Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Hanging around the playground at the elementary, trying to give them kids candy bars.”

“We have an ordinance about giving away candy bars?”

“You can be cute, Billy Bob. But I’ve dug children out of leaf piles and garbage dumps. Y’all do that in the Rangers?”

“I came over here for only one reason, Hugo. You planted

those bonds in Wilbur Pickett’s house. You’ll wish you didn’t.”

He grinned and picked up a pen from his blotter and popped off the cap. He worked the head of the pen in and out of the cap.

“You seen that Mexican girl lately, what’s her name, Esmeralda something?” he said.

I walked across the lawn to the main courthouse, where Skyler Doolittle was sitting on a wood bench inside a holding cage between the jailer’s office and the back elevator. In his long-sleeve white shirt and wide red tie, his bald head and fused neck looked exactly like the domed top of a partially repainted fire hydrant.

“I’ll have you out of here in about a half hour. But I think it’s a good idea you not go around the school yard again,” I said.

“I wouldn’t harm them kids,” he said.

“I know you wouldn’t,” I said. His eyes that were between gray and colorless seemed to take on a measure of reassurance. “By the way, my investigator checked around and didn’t find any indication Earl Deitrich is trying to put you in an asylum. So maybe you were worried unduly on that score, Mr. Doolittle.”

“Those sheriffs deputies called me a sex pervert. They said they’d had their eye on me. They said the state’s got a special place for my kind.”

I laced my fingers in the wire mesh of the cage. He looked like the most isolated and socially and physically rejected human being I had ever seen.

“Some Mexican gangbangers made mention of you to me, Mr. Doolittle. Maybe they’re the same kids who caused the death of a Jewish man in Houston. I think you’re a decent and good man, sir. I suspect your word is your bond. In that spirit I ask you to leave Earl Deitrich alone,” I said.

He seemed to study my words inside his head, his mouth flexing at the corners.

“If you ask it of me. Yes, sir, I won’t give him no more trouble,” he said.

When I walked past the elevator, one that looked like a jail cell on cables, two uniformed deputies were struggling with a waist-chained black inmate in county whites. The inmate’s left eye was cut and white foam issued from his mouth.

“What are you staring at? Sonofabitch drank out of a fire extinguisher,” one deputy said.

The second deputy looked at me with recognition, his arm locking simultaneously around the black man’s struggling head.

“Hey, your client, the freak in the cage? We pick him up again on the same beef, he’s going out of here a steer,” he said.

That evening a tornado destroyed an entire community south of us and killed over thirty people. I rode Beau, my Morgan, out into the fields and watched the dust blowing on the southern horizon and the rain clouds moving like oil smoke across the sun. I turned Beau back toward the house just as the rain began to march across the fields and dimple the river.

The sky turned black and the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees. I turned on the lights in the barn and tied on a leather apron and pried a loose shoe off Beau’s back left hoof. A car turned off the highway into my drive, paused for a moment by the side of the porch, then rolled slowly to the front of the barn.

Its headlights were on high beam and shone directly into my eyes.

I picked up a hammer off the anvil and stood just inside the opened doors of the barn. The headlights went off and I saw a chopped, sunburst 1961 T-Bird, with chrome wire wheels and an oxblood leather interior, full of Mexican kids. Ronnie Cruise cut the engine and walked through the rain into the barn.

He wore baggy black trousers and a form-fitting ribbed undershirt and a rosary with purple glass beads around his neck; his shoulders looked tan and hard and were beaded with water.

“That’s quite a car,” I said.

“Me and Cholo built it. I done a lot of custom work for people around here,” he said. His eyes dropped momentarily to the hammer in my hand. “You think we’re here to ’jack your Avalon, man?”

“You tell me.”

“I didn’t mean to dis you at the garage. But see—” He held his fingers up in the air and looked at them as he spoke, as though they held the words he needed. “See, I heard what the lady said when my back was turned, about two guys going off a roof. Like, that’s the story somebody told you. But you didn’t have the respect to ask me about it. I don’t think that’s too cool, man.”

“So maybe it’s none of our business.”