Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Why don’t you do it yourself?” Wesley said.

Jeff had a rolled magazine in his back pocket. He removed it and used the hard-packed end to hit Wesley on the forehead, biting down on his lip, as though he were on the edge of far greater violence. “Because I don’t get in the same water with corpses, zit-face. Want to wise off some more or live out the night?” he said.

Wesley undressed down to his Jockey undershorts and sat on the sand and put flippers on his feet and slipped the canvas straps of the air tank over his shoulders and the mask on his face. Warren hung a rubber-encased light from his neck and placed the camera and strobe in his hands.

“You never had a tank on?” he asked.

“Yeah, he’s a regular in the Bahamas, Warren,” Hammie said.

“What if I cain’t find the car?” Wesley said.

“Don’t come up,” Jeff said.

Wesley waded out into the water, the rocks cutting his feet, then stepped off a shelf and went under.

It was easier than he thought. The light around his neck turned the bottom of the quarry into a crusted, unthreatening slope that dipped down through the greenish-yellow haze to the Mercedes. Small bait fish and pieces of grass swam at his mask and flanked off on each side of him, and he breathed the air easily from the mouthpiece and even blew his mask clear as Warren had shown him.

Then his light lit up the inside of the Mercedes and he almost vomited into his mouthpiece.

The face of the man on the driver’s side looked straight into Wesley’s, his lidless eyes like gray marbles, while a fish eel ate his tongue.

Wes aimed through the camera’s lens and clicked the shutter five times. Then, with his heart tripping against his ribs, he let the camera float loose on its wrist cord and did something he never thought he would have the courage to.

He prised the back door loose from where it had lodged in the silt, then he was inside the car with the two dead men, his air tank clanging against the roof, their bloated skin brushing against his. A dreadlock wrapped across his mask like a leech, a forehead tipped against his jaw. His hands trembled while he worked, his fingernails and knuckles dipping into what felt like wet cornmeal, then a bilious fluid surged out of his stomach into his throat and he gagged violently and lost his mouthpiece and swallowed water that locked inside his windpipe like cement.

His lungs were bursting, his eyes bulging out of his head when he broke the surface into moonlight and air.

He fell on the sand, gasping, his body shaking, his Jockey undershorts strung with dead weeds.

“You get the pictures?” Jeff said.

“Hang them over your fucking mantel,” Wesley said.

Jeff uncapped a bottle of sparkling water and drank it while Wesley stumbled toward the convertible.

It was Monday afternoon that Wesley told me all this in my office.

“Who’s developing the pictures?” I asked.

“Warren’s old man owns some porno places in Houston. Warren uses their darkroom.”

“The Costens are in pornography?”

His ruined face, with its harelip and wide-set, reptilian-green eyes, looked into space, as though the question had nothing to do with his life and hence was not one that anyone would expect him to answer.

“What did you do inside the Mercedes?” I said.

“The black guys was mushy and swole up like garbage bags. Like they was full of gas and wanted to float. I unsnapped their seat belts and left both doors open.”

A grin scissored across his face, his eyes seeming to separate on the dough pan of his face and dance with light.

Score one for the little guys, I thought.

What happened that night out at Val’s Drive-In started over either Chug Rollins’s sister or Jerry Lee Lewis’s music, depending on whom you heard it from.

Background: Chug’s sister had the same weight problem as her brother, co

mpounded by a notorious reputation for profligate sexual behavior. Two months ago she had made national news when she was prosecuted for the statutory rape of one of her male students at a Fort Worth high school.