Her stare broke.
'Come in. I just baked a pecan pie,' I said.
'I'd better not.'
I put my hand under her forearm.
'You have to,' I said.
She bit down on her bottom lip.
'I need help with this Mexican drug agent,' I said.
'For just a minute.' She walked ahead of me and sat at the kitchen table, with her hat crown-down in front of her.
'Felix Ringo told me he was at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. Punch him up on the computer for me,' I said.
'The federal computer, you're saying?'
'You got it.'
'What's this School of the Americas?'
'It's supposed to be counterinsurgency training. But their graduates have a way of murdering liberation theologians and union organizers or anybody they don't approve of.'
I placed a piece of pie and cup of coffee in front of her. She turned a tiny silver spoon in her cup, then put the spoon down and gazed out the window.
'I'm not saying I have access. But I'll do what I can,' she said. Static, then a dispatcher's voice squawked on her portable. 'I'll have to take a rain check on the pie.'
She walked out onto the porch, both hands on the brim of her campaign hat.
I picked up one of her hands and traced my fingers down the inside of her arm and brushed her palm and touched her nails and the back of her wrist and folded her fingers across mine.
'You're really a nice lady,' I said.
The wind filled the trees outside and blew through the screens, and a loose strand of her hair caught wetly in the side of her mouth. I removed it with my fingertips, then looked in her eyes and saw the consent that I knew she rarely gave, and I put my hands on her arms and kissed her on the mouth, then did it again, then slipped my arms around her and touched her hair and the hard muscles in her back.
I felt a warm exhalation of her breath against my cheek, like that of a swimmer taking a self-disciplinary pause, then her palms pressing on my chest, and I was looking into her face again, the light brown freckles, the brightness of her eyes. She pursed her lips, then winked and was gone into the yard and the shadows and the moonlight and her cruiser, all that fast.
I stood in the drive and watched her back out into the road and pull away behind the row of poplar trees and myrtle bushes that bordered my front yard.
Down the road, I heard a second car engine start up, then a pair of headlights flared in the road and a sheriff's cruiser passed my driveway, with two men in it, headed in the same direction as Mary Beth. The man in the passenger's seat seemed to have his arm propped up on the sill so anyone watching from my house could not identify him.
I called 911 and told the dispatcher a drunk man with a gun was shooting at automobiles in front of my home.
* * *
chapter eleven
A half h
our later I stood in the front yard and watched the last of five cruisers from the sheriff's department, including Mary Beth Sweeney's, drive away. Temple Carrol had seen the emergency lights from her house down the road and had arrived only a few minutes ago. 'Somebody shooting at cars? I didn't hear any gunfire,' she said.
'I saw two guys in a cruiser follow that new deputy from my house, so I muddied up the water,' I replied.
'Mary Beth Sweeney? What's she doing at your house?'
'I wanted her to run this Mexican drug agent for me.'