Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Why’d you say I was the man?” he asked.

“Cholo’s dead. That means you’re going on the stand.”

“For what?”

“To tell everyone about Earl Deitrich’s dealings with Cholo.”

“That’s called hearsay. Even I know that much.”

“It’s called a subpoena. You’ll be in court of your own accord or you’ll be there in handcuffs, Ronnie.”

“I’ve heard it before. I’m gonna be picking up the soap in the county bag. It don’t flush.”

“Cholo was murdered,” I said.

“You mean the guy busted a vein in Cholo’s head?”

“I’ve got a friend named Doc Voss. He’s buds with the pathologist who did the postmortem on Cholo. The pathologist thinks a toxic substance of some kind was rubbed in Cholo’s face. Something that acts like cyanide.”

“Thinks?”

“This ex-con, Johnny Krause, the guy who got Cholo into the ring? He loaded up a vice snitch with angle iron and put him in the San Jacinto River for Sammy Mace.”

Ronnie pulled on an earlobe, then picked up a soft cloth off a workbench under the carport and rubbed it on the hood of his T-Bird.

“Sammy Mace’s dead. He got blown away by a cop a year or so back,” he said.

“I think Johnny Krause found a new employer. I’d like to ask him that, but nobody can find him. You have the same information on Earl Deitrich that Cholo did. Where’s that leave you, Ronnie? You want Johnny Krause looking you up?”

He held up one palm and ticked at a callus with his thumb, staring at it as though it held special meaning for him. He hooked his thumbs inside the pockets of his jeans and looked at a spot six inches to the right of my head and sucked in his cheeks, then cleared his throat before he spoke.

“Your boy, the one sleeping with Esmeralda? He don’t run scared. But you think I do. Is it ’cause I’m Mexican and you think I’m dumb or ’cause I got a sheet and I ain’t as good as other people and you can work my stick? I think you better go, Mr. Holland. I don’t want you coming around my mother’s house no more.”

Later that afternoon I looked out my back porch and saw Pete sitting on the top rail of Beau’s fence. I picked up a glass of iced tea and took a can of Pepsi from the icebox and walked out to the lot. The breeze smelled of rain out in the hills and the windmill had turned north, its blades ginning furiously.

“What you doing out here by yourself, bud?” I asked.

“You said we was gonna look for arrowheads.” He ignored the can of Pepsi I balanced on the rail.

“Sorry, I forgot. Let’s hitch the trailer on the truck and get Beau in.”

But his face remained preoccupied. He kept squeezing a half dollar in his palm and looking at the red lines it made in his skin.

“I seen Ms. Deitrich in town,” he said.

“Oh yeah, Ms. Deitrich.”

“She was coming out of the grocery. She had two big sacks in her arms. One was fixing to split. I tried to take it from her before the milk bottle broke on the cement.”

He stopped and watched Beau walking from the pasture toward the lot.

“Go on,” I said.

“She said I was gonna make her drop it. She said, ‘You’re in the way. Take your hands off the bag.’ ”

“She didn’t mean anything by it.”

“You weren’t there. She was mad. The bag split all over her hood. She said, ‘See what you made me do?’ ”