Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'It's a nice day. I think I'm going to get back in it,' I said, and started to rise.

'I'm talking to you,' he said, touching me in the sternum with the balls of his fingers. 'You brought up that cop-killer stuff in front of my friends. I let it go. But that don't mean I forgot.'

'You still live in River Oaks?'

'So what?'

'It's probably the richest neighborhood in the United States. That cop had a wife and four kids. You providing for them, Sammy?'

I walked past him, out the door and into the shower. I turned on the hot water in my face and let it fountain over my head and shoulders. But my encounter with Felix Ringo and Sammy Mace was not over. They were at the far end of the shower, lathering under the nozzles, soap roiling off their swimming-pool tans, men who knew that youth might fade but money and power did not.

I didn't want to look at or engage them again, but an image registered in the corner of my eye, one that connected somehow with memory and dreams and the voice of L.Q. Navarro. On Felix Ringo's right side, low in the back, was a six-inch scar, as thick as a night crawler, welted, perforated with stitch holes along the edges.

I walked into the dressing area and opened my locker. Felix Ringo followed me, drying his head with a wadded towel, his body hair glowing against a bank of lighted mirrors behind him. He rubbed a stick of deodorant under his arm.

'I hear your PI is checking out the kid I sent you,' he said.

'Maybe.'

'That kid's a good witness. You a guy who sees plots all the time. Don't fuck it up.'

'Who carved on your kidney?' I said.

The glare in his eyes made me think of a phosphorous match burning inside brown glass.

* * *

chapter twenty-two

Friday afternoon Temple Carrol asked me to walk across the square with her to the Mexican grocery store. The wind was warm, even in the shade of the trees on the courthouse lawn, and we sat in the back of the grocery, under the fans by the old soda fountain, and ordered tacos and iced tea. She read from the notebook opened by her elbow while she ate.

'Virgil Morales is everything he says he is,' she said. 'Hangs with some biker pukes called the Purple Hearts, in and out of juvie since he was thirteen, a couple of times down in county for dope and barroom bullshit. He's also had three paternity suits filed against him. In other words, your average Mexican gangbanger who operates on two brain cells and believes his Hollywood career is right around the corner.'

The overhead fan blew a strand of hair in her face.

'How do you think he'd do on a lie detector?' I asked.

'A kid who'd probably roll a joint during the Apocalypse? You tell me.'

'How about the girl he says was with him?'

'She lives in Austin, all right, but she's no college student. Not unless you count being a barmaid in a rathskeller next to the campus. Anyway, she's been in detox once, has butterflies tattooed on her shoulders, and gets off on bikers. You might think about hiring a speech coach for her.'

'Why's that?'

'Every third word in her vocabulary rhymes with duck.'

'She gives the same account as Virgil?'

'She says Lucas was passed out in his truck and Roseanne Hazlitt was throwing up in the bushes. She said they tried to wake him up and couldn't do it.'

'Lucas was passed out when the first cruiser got to the murder scene

,' I said. 'Drunks don't wake up from stupors and kill other people and go to sleep again. You did a great job, Temple.'

She didn't reply. She looked at the front screen door, her eyes as empty as glass.

'What's wrong?' I said.