'I cain't get on at any clubs. What am I gonna do, keep working for my dad the rest of my life?'
'It might beat chopping cotton with a gunbull standing over you,' I said and started the car and drove down the street before he could get out.
'Why don't you treat me like I'm three years old?' he said, his face red with anger and embarrassment.
'I want the names of all Darl Vanzandt's friends,' I said.
That night I sat at my library desk and read from Great-grandpa Sam's faded, water-stained journal that he had carried in a saddlebag through Oklahoma Territory.
L.Q. Navarro sat in a burgundy-colored stuffed chair in the corner, fiddling with his revolver, an armadillo-shell lamp lighted behind his head. He spun the revolver on his finger and let the ivory handles snick back flatly in his palm. The blue-black of the steel was so deep in hue it looked almost liquid. He opened the loading gate with his thumb, pulled back the hammer on halfcock, and rotated the cylinder so that one loaded chamber at a time clicked past his examining eye.
'That Garland T. Moon? You can take it to him with fire tongs. That boy's not a listener,' he said.
'I'm trying to read, L.Q.,' I said.
'You going to find your answers in there? I don't hardly think so.'
I rested my brow on my fingers so I wouldn't have to look at him.
I read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal:
In the Indian Nation, July 4, 1891
I always heard women in the Cherokee Strip was precious few in number and homely as a mud fence, but it was not held against them none. The Rose of Cimarron surely gives the lie to that old cowboy wisdom. She is probably part colored and part savage and perhaps even related to the Comanche halfbreed Quanah Parker. She is also the most fetching creature I have ever set eyes on. I would marry her in a minute and take her back to Texas, but I am sure I would not only be run out of the Baptist church but the state as well, provided she did not cut my throat first.
If the Lord made me for the cloth, why has my lust and this woman come together at such an inopportune time?
L.Q. stuffed his revolver in his holster and walked to the ceiling-high window and looked out at the hills. I could see the thick, brass cartridges in the leather loops on his gunbelt, and the Ranger badge clipped just in front of his holster.
'Your great-grandpa got rid of whiskey and guns in his life, but his propensities come out in a different way,' he said.
'What's that mean?'
'Garland Moon, Jimmy Cole, that Mexican drug agent with the grease pencil mustache? You don't run them kind off with a legal writ, Billy Bob.'
He took his revolver back out of his holster and hefted it from one palm to the other, the barrel and cylinder and moon-white grips slapping against his skin.
A pair of headlights turned into my drive, and through the library window I saw Mary Beth Sweeney pull her cruiser to the back of my house.
I stepped out on the back porch and opened the screen door. Her portable radio was clipped to her belt.
'You on duty?' I said.
'For another hour. I need to talk with you,' she said. She stepped inside the porch and took off her campaign hat and shook out her hair. 'You can't just unload a bomb like that and walk off from someone.'
'Last night?'
'Yeah, last night. I don't want somebody hanging his guilt on me like I'm some kind of dartboard.'
'That wasn't my intention.'
'Oh no? Like, "Hey, I killed my best friend, and you remind me of it, so see you around and thanks for the great evening."'
'Where do you get the in-your-face attitude?' I said.
'I knew it would be a mistake coming here.'
'No, it wasn't,' I said. I held my eyes on hers and realized what it was that drew me to her. The spray of pale freckles, the dark brown curls that had a silklike sheen in them, the obvious decency and courage in her behavior, these were all the characteristics that had probably defined her as a girl and had stayed with her into her maturity. But her eyes, which were bold and unrelenting, masked a level of past injury that she didn't easily share.