'Was it this way with you?'
'Yeah, the first time it was.'
'The first time?' she said.
My stare broke, and I tried not to let her see me swallow.
Now, the next day, I squatted on my boot heels in the grass and tossed pebbles down into the water on top of the submerged car that had once contained the bodies of two members of the Karpis-Barker gang, nameless now, buried somewhere in a potter's field, men who thought they'd write their names into memory with a blowtorch.
What was it that really bothered me, that hid just around a corner in my mind?
The answer was not one I easily accepted.
I had made a career of living a half life. I had been a street cop, a Texas Ranger, a federal prosecutor, and now I was a small-town defense lawyer who didn't defend drug traffickers, as though somehow that self-imposed restriction gave a nobility to my practice that other attorneys didn't possess. I was neither father nor husband, and had grown to accept endings in my life in the way others anticipated beginnings, and I now knew, without being told, that another one was at hand.
The sun broke above the horizon and was warm on my back as I walked toward the house. Then my gaze steadied on the barn, the backyard, the drive, the porte cochere, and two black sedans that shouldn't have been there.
I walked through the back porch and kitchen into the main part of the house, which Brian Wilcox and five other Treasury people were tearing apart.
'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I asked.
Wilcox stood in the middle of my library. Splayed books were scattered across the floor.
'Give him the warrant,' he said to a second man, who threw the document at me, bouncing it off my chest.
'I don't care if you have a warrant or not. You have no legitimate cause to be here,' I said.
'Shut up and stay out of the way,' the second man said. He wore shades and a military haircut, and his work had formed a thin sheen of perspiration on his face.
'Come on, Wilcox. You're a pro. You guys pride yourselves on blending into the wallpaper,' I said.
'You're interfering with a federal investigation,' Wilcox said.
'I'm what?'
'I think you've been running a parallel investigation to our own. That means there's probable cause for us to believe you possess evidence of a crime. Hence, the warrant. You don't like it, fuck you,' he said.
I used the Rolodex on my desk and punched a number into the telephone.
'I hope you're calling the judge. He's part Indian. His nickname is Big Whiskey John. He's in a great mood this time of day,' Wilcox said.
'This is Billy Bob Holland. I've got six Treasury agents ransacking my home,' I said into the receiver. 'The agent in charge is Brian Wilcox. He just told me to fuck myself. Excuse me, I have to go. I just heard glass breaking upstairs.'
The agent in shades picked up my great-grandfather's journal from a chair, flipped through it, and tossed it to me. 'Looks like a historical document there. Hang on to it,' he said, and raked a shelf of books onto the floor.
'That was the newspaper,' I said to Wilcox. 'It's owned by an eighty-year-old hornet who thinks fluoridation is a violation of the Constitution. Does the G still have its own clipping service?'
'You think you're getting a bad deal, huh? You cost us eight months' work. That's right, we were about to flip Sammy Mace, then you showed up. Plus your gal just got pulled out by her people.'
He looked at the reaction in my face, and a smile broke at the corner of his mouth.
'Her people?' I said numbly.
'Call her apartment. She's gone, bro. She got picked up in a plane at four this morning. She wouldn't survive an IA investigation,' he said.
I started to pick books off the floor and stack them on my desk, as though I were in a trance.
'You were a cop,' Wilcox said. 'You don't use a baton to bring a suspect into submission. You never deliver a blow with it above the shoulders. They'd crucify her and drag her people into it with her.'