'They weren't trying to escape?'
'What are the odds of a cop having to shoot an escapee on two occasions?'
'Seems like old history, Mary Beth.'
'He hated those men because a degenerate got in our back window when I was three years old.'
My eyes shifted off her face.
'He died going in a house after a serial rapist. At night, without backup, with a "throw-down" taped to his ankle. You figure out what the plan was,' she said.
'You blame yourself?'
She thought about it. 'No,' she said. 'But you're not going to use me to take down Garland Moon or Darl Vanzandt or whoever it is you're thinking about.'
'I just ran into Brian Wilcox. If that guy's the cavalry, I think we're all going to be wearing Arrow shirts.'
She smiled in spite of herself. I sat on the edge of her bed and picked up her hand. I touched the freckles on her face. 'Pete and I'll take you home today, then bring supper over,' I said.
She rested her head on the pillow and squeezed the top of my arm.
The man who had replaced the murdered sheriff was named Hugo Roberts. If you asked him how he had made his living the last thirty years, he would answer, 'I ain't spent a whole lot of time in the private sector.' He'd been a county road hack, a deputy sheriff, a city patrolman, a bailiff, a jailer, and some said a volunteer on a firing squad in Utah. He was shaped like a lean pear and smoked constantly, even though he had already lost one lung and wheezed like a leaking inner tube when he talked.
He sat at the corner of the old sheriff's desk, flipping ashes into the spittoon, his narrow shoulders hunched into the cigarette smoke that swirled about his head.
'Did I lock up Darl Vanzandt? Do bears shit in the woods? Does my wife read the Bible all night and tell me I'm the reason our kids are ugly?' he said. 'Hell, yes. What else you want to know, Billy Bob?'
'Where's Darl now?'
'I had the little fucker shot.'
'Give it a break, Hugo.'
'All we got on him is some roofies. Far as I know, they're not even illegal.'
'Roofies?'
'Rohypnol. Ten times stronger than Valium. It's made overseas for insomnia. It tends to show up in date rape cases. How long you been gone from law enforcement?'
'Is he upstairs?'
'Get real, Billy Bob. His old man was down here with his lawyer at six this morning. I cain't charge him. The black man owned the stolen vehicle didn't get a license number and never saw a face… Look, I ain't sure myself it was Darl. There's a mess of customized cars hereabouts that same shade of red.'
'How many of them are owned by people like Darl Vanzandt?'
He spit, then wiped his mouth on his palm.
'Know and prove ain't a difference I should have to explain to a lawyer,' he said.
'I think the county found the right man for the job, Hugo.'
'The air-conditioning unit in here does about as much good as an ice cube on a woodstove. Make sure you close the door snug on your way out,' he said.
It was noon and the sun was white and straight up in the sky when I got home. I went into the library and took L.Q.' s revolver out of the desk drawer. I opened the loading gate, clicked back the hammer to half-cock, and rotated the cylinder until the empty sixth chamber came back under the hammer again.
Great-grandpa Sam carried his Navy .36s down to the bluffs on the Cimarron when he burned out the Dalton-Doolin gang and never had to pop a cap, I told myself.
'Wrong way to think, bud,' L.Q. Navarro said behind me.