Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

I heard his mother open the screen behind us and smelled the cigarette smoke that curled away from her hand into the clean vibrancy of the morning air.

“What ch’all doin’?” she said.

“I had this old glove lying around. I thought Pete might get some use out of it,” I said.

“He ain’t eat his breakfast yet,” she said.

“He’ll be right in. How you been doing, Wilma?”

But she closed the door without answering. I winked at Pete and handed him the glove and removed my Stetson from his head.

“Are lawyers supposed to lie, Billy Bob?” Pete asked.

“Not a chance.”

“You’re mighty good at it.”

“Yeah, but don’t tell anyone,” I said.

“I ain’t.” His eyes squinted shut with his grin.

Two days later Kippy Jo Pickett’s bail was set a

t seventy-five thousand dollars. After she was taken back up to the women’s section of the jail, I caught Marvin Pomroy in the corridor outside the courtroom.

“They’re mortgaging their place to make the bail,” I said.

His eyes clicked sideways behind his glasses and looked somewhere else. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“This is all over one man’s pride and avarice,” I said.

“Sure it is,”he said. He set his briefcase on the arm of a wood bench and unsnapped the locks on it. He removed an eight-by-ten crime scene photo and put it into my hands without bothering to look at me. Bubba Grimes’s mutilated eyes were sealed with the coagulated blood that had welled out of the entry wounds. “Keep it. I have a dozen color slides or so for the jury,” he said.

That evening Pete and I bought a bucket of fried chicken and cane-fished for shovelmouth under a weeping willow on the bank of the river. The sun was a dull red on the western horizon, as though it were surrendering its heat to the darkness that lay beyond the earth’s rim, and when the wind blew from the river, the grass in the fields turned pale in the light slanting out of the clouds and the wildflowers seemed to take on a new color.

“Are Wilbur Pickett and his wife going to the pen?” Pete asked.

“Not if I can help it.”

Pete’s face was pensive, the way it became when he put the adult world under scrutiny.

“People are saying Wilbur’s wife shot that fellow ’cause they were all stealing from Mr. Deitrich,” he said.

“They’re wrong.”

His brow furrowed as another question swam in front of his eyes, like a butterfly that wouldn’t come into focus.

“If Mr. Deitrich is trying to put your clients in jail, how come you and Ms. Deitrich are such good friends?” he asked.

“Something just pulled your cork under.”

He jerked on his pole. The cork and weight and hook came flying out of the water into the grass.

“He must have taken off,” I said.

“Durn, I knew you was gonna say that.”

Then Pete looked past my shoulder at a low-slung, chopped-down Mercury coming through the field. In the muted light its tangled colors took on the deep reddish-purple hue of a stone bruise.