Free BBH01 - Cimarron Rose by James Lee Burke

went to Mass and the deserted
filling station on the corner and up the dirt street an unpainted
plank-walled tavern with a shingle-roof porch and boxes of petunias in
the windows.
    I stopped the Morgan by the side window.
    'You see him?' I asked.
    That's him yonder, by the pool table. The one eating
chili beans out of a paper plate.'
    'I want you to go on back to the
café and wait for me.'
    'Maybe you oughtn't to do this, Billy Bob. My eye
don't hurt now.'
    'Did you eat lunch yet?'
    'He's got a frog sticker in his right-hand
pocket. I seen it when he…'
    'When he what?'
    'Hung up his britches on my mother's bedpost.'
    I put five dollars in Pete's hand, 'Better get you a
hamburger steak and one of those peach ice cream sundaes. I'll be along
in a minute.'
    Pete slid off the Morgan's rump and walked down the
street toward the café, looking back over his shoulder at me,
the lump
by his eye as red as a boil.
    I took the polyrope off the pommel, unfastened the
pig string that held the coil in place, worked the length of the rope
through my palms and ran the bottom end through the eye at the tip.
Then I double-folded the rope along half the loop, picked up the slack
off the ground, and rode my Morgan up on the porch and through the
doorway, ducking down on his withers to get under the jamb.
    The inside of the tavern was well lighted and
paneled with lacquered yellow pine, and neon Lone Star and Pearl beer
signs and an enormous Texas flag were hung over the bar.
    'I hope you brung your own dustpan and whisk broom,'
the bartender said.
    I rode the Morgan between a cluster of tables and
chairs and across a small dance floor toward the pool table. The man
eating from a paper plate looked at me, smiling, a spoonful of chili
halfway to his mouth. He wore a neatly barbered blond beard and a shark
tooth necklace and a blue leather vest and black jeans and silver boots
sheathed with metal plates.
    I whipped the loop three times over my head and
flung it at the man with the blond beard. It slapped down on him hard
and caught him under one arm and across the top of the torso. He tried
to rise from the chair and free himself, but I wound the rope tightly
around the pommel, brought my left spur into the Morgan's side, and
catapulted the blond man off his feet and dragged him caroming through
tables and bar stools and splintering chairs, into an oak post and the
legs of a pinball machine and the side of the jukebox, tearing a huge
plastic divot out of the casing. Then I ducked my head under the
doorjamb, and the Morgan clopped across the porch and into the road,
and I gave him the spurs again.
    I dragged the blond man skittering through the
parking lot, across layers of flattened beer cans and bottle caps
embedded in the dirt. His clothes were gray with dust now, his face
barked and bleeding, both of his hands gripped on the rope as he tried
to pull himself free of the pressure that bound his chest.
    I reined in the Morgan and turned him in a slow
circle while the blond man rose to his feet.
    'Tell me why this is happening to you,' I said.
    'Wha—' he began.
    'You turn around and you tell all these people how
you hurt a child,' I said.
    He wiped the blood off his nose with the flat of his
hand.
    'His mama told me there was a fellow liked to put
his head up her dress,' he said.
    I got down from the saddle and hooked him in the
nose, then grabbed his neck and the back of his shirt and drove his
head into the corner of the porch post.
    The skin split in a scarlet star at the crown of his
skull. When he went down, I couldn't stop. I saw my boot and spur rake
across his face, then I tried to kick him again and felt myself topple
backward off balance.
    Pete was hanging on my arm, the five-dollar bill
crushed in his palm, his eyes hollow with fear as though he were
looking at a stranger.
    'Stop, Billy Bob! Please don't do it no more!' he
said, his voice sobbing in the peel of sirens that came from two
directions.

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chapter
nine
    I sat in the