'Pete's mother.'

'Yeah, that his name, Pete. She made a 911 at five this morning. She was showering to go to work. She went to wipe off the bathroom window to see if it was still raining outside. Six inches from her face is a guy with tufts of red hair slicked down on his head and blue eyes like she's never seen in a human being before.'

I felt a tingling, a deadness, in my hands that made me open and close my palms.

'The deputy put it down as a Peeping Tom incident. Nothing would have come of it, except I heard him talking about it when I was in the bullpen this morning. I made him go back out to the house with mug shots of Garland Moon and five other of our graduates. The deputy said she took one look at Moon's photo and wouldn't even touch it with her finger when she identified him,' Marvin said.

'Where's Pete now?'

'At school. I'll put a deputy at their house this afternoon.'

'Your deputies are worthless. Did you pick up Moon?'

'He has two witnesses who say he was eating breakfast in a diner at five A.M.'

'You believe them?'

'It's a Peeping Tom complaint. Even if we could charge him, he'd be out on bond in an hour.'

Then his defensiveness, his frustration with me and his job went out of his face.

'I called the lady and offered to keep Pete at our house for a while. She said I was helping Social Services take her little boy from her… Where you going?' he said.

Stonewall Judy granted a recess until the following morning.

I drove home and went into the barn, unlocked the tack room and sorted through the garden hoes and rakes and mauls and picks and axes that were stacked inside an old Mayflower moving drum. The edges of the tools were flecked with bits of dried mud and tangles of dead weeds from cleaning the vegetable garden and flower beds in the early spring, or strung with resinous wisps of pine from the cords of wood I had split last fall. But I knew the tool I was looking for.

It was a mattock whose heavy, oblong iron head had already worn loose from the helve. I clamped a pair of vise grips on the wedge that held the handle fast inside the mattock head, twisted it out of the wood, and slipped the handle free. It was made from ash, thick across the top to support the weight of the iron head, the grain worn smooth at the grip. I propped it on the passenger seat in the Avalon and headed down the road to town just as a curtain of rain moved in a steady line across the clumped-up herd of red Angus in my neighbor's draw.

I parked behind the tin shed where Moon worked. The rain pattered on my slicker and the brim of my Stetson as I pulled open the back door of the shed. A black man in a bikini swimsuit with a yellow rag tied around his head was grinding a metal bracket on an emery wheel.

'Hep you?' he asked.

'Is this your shop?'

'What you want?'

'Garland Moon.'

His eyes went over my person. 'That a chunk of wood under your raincoat?'

'It's been that kind of day.'

He nodded. 'He gone down to Snooker's Big Eight.'

'You going to use the telephone on me?'

'Rather y'all do it there than here… Tell you something, a man like that is looking for somebody to click off his switch. You don't do it, he'll find the right man sooner or later.'

I drove a half mile down the road to a bluff above the river and a long wood building that was ventilated with window fans and set in a grove of oak trees that had been the site of a beer garden during the 1940s. The parking lot was full of pickup trucks and motorcycles, and rain was blowing through the trees and streaking on the front windows, which glowed with purple and red neon.

I walked the length of the building, stepping across puddles, looking through the spinning blades of fans at the felt tables, pinball machines that swam with light, bikers drinking beer at the bar, an enormous Confederate flag ruffling against the far wall. Then I looked through a screen door and saw him bent over a cue, sighting on the diamond-shaped nine-ball rack, the triceps of his poised right arm knotted with green veins. He drove the cue ball into the rack like a spear.

He raised up, his mouth smiling at the perfection of the break, his fingers reaching for the chalk. Then he heard the screen open and close behind him and he turned toward me just as I whipped the mattock handle, edge outward, across his jaw.

His knees buckled slightly, and a choked sound, a grunt, came out of his throat. He pressed his hand against his cheek as though he had a toothache, his eyes glazing with shock and surprise, and I hit him again, this time whipping the helve across his mouth.

His pool cue had clattered to the floor. He looked at it rolling away from him, his mouth draining blood on the apron of the table, and I hit him again, in the ribs, and again in the head, the neck, across the ear; then Moon was stumbling out the back screen door, through the trees, along the edge of the bluff. Down below, the river was covered with rain rings.

I swung the mattock handle with both hands across his spine. I seemed to slip out of time and place, as though I had been absorbed into a red-black square of film that was like the color of fire inside oil smoke. Then, like a man awakening from a dream, I realized the mattock handle was no longer in my grasp, that I was on one knee beside him, his head lolling against a tree trunk, my fist driving into his face.

'That's enough, motherfucker,' a voice said behind me.

I turned and looked up into the disjointed, heated eyes of a booted man in a leather vest whose body glowed with odor.

'Private conversation,' I said. But my words sounded outside my skin, as though they had been spoken by someone else and I heard them through the rain. The back of my right fist was flecked with Moon's blood.

A biker next to him studied my face and extended his arm across his friend's chest.

'His name's Holland. Sonofabitch is crazy. Leave him alone. Snooker done already called the Man,' he said.

They and those who had followed them walked away, their boots splashing in puddles, as though water had no effect on their clothes and bodies, their hair blowing in the wind like dirty string.

I looked again at Moon, his face, the tree he lay against, the grass stains on his elbows, the skinned lesions around his eyes, the rain dripping out of the overhead branches, all of it coming into focus now, my breath quieting in my throat, as though a bird with blood in its beak had flown out of my chest.

'You think you're conwise, but somebody's laughing at you, Moon, just like those gunbulls did when they draped you over a barrel and made a girl out of you,' I said.

He pushed his back up against the tree, wincing slightly, grinning at me. He started to speak, then cleared his mouth and spit in the grass and started over.

'This don't mean nothing. I done something to you won't ever change,' he said.

'The people who hired you are the same people who tried to run you out of town earlier.'

He grinned again and wiped his nose on his sleeve, but I saw my words catch in the corner of his eye.

'You and Jimmy Cole wandered into something you shouldn't out at the Hart Ranch. Then some guys tried to take you down with a baseball bat at your motel. The same guys jumped me behind my barn. One of them was a dude named Felix Ringo.'

He looked out into the rain, his brow knurled, his recessed eye bright, brimming with water.

'A Mexican narc works out of San Antone?' he asked.

'Guy's got a nasty record, Moon. He likes to hurt people. But unlike you, he's got juice with the government.'

'That don't change nothing between me and you.'

'The Big C has its own clock.'

'You still ain't caught on, have you? How come that pipe joint blowed out on your old man? 'Cause some kid lit a cigarette down in the hellhole?'