Read BBH01 - Cimarron Rose for Free Online Page A

trusties brought up the food carts loaded with aluminum containers
of grits, fried ham, white bread, and black coffee. The men in the
drunk tank were fed first, then Lucas Smothers, who had been moved into
an isolation cell by the showers. A trusty stopped his food cart in
front of Jimmy Cole's cell and tapped a wood serving spoon against the
bars.
    'Fixing to tote it back, Jimmy Cole… Hey, boy, you
want to eat, you better roll it out.'
    The trusty looked more closely at the man in the bunk, who was
dressed in jailhouse whites, and at the striped pillow pressed down on
his face with one arm, and at the thin coppery glint buried in the
folds of his throat. The trusty whirled and shouted down the corridor
at the turnkey: 'Inmate out on the ground, bossman!'
    'What the hell you talking about? That's him right yonder,'
the turnkey said, pointing through the bars. Then the turnkey saw the
chipped, black baton on the floor under the bunk and the lower part of
the face under the pillow. 'Oh Lord have mercy,' he said, and unlocked
and flung back the door and then gingerly pulled the pillow loose from
the arm folded across it like a person who cannot watch the next frames
of film about to flash on a movie screen.
    The copper wire had been unwrapped from the head of a broom,
twisted into a hangman's noose, dropped over Harley Sweet's neck, and
then razored into the flesh. Later, the medical examiner would report
that the blows with the baton had been delivered while Harley Sweet
strangled to death on his knees.
    Garland T. Moon wolfed his breakfast and talked the trusty
into filling his tin plate again with grits and the ham fat from the
bottom of the serving container. Then he leaped up and grabbed the lip
of a steel crossbeam at the top of his cell with his fingertips and did
chin-ups in his Jockey undershorts, the veins and sinew in his body
erupting across his skin like nests of twigs.
    'Hey, bossman, don't Mr Sweet's mother live at 111 Fannin
Street?… I'd put a guard on her if I was y'all. You got Jimmy
Cole out on the ground, there ain't no telling what might happen,' he
said. He dropped flat-footed from the steel crossbeam and giggled
uncontrollably.
     
    The courtroom was almost empty when
Lucas Smothers appeared
before the judge and had his bail reduced from $150,000 to $75,000. His
father, Vernon, was supposed to appear in court with a bondsman. He
didn't. I put up my property for the bond, then waited on the front
steps of the courthouse for Lucas to be processed out of the jail.
    Vernon Smothers parked his pickup by the curb and cut across
the lawn toward me. He wore a pair of dark blue overalls that were wet
at the knees.
    'Where were you, Vernon?' I asked.
    'Putting in pepper plants. I didn't watch the time. That
little snip of a bondsman didn't call me back, either. What happened in
there?'
    'I went his bond.'
    'I ain't asked for that.'
    'It's no big thing.'
    His eyes looked out at the glare of sunlight on the walk, the
traffic in the square, the old men who sat on benches by the
Spanish-American War artillery piece. The olive skin of his narrow face
twitched as though someone were touching it with the tip of a feather.
    'Them that's got money use it to put their shame on others.
That's the way it's always worked around here. I won't abide it,
though,' he said.
    'Vernon, don't hurt your boy again.'
    'Seems like the calf's mine only when it's time for
you to
lecture, Billy Bob.'
    I walked away from him, through the doors of the courthouse
and down a hallway whose woodwork seemed infused with the dull amber
glow of its own past. Marvin Pomroy came out of his office and almost
collided into me. His face was bloodless, as though it had been slapped.
    'What's wrong?' I said.
    'We messed up. Moon and Jimmy Cole did time together at
Sugarland,' he answered.
    'You're not communicating, Marvin.'
    'The witness… The customer who saw Moon go into the
store where he killed the old woman… Somebody sliced her back
screen and