.

* * *

chapter seven

At sunrise Sunday morning I put on my pinstriped beige suit and a short-sleeve white shirt and a pair of oxblood Tony Lamas, walked down to the barn and lifted my saddle off a sawhorse in the tack

room and threw it on the back of my Morgan. The breeze blew through the doors on each end of the barn and the air was cool and smelled of wildflowers, fish spawning, oats and molasses balls, green horse dung, hay that had turned yellow in the corners, and well water spilling over the lip of the corrugated windmill tank.

L.Q. Navarro sat on top of a stall, the heels of his boots hooked onto a plank, his body slatted with sunlight.

'You should have taken that .38-40 that gal tried to give you,' he said.

'It's Sunday, L.Q. Take a day off.'

'It's them kind of days the shitbags crawl out of the storm sewers. Tell me it wasn't fun busting caps on them dope mules down in Coahuila.'

'Adios, bud,' I said, and flicked my heels into the Morgan's ribs and thudded across the soft carpet of desiccated horse manure in the lot.

I crossed the creek at the back of my property and rode through a stand of pines, then up an incline that was humped with blackberry bushes into Pete's backyard. He waited for me on the porch, dressed in a pair of pressed jeans and a starched print shirt and freshly shined brown shoes. I reached my arm down and pulled him up behind the cantle.

The Morgan's hooves clattered on the flattened beer cans in the yard.

'Was you really baptized in the river?' he said.

'Sure.'

'I never heard of a river-baptized person converting to a Catholic'

'Somebody's got to keep y'all honest.'

He was quiet a long time, rocking against me with the horse's steps.