'I don't care if you have a warrant or not. You have no legitimate cause to be here,' I said.

'Shut up and stay out of the way,' the second man said. He wore shades and a military haircut, and his work had formed a thin sheen of perspiration on his face.

'Come on, Wilcox. You're a pro. You guys pride yourselves on blending into the wallpaper,' I said.

'You're interfering with a federal investigation,' Wilcox said.

'I'm what?'

'I think you've been running a parallel investigation to our own. That means there's probable cause for us to believe you possess evidence of a crime. Hence, the warrant. You don't like it, fuck you,' he said.

I used the Rolodex on my desk and punched a number into the telephone.

'I hope you're calling the judge. He's part Indian. His nickname is Big Whiskey John. He's in a great mood this time of day,' Wilcox said.

'This is Billy Bob Holland. I've got six Treasury agents ransacking my home,' I said into the receiver. 'The agent in charge is Brian Wilcox. He just told me to fuck myself. Excuse me, I have to go. I just heard glass breaking upstairs.'

The agent in shades picked up my great-grandfather's journal from a chair, flipped through it, and tossed it to me. 'Looks like a historical document there. Hang on to it,' he said, and raked a shelf of books onto the floor.

'That was the newspaper,' I said to Wilcox. 'It's owned by an eighty-year-old hornet who thinks fluoridation is a violation of the Constitution. Does the G still have its own clipping service?'

'You think you're getting a bad deal, huh? You cost us eight months' work. That's right, we were about to flip Sammy Mace, then you showed up. Plus your gal just got pulled out by her people.'

He looked at the reaction in my face, and a smile broke at the corner of his mouth.

'Her people?' I said numbly.

'Call her apartment. She's gone, bro. She got picked up in a plane at four this morning. She wouldn't survive an IA investigation,' he said.

I started to pick books off the floor and stack them on my desk, as though I were in a trance.

'You were a cop,' Wilcox said. 'You don't use a baton to bring a suspect into submission. You never deliver a blow with it above the shoulders. They'd crucify her and drag her people into it with her.'

'I can't stop what you're doing here. But somewhere I'm going to square this down the line,' I said.

'Yeah, that's going to be a big worry of ours,' Wilcox said.

The man in shades began rifling my desk. He removed L.Q. Navarro's holstered.45 revolver and flipped open the loading gate on the brass bottom of a cartridge.

I fitted my hand around his wrist.

'That belonged to a friend of mine. He's dead now. You don't mind not handling it, do you?' I said, and squeezed his wrist until I saw his lips part on his teeth and a look come into his eyes that his shades couldn't hide.

'We're done here,' Wilcox said, raising his palm pacifically. 'Don't misunderstand the gesture, Holland. Touch a federal agent again and I'll put a freight train up your ass.'

I waited for her call, but it didn't come.

I worked late at the office that day. Through the blinds I could see the sun, like a burning flare, behind the courthouse and the tops of the oak trees. At just after seven Temple Carrol came by.

'I'll buy you a beer,' she said.

'I still have some work to do.'

'I bet.' She sat with one leg on the corner of my desk. She lifted her chestnut hair off her neck. 'It's been a hot one.'

'Yeah, it's warming up.'

'She blew Dodge, huh?'

'I don't know, Temple. Not everybody reports in to me.'

'You want to talk business, or should I get lost?'

I pushed aside a deposition I was reading and waited.

'I took Jamie Lake shopping for some clothes that make her look half human,' she said. 'At first she's looking at these see-through things and I tell her, "Jamie, it might be the nature of prejudice and all that jazz, but tattoos just don't float well with juries."

"Oh I get it," she says. "Upscale people tell the truth. Trailer court people lie. Wow! Tell me, which kind was that needle-dick polygraph nerd who was trying to scope my jugs?".

'I say, "We do what works, kiddo."

'She goes, "There's nothing like being sweet, is there? I once told a narc, 'Gee, officer, I wouldn't have smoked it if I had known it was harmful to my health.' He was such a gentleman after that. He took it out of his pants all by himself."

'Billy Bob, this gal is major off the wall.'

'Most of our clientele is. That's why they're in trouble all the time,' I said.

'Here's the rest of it. She had her nose really bent out of joint by this time. So she takes out her MasterCard and buys four hundred dollars' worth of clothes I couldn't afford.'

'It doesn't mean she's dirty.'

'Yeah, and Jack Vanzandt and this greaseball Felix Ringo brought her to us out of goodwill.'

I rubbed my forehead and looked at the soft orange glow of the sunset over the trees. Mockingbirds glided by the clock tower on the courthouse.

'Yeah, this guy Ringo doesn't fit. He's a friend of Jack, he was hanging around Sammy Mace, and he's hooked up with the G at the same time,' I said.

I felt the fatigue of the day catch up with me. I tried to think straight but I couldn't. I felt her eyes on my face.

'Go to supper with me,' she said.

'I'm going to put Darl Vanzandt on the stand,' I said.

That night there was still no call from Mary Beth. In the morning I drove to the office, then walked to the thrift store operated by the Baptist church, where Emma Vanzandt was a volunteer worker.

She was in back, sorting donated clothes on a long wood table. She wore tailored jeans and red pumps and a white silk blouse with red beads. She didn't bother to look up when I approached her.

'Jack and Felix Ringo gave me some witnesses that are almost too good to be true,' I said.

'Oh, how grand,' she said.

'I think Jack may have done it to get me off your son's back.'

She looked me in the face and silently formed the word stepson with her mouth.

'Excuse me, your stepson, Darl.'

'Why tell me, good sir?'

'Because Darl's going on the stand just the same.'

'Would you kindly take the okra out of your mouth and explain what you're talking about.'

'Darl was at Shorty's the night Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked. He's mentally defective and has a violent history. He's beaten women with his fists. He goes into rages with little provocation. You figure it out, Emma.'

'Ah, our conscience feels better now, doesn't it? You take Jack's favor, but to prove your integrity, you subpoena a walking basket case and fuck him cross-eyed in front of a jury of nigras and Mexicans.'

A woman paying for her purchase at the counter turned around with her mouth open.

'Tell Jack what I said.'

I walked back out the front door. Then I heard her behind me. In the sunlight her makeup looked like a white and pink mask stretched on her face, her black hair pulled tightly back on her forehead, her eyes aglitter with anger or uppers or whatever energy it was that drove her.

'You're a fool,' she said.

'Why?'

Her mouth was thick with lipstick, slightly opened, her eyes fastened on mine, as though she were on the edge of saying something that would forever make me party to a secret that she imparted to no one.

'Bunny Vogel,' she said.

'What?'

Then the moment went out of her eyes.

'I wish I were a man. I'd beat the shit out of you. I truly hate you, Billy Bob Holland,' she said.

My father was both a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines for thirty years, but all his jobs came from the same company, one that contracted statewide out of Houston. I called their office and asked the lady in charge of payroll if their records would indicate whether my father ever worked around Waco in the late 1930s or early 1940s.