Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'All right, I'll bite,' I answered.

'You don't tote it as a fashion statement. The other guy's got to know you cain't wait to use it. Elsewise, it's got the value of tits on a boar hog'

I eased the hammer down, locking the cylinder, and slipped the barrel back into the holster.

'You know what's really fretting you?' he said.

'Why don't you tell me, L.Q.?'

'It ain't that I got shot accidentally. It's because you believe it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been down in Coahuila vigilanting them dope mules.'

I kept my back to him. The sky outside was hot and bright, and dust was blowing in gray clouds out of the fields.

'Hey, the blood lust wasn't yours, bud; it was mine. I loved flushing them out of the poppies and blowing feathers when they ran. It could have been you instead of me,' he said.

'The new sheriff's corrupt.'

'That's like going to the whorehouse and saying the place is full of whores.'

'Everything was straight lines in Coahuila. It was us against them, and at sunrise we added up the score,' I said.

L.Q. didn't answer. I turned and looked at him. He stood with one arm propped against the bookshelves, staring at his foot, the brim of his Stetson shielding his face.

'You don't usually lack for words,' I said, my throat burning at what I knew was coming next.

'We mortgaged tomorrow for today, bud. Even for me, that thought is about like swallowing a piece of barbed wire,' he replied.

He walked toward the doorway, his back to me, his hands on his hips, splaying his coat out. I raised my hand to speak, then he was gone into the hallway and I heard the wind fling open the front door and fill the house with a creaking of boards and wallpaper.

I parked my Avalon behind the tin shed where Garland T. Moon worked as a welder and entered through the back door. The heat inside was numbing. A propane-fed foundry roared in one corner, a cauldron of melted aluminum wedged in the flames. Moon wore sandals without socks and a pair of flesh-colored gym shorts that were molded against his loins. He was bent over a machinist's vise, cutting a chunk of angle iron in half with an acetylene torch, his back spiderwebbed with rivulets pf sweat.

He heard me behind him, screwed down the feed on the torch, and pulled off his black goggles with his thumb. Dirty strings of soot floated down on his head and shoulders. His eyes dropped to my belt. He pulled at his nose.

'You come here to gun me?' he said.

'What's your hold on these kids?'

'It ain't no mystery. Cooze and dope. The high school clinic already gives them the rubbers. I just introduce them to what you might call more mature Mexican women.'

'You're a genuinely evil man, sir.'

'You got to stick a gun down in your britches to tell me that?' He laughed to himself and wiped his hands with an oil rag. The muscles in his stomach looked as hard as corrugated metal. 'You got your ovaries stoked up 'cause them boys poured cow shit on your son?'

'They almost killed a deputy sheriff last night.'

He picked up a can of warm soda from the workbench and drank, his throat working smoothly, his gaze focused indifferently out the door on the river.

'The doctors said I was supposed to be dead eight years ago. Said I was plumb eat up with cancer. I smell death in my sleep. It comes to somebody else first, bet

ter them than me,' he said. He wiped his armpits with the rag and threw it on the floor.

I looked at his softly muted profile, his recessed, liquid blue eye, the ridged brow that was like a vestige of an earlier ancestor. My forearm rested on the butt of L.Q. Navarro's revolver. I lifted the revolver from my belt, my palm folded across the cylinder, and laid it on the workbench.

'Pick it up,' I said.

He lit a cigarette, picked a particle of tobacco off his lip and dropped it from between his fingers.

'I cain't be hurt, boy. I live in here,' he said, and pointed to the side of his head. 'I learned it when a three-hundred-pound nigger stuffed a sock in my mouth and taught me about love.'