ng into the front wall, then he began running again. He passed a tack room and flung the plywood door open in his wake, his arms waving almost simultaneously, as though hornets were about to torment his flesh.
I held on to a wood post by a stall and fired one round after another, the powder flashes splintering from the cylinder and the barrel. The explosions were deafening, the recoil knocking my wrist high in the air. Each round blew divots out of the tack room door that yawned open in the passageway, tore even larger holes in the outside door, whined away into the woods with a sound like piano wire snapping.
Dust and lint and smoke drifted in the light from the Coleman lantern. My right ear was numb, as though frigid water had been poured inside it. I put the hammer on half-cock and shucked out the empty shell casings on the floor and rotated the cylinder and inserted six fresh rounds in the loading gate, then lowered the hammer again and locked the cylinder into place.
I limped slowly past the stalls and closed the splintered door of the tack room. Felix Ringo lay on the floor, the slide on his automatic jammed open by a partially ejected shell casing. Blood welled from a wound that looked like a crushed purple rose inserted inside the torn cloth on his hip.
'My friend L.Q. Navarro used to say ankle hideaways are mighty cool, but the problem is they only work for midgets,' I said, and sat down heavily on a hay bale that puffed dust and lint into the air.
'I got to have a doctor,' Ringo said.
I felt weak all over. Gray threadworms floated in front of my eyes. I touched my upper chest and my hand came away coated with something that was warm and damp and sticky.
'Looks like we both got a problem here, Felix.' I breathed slowly and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. From my shirt pocket I pulled the playing card emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers and marked with the date of L.Q.'s death. 'You remember the rules down in Coahuila. When you lose, you get one of these stuck in your mouth.'
'I'm hurt bad. Look, man, I die here, I gotta have a priest.'
'You killed Roseanne Hazlitt, didn't you?'
'Yeah, okay, we done that.' He breathed hard through his nose.
'And set up Lucas Smothers?'
'Yeah, that, too.'
'All that grief, just to protect Jack Vanzandt.'
'There was a lot at stake, things you don't know about, man. Ask the guapa, the DEA woman, it's like a war, man, there's casualties. Hey, man, I work for your fucking government. That's what you ain't hearing.'
He stared at me for a long time, waiting, his eyes lustrous with hate and apprehension.
'What you gonna do, man?' he said, his voice climbing into a higher register.
'I guess you're just up shit's creek, bud,' I replied.
His face was gray from loss of blood, beaded with sweat. He closed his eyes, his mouth trembling.
'No, you got it all wrong, Felix,' I said. 'L.Q. Navarro used to own this card. I wouldn't soil it by putting it on your body. But you parked one in my chest. So the medics won't be coming for either one of us tonight.'
I winked at him and grinned.
Or thought I did. The passageway was slatted with moonlight, redolent with dust and the musky smell of field mice and moldy hay and fresh deer droppings in the barnyard and wind and flowers in the glade and wet fern and creek water coursing over stone. I felt myself slip in and out of time, then the darkness bled out of the sky and a pink light glowed through the holes in the barn's walls and out in the fields I saw a group of federal agents in blue hats and vests walking through the mist, their weapons at port arms, like the emissaries of Empire, a statuesque woman with brown freckles' in the lead whose fingers would be as cool and bloodless as alabaster when they touched my brow.
* * *
epilogue
Felix Ringo was DOA at the county hospital. I had the feeling the DEA considered his passing his greatest public service. To my knowledge, no investigation into his background was ever made. I tried to tell newspapers in Dallas and Houston about Felix Ringo, then the wire services, and finally anyone who would listen. But the time came when I accepted the fact that societal hearing and sight are a matter of collective consent, and I desisted from trying to undo the cynicism and cruelty of governments and learned to walk away when people spoke of the world as a serious place.
Jack Vanzandt plea-bargained down to three years in a federal facility. It seemed like a light sentence, at least for a man who had trafficked in crystal meth and counterfeit credit cards and indirectly caused the death of a young woman, until the morning I read in the paper that Jack had taken poison in the psychiatric unit of a federal hospital and had suffered a brain seizure that cost him his eyesight.
Emma divorced him after their home and their assets were confiscated by the government. I heard her stepson's ashes were left behind in an urn on the mantelpiece and she never tried to recover them. Today she runs her parents' mail-order wedding cake business in Shreveport and sometimes appears on a televangelical cable program and denounces drug use among teenagers.
I never saw Mary Beth again, at least not when I was fully conscious. After the surgery that removed the .25-caliber round from my chest, I floated for days through a warm pool of morphine and was sure I saw her in the room with L.Q. Navarro. But one morning I woke to sunlight and the realities of physical recovery and spoke both their names repeatedly, my hands as useless as blocks of wood, my face tingling with thousands of needles, until a black male nurse pushed me back on the bed and held me there, his eyes lighted with pity.
On a Friday evening in late summer Temple Carrol and I went to watch Pete play in a ball game at the Catholic elementary school. I had let him ride Beau to the game by himself, and later we walked from the diamond to the café down the street and ate buffalo burgers and blackberry milkshakes. Outside the window, Beau pulled his tether loose and walked into the grove of pines by the stucco church and began grazing in the grass. The attic fan in the café drew the air through the open door and windows, and I could smell the evening coming to its own completion, the dusk gathering in the streets, the water that ebbed out of the irrigation ditch into the grass, the pine boughs etched against the late sun, the hot sap cooling on the bark of the trees.
'That's good about Lucas going to A&M this fall, ain't it?' Pete said.