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blowing from the bed of his truck.

4
    Late the next afternoon I received a phone call from Kippy Jo Pickett, Wilbur’s wife.
    “They tore up our house. They ripped the floor out of the barn,” she said.
    “Who did?” I said.
    “The sheriff and his men.”
    “Did he have a search warrant?”
    “He said he did. He kept rattling a paper in front of me. He smelled like liquor,” she said.
    “Where’s Wilbur?” I asked.
    “They drove him out to the hills. When they brought him back, he wouldn’t come in the house,” she replied.
    A half hour later I parked in Wilbur’s dirt drive and walked around the side of the house to the back, where he was burning trash in an oil barrel. His shirt hung on a fence post and his skin looked like warm tallow in the yellow and red light of the fire. The kitchen window wasat my back. I turned and looked through the screen into the sightless eyes of Kippy Jo.
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there,” I said, regaining my breath.
    She walked away from the sink without answering.
    Wilbur glanced up from his work, then went on shoving a stack of splintered boards into the flames.
    “Hugo Roberts drove you out in the hills?” I said.
    Wilbur sucked in one side of his mouth. “He showed me what was left of a cougar that got caught in a hoop wire. He said the more it fought, the more it cut itself up.”
    “He threatened you?” I asked.
    “He said we live way out here on the hardpan. He said Mexican dopers go through here at night sometimes. He wouldn’t want none of them to catch Kippy Jo home alone, ’cause some of them ain’t half human.”
    I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. His face looked flushed in the heat of the fire.
    “You’re not telling me something, Wilbur,” I said.
    “Hugo said he’d like to have a good boy like me as one of his deputies. He took his nine-millimeter out and stuck it down in my pants. Like this.” Wilbur shoved the flattened ends of his fingers down under his belt buckle. “He pushed it on down till it was pressing against my privates. He told me, ‘You’re a natural-born lawman, Pickett.’ His deputies was grinning from behind their sunglasses, like I was some kind of geek in a carnival.”
    “Hugo fears and hates people who have courage, Wilbur. That’s why he’s cruel,” I said.
    He speared a board into the flames, his eyes avoiding mine.
    “He offered you a deal, didn’t he?” I said.
    “He said it don’t matter if Deitrich gets the bondsback or not. I can say a fence burned me and took off without giving me no money. The insurance is gonna take care of it, anyway.”
    “Listen to Hugo Roberts and you’ll be chopping cotton on Huntsville Farm.”
    “He’s the man with the power.”
    “Goodbye, Wilbur.”
    I walked back out to my car. The scrub oak on the rim of the hills looked like stenciled black scars against the molten sun. I started the car engine, then turned it off and got back out and slammed the door. I stepped up on the gallery and opened the screen door without knocking. Kippy Jo was tucking in a fringed bedspread on the couch. She turned and stared in my direction.
    “Did you tell your husband I was a giver of death?” I asked.
    She folded her fingers in front of her, her eyes like white-flecked blue marbles, her very skin seeming to absorb the sounds around her. But she didn’t speak.
    “I not only killed drug transporters, I accidentally killed my best friend. If people want to talk about it, that’s fine. I just don’t want to listen to it,” I said.
    I let the screen swing back on the spring behind me. But my angry words brought me no comfort.
    That night I drove down the road to the convenience store for a loaf of bread. I heard the car behind me before I saw it, its twin Hollywood mufflers rumbling off the asphalt. It was a customized 1949 Mercury convertible, with a grille like chromed teeth, the deep maroon finish overpainted with a tangle of blue and red flames blowing out of the