The next morning was Saturday, a blue-gray, misty, cool dawn that brought Mary Beth Sweeney to my back door at 6 a.m., still in uniform from the night shift, her thumbs hooked into the sides of her gunbelt.
I held open the screen. 'Come in and join Pete and me for breakfast. We're fixing to go down to the river in a few minutes,' I said.
She removed her hat, her eyes smiling into mine.
'I'm sorry for the other night,' she said.
'You got to try some of Pete's fried eggs and pork chops. They run freight trains on this stuff, isn't that right, Pete?'
He grinned from behind his plate. 'I always know when he's gonna say something like that,' he said.
We rode down the dirt track in my car to the bluffs. The water in the river was high and slate green, tangled with mist, the current eddying around the dead cottonwood trees that had snagged in the clay.
Five feet under the surface was the top of an ancient car, now softly molded with silt and moss. In the winter of 1933 two members of the Karpis-Barker gang robbed the bank in Deaf Smith and tried to outrun a collection of Texas Rangers and sheriffs' deputies from three counties. Their car was raked with Thompson machine-gun bullets, the glass blown out, the fuel tank scissored almost in half. My father watched the car careen off the road, plow through the corn crib and hog lot, then ignite with a whoosh of heat and energy that set chickens on fire behind the barn.
The car rolled like a self-contained mobile inferno across the yellow grass in the fields, the two robbers like blackened pieces of stone inside. The ammunition in their stolen Browning Automatic Rifles was still exploding when the car dipped over the bluffs and slid into the river. It continued to burn, like a fallen star, under the water, boiling carp that were as thick as logs to the surface.
Today the car was a home to shovel-mouth catfish that could straighten a steel hook like a paper clip.
Mary Beth got out of the Avalon and stretched and hung her gunbelt over the corner of the open door. She watched Pete baiting his hook down on the bank, as though she were forming words in her mind.
'The man at my apartment, his name's Brian. I was involved with him. But not anymore. I mean, not personally,' she said.
'Take this for what it's worth, Mary Beth. Most feds are good guys. That guy's not. He put you at risk, then he tried to lean on me.'
'You?'
'I suspect y'all are DEA. The FBI doesn't send its people in by themselves.'
'Brian leaned on you?'
'Tried. This guy's not first team material.'
Her eyes were hot, her back stiff with anger.
'I have to make a phone call,' she said.
'Stay here, Mary Beth.'
'I'll walk back.'
I took her gunbelt off the corner of the door.
'Nine-Mike Beretta,' I said.
'You want to shoot it?'
'No.' I folded the belt across the holster and handed it to her. The nine-millimeter rounds inserted in the leather loops felt thick and smooth under my fingers. 'I don't mess with guns anymore. Take my car back. Pete and I will walk.'
Then she did something that neither Pete nor I expected. In fact, his face was beaming with surprise and glee as he looked up from the bank and she hooked one arm around my neck and kissed me hard on the mouth.
That afternoon the district attorney, Marvin Pomroy, rang me at home.
'We've got Garland Moon in the cage. He wants to see you,' he said.
'What's he in for?'
'Trespassing, scaring the shit out of people. You coming down?'