Cimarron Rose

I felt a warm exhalation of her breath against my cheek, like that of a swimmer taking a self-disciplinary pause, then her palms pressing on my chest, and I was looking into her face again, the light brown freckles, the brightness of her eyes. She pursed her lips, then winked and was gone into the yard and the shadows and the moonlight and her cruiser, all that fast.

I stood in the drive and watched her back out into the road and pull away behind the row of poplar trees and myrtle bushes that bordered my front yard.

Down the road, I heard a second car engine start up, then a pair of headlights flared in the road and a sheriff's cruiser passed my driveway, with two men in it, headed in the same direction as Mary Beth. The man in the passenger's seat seemed to have his arm propped up on the sill so anyone watching from my house could not identify him.

I called 911 and told the dispatcher a drunk man with a gun was shooting at automobiles in front of my home.

chapter eleven

A half hour later I stood in the front yard and watched the last of five cruisers from the sheriff's department, including Mary Beth Sweeney's, drive away. Temple Carrol had seen the emergency lights from her house down the road and had arrived only a few minutes ago. 'Somebody shooting at cars? I didn't hear any gunfire,' she said.

'I saw two guys in a cruiser follow that new deputy from my house, so I muddied up the water,' I replied.

'Mary Beth Sweeney? What's she doing at your house?'

'I wanted her to run this Mexican drug agent for me.'

'She had to come by your house to do it?' She looked across the road at my neighbor's cattle bunched in the field.

'She was in the neighborhood,' I said.

'This broad always has a way of being in the neighborhood.'

'You want a cup of coffee?'

She pulled a banda

She walked toward her car.

'Temple?' I said.

She didn't answer.

I was rinsing the dishes after breakfast the next morning when Vernon Smothers tapped on my back door. He wore a broken straw hat and had a matchstick in the corner of his mouth.

'What is it?' I said, opening the door part way, without inviting him in.

He rolled his wedding ring on his index finger and looked at the palm of his hand.

'I made a mistake about something. I need your advice,' he said. He blew air out of his nose, as though he had a cold, and looked away at the windmill behind the barn.

I widened the door for him. He sat down at the plank table on the porch. The heels of his cowboy boots were worn almost flat.

'Yesterday I hauled my car in to have the oil pan welded. To that shop next to the Green Parrot Motel?' he said.

He saw the recognition in my face.

'Yeah, that's right,' he said. 'The place where Garland Moon is working. Except I didn't know that and I didn't know what he looked like, either.'

'Oh man,' I said.

'He gets my car up on a jack and drains the oil and takes the pan off and welds it and sticks it back on, and I ask how much I owe him.

'"Hu

'I go, "My ass. That job ain't worth one nickel more than seventy-five dollars."

'He says, "Then it looks like I got me a fishing car."

'I give him eighty dollars cash and take out my MasterCard for the rest of it. He looks at the name and says, "Vernon Smothers… Vernon Smothers… Is that little jailhouse bitch your son? Why, you're bird-dogging me, ain't you?"

'I told him I'd never laid eyes on him and didn't want to and didn't have no plan on seeing him again… He never said a word. He just smiled and wrote out my charge slip and handed it to me… I seen eyes like that on one other man in my life. He was a door gu

'Forget it,' I said.

'I think he's going to hurt my boy.'

'We won't let that happen, Vernon.' He cupped his fingers over his mouth. His skin made a dry, rasping sound against his fingers.

The social circle of Darl Vanzandt wasn't a difficult one to track. They were rich and lived in the East End; they had flunked out of the University of Texas or they commuted to a community college or they held token jobs in the businesses they would inherit. But it was a strange solipsistic attitude toward others that truly defined them. They were animated and loud and unseeing in public, indifferent to the injury their words might cause anyone outside their perimeter. They drove too fast, ru

Their accents were regional, but they had skied in Colorado and surfed in California, and they played golf and te

But one member of this group was an exception. Bu

After he was expelled, he turned his motorcycle on its side and ground a strip of metal, leather, and bone a hundred feet long on the highway to Austin.

I found him at his job out at the skeet club. He could have been a Visigoth, with his grained, ruddy face, his long bronze-colored hair tangled on his shoulders, a deep pink scar, with stitch holes, along one jaw. Bu

Shotguns popped in the warm breeze behind him, and beyond the row of oblong green traps, clay pigeons exploded in puffs of colored smoke against the sky.

'I'd like to hep you, Mr Holland, but far as I know the only guy mixed up with Rosea

'Were you out at Shorty's the night she was attacked?' I asked.

'I might have been. But I didn't see her… Seen Lucas… That ain't no hep, though, is it?' He smiled boyishly and brushed at the grass with one shoe.

'You think Lucas could rape and kill a girl?'

'Lucas?' He thought about it. 'It's not like him. But a guy gets a snootful, who knows?'

'How you know he had a snootful, Bu

He smiled with his eyes. 'I never saw him out there when he didn't.'

'See you around.'

'Yeah, anytime, Mr Holland. I hope it works out for Lucas.' He bit the corner of his lip philosophically.

On the way to my car I saw Emma Vanzandt walking toward me from a pavilion. She wore a pair of tailored brown riding jeans and lizard boots and a maroon silk shirt that filled with the wind.

'You're not going to say hello?' she asked.

'How you doin', Emma?'

'You've been busy. All Darl's friends wonder what you might be up to.'