'That's the way I'd read it.'
'I'm starting to feel a little uncomfortable about this, Billy Bob.'
She gazed out the side window so I couldn't see her expression. We crossed the river and the planks on the bridge rattled under my tires.
'My great-grandfather's ranch ran for six miles right along that bank,' I said. 'He used to trail two thousand head at a time to the railhead in Kansas, then he gave up guns and whiskey and became a saddle preacher. His only temptation in life after that was the Rose of Cimarron.'
'I'm sorry. I wasn't listening,' she said.
'My great-grandpa… He was a gunfighter turned preacher, but he had a love affair with an outlaw woman called the Rose of Cimarron. She was a member of the Dalton-Doolin gang. He wrote in his journal that his head got turned by the sweetest and most dangerous woman in Oklahoma Territory.'
'I'm afraid you've lost me,' she said.
I tried to laugh. 'You're a fed. This county's got a long history of political corruption, Mary Beth. There're some violent people here.'
'How about the prosecutor, Marvin Pomroy?'
'He's an honest man. As far as I know, anyway. Are you FBI?'
'Can we forget this conversation?' she said.
I didn't answer. We pulled into a Mexican restaurant built of logs and scrolled with neon. I walked around to the passenger side to open the door for her, but she was already standing outside.
The hills to the west were rimmed with a purple glow when I drove her back home. During the evening I had managed to say almost nothing that was not inept and awkward. I turned into her apartment building and parked by the brick wall that bordered the swimming pool.
'Maybe I should say good night here,' I said.
'No, come in for a drink.'
'I've made you uneasy. I don't want to compound it.'
'You're patronizing me… I don't understand you, Billy Bob. You quit a career as a law officer and then as an assistant US attorney to be a defense lawyer. You like putting dope mules back on the street?'
'I won't handle traffickers.'
'Because you're a cop. You think like one.'
I heard cars behind me on the road, the same two-lane that I could follow, if I were willing, into Val Verde County and beyond, across the river, into an arroyo where horses reared in the gunfire and a man in a pinstriped suit and ash gray Stetson and Mexican spurs grabbed at his breast and called out to the sky.
We were outside the car now. My ears were popping, as though I were on an airplane that suddenly had lost altitude.
I heard myself say something.
'I beg your pardon?' Mary Beth said, her mouth partly open.
My face felt cold, impervious to the wind, the skin pulled back against the bone. Like the penitent who refuses to accept the priest's absolution through the grilled window inside the confessional, I felt the words rise once more in my throat, as in a dream that knows no end.
'I killed my best friend. His name was L.Q. Navarro. He was a Texas Ranger,' I said.
Her lips moved soundlessly, her eyes disjointed as though she were looking at a fractured image inside a child's kaleidoscope.
At noon the next day I walked from my office to the pawnshop down the street from the health club. The three-hundred-pound black woman who owned it, whose name was Ella Mae, wore glass beads in her hair and a white T-shirt that read: I Don't Give a Fuck—Don't Leave Home Without American Express.
On the wall behind the counter were scores of guns and musical instruments. I pointed at one.
'Can you give me a good deal, Ella Mae?' I said.
'Honey, if we was back in the old days, I'd pay to pick your cotton. That's the truth. Wouldn't put you on,' she said.