Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'Who cares?'

'It's Bunny who started it all. I'm talking about Roseanne. You listening? Bunny pretends he's a victim or something. Believe me, 'cause he's got a messed-up face doesn't mean he's a victim.'

'Not interested.'

He made an unintelligible sound and his face seemed to wrinkle with disbelief.

'I can give you Bunny, man,' he said.

'I'm not interested, because you're a liar, Darl. Your information is worthless,' I said.

He inched farther down the fence rail, as though somehow he were getting closer to me.

'You want Garland Moon? I can do that too. I got stuff on that geek can make you throw up,' he said.

'Nope.'

'What's with you?'

I pulled Beau's left front hoof up between my legs and pried a rock out of his shoe with my pocketknife. I could hear Darl's shirt puffing and flapping in the wind.

'You and Marvin Pomroy got to work some kind of deal,' he said. 'The judge said I fart in the street, I'm going to the Walls. I'm still a kid.'

I put down Beau's left hoof and stooped under his neck and picked up his other front hoof. The wind blew my hat across the lot into the barn.

'My old man,' Darl said.

'What?'

'That's who you're really after. You want him, I can give him to you.'

I stood erect and stared at him. No shame, no expression except one of expectancy showed in his face. I folded my pocketknife blade in my palm and walked toward him and placed my hand on the smoothness of the fence rail next to his. His skin was sunburned inside the peach fuzz on his cheeks; there was a small clot of mucus in the corner of his mouth.

'I don't want anything you can give,' I said.

'Wha—'

'I'm going to take it from you on the stand,' I said.

I turned away from him and stroked Beau's face and took a sugar cube from my shirt pocket and let him gum it out of the flat of my hand. A moment later I heard Darl's car engine roar, then the dual exhausts echo off the side of the house and fade away in the wind.

* * *

chapter twenty-eight

The evening before opening statements I drove to Lucas Smothers's house and took a new brown suit, white shirt, and tie off the clothes hook in the back of the Avalon and knocked on the door. Lucas appeared at the screen with a wooden spoon in one hand and a shot glass in the other.

'You got your hair cut,' I said.

'Yeah, just like you told me.'

'What are you doing with a whiskey glass?'

'Oh, that,' he said, and smiled. 'I'm baking a cake for my father's birthday. I use it for measuring. Come on in.'

I followed him into the kitchen, the plastic suit bag rattling over my shoulder.

'What's that?' he asked.