Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

A paramedic was the first person to the cruiser. When he opened the door, Mary Beth's campaign hat rolled out on the grass, the crown marbled with blood.

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chapter twenty-three

The next morning I got off the hospital elevator on the fifth floor and started through the waiting area toward the nurses' station. Brian Wilcox and two other federal agents came around the corner at the same time.

'I don't believe it. Like a fly climbing out of shit every place I go,' he said.

'I don't want to 'front you today, Brian.'

'What makes you think you can call me by my first name?'

He wore a blue suit and tie and white shirt. His hair had the dull sheen of gunmetal, with silver threads in the part. He stood flat-footed in front of me, heavy, solid, his shoulders too large for his suit. The cleft chin, the cologned, cleanly shaved jaws, the neatness that he wore like a uniform, did not go with the expression in his eyes.

'Let me by, please,' I said.

'She's in that room because those kids went through her to get to you.'

'If they did, Garland T. Moon put them up to it.'

'Same problem. You can't stay out of his face. But other people end up in the barrel.'

'Moon wandered into something out at the old Hart Ranch. He's just not sure what it is. But you probably know all this. Run your game on somebody else.'

I started past him, but he grabbed my arm. I flung it away and felt my fingers accidently hit his chest. His face flared and he grabbed at me again, with both hands, his chin raised, his teeth bared. I shoved him away and stepped back, raising my arm in front of my face, then the other two agents were on him, splaying their hands against his chest.

'Get going,' one of them said over his shoulder.

'The problem's not mine.'

'Don't fool yourself, ace,' he replied.

Mary Beth was sitting up, with a pillow behind her back, when I entered

her room. Her right arm was bandaged, the skin purple and red between the strips of tape, swollen tight and hard against the dressing like a wasp sting. Her hair was tied on top of her head with a bandanna to keep it off the dressing where a steel rod had incised the scalp almost to the bone.

'You look good,' I said.

'Sure I do.'

'When can you go home?'

'Today. There's no big damage done.'

She wore no makeup, and in the slatted sunlight through the window her face looked opaque, as though it hid thoughts she herself had not dealt with.

'Did you sleep last night?' I asked.

'Yeah, some.'

'When I was shot, I couldn't close my eyes without seeing gun flashes again. That's the way it is for a while.'

Her gaze roved over my face and seemed to go inside my eyes.

'What is it?' I asked.

'The other day you said you didn't know who I was,' she said. 'My father was a motorcycle cop in Oklahoma and a high sheriff in Kentucky. He was a good man, but he had a special hatred for sex predators. He killed two of them after they were in custody.'