He dropped his cigar hissing into the spittoon.
'There's the door. Don't mistake my gesture. Stay the hell out of what don't concern you,' he said.
Felix Ringo followed me outside. The light was hard and bright on the stone buildings in the square, the trees a violent green against the sky. I could see Mary Beth Sweeney outside her cruiser, writing on a clipboard in the shade. She stopped and stared across the lawn at me and the man named Felix Ringo.
'You want something?' I asked him.
'I seen you somewhere before. You was a Ranger?' he said.
'What about it?'
'You guys did stuff at night, maybe killed some people that was fruit pickers crossing the river, that didn't have nothing to do with dope.'
'You're full of shit, too, bud,' I said, and walked toward the cab stand across the street.
I stepped off the curb and waited for a car to pass.
Then I heard her voice behind me.
'Hey, Billy Bob,' she said.
'Yeah?'
She gave me the thumbs-up sign and smiled.
The next morning I drove along the fence line of my property to a section by the river where Lucas and Vernon Smothers were hoeing out the rows in a melon patch. I walked out into the field, into the heat bouncing off the ground, into Vernon's beaded stare under the brim of his straw hat.
'I want to borrow Lucas for a couple of hours,' I said.
'What for?' he asked.
'Take a guess,' I said.
He propped his forearm on his hoe handle and smelled himself. He looked out over the bluff and the milky green flatness of the river and the willows on the far side.
'I don't want to lose my melons to coons this year. I aim to put steel traps along that ditch yonder. That's where they're coming out of,' he said.
'I need Lucas to help me with the case, Vernon. You're not putting any steel traps on my property, and you can forget about poisons, too.'
'You ever see how a coon eats a melon? He punches a little hole, no bigger than a quarter. Then he sticks his paw in and cleans the whole insides out. All he needs to do is get his paw in the hole and he don't leave nothing but an empty shell for anybody else.'
His mouth was small and angry, down-turned on the corners, his stare jaundiced with second meaning.
'Let's go to the movies, Lucas,' I said.
Lucas sat on the back steps and pulled off his boots.
'You don't have to do that,' I said.
'I'll track your house.'
We went into the library and I switched on the VCR that contained the videotape of Roseanne Hazlitt dancing. Lucas's face went gray when he realized what he was being shown.
'Mr Holland, I ain't up to this,' he said.
'Who are the other kids in that woods?'
'East End kids messin' around. I don't know them too good.'