Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

I told him what Moon had said.

'Why does he seem to have this ongoing obsession with you?' he asked.

'You got me.'

'You never ran across him when you were a Ranger or prosecutor?'

'Not to my knowledge.'

Down the street a construction crew was fitting a steel crossbeam into the shell of a building and a man in black goggles was tack-welding a joint in a fountain of liquid sparks.

'What kind of vocational training did Moon get inside?' I asked.

'He picked cotton. That's when he wasn't in lockdown… Why?'

'Moon's an arc welder. So was my father.'

'Big reach.'

'You got a better one?' I asked.

Late that evening the sheriff parked his new Ford pickup at his hunting camp above the river. He was proud of his camp. The log house on it was spacious and breezy, with cathedral ceilings, lacquered yellow pine woodwork, a fireplace built from river stones and inset with Indian tomahawks and spear points recovered from a burial mound, stuffed tarpon and the heads of deer and bobcats mounted on the walls and support beams, a green felt poker table cupped with plastic trays for the chips, a freezer stocked with venison and duck, ice-cold vodka and imported beer in the refrigerator, glass gun cases lined with scoped rifles.

He showered and dried off in the bathroom, then walked naked into the kitchen and opened a bottle of German beer, turned on the television set atop the bar, and punched in the number of an escort service in San Antonio on his cordless phone.

From the kitchen window he could see the sun's last fiery spark through the trees that rimmed the hills above the river, the gray boulders that protruded from the current, his dock and yellow-and-red speedboat snugged down with a tarp, the flagstone terrace where he barbecued a whole pig on a spit for state politicians who introduced him with pride to their northern friends as though he were a charismatic frontier reflection of themselves.

Not bad for a boy with a fourth-grade education who could have ended up road-ganging himself.

The sheriff had always said, 'We all work for the white man. You can do it up in the saddle with a shotgun, or down in the row with the niggers. But there's no way you ain't gonna do it.'

The woman who answered the number in San Antonio said his visitor would be there in two hours.

The sheriff drank the last of his beer and let the foam slide down his throat. His massive torso was ridged with hair, his back and buttocks pocked with scars from the naked screws on football shoes that had thundered over his body when he had played defensive lineman in a semipro league at age nineteen. He peeled the cellophane off a cigar, lit it, wet the match under the faucet, and dropped it into a plastic-lined wastebasket under the counter. Then he seemed to have turned from the sink, perhaps when a shadow fell across his neck and shoulders.

The ax was one he recognized. It had rested on a nail in the shed above his woodpile. He had honed it on a grinding stone until its edge looked like a sliver of ice.

The first blow was a diagonal one, delivered at a downward angle. The blade bit into the sheriff's face from below the left eye to the right corner of the mouth.

That was the first blow. The others were struck along a red trail from the kitchen to the gun case in the living room, where the sheriff gave it up forever and lay down among the stuffed heads that had always assured him he was intended to be the giver of death and never its recipient.

* * *

chapter sixteen

Sunday morning, before the sun was above the hills, I watched from behind the crime scene tape while the paramedics rolled the sheriff's body on a gurney to the back of an ambulance. Marvin Pomroy nudged me on the arm, then walked with me toward my Avalon.

'You got any thoughts?' he asked.

'No.'

'He was dead at least two hours before the hooker got there. The intruder could have cleaned the place out. But he didn't. So it's a revenge killing, right?'

'A lot of TDC graduates hated his guts,' I said.

Marvin looked back at the log house. His face was dry and cool in the wind, but the skin jumped in one cheek, as though a string were pulling on it.

'Two Secret Service agents were in here earlier. What's their stake in a guy who spit Red Man on restaurant floors?' he said.