When she got out of her car, she had a bag of charcoal in one hand and a plastic bag packed with picnic food hanging from the other. “It’s late for planting roses, isn’t it?” she said.

“At my age, everything is late,” Hackberry said.

“I’ve got some sausage links and potato salad and beans and slaw and buns, if you’d like to have an early lunch,” she replied.

He stood up and took off his straw hat and blotted his forehead on his sleeve. “Something happen last night I should know about?”

“We busted a Mexican with tar and three grand in cash on him. I think he might be a mule working for Ouzel Flagler. That’s the third one we arrested this month.”

At the rear of the house was a paintless picnic table with an umbrella set in the center of it. She put the charcoal and the food on the table and slipped the flats of her hands in her back pockets and looked at Hackberry’s barn and poplar trees and vegetable garden bursting with Big Boy tomatoes. Her handcuffs were drawn through the back of her belt, the tip of a braided blackjack protruding from her side pocket. He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t.

“Let’s have it, Pam,” he said.

“Isaac Clawson was at the office an hour ago. He wants to track as much pig flop into your life as he can, Hack.”

“Who cares?”

“You’re too nice. People blindside you.”

“You’re going to protect me?”

She turned around and fixed her eyes on him. “Maybe somebody should.”

He pressed a dent out of the crown of his hat with his thumb and replaced it on his head, a smile at the corner of his mouth, one eye a little more narrow than the other. “You got a cold drink in that bag?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

He cracked open the Coca-Cola she’d brought and took a long swallow. It was ice-cold and hurt his throat, but he continued to swallow, his gaze directed at two blue jays in his mulberry tree. He could feel Pam’s eyes on the side of his face. He lowered the bottle from his mouth. “You’re a good lady,” he said.

Her face seemed to go soft in the shade, like a flower in late afternoon. Then he heard a voice, one as clear as the sound of the birds in the trees: Don’t say any more.

She folded her arms across her breasts. “You got any charcoal lighter?” she said.

“Inside the toolshed,” he replied.

The moment had passed, the way a kitchen match can flare and burn and die inside one’s chest. He went back to work in his garden, and Pam started a fire in his grill and covered the picnic table with a cloth and began laying out sausage links and buns and paper plates and plastic forks.

Twenty minutes later, Isaac Clawson’s government car came up the driveway. Hackberry walked to the gate, rolling up the cuff on one sleeve, touching his sunglasses in his pocket, not looking directly at Clawson, his expression neutral, his back turned to Pam. Clawson’s rimless octagonal glasses were wobbling with light, his shaved head polished and gleaming, the cranial indentations ridged with bone. His eyes shifted off Hackberry’s face and focused on Pam, who was turning sausages on the grill inside a patch of shade.

“You work at home sometimes?” he said to Hackberry.

“What’s the nature of your errand, sir?” Hackberry said.

“Errand?”

“Want to join us in a hot dog?”

“No, I want a man in custody for the murder of Junior Vogel.” With two fingers, Clawson pulled a color photo out of his shirt pocket. “You know this guy?”

The photo had not been taken in a booking room and looked like one used for employee identification. The man in the photo had wide-set eyes, an upper lip that was too close to the nose, and a full orange beard, one that a nautical man might wear.

“Who is he?” Hackberry asked.

“His name is Liam Eriksson. Yesterday he and a woman tried to cash Pete Flores’s disability check at an auto-title loan place in San Antonio. They’d both been drinking. When the clerk went in back with the check, they took off. The surveillance camera got them both on tape. We got Eriksson’s thumbprint off the counter. Eriksson had gotten a library card with Flores’s name on it.”

“How much was the check for?”

“Three hundred and fifty-six bucks.”

“He linked himself to incriminating evidence from a homicide scene for three hundred and fifty-six dollars?”

“Who said any of these guys are smart? There’re just more of them than there are of us. You haven’t made a press release indicating Vogel’s death was a homicide?”

“Not yet.”

“What does his family know?”

“That others ‘may’ have been involved in his death.”

“Let’s keep it that way. Eriksson is a frequenter of prostitutes. Maybe he’s still with the woman who was on the surveillance tape. If we can find the woman, we’ll probably find him, unless he knows he’s been ID’d in a homicide investigation.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“The clerk said he didn’t know her. The surveillance camera only got the back of her head.”

“Where’d you get the photo of Eriksson?”

“He worked as a contract security man in Iraq. He was suspected of firing arbitrarily into the automobiles of civilians. There was a video of his work on CNN. Cars were veering out of their lane and crashing into other cars. His company got him out of the country before he was charged.”

“I’ll have to share some of this with Junior’s wife.”

“Why?”

“Because they have a right to know,” Hackberry said.

“What about the rights and safety of the citizenry?”

“You know what the Catholic theological definition of a lie is? To deny others access to knowledge to which they’re entitled.”

“I think this place is an open-air mental asylum.”

“Can I have the photo of Eriksson? Or at least a copy of it?”

“Maybe later.”

“Later?”

Hackberry heard Pam’s footsteps behind him on the St. Augustine grass.

“Why don’t you haul your ass down the road?” she said to Clawson.

“Take it easy,” Hackberry said.

Clawson removed his glasses, polished them with a Kleenex, and put them back on, crinkling his nose. “Can you tell me why you bear me such animosity?” he asked Pam.

“When your daughter and her fiancé were abducted and murdered, she was working as a night clerk at a convenience store,” Pam said. “You didn’t know the risk exposure for a woman working nights at a convenience store? You weren’t making enough money to provide a better situation for her? Is everyone else supposed to pay the price for your guilt, Agent Clawson? If that’s the case, it’s a real drag.”

Clawson’s face had gone white. “Don’t you dare talk about my daughter,” he said.

“Then you stop hiding behind her, you miserable fuck.”

“Sheriff, you get this crazy bitch out of my face.”

“No, you hold on a minute,” Hackberry replied.

But it was too late. Hackberry saw Pam Tibbs pull her blackjack from her pocket, letting the spring-mounted, leather-weighted end dip away from her wrist, tightening her fingers on the leather-braided wood handle, stepping toward Clawson all in one motion. Before Hackberry could knock her arm down, she whipped the blackjack across the side of Clawson’s head, snapping her wrist into the swing, slashing open his scalp, slinging a red stripe down his white shirt.

His glasses fell from his face, cracking on a flagstone. His eyes were wide with shock, out of focus, his mouth open in a great round O. He raised his forearm to ward off the second blow, but she caught him on the elbow, then behind the ear. His knees buckled, and he grabbed the gate to keep from going all the way down.

Hackberry locked his arms around Pam, pinning her hands at her sides, lifting her into the air, carrying her backward deeper into the yard. She fought with him, kicking the heels of her boots into his shins, pulling at his wrists to force him to unclasp his hands, butting her head into his face.

Clawson propped one hand against the fender of his car and held himself erect, struggling to get a handkerchief out of his pocket to stop the blood that ran in strings down his forehead and into his eyebrows. Hackberry carried Pam to the back of the house, her feet still off the ground, the smell of her hair and body heat rising into his face.