'He said he'd been going to church and trying to get right for the bad things he's done. What was I supposed to say, "I don't want to have nothing to do with you"?'
'I think he'll hurt you.'
'By giving me an old bike?'
'Jimmy Cole was murdered on the Hart Ranch. You were probably right the first time. Darl and his friends found him hiding out there and killed him.'
He pressed his palm on his forehead, smearing grease in his hair.
'Everything I do is fucked up. I feel worse every time I come over here,' he said, his eyes glistening.
'Leave the bike here. I'll call his father and have it picked up.'
'Yeah, 'cause the product of your broken rubber cain't take care of hisself. Thanks, anyway,' he said.
He started the motorcycle, fed it the gas until the misfires became a dirty roar, then fishtailed off the gravel onto the county road, his hair whipping in the wind, his T-shirt pooling with air.
Way to go, Holland, I thought.
Mary Beth Sweeney called the next morning, just as I was about to leave for the office.
'Bunny Vogel got into it last night with a Mexican biker at Shorty's,' she said.
'Which biker?'
'No name. He took off before I got there. But it looks like the fight had something to do with Roseanne Hazlitt.'
'How do you know?'
'A couple of witnesses said the Mexican kid called Bunny "spermbrain", then "Roseanne's pimp." That's when they went at it. They tore up most of the side porch.'
'Where's Bunny now?'
'I kept him downtown two hours, then kicked him loose. He's supposed to pay the owner half the damages.'
'You're a good cop, Mary Beth.'
'A good cop would take him to the Marine Corps recruiting station before he ends up in Huntsville. Have you ever been to California?'
'No, why?'
'These kids must go out there and take courses in how to screw up their lives.'
Bunny lived on the west end of the county, not far from a train siding, a shut-down cannery, and a string of abandoned and overgrown wood cottages that had been used by migrant workers during the 1940s. His house was sheathed in ancient grey Montgomery Ward brick and elevated on cinder blocks, but the floor had settled through the center, so that the outside covering had cracked like a dried husk, exposing the tar paper underneath. Bunny's '55 maroon Chevy, with the rolled white le
ather interior, was parked in the dirt yard, as incongruous as a color cutout pasted on a gray stage set, its green-tinted windows filled with reflections of clouds.
Bunny stood in the backyard, in a sleeveless red sweatshirt and running shorts and half-top cleats, flinging footballs through a rubber tire that hung on a rope from the limb of a hackberry tree.
'I heard you got put in the bag last night,' I said.
'Word gets around.' He picked up another football from an orange crate and fired a bullet pass through the tire. It landed on a grassy knoll and rolled toward the train tracks.
'Who was the biker?'
'Just a greaseball who wants to take down a swinging dick in Shorty's. I ain't a swinging dick. But that's what the greaseball wants to think.'
'He called you a spermbrain?'