Read Online Heartwood by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online Page B

the panel of his wife’s dresser. Thought I’d just keep you up to date. Have a good day.”

7
    My son, Lucas, had told me that the older people of Deaf Smith had never known what really went on in our town. He was right. We talked about younger people as though they were no different from the generations of years past. Somehow the eye did not register the kids who were stoned by second period at the high school, the girls who had abortions, the kids infected with hepatitis and herpes and gonorrhea, or the ones who passed their backpacks through a window so they could get their guns past the school’s metal detectors.
    A kid upon his knees in front of a toilet bowl, strings of blood hanging from his broken lips, the jean-clad legs of his tormentors surrounding him like bars, is a sad sight to witness. The fact that the teachers know better than to intervene is even sadder.
    But if we saw younger people as they were, we’d have to examine ourselves as well. We’d have to ask ourselveswhy we allowed people like Hugo Roberts to dwell in our midst.
    By the time I had listened to his voice on the message machine and walked over to his office, he had another revelation to make. The only light in his blockhouse of an office came from the desk lamp; the upward glow from the shaded bulb made his face look like a wrinkled tan balloon floating in the gloom.
    “We picked up that ole boy Skyler Doolittle. He says he’s your client,” he said.
    “Not exactly. What’d he do?”
    “Hanging around the playground at the elementary, trying to give them kids candy bars.”
    “We have an ordinance about giving away candy bars?”
    “You can be cute, Billy Bob. But I’ve dug children out of leaf piles and garbage dumps. Y’all do that in the Rangers?”
    “I came over here for only one reason, Hugo. You planted those bonds in Wilbur Pickett’s house. You’ll wish you didn’t.”
    He grinned and picked up a pen from his blotter and popped off the cap. He worked the head of the pen in and out of the cap.
    “You seen that Mexican girl lately, what’s her name, Esmeralda something?” he said.
    I walked across the lawn to the main courthouse, where Skyler Doolittle was sitting on a wood bench inside a holding cage between the jailer’s office and the back elevator. In his long-sleeve white shirt and wide red tie, his bald head and fused neck looked exactly like the domed top of a partially repainted fire hydrant.
    “I’ll have you out of here in about a half hour. But Ithink it’s a good idea you not go around the school yard again,” I said.
    “I wouldn’t harm them kids,” he said.
    “I know you wouldn’t,” I said. His eyes that were between gray and colorless seemed to take on a measure of reassurance. “By the way, my investigator checked around and didn’t find any indication Earl Deitrich is trying to put you in an asylum. So maybe you were worried unduly on that score, Mr. Doolittle.”
    “Those sheriffs deputies called me a sex pervert. They said they’d had their eye on me. They said the state’s got a special place for my kind.”
    I laced my fingers in the wire mesh of the cage. He looked like the most isolated and socially and physically rejected human being I had ever seen.
    “Some Mexican gangbangers made mention of you to me, Mr. Doolittle. Maybe they’re the same kids who caused the death of a Jewish man in Houston. I think you’re a decent and good man, sir. I suspect your word is your bond. In that spirit I ask you to leave Earl Deitrich alone,” I said.
    He seemed to study my words inside his head, his mouth flexing at the corners.
    “If you ask it of me. Yes, sir, I won’t give him no more trouble,” he said.
    When I walked past the elevator, one that looked like a jail cell on cables, two uniformed deputies were struggling with a waist-chained black inmate in county whites. The inmate’s left eye was cut and white foam issued from his mouth.
    “What are you staring at? Sonofabitch