“I’m heading back home,” Pete said.
“No, you stay here. This is your place. You never have to leave it, not for any reason.”
“Them gangbangers are no good, Billy Bob. You don’t see what they do when people like you ain’t around.”
I set down my cane pole and walked toward the Mercury before it reached the riverbank. Cholo Ramirez pulled to a stop and got out, his baggy khaki trousers hanging loosely from his hips, his ribbed, white undershirt molded to his physique. His tan shoulders seemed to glow with the sun’s fire.
“How much can I tell you and be protected?” he said.
“You mean by client-lawyer privilege?”
“Whatever.”
“You’re not my client. I’m not taking on any new clients”
He gazed at the river, his hands opening and closing at his sides.
“Esmeralda married a maricón, man. He beats up queers ’cause that’s what he is. She told me how they made love on an air mattress on the Comal River. I was getting sick,” he said.
“I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place, Cholo,” I said.
“Me and Earl Deitrich got a history. I can jam him up real bad, man. But I got to have guarantees.”
“What’s he done to you?”
“It’s what he’s doing to Esmeralda. She ain’t no gangbanger, man. She makes As in college. He sent a lawyer to the house. Five thousand dollars for her to get lost.”
“You want more?” I said.
Cholo stepped closer to me. I could smell the heat in his skin. For the first time in months I saw the silhouette of L.Q. Navarro on the edge of my vision, his ash-gray hat shadowing his face, his white shirt glowing against his dark suit, his index finger wagging cautiously.
“Esmeralda ain’t somebody’s pork chops you pay for by the pound. She thinks Jeff loves her. If he loves her, how come he lets his old man treat her like she’s the town pump?” Cholo said.
“How did you know I was back here?” I asked.
“I walked around back. I looked in your barn. I seen you and the little boy riding your horse out here.”
“You walked around back?”
“You got a hearing problem? I’m talking about my sister. What, I didn’t have permission to walk behind your fucking house?”
“Come to the office, Cholo. We’ll talk this stuff over. Maybe I can help,” I said.
His brow was creased into rolls of grizzle, his eyes pulled close together like BBs.
“I’m all mixed up. I can’t think. It makes my head hurt,” he said.
I walked away from him and picked up my cane pole and swung the bobber out into the current. I kept my back turned until I heard the Mercury engine roar to life and the weeds in the field clatter under the front bumper.
L.Q. Navarro leaned with one shoulder against the willow tree, rolling a cigarette. He popped a lucifer match on his thumbnail and cupped it to the cigarette, and I saw the flame flare on his mustache and dark eyes and grained skin.
“That boy will cook your liver on a stick,” he said.
Once in a while you hear about truly wicked abuses inside the system: In California, rival Hispanic and black gang members forced into a concrete-enclosed recreation area while a gunbull waits to blow away a particularly troublesome inmate as soon as the fighting starts; over in Louisiana, an inmate kept for years in solitary confinement, until he permanently damages his brain by beating his head against an iron wall; a Haitian immigrant sexually tortured with a plumber’s helper in the rest room of a New York City police station.
You hope it’s only a story. Or that, if true, the culpable parties have been fired or jailed themselves.
That’s what you hope.