Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

What were his words? Tore my insides out and laughed while they done it… Y'all gonna get rid of me the day you learn how to scrub the stink out of your own shit.

Was the splattered, red trail from the kitchen to the gun case in the sheriff's log house just the beginning of our odyssey with Garland T. Moon?

That night I called Mary Beth Sweeney and got her answering machine.

'It's Billy Bob. I'll buy you a late dinner—' I said, before she picked up the receiver.

'Hi,' she said.

'Are you Secret Service?'

'No!'

'I had a run-in with this character Brian Wilcox this morning. Why are Treasury people interested in the sheriff's murder?'

'Ask Brian Wilcox.'

'Come on, Mary Beth.'

'I don't want to talk about him.'

Through my library window I could see the moon rising over the hills.

'How about dinner?' I said.

'It's a possibility.'

'I'll be by in a few minutes.'

'No, I'll come there.'

'What's wrong?'

'Brian watches my place sometimes. He's weird…' Then, before I could speak again, she said, 'I'll take care of it. Don't get involved with this man… See you soon.'

The breeze was cool that night, the clouds hammered with silver. It had been an unseasonably wet spring, and small raindrops had started to click on the roof and the elephant ears under my library windows. I walked out into the barn and the railed lot behind it and fed Beau molasses balls out of my hand. When he had finished one, he would bob his head and nose me in the shirt pocket and face until I gave him another, crunching it like a dry carrot between his teeth. I stroked his ears and mane and touched the dried edges of the wound someone had inflicted on his withers, and tried to think through all the complexities that had attached themselves to the defense of Lucas Smothers and had brought someone onto my property who would take his rage out on a horse.

I could hear the windmill's blades ginning in the dark and the bullfrogs starting up in the tank. My back was to the open barn doors and the wind blew across me and Beau as though we were standing in a tunnel. For no apparent reason his head pitched away from the molasses ball in my palm, one walleye staring at me, and then he backed toward the far side of the lot, his nostrils flaring.

I turned and just had time to raise one arm before a booted man in shapeless clothes swung a sawed-off pool cue at the side of my head. I heard the wood knock into bone, then the earth came up in my face, the breath burst from my chest, and I heard a snapping, disconnected sound in the inner ear, like things coming apart, like the sound of seawater at an intolerable depth.

I was on my elbows and knees when he kicked me, hard, the round steel-toe of the boot biting upward into the stomach.

'You like roping people in bars? How's it feel, motherfucker?' he said.

Then a second man kicked me from the other side, stomped me once in the neck, lost his balance, and kicked me again.

My Stetson lay in the dirt by my head, the crown pushed sideways like a broken nose. I could hear Beau spooking against the rails, his hooves thudding on the mat of desiccated manure.

But a third man was in the lot too. He wore khakis and snakeskin boots, and hanging loosely from the fingers of his right hand was a curved knife, hooked at the end, the kind used to slice banana stalks. He dropped it in the dirt by the booted man's foot.

The booted man gathered it into his right hand and laced the fingers of his left into my hair and jerked my head erect.

'Just so you'll know what's going on, we're cutting off your ears,' he said.

For just a second, through the water and blood and dirt in my eyes, I saw a flash of gold in the mouth of the man who had dropped the knife to the ground.

I brought my fist straight up between the thighs of the man who held me by the hair, sinking it into his scrotum. I saw his body buckle, the knees come together, the shoulders pitch forward as though his lower bowels had been touched with a hot iron.