'I can't describe what I'm feeling right now,' he said.
'Your son's problem is dope and booze. Address the situation, Jack. Don't blame it on other people.'
'I feel like taking off your head.'
'Oh?'
'You put me in mind of a blind leper climbing into a public swimming pool.'
'I get it. I'm the source of everyone's discontent but don't know it.'
'You got this guy Moon stoked up, then you broke my boy's nose.'
'Moon?'
'He wouldn't be around here if it wasn't for you.'
'What do you care?'
'He hauled a dead man out to my property, what's his name, that character Jimmy Cole.'
'Cole was found on the old Hart place.'
'I have an eighth interest in it…' He seemed distracted and tried to regain his train of thought. 'I want you to leave us alone. It's a simple request. You've fucked up your life and your career. But I'll be damned if you'll make my family your scapegoat.'
I stepped closer to him. I could feel the blood rise in my head. In the corner of my eye I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro watching me, wagging a cautionary finger.
'You want to explain that, Jack?' I asked.
'I gave orders in Vietnam that cost other men their lives. It comes with the territory. That's what maturity is about. I'm embarrassed to be in your presence,' he replied.
He went out the door, nodding to the secretary as he passed.
I sat alone in the steam room at the health club, the sting of his words like needles in my face. I pushed a towel into a bucket of water and squeezed it over my head and shoulders. L.Q. Navarro leaned against the tile wall, his dark suit bathed in steam, his face as cool and dry as if he stood on an ice flow.
'Don't let them kind get to you,' he said.
'Which kind is that?'
'The kind with money. I don't know what that boy did in Vietnam, but down in Coahuila we went up against automatic weapons with handguns. We shot the shit out of those guys, too.'
'I grant, they knew we'd been in town.'
He took off his Stetson and spun it on his finger. His teeth shone when he smiled.
'That woman deputy, the tall one, Mary Beth's her name? She was good to the little boy. That's how you tell when it's the right woman,' he said.
'You saved me from burning to death, L.Q. It was the bravest thing I ever saw anyone do.'
He grinned again, then his face became somber and his eyes avoided mine.
'I got to leave you one day, bud,' he said.
A fat man with a towel wrapped around his loins opened the steam room door and came inside. L.Q. fitted his hat on his head and walked toward the far wall, where the tiles melted into a horizontal vortex spinning with wet sand.
I showered and walked back to my locker in the dressing room, then caught myself glancing sideways at my reflection in the wall mirror, at the same reddish blond hair that Lucas had, the same six-foot-one frame, the puckered white scar on my upper right arm where a bullet had snapped the bone the night L.Q. died, the long stitched welt on top of my foot from the night he pulled me out of the grass fire and we thundered down the hills with tracers streaking over our heads in the darkness.
At age forty-one I had gained only ten pounds since I was a beat cop in Houston, and I could still bench two hundred pounds and do thirty push-ups with my feet elevated on a chair.