Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“I don’t hold no personal grudge,” Wilbur said.

“I understand you have a piece of evidence that bears looking at,” Marvin said.

“It’s what them worthless deputies stuck in there and didn’t take back out,” Wilbur said.

Hugo Roberts screwed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it with his lighter, blowing the smoke out in the sunset.

“If this ain’t the silliest waste of time I can think of, I don’t know what is,” he said.

“If you’re going to smoke, do it downwind from me, Hugo,” Marvin said.

The independent fingerprint man from San Antonio picked up the bearer bond gingerly with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a plastic bag.

“Y’all put me in mind of somebody tweezering corn out of pig shit. What in the hell is this supposed to prove?” Hugo said.

“I imagine all your deputies’ fingerprints are on file, as well as your own, Hugo. You’ll make those immediately available to us, won’t you?” I said.

“I don’t have nothing else to do. Did your boy smash up a bunch of cars with his stepdaddy’s pickup truck?” he replied. He looked out at a freight train crossing a trestle in the hills and held his cigarette close to his lips with two fingers and puffed it uninterruptedly, the skin of his face the same nicotine shade as his fingers in the late sunlight.

I had just hung up the phone after talking to Marvin Pomroy when Wilbur came through my office door at noon the next day. He continued to stand rather than take a chair, his teeth clamped down on the corner of his lip, his hat held with both hands in front of his belt buckle.

“Hugo Roberts’s prints and Kyle Rose’s are on the bond. Yours aren’t,” I said.

“Kyle Rose, the deputy somebody strung a deer arrow through?” Wilbur said.

“That’s the guy. You didn’t steal those bonds. They were planted, Wilbur. Marvin Pomroy just said as much.”

“What’s it mean?”

“I have some paperwork to do, then you’re going to be out of it.”

He sat down in a chair and rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes burrowing into the carpet.

“What about Kippy Jo?” he asked.

“She’s still on the hook.”

“One deal’s part of the other, ain’t it? If I hadn’t been set up, Bubba Grimes wouldn’t have been sent out there to kill me and Kippy Jo.”

“I thought you’d be happy.”

He got up from the chair, my words never registering in his face.

“I can leave the state now, cain’t I?” he said. “Excuse me?”

“Them boys investing in my pipeline deal down in Venezuela? I showed them that core sample from up in Wyoming. They’re ready to rock.”

I propped my elbow on the arm of my swivel chair and rubbed the corner of my chin.

“To drill a damn oil well you’d leave your wife by herself?” I said.

“It’s money all this is about. She ain’t standing trial for killing Bubba Grimes. She’s standing trial ’cause her husband’s got something Earl Deitrich wants.”

“You want to buy and sell him, don’t you?” I said.

His skin was still slick with the heat and moisture from outside, and he wiped his throat and looked at the shine his sweat made on his calluses. He wiped his hand dry on his shirtfront and said, “I was one second from being a world champion. Lacking that one second makes me a guy who digs postholes for rich people. You think Ms. Deitrich’s a high-class woman. Maybe she is. But when I worked out at their place, she never give me a drink of water that wasn’t in a jelly glass. Kippy Jo Pickett is gonna have rubies on her fingers big as bird’s eggs, and there ain’t nobody in this county, particularly not no dadburn Deitrichs, gonna look down on us.”

The next afternoon I loaded Beau in his trailer and we drove north of the river to the base of the ravine where Pete and I often hunted arrowheads and the flint chippings washed down from Tonkawa workmounds. I hung L.Q. Navarro’s holstered .45 and gun belt from one side of the pommel and my rucksack from the other and rode up the incline along the creekbed, Beau’s shoes raking dully on the stones along the bank.