Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'Here's the street menu in Deaf Smith, Jack: purple hearts, black beauties, rainbows, screamers, yellow jackets, and China white if you want to get off crack. I hear Darl does it all. If you don't want to take a wake-up call, at least keep him away from my house.'

He set his cocktail fork on the side of his plate and started to speak. But Emma placed her hand on his forearm.

'We're sorry he bothered you. Call either Jack or me if it happens again. Would you like to order something?' she said.

'Blow it off. I can't blame you. The sheriff did too. But now he's dead,' I said.

They stared at each other.

'You didn't know?' I said.

'We just got back from Acapulco,' Jack said.

'Somebody came up behind him with an ax,' I said.

'That's terrible,' Emma said.

'He had a lot of enemies. A lot,' Jack said. But his eyes were fastened on thoughts that only he saw.

'I told the sheriff I think Darl killed Jimmy Cole. I don't know if there's a connection or not,' I said.

Emma's eyes were shut. Her lashes were black and the lids were like paper, traced with tiny green veins, and they seemed to be shuddering, as though a harsh light were burning inside her.

'Leave our table, Billy Bob. Please, please, please leave our table,' she said.

But later I was bothered by my own remarks to the Vanzandts. Darl connected with the sheriff's murder? It was unlikely. Darl and his friends didn't prey on people who had power. They sought out the halt and lame and socially ostracized, ultimately the people who were most like themselves.

The sheriff's widow was the daughter of a blacksmith, a square, muscular woman with recessed brooding eyes who wore her dark hair wrapped around her head like a turban. Whether she bore her husband's infidelities and vulgarity out of religious resignation or desire for his money was a mystery to the community, since she had virtually no friends or life of her own except for her weekly attendance at the Pentecostal church downtown, and the community had stopped thinking of her other than as a silent backdrop to her husband's career.

'The person done this was probably a lunatic got loose from some mental hospital,' she said in her kitchen.

'Why's that?'

'Cause it's what Davis Love always told me it'd be if it happened,' she said. (Davis Love was her husband's first and last name and the only one she ever called him by.) 'He said the man who killed him would probably be some crazy person, 'cause nobody he sent up to prison would ever want to see him again.'

She let the undisguised heat in her eyes linger on my face so I would make no mistake about her meaning.

'He left his mark on them?' I said.

'They tended to move to other places.'

I looked out the kitchen window at the rolling pasture behind her house, the neat red and white barn, an eight-acre tank stocked with big-mouth bass, the sheriff's prize Arabians that had the smooth gray contours of carved soap rock.

'I'm sorry for your loss,' I said.

'They might bad-mouth him, but he worked hisself up from road guard to high sheriff, without no hep from nobody.'

I nodded as her words turned over a vague recollection in my mind about the sheriff's background.

'He was an extraordinary person,' I said.

Her smile was attenuated, wan, a victorious recognition of the assent she had extracted from me. Then I saw it in her eyes. She had already revised him and placed him in the past, assigning him qualities he never had, as the roles of widow and proprietress melded together in her new life.

I had forgotten that the sheriff had started out his law enforcement career not as a cop but as a gunbull on a road gang, back in the days when the inmates from the old county prison were used to trench water and sewer lines and to spread tar on county roads. I remember seeing them as a boy, their backs arched with vertebrae, their skin sun-browned the color of chewing tobacco, thudding their picks into a ditch while the road hacks stood over them with walking canes that were sheathed on the tips with cast-iron tubes.

Moon had been one of those inmates.

At age fifteen raped on a regular basis by two gunbulls in the county prison.