He laughed to himself.
'How about staying out of Dodge?' he said.
'I expect we're on the same side, aren't we?'
'You're a defense lawyer, pal. You get paid to keep the asswipes out of the gray-bar hotel chain.' His gaze drifted to Pete, then back on me. 'You really stick playing cards in the mouths of dead wets down in Coahuila?'
I stroked Beau once along his mane, then stepped across the rain ditch and leaned down into the open window of the lead car.
'I worked with a Ranger named L.Q. Navarro. We took down the mules and burned out the stash houses y'all didn't know how to find. You couldn't shine his boots, bud.'
He took off his sunglasses and looked indolently into my face.
'You like the lady, don't make trouble for her. You're an intelligent man. You can work with this, I'm convinced of it,' he said, and motioned to his driver.
Pete and I watched the two cars move slowly away, the windows sealed against the dust, the whitewall tires crunching delicately on the gravel as though the two drivers did not want to chip the gleaming finish on the cars' exteriors.
'You pretty mad, Billy Bob?' Pete said.
'No, not really.'
'For a person that's been river baptized and converted to Catholic, too, you sure know how to tell a fib.'
I rubbed the top of his soft, brushlike hair as the two cars turned down a dirt alley and their dust rolled across the wash hanging behind a row of clapboard shacks.
* * *
chapter fourteen
The typical isolation unit in a prison is a surreal place of silence, bare stone, solid iron doors, and loss of all distinction between night and day. Its intention is to lock up the prisoner with the worst company possible, namely, his own thoughts.
But fear and guilt have corrosive effects in the free people's world as well.
Bunny Vogel passed my house twice, driving a customized maroon '55 Chevy, before he mustered the courage to turn in the driveway and walk out to the chicken run in back, where I was picking up eggs in an apple basket.
He wore an unbuttoned silk shirt and jeans and Roman sandals without socks, and his tangled bronze-color
ed hair seemed to glow on the tips against the late sun. With his classical profile and his abdominal muscles that were like oiled leather, he could have been a male model for the covers of romance novels, except for the sunken scar that curled like an inset pink worm along his jawbone.
'Pretty nice automobile,' I said.
'What you said the night you busted Darl in the nose? About me being loyal to a guy who cost me a pro career?'
'I didn't mean to offend you, Bunny.'
He let out a breath. 'I think you're gonna pin the tail on any donkey you can. I ain't gonna be it, Mr Holland,' he said.
'You want to come inside?'
'No… The old black guy out at Shorty's told you Roseanne Hazlitt slapped somebody in the parking lot the night she was killed.'
'How do you know that?'
'Darl heard the old guy'd been talking to you. So he kind of got in his face about it.'
'He's quite a kid. I don't think I've ever known one exactly like him.'
'It was me she slapped. I ain't gonna hide it no more.'