Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'Not DEA?'

'No.'

'One of them was named Brian?'

'That's right, Brian Wilcox. A real charmer. You know him?'

'Maybe. You want to go to breakfast?'

'After looking at what's inside that house?'

'The sheriff was a violent man. He dealt the play a long time ago.'

'Where the fuck do you get your ideas? Pardon my language. Violent man? That's your contribution? Thanks for coming out, Billy Bob. I don't think my morning would have been complete without it.'

I drove up a sandy, red road that twisted and dipped through hardwoods and old log skids and pipeline right-of-ways that were now choked with second growth.

Up ahead, a dark, polished car with tinted windows and a radio antenna came out of an intersecting road and stopped in front of me.

The man whom Mary Beth called Brian got out first, followed by two others who also wore aviator's sunglasses and the same opaque expression. But one man, who had rolled down a back window part way, did not get out. Instead, Felix Ringo, the Mexican drug agent, lit a cigarette in a gold holder and let the smoke curl above the window's edge.

'Step out of your car,' Brian said.

'I don't think so,' I said.

The man next to him opened my door.

'Don't be shy,' he said.

I turned off the ignition and stepped out among them. The air was motionless between the trees and smelled of pines and the rainwater in the road's depressions. Brian raised his finger in my face. It stayed there, uncertainly, as though he were on the brink of doing something much more serious and precipitous.

'I don't have the right words. Maybe it's enough to simply say I don't like you,' he said.

'You're over the line, bud,' I said.

'You're not a police officer anymore, you're not an assistant US attorney, you're a meddlesome civilian. That fact seems to elude you.'

'You going to move your car now?'

'No.' His finger was stiff, the nail thin and sharp and trembling below my eye. 'Stay away from crime scenes that don't concern you, stay away from the lady… You got anything clever to say?'

'Not really. Except if you put your finger in my face again, I'm going to break your jaw. Now, get your fucking car out of my way.'

I went back home and weeded the vegetable garden. I curried out Beau and cleaned his stall and set out catfish lines in the tank and shoveled out the chicken run and worked buckets of manure into my compost pile with a pitchfork, my calluses squeezing tighter and tighter on the smooth wood of the handle, until I finally gave it all up and flung the pitchfork into a hay bale and went inside.

The palms of my hands rang as though they had been stung by bees, as though they ached to close on an object that was hard and round and cool against the skin and flanged with a knurled hammer that cocked back with a loud snap under the thumb.

Moon had said some people are made different in the womb. Was he just describing himself, or did the group extend to people like me and Great-grandpa Sam?

Or Darl Vanzandt?

Through my open front windows I heard the deep, throaty rumble of the Hollywood mufflers on his '32 Ford, then a cacophony of straight pipes and overpowered engines and chopped-down Harleys behind him.

He turned into the drive, alone, the exposed chrome engine so fine-tuned a silver dollar would balance on the air cleaners. His friends pulled onto the shoulder of the road, on my grass, their tires crumpling the border of my flower beds. They cut their engines and lit cigarettes and lounged against their cars and trucks and vans and motorcycles, as though their physical connection to a public road gave them moral license to behave in any fashion they wished.

Darl swung a dead cat by its tail, whipping it faster and faster through the air, and thudded it against the screen door.