“Nothing. A guy tried to put moves on me. I never saw him before.”
“Get in the car.”
He remained motionless. She looked back down the road where the emergency lights of a sheriffs cruiser were coming around a bend.
“Did you hear me? Get in the car. Now,” she said.
He sat down in the passenger seat and closed the door and did not look back at his friends. His body seemed to press back into the leather seat, as though it were dead weight gathered into foam rubber, when Esmeralda fish-tailed the Mercury out onto the asphalt.
9
Sunday morning I shined my boots and put on a suit and saddled Beau and rode up a slope that was humped with blackberry bushes. Then I was inside the sun-spangled shade of pine trees, Beau’s hooves thudding softly on the moist carpet of pine needles, and a moment later I came out into the hard-packed dirt backyard of a half-breed Mexican boy named Pete who went with me to Mass every week.
Pete was eleven years old and had a haircut like an inverted shoe brush. Even though he had an alcoholic mother and no father, he had already skipped one grade in school and could think circles around most adults. I leaned from the saddle and pulled him up on Beau’s rump.
“I got a good one for you,” he said. “An old man was playing checkers on the front porch of his store with a cocker spaniel. This California guy pulls in for gas and says, ‘Mister, that must be the smartest dog that ever was born.’
“The old man says, ‘I don’t think he’s so smart. I done beat him three games out of five.’ ”
Pete howled at his own joke.
We rode along the crest of the slope that bordered my property. Our shadows flowed horizontally along the ground through the vertical shadows of the trees, then we came out on a dusty street, where the tile-roofed church and Catholic elementary school stood. Beyond the pines in the churchyard I could see the small white cafe where Pete and I always ate breakfast after Mass. Ronnie Cruise’s sunburst T-Bird was parked in the lot, the front door open for the breeze. Ronnie had reclined the seat and was stretched back on it with his forearm across his eyes.
“Take Beau into the shade. I’ll be along in a minute,” I said to Pete.
“You know that guy?” Pete asked.
“I’m afraid so.”
“He’s a gangbanger, Billy Bob. He don’t belong here.”
“He probably wants to go to confession,” I said, and winked.
But Pete saw no humor in my remark. He walked with Beau and the tethering weight into the pines, repeatedly looking back at me, as though somehow I had made an alliance with an enemy.
“You want to see me?” I said to Ronnie.
“Yeah, that lady you come to the shop with, she was jogging by your house. She said I’d find you here. Esmeralda didn’t come home last night.”
“I’m supposed to know where she is?”
He scratched his face. “Do you?” he asked.
“No.”
“I went out to Jeff Deitrich’s place. Some guy named Fletcher stopped me at the gate. He said if I was interested in the gardening job, I could come back tomorrow. He said not to knock on the front door.”
He took his sunglasses off the dashboard and clicked the wire arms together.
“Anything else you want to tell me?” I said.
He gave
me a quizzical look. “You bent out of joint about something?” he asked.
“Four firemen were burned to death on Earl Deitrich’s property. I think you came by my house the other night to cover your ass.”
He got out of the car and put on his shades.