Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

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That afternoon I sat in Marvin Pomroy’s office and gazed out the window at the courthouse lawn.

“You want to tell me why you’re here?” he asked.

“It’s been a slow day.”

“With your clients? I take that back. You don’t have clients. You supervise a crime wave.”

But it was obvious I saw no humor in his remark. He took off his rimless glasses and sighted through the lenses as though he were looking for blemishes.

“Earlier I saw you go into the drugstore and buy four different newspapers,” he said. “I wonder why a defense attorney would do that.”

“Beats me,” I said.

“One of your clients has confessed a particularly atrocious crime or told you something else that really bothers you. Since most of your clients are mentally impaired, you want to believe he’s just hallucinating. Tell me I’m wrong,” he said.

I cut my head noncommittally.

“Jerk yourself around all you want. You hate these sleazebags worse than I do,” he said.

“You have a Little League schedule handy?” I asked.

“Clever,” he said.

But my day with Marvin Pomroy wasn’t over. Just before 5 P.M. I looked down from my office window into the burned-out end of another ninety-nine-degree afternoon and saw two sheriff’s department cruisers and a van loaded with rifle-armed deputies park in the shade on the north side of the courthouse. The deputies got out on the sidewalk, looking hot and weary, their uniforms and campaign hats powdered with dust.

I called Marvin.

“What’s going on with Hugo’s goon squad?”

“Glad you asked. Your clients, Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump? They’re up in the hills above Earl Deitrich’s place. How do we know that? Because Jessie Stump put a steel-barbed arrow two inches from Earl’s head this afternoon.”

“Why would Jessie want to hurt Earl?”

“Could it have something to do with the fact Doolittle thinks Earl is the Antichrist? Could Doolittle possibly be behind it? Search me.”

“Maybe Earl and Jessie have found each other.”

“Which church do you attend, Billy Bob? The only reason I ask is that I’d like to avoid it.”

Tuesday evening Wilbur Pickett made a mistake. He stopped at Shorty’s for barbecue, then left Kippy Jo there while he went down the road to sell a man a welding machine.

She sat at a plank table on the screen porch and felt the breeze come up and the shadows lengthen on the river and the sun cut the tops of the cliffs with a yellow glare before it settled into an indistinct purple haze beyond the pasturage to the west.

The sounds around her were those of young people who spoke too loudly, who gave the waitress their orders as they would to a post, who were casually profane, as though the validation of their own power could be achieved only by their assault on the sensibilities of others.

But inside her mind she saw Wilbur’s pickup truck turning into the welding shop down the road and she knew he would be back in fifteen minutes, just as he said he would, and she ate her food and listened to the sounds of the wind and the river threading around the boulders in the current and paid no attention to the voices from the next table.

Then she heard a car engine that was too powerful for the frame it was mounted on, the driver double-clutching as he shifted down and turned into the parking lot, the throaty rumble of his dual Hollywood mufflers bouncing off the front of the building like a glove in the face.

The voices at the next table died when the driver came through the screen door.

He saw her but he didn’t speak. He seemed to study the people at the next table, his body swaying, the boards bending under his hobnailed boots, an odor like smoke, alcohol, and body grease emanating from his clothes.

He walked to the bar and came back out with an iced mug of draft beer in his fist. His shoulder struck the doorjamb and the beer splashed over the mug’s rim onto the floor.

He was standing behind her chair now, the wall fan wafting across his body, blowing the rawness of his odor on her skin. He steadied himself with one hand on the back of her chair, the muscles of his upper arm swelling with blood, his knuckles touching her shoulder blade.