'You're a good guy, Mr Holland. But I don't want to talk about this.'

'Suit yourself. But you're an artist, the honest-to-God real article, Lucas. Some people will always envy and hate you for the talent you have.'

He turned the guitar over in his hands and felt the polished mahogany and walnut belly and the spruce soundboard.

'It's funny, I seen one just like this in Ella Mae's pawnshop. She wanted three hundred dollars for it,' he said.

'No kidding?'

His gaze wandered over my face, then he looked out the window at a man in cream-colored slacks and a tropical hat walking toward the poolroom.

'There's the guy I'm meeting,' Lucas said.

'Felix Ringo? He's the guy talking to you about a job?'

'Yeah, I told you about him. He's got a furniture factory down in Piedras Negras.'

'He's a Mexican drug agent.'

'Yeah. He's got a furniture business, too.'

'Wait here.'

I got out of the Avalon and approached the man named Felix Ringo. His expression was flat, his eyes registering me with the valuative pause of a predator waking from sleep.

'I don't know why, but you're running a game on the kid in my car. It stops here,' I said.

'You got some bad manners, man.'

'I'll say it once. Stay away from him.'

'I was at Fort Benning. The School of the Americas. I'm here with the permission of your government. I don't like to provoke nobody, but I don't got to take your shit.'

'Don't bet on it.'

'Hey, man, I got a good memory. I'm gonna remember where I seen your face. When I do, maybe you ain't gonna have a very good day.'

I stepped off the sidewalk and got back in my car. He remained under the colonnade, staring at Lucas. Then he jerked his head at him, motioning him inside.

'He's dirty, Lucas. It's something you can smell on a bad cop. He'll take you down with him,' I said.

'I cain't get on at any clubs. What am I gonna do, keep working for my dad the rest of my life?'

'It might beat chopping cotton with a gunbull standing over you,' I said and started the car and drove down the street before he could get out.

'Why don't you treat me like I'm three years old?' he said, his face red with anger and embarrassment.

'I want the names of all Darl Vanzandt's friends,' I said.

That night I sat at my library desk and read from Great-grandpa Sam's faded, water-stained journal that he had carried in a saddlebag through Oklahoma Territory.

L.Q. Navarro sat in a burgundy-colored stuffed chair in the corner, fiddling with his revolver, an armadillo-shell lamp lighted behind his head. He spun the revolver on his finger and let the ivory handles snick back flatly in his palm. The blue-black of the steel was so deep in hue it looked almost liquid. He opened the loading gate with his thumb, pulled back the hammer on halfcock, and rotated the cylinder so that one loaded chamber at a time clicked past his examining eye.

'That Garland T. Moon? You can take it to him with fire tongs. That boy's not a listener,' he said.

'I'm trying to read, L.Q.,' I said.

'You going to find your answers in there? I don't hardly think so.'

I rested my brow on my fingers so I wouldn't have to look at him.

I read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal:

In the Indian Nation, July 4, 1891

I always heard women in the Cherokee Strip was precious few in number and homely as a mud fence, but it was not held against them none. The Rose of Cimarron surely gives the lie to that old cowboy wisdom. She is probably part colored and part savage and perhaps even related to the Comanche halfbreed Quanah Parker. She is also the most fetching creature I have ever set eyes on. I would marry her in a minute and take her back to Texas, but I am sure I would not only be run out of the Baptist church but the state as well, provided she did not cut my throat first.

If the Lord made me for the cloth, why has my lust and this woman come together at such an inopportune time?

L.Q. stuffed his revolver in his holster and walked to the ceiling-high window and looked out at the hills. I could see the thick, brass cartridges in the leather loops on his gunbelt, and the Ranger badge clipped just in front of his holster.

'Your great-grandpa got rid of whiskey and guns in his life, but his propensities come out in a different way,' he said.

'What's that mean?'

'Garland Moon, Jimmy Cole, that Mexican drug agent with the grease pencil mustache? You don't run them kind off with a legal writ, Billy Bob.'

He took his revolver back out of his holster and hefted it from one palm to the other, the barrel and cylinder and moon-white grips slapping against his skin.

A pair of headlights turned into my drive, and through the library window I saw Mary Beth Sweeney pull her cruiser to the back of my house.

I stepped out on the back porch and opened the screen door. Her portable radio was clipped to her belt.

'You on duty?' I said.

'For another hour. I need to talk with you,' she said. She stepped inside the porch and took off her campaign hat and shook out her hair. 'You can't just unload a bomb like that and walk off from someone.'

'Last night?'

'Yeah, last night. I don't want somebody hanging his guilt on me like I'm some kind of dartboard.'

'That wasn't my intention.'

'Oh no? Like, "Hey, I killed my best friend, and you remind me of it, so see you around and thanks for the great evening."'

'Where do you get the in-your-face attitude?' I said.

'I knew it would be a mistake coming here.'

'No, it wasn't,' I said. I held my eyes on hers and realized what it was that drew me to her. The spray of pale freckles, the dark brown curls that had a silklike sheen in them, the obvious decency and courage in her behavior, these were all the characteristics that had probably defined her as a girl and had stayed with her into her maturity. But her eyes, which were bold and unrelenting, masked a level of past injury that she didn't easily share.

Her stare broke.

'Come in. I just baked a pecan pie,' I said.

'I'd better not.'

I put my hand under her forearm.

'You have to,' I said.

She bit down on her bottom lip.

'I need help with this Mexican drug agent,' I said.

'For just a minute.' She walked ahead of me and sat at the kitchen table, with her hat crown-down in front of her.

'Felix Ringo told me he was at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. Punch him up on the computer for me,' I said.

'The federal computer, you're saying?'

'You got it.'

'What's this School of the Americas?'

'It's supposed to be counterinsurgency training. But their graduates have a way of murdering liberation theologians and union organizers or anybody they don't approve of.'

I placed a piece of pie and cup of coffee in front of her. She turned a tiny silver spoon in her cup, then put the spoon down and gazed out the window.

'I'm not saying I have access. But I'll do what I can,' she said. Static, then a dispatcher's voice squawked on her portable. 'I'll have to take a rain check on the pie.'

She walked out onto the porch, both hands on the brim of her campaign hat.

I picked up one of her hands and traced my fingers down the inside of her arm and brushed her palm and touched her nails and the back of her wrist and folded her fingers across mine.

'You're really a nice lady,' I said.

The wind filled the trees outside and blew through the screens, and a loose strand of her hair caught wetly in the side of her mouth. I removed it with my fingertips, then looked in her eyes and saw the consent that I knew she rarely gave, and I put my hands on her arms and kissed her on the mouth, then did it again, then slipped my arms around her and touched her hair and the hard muscles in her back.