BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  'We're out of here, Jack. Right now,' Emma said.

  Mary Beth cupped her hand around Vernon's arm.

  'Walk with me, sir,' she said.

  But she knew it was unraveling now, in the way that dreams take you in high-speed cars over the edges of canyons and cliffs.

  Sammy Mace walked up behind her and punched her with one finger between the shoulder blades.

  'No cunt talks to me like that. Hey, did you hear me? I'm talking here. Turn around and look at me,' Sammy said, and punched her again with his finger.

  She slipped her baton from its ring and whipped it across Sammy's left arm. Even from ten yards away, Bunny Vogel said he heard the bone break.

  Sammy's face went white with pain and shock. He cradled his arm against his chest, his mouth trembling. Then he extended his right hand, like an inverted claw, toward the man in the ponytail.

  'Give it to me!' he said.

  Mary Beth pushed Vernon Smothers away from her.

  'Down on the ground, on your face! Do it, both of you, now!' she said to Sammy and the man in the ponytail.

  Then she saw Sammy lunge toward his friend and try to pull a .25-caliber automatic from a small holster inside the friend's coat. She swung the baton again, this time across the side of Sammy's face, and shattered his jaw. It hung locked in place, lopsided, blood that was absolutely scarlet issuing off his tongue. His glasses lay broken on the grass.

  Sammy collapsed to his knees, then grabbed at her legs and at the nine-millimeter on her hip, while the man in the ponytail at first pushed her, then watched stupidly as his .25 automatic fell from its holster into Sammy's lap.

  The man in the ponytail tried to disentangle himself and back away while Sammy pulled the trigger impotently on the automatic and fought to get the safety off.

  Mary Beth gripped her nine-millimeter with both hands but fired high with the first shot at Sammy Mace and hit the man in the ponytail in the groin. He stumbled away, his face rearing into the sky, his hands clutched to the wound as though he wanted to relieve himself.

  Her second round entered Sammy's eye socket and blew the back of his head out on the grass.

  Suddenly there was no sound in the skeet club except the wind fluttering an American flag on top of the pavilion.

  * * *

  chapter twenty-five

  It was hot that night, and still hot at false dawn, as though the air had been baked, then released again on the new day. I got a handful of molasses balls from the tack room and fed them to Beau in the lot, then turned him out and walked down to the river and watched the darkness go out of the sky. The current was dark green and swirling with froth from dead cottonwood trees that were snagged along the shore, and I could hear bream popping the surface where the riffle channeled under the tree trunks.

  I tried to think clearly but I couldn't. I had stayed with Mary Beth until eleven last night. The man with the ponytail had lived three hours and died on the operating table. His name was Sixto Dominque, and his sheet showed only one felony conviction, for extortion in Florida, for which he had received a gubernatorial pardon. His wallet contained a permit for the .25-caliber automatic.

  'They thought they were in Dog Patch. They got what they deserved,' I told her.

  'I should have hooked up Vernon Smothers and taken him to the cruiser and called for backup,' she said.

  'Listen, Mary Beth, you're an officer of the law. When a lowlife puts his hand on your person during the performance of your duty, you bounce him off the hardest object in his environment.'

  'I blew it.'

  I offered to stay with her.

  'Thanks, anyway. I've got to spend some serious time on the phone tonight,' she said. In the electric lighting of her apartment the color seemed washed out of her face, her freckles unnatural, as though they were painted on her skin.

  'Don't drink booze or coffee. Don't pay attention to the thoughts you have in the middle of the night,' I said.

  'Was it this way with you?'

  'Yeah, the first time it was.'

  'The first time?' she said.

  My stare broke, and I tried not to let her see me swallow.

  Now, the next day, I squatted on my boot heels in the grass and tossed pebbles down into the water on top of the submerged car that had once contained the bodies of two members of the Karpis-Barker gang, nameless now, buried somewhere in a potter's field, men who thought they'd write their names into memory with a blowtorch.

  What was it that really bothered me, that hid just around a corner in my mind?

  The answer was not one I easily accepted.

  I had made a career of living a half life. I had been a street cop, a Texas Ranger, a federal prosecutor, and now I was a small-town defense lawyer who didn't defend drug traffickers, as though somehow that self-imposed restriction gave a nobility to my practice that other attorneys didn't possess. I was neither father nor husband, and had grown to accept endings in my life in the way others anticipated beginnings, and I now knew, without being told, that another one was at hand.

  The sun broke above the horizon and was warm on my back as I walked toward the house. Then my gaze steadied on the barn, the backyard, the drive, the porte cochere, and two black sedans that shouldn't have been there.

  I walked through the back porch and kitchen into the main part of the house, which Brian Wilcox and five other Treasury people were tearing apart.

  'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I asked.

  Wilcox stood in the middle of my library. Splayed books were scattered across the floor.

  'Give him the warrant,' he said to a second man, who threw the document at me, bouncing it off my chest.

  'I don't care if you have a warrant or not. You have no legitimate cause to be here,' I said.

  'Shut up and stay out of the way,' the second man said. He wore shades and a military haircut, and his work had formed a thin sheen of perspiration on his face.

  'Come on, Wilcox. You're a pro. You guys pride yourselves on blending into the wallpaper,' I said.

  'You're interfering with a federal investigation,' Wilcox said.

  'I'm what?'

  'I think you've been running a parallel investigation to our own. That means there's probable cause for us to believe you possess evidence of a crime. Hence, the warrant. You don't like it, fuck you,' he said.

  I used the Rolodex on my desk and punched a number into the telephone.

  'I hope you're calling the judge. He's part Indian. His nickname is Big Whiskey John. He's in a great mood this time of day,' Wilcox said.

  'This is Billy Bob Holland. I've got six Treasury agents ransacking my home,' I said into the receiver. 'The agent in charge is Brian Wilcox. He just told me to fuck myself. Excuse me, I have to go. I just heard glass breaking upstairs.'

  The agent in shades picked up my great-grandfather's journal from a chair, flipped through it, and tossed it to me. 'Looks like a historical document there. Hang on to it,' he said, and raked a shelf of books onto the floor.

  'That was the newspaper,' I said to Wilcox. 'It's owned by an eighty-year-old hornet who thinks fluoridation is a violation of the Constitution. Does the G still have its own clipping service?'

  'You think you're getting a bad deal, huh? You cost us eight months' work. That's right, we were about to flip Sammy Mace, then you showed up. Plus your gal just got pulled out by her people.'

  He looked at the reaction in my face, and a smile broke at the corner of his mouth.

  'Her people?' I said numbly.

  'Call her apartment. She's gone, bro. She got picked up in a plane at four this morning. She wouldn't survive an IA investigation,' he said.

  I started to pick books off the floor and stack them on my desk, as though I were in a trance.

  'You were a cop,' Wilcox said. 'You don't use a baton to bring a suspect into submission. You never deliver a blow with it above the shoulders. They'd crucify her and drag her people into it with her.'

  'I can't stop what yo
u're doing here. But somewhere I'm going to square this down the line,' I said.

  'Yeah, that's going to be a big worry of ours,' Wilcox said.

  The man in shades began rifling my desk. He removed L.Q. Navarro's holstered .45 revolver and flipped open the loading gate on the brass bottom of a cartridge.

  I fitted my hand around his wrist.

  'That belonged to a friend of mine. He's dead now. You don't mind not handling it, do you?' I said, and squeezed his wrist until I saw his lips part on his teeth and a look come into his eyes that his shades couldn't hide.

  'We're done here,' Wilcox said, raising his palm pacifically. 'Don't misunderstand the gesture, Holland. Touch a federal agent again and I'll put a freight train up your ass.'

  I waited for her call, but it didn't come.

  I worked late at the office that day. Through the blinds I could see the sun, like a burning flare, behind the courthouse and the tops of the oak trees. At just after seven Temple Carrol came by.

  'I'll buy you a beer,' she said.

  'I still have some work to do.'

  'I bet.' She sat with one leg on the corner of my desk. She lifted her chestnut hair off her neck. 'It's been a hot one.'

  'Yeah, it's warming up.'

  'She blew Dodge, huh?'

  'I don't know, Temple. Not everybody reports in to me.'

  'You want to talk business, or should I get lost?'

  I pushed aside a deposition I was reading and waited.

  'I took Jamie Lake shopping for some clothes that make her look half human,' she said. 'At first she's looking at these see-through things and I tell her, "Jamie, it might be the nature of prejudice and all that jazz, but tattoos just don't float well with juries."

  "Oh I get it," she says. "Upscale people tell the truth. Trailer court people lie. Wow! Tell me, which kind was that needle-dick polygraph nerd who was trying to scope my jugs?" .

  'I say, "We do what works, kiddo."

  'She goes, "There's nothing like being sweet, is there? I once told a narc, 'Gee, officer, I wouldn't have smoked it if I had known it was harmful to my health.' He was such a gentleman after that. He took it out of his pants all by himself."

  'Billy Bob, this gal is major off the wall.'

  'Most of our clientele is. That's why they're in trouble all the time,' I said.

  'Here's the rest of it. She had her nose really bent out of joint by this time. So she takes out her MasterCard and buys four hundred dollars' worth of clothes I couldn't afford.'

  'It doesn't mean she's dirty.'

  'Yeah, and Jack Vanzandt and this greaseball Felix Ringo brought her to us out of goodwill.'

  I rubbed my forehead and looked at the soft orange glow of the sunset over the trees. Mockingbirds glided by the clock tower on the courthouse.

  'Yeah, this guy Ringo doesn't fit. He's a friend of Jack, he was hanging around Sammy Mace, and he's hooked up with the G at the same time,' I said.

  I felt the fatigue of the day catch up with me. I tried to think straight but I couldn't. I felt her eyes on my face.

  'Go to supper with me,' she said.

  'I'm going to put Darl Vanzandt on the stand,' I said.

  That night there was still no call from Mary Beth. In the morning I drove to the office, then walked to the thrift store operated by the Baptist church, where Emma Vanzandt was a volunteer worker.

  She was in back, sorting donated clothes on a long wood table. She wore tailored jeans and red pumps and a white silk blouse with red beads. She didn't bother to look up when I approached her.

  'Jack and Felix Ringo gave me some witnesses that are almost too good to be true,' I said.

  'Oh, how grand,' she said.

  'I think Jack may have done it to get me off your son's back.'

  She looked me in the face and silently formed the word stepson with her mouth.

  'Excuse me, your stepson, Darl.'

  'Why tell me, good sir?'

  'Because Darl's going on the stand just the same.'

  'Would you kindly take the okra out of your mouth and explain what you're talking about.'

  'Darl was at Shorty's the night Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked. He's mentally defective and has a violent history. He's beaten women with his fists. He goes into rages with little provocation. You figure it out, Emma.'

  'Ah, our conscience feels better now, doesn't it? You take Jack's favor, but to prove your integrity, you subpoena a walking basket case and fuck him cross-eyed in front of a jury of nigras and Mexicans.'

  A woman paying for her purchase at the counter turned around with her mouth open.

  'Tell Jack what I said.'

  I walked back out the front door. Then I heard her behind me. In the sunlight her makeup looked like a white and pink mask stretched on her face, her black hair pulled tightly back on her forehead, her eyes aglitter with anger or uppers or whatever energy it was that drove her.

  'You're a fool,' she said.

  'Why?'

  Her mouth was thick with lipstick, slightly opened, her eyes fastened on mine, as though she were on the edge of saying something that would forever make me party to a secret that she imparted to no one.

  'Bunny Vogel,' she said.

  'What?'

  Then the moment went out of her eyes.

  'I wish I were a man. I'd beat the shit out of you. I truly hate you, Billy Bob Holland,' she said.

  My father was both a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines for thirty years, but all his jobs came from the same company, one that contracted statewide out of Houston. I called their office and asked the lady in charge of payroll if their records would indicate whether my father ever worked around Waco in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

  'My heavens, that's a long time ago,' she said.

  'It's really important,' I said.

  'A lot of our old records are on the computer now, but employees' names of fifty years ago, that's another matter—'

  'I don't understand.'

  'The company has to know where all its pipe is. But back during the Depression a lot of men were hired by the day and paid in cash. WPA boys, drifters off the highway, they came and they went.'

  And the company didn't have to pay union wages or into the Social Security fund, either, I thought.

  'Can you just determine if y'all lay any lines around Waco about 1940 or so?' I asked.

  'That's a whole lot easier. Can I call you back when I have more time?' she said.

  I gave her my office number and went home for lunch. The light on my telephone answering machine was flashing in the library. I pushed the 'play' button, trying not to be controlled by the expectation in my chest.

  'It's me, Billy Bob. I'm sorry I left the way I did. I'm not even supposed to call you. I'll try to get back to you later,' Mary Beth's voice said.

  The tape announced the time. I had missed her call by fifteen minutes.

  I fixed a sandwich and some potato salad and a glass of iced tea and sat down to eat on the back porch. The fields were marbled with shadow and the breeze was warm and flecked with rain and I could smell cows watering at my neighbor's windmill. On the other side of the tank, beyond the line of willows that puffed with wind, was the network of baked wagon ruts and hoofprints where the Chisholm Trail had traversed my family's property. Sometimes I believed Great-grandpa Sam was still out there, in chaps and floppy hat, a bandanna tied across his face against the dust, trying to turn his cows away from the bluffs when dry lightning caused them to rumble across the prairie louder than the thunder itself.

  I wished I had lived back in his time, when men like Garland T. Moon were bounced off cottonwood trees and federal agents didn't make you fall in love with them and then leave on airplanes at four in the morning with no explanation.

  It was a self-pitying way to think, but I didn't care. I went into the library and got out Sam's journal and read it while I finished lunch.

  August 28, 1891

  Maybe burning out them four caves wasn't such a good idea. The
gang has come back from Pearl Younger's whorehouse and now the Dalton brothers seem to think their leadership is on the line. To make matters worse, Emmett Dalton, the only one of them who probably has half a brain, told me my name has been put on a warrant by the U.S. court up in Wichita, because I am now considered a known associate of train robbers and murderers.

  I understand the judge who done this is the same one who told the Colorado cannibal Albert Packer there was only seven good Democrats in the mountains where Packer got froze in for the winter and Packer had went and ate five of them. I now wish Packer had carried his knife and fork into the court and made it six.

  The Cimarron is naught but ribbons of muddy water now and carrion birds perch on the ribs of the wild horses the Dalton-Doolins have shot and butchered down on the banks. The hills are orange and sear with drought all the way to Kansas, and dust and chickweed blows up in flumes that will sand the skin off your bones.

  The poppy husks in the fields have hardened and dried and they rattle and hiss like snakes when I ride down to the river to draw water for our garden. When I see the fireflies in the trees and hear the cicadas in the evening, I wonder how I have strayed so far from the smell of rain and flowers on the Texas Gulf. It is the feeling I always had as a child, that everything was ending, that the world's sins was fixing to turn the sky to flames. I never could account for the notions I had as a child. But it is feelings like this that always made the word whiskey want to break like a bubble on the back of my tongue.

  I know if I stay on the Cimarron, I will be gunned down for sure or forced once again to kill other men. Jennie woke me last night when she heard sounds by the outhouse. It was only hogs, but she commenced crying and said she has heard her relatives talking and she fears for my life. I have not knowed her to cry before.

  It is cowardly to run, though, particularly from the likes of them down in the mud caves. We never done it when we marched alongside Granny Lee and I'll be damned if I'll do it now.

  These are prideful thoughts, all. God forgive me for them. I feel desolate and lost and would ride into the worst storm on earth for just a drop of rain.