Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

I said goodbye to my client and walked past Jeff and Peggy Jean toward my car. Then I stopped and looked at their backs until they both felt my eyes on them.

“Why, Billy Bob. Come have a drink with us,” Peggy Jean said. And she seemed to say it with genuine warmth.

“I’d like a word with Jeff,” I said.

The smile went out of her face. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

“Would you step over here, please, Jeff?” I said.

He grinned good-naturedly, as though tolerating a harmless aberration, then came toward me, resting his club on his shoulder.

“What’s up, Billy Bob?” he said.

“You exploited my son’s friendship. You used his home, then dumped your wife there. Now Lucas is taking your weight with Ronnie Cruise,” I said.

“I can’t control what others do. You sure you don’t want to hit some balls or have a drink?”

“You’re quite a guy,” I said.

He winked at me, his eyes full of ridicule, and went back to the tee. Peggy Jean had never moved, her face stamped with the insult of being rebuffed publicly in her own club.

She waited for me to speak or say goodbye. But I didn’t. Behind me, I heard a suck of air as Jeff cut his club viciously into a golf ball.

On the way home I felt my stomach suddenly seize and constrict, as though the lining were being stapled by a machine. My breath went out of my mouth, and my chest hit the steering wheel. Up ahead, I saw Temple Carrol working in her yard, pulling weeds on her hands and knees out of a hydrangea bed and throwing them behind her on the grass. I turned into her drive and sat very still behind the wheel, my face sweating.

She glanced over her shoulder, then continued her work. I wiped my face on my sleeve and opened the door and got out. Then I had to sit down again.

Temple walked toward me, wiping her hands on her shorts, blowing her breath up into her face to remove a strand of hair from her eyes.

“You all right?” she said.

“I must have eaten the wrong thing.”

She cupped her hand on my forehead.

“You’re burning up. I’ll drive you home,” she said.

“I’m fine.” I tried to smile. “Saw Jeff Deitrich at the country club. He was born to it.”

“Earthshaking news.”

“You hear anything about Earl Deitrich having a big infusion of cash in his business?”

“Move over and quit worrying about the Deitrichs,” she said, and nudged me sideways into the passenger seat.

A few minutes later she walked me to my front door, one hand under my arm.

“Get in bed and I’ll check on you in a couple of hours,” she said.

“What about my car?”

“I’ll bring it back. Do what I say.”

I went up to my bedroom on the third floor and switched on the floor and ceiling fans and opened the windows wide and lay down on top of the sheets in my underwear. In minutes my pillow was soaked. Outside the window, in the setting of the sun, I could see the vast green rolling landscape to the west, as though I were looking into the vastness of the world itself, with all its shadows and mysteries and its alluring red-tinged precipices that fell away into darkness.

I went into the bath and showered and lay down again but found no relief. It was dark now, and in my mind I saw the flashes of gunfire in the arroyo where L.Q. Navarro died, relived the moments when bullets pierced my own body like hot pokers, floated once again in the warm water that Morpheus prepared for his friends.

Kippy Jo Pickett had called me a giver of death. Her words were like spittle in the face, and I could not dismiss or forget them. L.Q. and I killed Mexican drug mules on the pretext they would otherwise never be made accountable for their crimes; but the truth was we killed them because we personally loathed what they were and what they did and we took enormous satisfaction in leaving them where they fell, a card twisted in the mouth, for their friends to find.