'Wha—' he began.
'You turn around and you tell all these people how you hurt a child,' I said.
He wiped the blood off his nose with the flat of his hand.
'His mama told me there was a fellow liked to put his head up her dress,' he said.
&
nbsp; I got down from the saddle and hooked him in the nose, then grabbed his neck and the back of his shirt and drove his head into the corner of the porch post.
The skin split in a scarlet star at the crown of his skull. When he went down, I couldn't stop. I saw my boot and spur rake across his face, then I tried to kick him again and felt myself topple backward off balance.
Pete was hanging on my arm, the five-dollar bill crushed in his palm, his eyes hollow with fear as though he were looking at a stranger.
'Stop, Billy Bob! Please don't do it no more!' he said, his voice sobbing in the peel of sirens that came from two directions.
* * *
chapter nine
I sat in the enclosed gloom of the sheriff's office, across from his desk and the leviathan silhouette of his body against the back window. The deputy who had arrested me leaned against the log wall, his face covered in shadow. The sheriff took his cigar out of his mouth and leaned over the spittoon by the corner of his desk and spit.
'You turned that fellow into a human pinball. What's the matter with you?' he said.
'It's time to charge me or cut me loose, sheriff,' I said.
'Just keep your britches on. You don't think I got enough drunk nigras and white trash in my jail without having to worry about the goddamn lawyers?… Ah, there's the man right now. Cain't you beat up somebody without starting an international incident?' he said.
The door opened, and a dark-skinned man in a tropical hat with a green plastic window built into the brim and a tan suit that had no creases entered the room. He removed his hat and shook the sheriff's hand, then the uniformed deputy's and mine. He was a little older than I, in his midforties, perhaps, his jawline fleshy, his thin mustache like the romantic affectation of a 1930s leading man.
'Felix Ringo, a Mexican drug agent?' I repeated.
'Yeah, you know that name, man? Is gringo. My ancestor, he was a famous American outlaw,' he said.
'Johnny Ringo?' I said.
'Yeah, that was his name. He got into it with guys like, the guy there in Arizona, was always wearing a black suit in the movies, yeah, that guy Wyatt Earp.'
'Felix is jalapeño and shit on toast south of the Rio Grande. You fucked up his bust, Billy Bob,' the sheriff said.
'Oh?' I said.
'The guy you drug up and down, man, I been following him six months. He's gonna be gone now,' the Mexican said.
'Maybe you should have taken him down six months ago. He hurt a little boy this morning.'
'Yeah, man, but maybe you don't see the big picture. We take one guy down, we roll him over, then we take another guy down. See, patience is, how you call it, the virtue here.'
'The guy I pulled out of that bar isn't the Medellin Cartel North. What is this stuff, sheriff?' I said.
The sheriff rolled his cigar in the center of his mouth and looked at the Mexican drug agent.
'Billy Bob used to be a Texas Ranger, so he looks down on the ordinary pissant work most of us have to do,' he said.
'That's a bad fucking attitude, man,' Felix Ringo said.
'Get out your fingerprint pad or I'm gone, sheriff,' I said.