“About what?”

“I didn’t give him a chance to say. I told him I’d report him to the sheriff’s office if he called again.”

“I’ll have a talk with him.”

“He’s worthless. Let him alone.”

She walked down to the barn and turned on the valve that fed the irrigation line to the pasture. In the distance I saw the water burst from the pipe and spray in the wind. Then she came back in the house, showered, and went to bed. I went into the den I used as a home office and sat in the dark with L. Q. Navarro’s holstered.45 revolver in my lap. It was a beautiful firearm, blue-black, perfectly balanced, with yellowed ivory grips and a gold-plated trigger guard and hammer. I sometimes wondered if my fondness for holding L.Q.’s revolver wasn’t a form of fetish, but actually I didn’t care whether it was or not. I loved guns then and I love them now, just as I loved L.Q. and his courage and his manly smell and his confidence that regardless of what we did, we were always on the side of justice.

The moon above the hills was the same pale yellow as the ivory on L.Q.’s revolver. I could hear heavy animals cracking through the underbrush on the slope behind the house and pinecones pinging off the metal roof when the wind gusted hard out of the trees. For a moment I thought I saw L.Q. moving about in the shadows, his jaws slack, his white shirt water-stained from the grave, death’s hold on him not up for debate.

In my mind’s eye I saw the beer garden strung with paper lanterns where we attended dances in Monterrey; the times he and Temple and I ate Mexican dinners in a sidewalk café by the San Antonio River, only two blocks from the Alamo; the ancient Spanish mission where he was married and I stood as his best man, the same mission where his wife’s funeral Mass would be celebrated six months later.

L.Q. and I had lived a violent life, marked by death and memories of nocturnal events that made me doubt our humanity, but it had its moments. I just wished I could reclaim them.

I felt Temple’s hand on my shoulder. “I’ve acted badly,” she said.

Her nightgown was backlit by the moon, and I could see the outline of her body inside it.

“No, you haven’t. You warned me about Johnny, but I walked into a buzz saw,” I said.

“Your goodness is your weakness. People use it against you. That’s why I get mad.”

“I don’t believe Johnny and Amber meant to hurt us.”

“We’re not going to lose our home, Billy Bob. We’re going to find out who’s behind all this and make their lives miserable.”

“L.Q. couldn’t have said it better.”

“What are you doing with his gun?”

“I hear sounds out in the woods. Sometimes I think it’s L.Q.”

She looked at me strangely. I learned forward in the leather chair in which I was sitting and dropped L.Q.’s revolver in my desk drawer. “Sometimes I still want the old ways back. I want to round up every greedy shit hog who’s feeding off this country and blow them apart,” I said.

She sat down on the arm of my chair and pulled my head against her breast and pressed her cheek down on my hair. I could feel her heart beating against my ear.

I DIDN’T KNOW Wyatt Dixon’s cell phone number and the next morning I had to drive out to his house in order to talk to him. He was sitting on a rock patterned with the scales of dead hellgrammites, wearing neither shirt nor shoes, flipping a wet fly into the current, watching it float downstream.

“Doin’ any good?” I said.

“It’s too hot. They’re holed up in them pools.”

“Why’d you call my wife yesterday?”

“Your office was closed. So I rung you at home. I wasn’t trying to bother your wife, if that’s why your nose is bent out of joint.”

“She doesn’t want to hear from you. What does it take to get that across?”

His mouth was hooked down at the corners, his face as absent of emotion as clay. “There’s a yard bitch by the name of Wilbur Pickett, lives up at Ronan. I knowed him from some of my past activities before the Man on High got my attention. He says them boys who put that frog-sticker in me told him there’s an ex-Texas Ranger herebouts gonna get himself boxed up and shipped to the boneyard. The ex-Ranger and maybe his old woman, too.”

“How about giving me Mr. Pickett’s address?”

“Mr. Pickett has done caught air for other parts. Primarily ’cause he dimed them two boys with Darrel McComb and they found out about it.”

“My wife was mentioned in this threat?”

He retrieved the wet fly out of the riffle and flicked it out again.

“Asked you a question, partner,” I said.

“When you tell a man to repeat himself, you’re accusing him of lying. I don’t care for it, counselor.”

“Who’s paying these two guys?”

“I think you know.” He set his fly rod down on the rock. Perhaps because of the shade his eyes had taken on the pale blue cast of the sky, but nonetheless they looked like marbles placed inside a death mask. “That name ‘Mabus’ wrote down inside a pentacle won’t go out of my head. I ain’t got the education or experience to deal with them kinds of things by myself. The preacher at our congregation ain’t an educated man, either. But you and me? That’s another matter. Brother Holland, we could crank up the band.”

“Deal with what things?”

“Read the Book of John. I made a study of it in Deer Lodge.” His eyes clicked sideways and looked into mine.

“Don’t call my wife again,” I said.

DARREL MCCOMB was in trouble with Fay Harback, but this time he was beginning to enjoy it. In some ways it felt good to be excoriated, to be the one wheel in the machine that didn’t automatically lock into gear when a lever was pulled. In fact, for the first time in his life he felt genuinely free.

Fay Harback removed her glasses and looked up at him after reading the document on her desk, a Xerox of a letter Darrel had written and mailed four days earlier. “Darrel, you cannot write to the United States attorney and say the kind of things you say in this letter,” she said.

Her tone was not unsympathetic. Actually, Darrel had just realized he liked Fay; he also liked her petite features and small face and the way her mahogany-colored hair lay thickly on the back of her neck. He couldn’t remember when he had felt so protective toward her.

“Darrel?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Are you listening?”

“You said I shouldn’t take it on myself to write the United States attorney. But why shouldn’t I? The First Amendment gives me that right.”

“You accused him of misusing his office.”

“Not exactly.”

She slipped her glasses back on and looked back down at the photocopy. “ ‘If you’d take the time to examine American Horse’s service record, you’d discover he was an expert marksman. The shooter on the hill behind American Horse’s house couldn’t hit a blimp with a guided missile. Maybe you guys used up the remnants of your brainpower while persecuting Richard Jewell, but this time out I suggest you give up the role of court jesters and not try to railroad another innocent man.’ ”

“Sounds pretty accurate to me,” Darrel said.

“I worry about you.”

“Why?”

“I think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

“Maybe I was. But not now. Life is great.”

“I.A. still has you on the desk?”

“Some guys are cops twenty-four hours a day. What’s eight hours?”

“Not a good statement to make to the district attorney.”

But he wasn’t listening now. Through the window he saw Wyatt Dixon parking himself and his crutches on a bench under the maples, a group of bums and jailhouse riffraff greeting him, shaking his hand, as though he were a celebrity. “Before this is over, I’m going to cool that son of a buck out,” Darrel said.

Fay followed Darrel’s line of vision to Wyatt sitting on the bench, a silvery shirt stitched with purple roses stretched tightly across his back, a black hat with a red feather in the band perched high on his head. “What I see is a man enjoying the morning and not bothering anyone. And I didn’t hear that last remark,” she said. “God, you’re a fruitcake.”