Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“I want you to lay some flowers on Skyler’s grave. Put it on my tab.”

“You don’t have a tab. You’re not my client … Hello?”

At 8 A.M. I walked down the first-floor hallway of the courthouse and entered Marvin Pomroy’s office right behind him.

“You’re going to tell me Jessie Stump got in touch with you after terrifying the Rollins kid?” he said.

“Stump isn’t my client. I have nothing to do with him. That’s an absolute,” I said.

“Three years ago we had him deadbang on a check-writing charge. With his sheet we could have put him away for five years. You discredited an honest witness and got Stump off. How’s it feel?”

“I need your help.”

“You’re outrageous.”

“Jeff Deitrich has targeted the Ramirez girl and my boy Lucas.”

Marvin hadn’t sat down at his desk yet. The heat went out of his face and he moved some papers around on his ink blotter, his eyes lowered.

“You talk to Hugo Roberts?” he asked.

“Waste of time.”

“What do you want from me?”

“You have influence with the Deitrichs. They want to stay in your favor. Get them to pull Jeff’s plug.”

“That’s not too complimentary.”

“Ronnie Cruise says he’s going to take down a couple of Jeff’s buds. Maybe cancel their whole ticket.”

Marvin brushed at his nose and fiddled with his shirt cuffs.

“That’s still not why you came here, though, is it?” he said.

“I’ve thought about remodeling a couple of those kids myself. Maybe going all the way with it.”

“The last portion of this conversation didn’t occur. On that note, I’d better get to work,” Marvin said, and picked up a sheet of typed paper from his blotter and studied it intently until I was out the door.

That afternoon I came home from work and rode Beau along the irrigation ditch at the bottom of the pine-wooded slope that gave onto the backyards of the rundown neighborhood where Pete lived. To my left was the acreage that Lucas’s stepfather, who worked for me on shares, had planted with okra, squash, corn, cantaloupe, strawberries, melons, and beans. I passed the water-stained plank that Pete used to walk down from his house to mine, then rode up on the bench into shadow to a weathered wood shed where my father once kept the tools that his Mexican field hands used.

I let Beau graze along the banks of the ditch and twisted the key in the big Yale lock on the shed door and went inside. The air was warm and smelled of metal and grease. Dust and particles of hay glowed in the cracks of light through the walls, and a deer mouse skittered inside the well of an automobile tire. The door was caught on a wood sled, one with boards for runners that at one time we drew with a mule down the rows when we picked beans and tomatoes into baskets. I propped the sled against the wall, touching the dirt-smoothed and rounded edges of the runners and for just a moment seeing my father framed against the late sun, drinking water from a ladle, then replacing it on the bucket that sat between the baskets. Then I felt someone’s eyes on my back.

In the far corner L.Q. Navarro sat on top of a sawhorse, his arms propped beside him for support, his long legs crossed at the ankles.

“Your friend Pomroy is gonna fret his mind till he takes the easy way home. Which means he’s gonna lock up that Mexican gangbanger, what’s his name, Ronnie Cruise,” L.Q. said.

“Marvin’s a good man,” I replied.

“He wants to sleep at night, bud. His kind don’t win wars. Them kids are scum. You cap ’em and bag ’em and don’t study on it.”

I began pulling a pile of junk apart in one corner until I found what I had come for. It was made of red oak, and was heavy and splinter-edged, three inches thick, two feet high, and the width of a door. Two screw bolts, with eyelets as big as half dollars, were twisted vertically into the top of the wood. I hoisted it up on my shoulder.

“I’m gonna lock up. You coming?” I said to L.Q.

“You know I’m right.”

“I sure don’t,” I said, and closed the door on L.Q. and snapped the lock into place.