'I'll be in the car,' he said to Wilcox. 'This guy here, he's got a disease in his thinking, like clap or something. I don't want to be hearing it no more.'
He walked back through the open barn doors, the wind billowing his loosely buttoned shirt. The butt of a black automatic was pushed down in the back of his trousers.
'You got the wrong man. Felix works for us,' Wilcox said.
'That's the problem,' I said.
I thudded the blades of the posthole digger into the hole and expanded the handles and turned them in a circle, the grain of the wood twisting against my calluses. I could feel the sweat in my eyebrows, my heart beating in my chest.
Brian Wilcox continued to stare at me, his mouth still painted with that ironic smile.
'So maybe this is the last time I see you,' Wilcox said.
He's going to do it, I thought.
I lifted the posthole digger free and rinsed the blades in the bucket of water. The wind popped in my ears, as though it were filled with distant pistol reports. I opened and closed my mouth and pressed with one thumb under my right ear.
'You all right?' he asked, and cupped his hand on my bare shoulder. I could feel the heat and oil in his skin, as though he were rubbing a layer of fouled air into my pores.
Don't let it happen, I told myself.
'Sorry we tossed your house,' he said.
'Forget it.'
'About Mary Beth…'
'Yes?'
'She'll come for you a second time, but you have to stay on top. There's something about the missionary position with her. She just can't get over the crest when she's sitting on you.'
I caught him right below the bottom lip, saw his teeth bare and his mouth go out of shape with the blow; then I drove my fist into his eye socket, hooked him with my left in the nose and hit him again in the mouth. His knees buckled and his head bounced off a fence rail. I felt him try to grab my waist as he went down, his eyes wide with fear, like those of a man who realizes he has slipped forever off a precipice, and I knew the old enemy had once more had its way and something terrible was happening in me that I couldn't stop.
He was at my feet now, his face strung with blood, his tie twisted backward on his neck, his chest laboring for breath.
Then among the thud of Beau's hooves, I saw Felix Ringo running at me through the tunnel of light inside the barn, simultaneously pulling back the slide on his nine-millimeter, his hat blowing off his head.
'You wasn't born, gringo. You was picked out of your mother's shit. This is for them people you killed down in Coahuila,' he said.
My hands felt swollen and useless at my sides, my chest running with sweat in the wind, the spilled water bucket ballooning in the dust by my feet. I could hear the blades on the windmill clattering like a playing card clipped inside whirling bicycle spokes. Felix Ringo extended the nine-millimeter in front of him with both hands, crouched in a shooter's position, as though he were on a practice range, and flipped off the butterfly safety with his thumb.
Temple Carrol stooped under the top fence rail, ripped L.Q. Navarro's revolver from the holster I had hung on a fence post, and screwed the barrel right behind Ringo's ear. She cocked the hammer, locking the cylinder in place.
'How your pud hanging, greaseball? You want to wear your brain pan on your shirt?' she asked.
* * *
chapter twenty-nine
There was no false dawn the next morning. The sky was a black lid above the velvet green crest of the hills, the clouds veined with lightning. I opened all the windows and let the smell of ozone and wind and distant rain fill the house. Mary Beth called while I was fixing breakfast.
'Where are you?' I asked.
'At the hotel downtown.'
'When did y
ou get in?'