Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'Your honor,' I said.

'Mr Pomroy,' she said.

'I have nothing else for this witness,' he said.

Temple Carrol handed me a note over the spectator rail. It read, Garland Moon's at your office and won't leave. You want him picked up?

Stonewall Judy granted a twenty-minute recess, and I put a raincoat over my head and walked across the street and up the stairs of my building. Moon sat in the outer office, wearing a gray, wide-necked weight lifter's shirt, with palm trees and Venice Beach, California ironed on the front, and tennis shoes and gray running pants with crimson stripes down the legs. His face knotted with self-satisfied humor when he saw me.

'Got you away from your pup. I 'spect you study a lot more on me than you admit,' he said.

'Go inside my office,' I said.

He picked himself up lazily from the chair, arching a crick out of his neck, flexing his shoulders. When he went through the doo

rway into the inner office, he casually scratched a match on the wooden jamb and lit a cigarette with it.

'Billy Bob, I hope someone kills that man,' Kate, my secretary, said.

I went into the inner office and closed the door behind me. Moon stood at the window, one finger pulling the blinds into a V, staring down at the wet street, at the people who moved along on it, oblivious to the pair of blue eyes that followed them.

'A rich person made me a deal. Kind of work a man like me can handle,' he said.

'Get to it, Moon.'

'Money ain't no good to me. I want the place should have been mine. At least part of it.'

'You want what?'

'Ten acres, on the back of your property, along the river there. I'll build my own house, one of them log jobs. With a truck patch and some poultry, I'll make out fine.'

'What do I get?'

'I'll fuck whoever you want with a wood rasp. I done things to folks you couldn't even guess at.'

'I think your benefactor will use you for a golf tee, Moon.'

I saw the heat climb from his throat into his face.

'There's a kid hereabouts thinks he's a swinging dick 'cause he can throw a football—' Then Moon caught himself, his mouth drawn back on his teeth.

'You molested a little Negro girl when you were sixteen. That's why my father fired you off the line,' I said.

He walked to my desk and mashed out his cigarette. His arms were still damp from the rain and his muscles knotted and glistened like white rubber.

'The little girl lied. It was her uncle done it,' he said.

'You were at Matagorda Bay when my father was killed in 1965.'

His eyes lighted and crinkled at the corners.

'You're hooked, ain't you?' he said.

'Nope, it's just time for you to find another wallow. Deal with that wet rat that's eating out your insides.'

He sucked his teeth, then scraped a thumbnail inside one nostril, his expression hidden. 'You got a mean streak, boy, but I know how to put the stone bruise down in the bone,' he said.

He strolled through the outer office into the hallway, dragging one finger across the secretary's desk.