'Roofies?'

'Rohypnol. Ten times stronger than Valium. It's made overseas for insomnia. It tends to show up in date rape cases. How long you been gone from law enforcement?'

'Is he upstairs?'

'Get real, Billy Bob. His old man was down here with his lawyer at six this morning. I cain't charge him. The black man owned the stolen vehicle didn't get a license number and never saw a face… Look, I ain't sure myself it was Darl. There's a mess of customized cars hereabouts that same shade of red.'

'How many of them are owned by people like Darl Vanzandt?'

He spit, then wiped his mouth on his palm.

'Know and prove ain't a difference I should have to explain to a lawyer,' he said.

'I think the county found the right man for the job, Hugo.'

'The air-conditioning unit in here does about as much good as an ice cube on a woodstove. Make sure you close the door snug on your way out,' he said.

It was noon and the sun was white and straight up in the sky when I got home. I went into the library and took L.Q.' s revolver out of the desk drawer. I opened the loading gate, clicked back the hammer to half-cock, and rotated the cylinder until the empty sixth chamber came back under the hammer again.

Great-grandpa Sam carried his Navy.36s down to the bluffs on the Cimarron when he burned out the Dalton-Doolin gang and never had to pop a cap, I told myself.

'Wrong way to think, bud,' L.Q. Navarro said behind me.

'All right, I'll bite,' I answered.

'You don't tote it as a fashion statement. The other guy's got to know you cain't wait to use it. Elsewise, it's got the value of tits on a boar hog'

I eased the hammer down, locking the cylinder, and slipped the barrel back into the holster.

'You know what's really fretting you?' he said.

'Why don't you tell me, L.Q.?'

'It ain't that I got shot accidentally. It's because you believe it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been down in Coahuila vigilanting them dope mules.'

I kept my back to him. The sky outside was hot and bright, and dust was blowing in gray clouds out of the fields.

'Hey, the blood lust wasn't yours, bud; it was mine. I loved flushing them out of the poppies and blowing feathers when they ran. It could have been you instead of me,' he said.

'The new sheriff's corrupt.'

'That's like going to the whorehouse and saying the place is full of whores.'

'Everything was straight lines in Coahuila. It was us against them, and at sunrise we added up the score,' I said.

L.Q. didn't answer. I turned and looked at him. He stood with one arm propped against the bookshelves, staring at his foot, the brim of his Stetson shielding his face.

'You don't usually lack for words,' I said, my throat burning at what I knew was coming next.

'We mortgaged tomorrow for today, bud. Even for me, that thought is about like swallowing a piece of barbed wire,' he replied.

He walked toward the doorway, his back to me, his hands on his hips, splaying his coat out. I raised my hand to speak, then he was gone into the hallway and I heard the wind fling open the front door and fill the house with a creaking of boards and wallpaper.

I parked my Avalon behind the tin shed where Garland T. Moon worked as a welder and entered through the back door. The heat inside was numbing. A propane-fed foundry roared in one corner, a cauldron of melted aluminum wedged in the flames. Moon wore sandals without socks and a pair of flesh-colored gym shorts that were molded against his loins. He was bent over a machinist's vise, cutting a chunk of angle iron in half with an acetylene torch, his back spiderwebbed with rivulets pf sweat.

He heard me behind him, screwed down the feed on the torch, and pulled off his black goggles with his thumb. Dirty strings of soot floated down on his head and shoulders. His eyes dropped to my belt. He pulled at his nose.

'You come here to gun me?' he said.

'What's your hold on these kids?'

'It ain't no mystery. Cooze and dope. The high school clinic already gives them the rubbers. I just introduce them to what you might call more mature Mexican women.'

'You're a genuinely evil man, sir.'

'You got to stick a gun down in your britches to tell me that?' He laughed to himself and wiped his hands with an oil rag. The muscles in his stomach looked as hard as corrugated metal. 'You got your ovaries stoked up 'cause them boys poured cow shit on your son?'

'They almost killed a deputy sheriff last night.'

He picked up a can of warm soda from the workbench and drank, his throat working smoothly, his gaze focused indifferently out the door on the river.

'The doctors said I was supposed to be dead eight years ago. Said I was plumb eat up with cancer. I smell death in my sleep. It comes to somebody else first, better them than me,' he said. He wiped his armpits with the rag and threw it on the floor.

I looked at his softly muted profile, his recessed, liquid blue eye, the ridged brow that was like a vestige of an earlier ancestor. My forearm rested on the butt of L.Q. Navarro's revolver. I lifted the revolver from my belt, my palm folded across the cylinder, and laid it on the workbench.

'Pick it up,' I said.

He lit a cigarette, picked a particle of tobacco off his lip and dropped it from between his fingers.

'I cain't be hurt, boy. I live in here,' he said, and pointed to the side of his head. 'I learned it when a three-hundred-pound nigger stuffed a sock in my mouth and taught me about love.'

I pulled a photograph from my shirt pocket and held it up in front of him.

'Is the boy in overalls you?' I asked.

He lifted it out of my hand and smiled while he studied it. He tossed it on top of the revolver and smoked his cigarette, a merry light in one eye.

'My father taught you how to weld, didn't he?' I said.

'He wasn't bad at it. I'm better, though.'

'I think a man like you must come out of a furnace.'

'That's the first thing you said today made any sense.'

I took a six-inch bone-handled game knife out of my pocket and pried open the single blade. Two days ago I had ground it on an emery wheel in the barn and stropped it on an old saddle flap, and the buffed ripples along the edge looked like the undulations in a stiletto.

I lay the photograph down on his workbench and sliced it in half.

'My father was a fine man. You're a piece of shit, Moon. You don't belong in his past anymore than you do in our present,' I said.

I pulled loose the severed image of the child who had become the man standing before me and dropped it into the foundry. It curled immediately into a film of ash and rose into the air like a black butterfly.

Then I hit him across the mouth with the back of my hand, my ring breaking his lip against his teeth.

Moon grinned and spit blood onto the molten rim of the foundry. He blotted his mouth with his palm before he spoke. 'A man got that much hate in him is a whole lot more like me than he thinks,' he said.