Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

It was amazing what a good night’s sleep could do. His worries about Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump now seemed childish and inconsequential. Besides, they had invited whatever troubles befell them. Sometimes you had to shave the dice a little bit or nobody went down. That’s what Hugo said. Skyler Doolittle had killed children while DWI, then had been picked up next to a school yard. How many free passes does a guy like that get? So they put some child porn in his room. Big deal. Rather that than this guy wipe out another busload of kids. Bight?

Stump was another one who should have been fed into a tree shredder. The whole family had lived on a muddy, brush–tangled oxbow of the river for generations, inbreeding, shining deer, tapping into the county power line, stringing forest fires when the lumber mill wouldn’t hire them, shooting holes in a Job Corps water tower.

No, a tree shredder wouldn’t do it, Kyle thought. It would take napalm. Bring in fighter jets and nape the entire sinkhole, sterilize the earth they had walked on so the virus couldn’t infect the gene pool worse than it already had.

In fact, as the day wore on, Kyle wished Doolittle or Stump would have a go at him. They all made noise about getting even once they were on the street. How they’d like to eat a toppling soft-nosed round from his scoped deer rifle? Whap. Just like blowing the ba

ck out of a watermelon.

That evening he went outside with his bow and quiver of arrows and pinned a fresh paper target on the hay bales he had stacked against his toolshed. The paper was shiny and soft, like oilcloth, when Kyle rolled it out and flattened it against the bale, and the image of the white-tailed deer seemed to shimmer with life in the fading light. From thirty-five yards Kyle drove a half dozen arrows into the deer’s neck and sides, the fletched shafts quivering solidly upon impact.

It was a beautiful evening. The sky was purple above the hills, and the shadows seemed to drape the trees with a mosslike softness, like fir trees in a rain forest. He took a bottle of tequila out of an ice bucket on his shooting table and drank two fingers neat from a shot glass and chased it with Carta Blanca. This was the good life. It might even get a lot better after Hugo Roberts destroyed his remaining lung with cigarettes. Who was a better candidate for Hugo’s replacement than Kyle Rose?

He lay his bow on the shooting table and walked to the perforated paper target and began pulling the arrow shafts from the bales of hay. Rain was moving out of the south, dimming the fields in the distance, clicking now on the asphalt county road at the foot of his property. The air was dense and cool, like air from a cave, and the pine trees shook in the wind and scattered pine needles across the top of Kyle’s trailer. For just a moment he thought he heard a tin can tinkle on a wire.

A bolt of lightning crashed in a field across the road and illuminated the trees, burning all the shadows from the clearing, and Kyle saw the tinkling sound was only the wind playing tricks on him. A solitary drop of water struck his head, hard, like a marble, and he finished gathering the arrow shafts from the hay bale.

When he turned around he saw a man in a yellow raincoat and shapeless fedora by the shooting table. The man’s face was dark with shadow, but there was no doubt about what he was doing. He had notched an arrow, one with a filed and barbed point, on the bowstring and was pulling back the bow with the power of a man whose strength seemed more than human.

He heard the arrow whiz toward him, a sound like the air being scissored apart. He threw his hands in front of his face and tried to whirl away from the arrow’s impact but instead took the point high up under his armpit. He felt the shaft traverse his lungs, felt the gift of breath and oxygen taken from him as quickly as the ruptured bladder of a football collapsing against the toe of a cleated shoe.

He felt blood rising into his throat now, his chest breaking into flame, the arrow’s shaft catching under his right arm each time he tried to reach for the .25-caliber hideaway that was strapped to his ankle.

The man in the yellow raincoat and fedora walked toward him in the rain, notching another arrow on the bowstring. Kyle’s fingers fluttered on the grips of the .25 automatic, then he freed it from its holster and tried to raise it in front of him. The hatted man kicked it from his hand as though it were a toadstool.

The second arrow pierced Kyle’s jaws and embedded in the soft earth under the side of his face. In his mind’s eye he saw himself as a fish cast upon land, red flowers issuing from his mouth, the pollen blowing across a pair of prison work boots.

He breathed hard through his pinioned cheeks, his eyes trying to absorb a last glimmer of gold light on the river’s surface.

15

The following Monday I stood at my office window and watched Marvin Pomroy cross the street, his starched white shirt crinkling in the sunlight. He disappeared into the alcove on the first floor of my building, and although I couldn’t see him now, I knew he was mounting the stairs three at a time, as he always did. Moments later he sat down in front of my desk and wiped his glasses with a Kleenex. His face was egg-shaped, pink with heat, but not a hair was out of place.

“Boiling out there, huh?” I said.

He touched at his forehead with his shirtsleeve and ignored the question.

“The casts from the crime scene are of prison work shoes, the same kind we issue at the jail. Doolittle and Stump were both wearing them when they broke loose from the bus. They both wear size eleven, same size as the casts,” he said.

“Doolittle’s not a killer, Marvin,” I said.

“That was an eighty-pound bow. Doolittle has the strength to pull it. Stump doesn’t.”

“Stump’s a meth-brain. He destroyed his brother-in-law’s house by running back and forth through the walls. He stuffed a Mexican’s head in a drainpipe at Snooker’s Big Eight.”

But I could see Marvin’s attention already starting to wander.

“A paramedic over at County says you brought a little half-breed boy into emergency receiving. You wanted his lungs checked out so he didn’t develop pneumonia from a near drowning,” Marvin said.

“That’s right.”

He got up from his chair and stood at the window and looked down at the street. “It happened around New Braunfels? At a swimming party for an orphans group or something?” he asked.

“This is why you came over here?”

“Peggy Jean and Earl Deitrich have a cottage down there. They sponsor a swim party for orphans once or twice a year.”

“What’s your point, Marvin?”