Free Heartwood by James Lee Burke

drank out of a fire extinguisher,” one deputy said.
    The second deputy looked at me with recognition, hisarm locking simultaneously around the black man’s struggling head.
    “Hey, your client, the freak in the cage? We pick him up again on the same beef, he’s going out of here a steer,” he said.
    That evening a tornado destroyed an entire community south of us and killed over thirty people. I rode Beau, my Morgan, out into the fields and watched the dust blowing on the southern horizon and the rain clouds moving like oil smoke across the sun. I turned Beau back toward the house just as the rain began to march across the fields and dimple the river.
    The sky turned black and the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees. I turned on the lights in the barn and tied on a leather apron and pried a loose shoe off Beau’s back left hoof. A car turned off the highway into my drive, paused for a moment by the side of the porch, then rolled slowly to the front of the barn.
    Its headlights were on high beam and shone directly into my eyes.
    I picked up a hammer off the anvil and stood just inside the opened doors of the barn. The headlights went off and I saw a chopped, sunburst 1961 T-Bird, with chrome wire wheels and an oxblood leather interior, full of Mexican kids. Ronnie Cruise cut the engine and walked through the rain into the barn.
    He wore baggy black trousers and a form-fitting ribbed undershirt and a rosary with purple glass beads around his neck; his shoulders looked tan and hard and were beaded with water.
    “That’s quite a car,” I said.
    “Me and Cholo built it. I done a lot of custom work for people around here,” he said. His eyes dropped momentarilyto the hammer in my hand. “You think we’re here to ’jack your Avalon, man?”
    “You tell me.”
    “I didn’t mean to dis you at the garage. But see—” He held his fingers up in the air and looked at them as he spoke, as though they held the words he needed. “See, I heard what the lady said when my back was turned, about two guys going off a roof. Like, that’s the story somebody told you. But you didn’t have the respect to ask me about it. I don’t think that’s too cool, man.”
    “So maybe it’s none of our business.”
    “Yeah, well, I’ll clear it up for you. A couple of Viscounts put their hands all over a girl in a theater. Then when they had to explain theirselves they got scared and like the punks they were they pulled a nine. Maybe the guy they pulled it on got it away from them and chased them across a couple of roofs. So the two Counts decided they were gonna jump to a fire escape. They almost made it. But the guy didn’t throw nobody off a roof …” His eyes searched my face. “Why you keep looking at me like that?”
    “Because I don’t have any idea why you’re here.”
    He cut his eyes sideways and exhaled through his nose.
    “There’s a tornado out there and I couldn’t get back home,” he said.
    “Y’all want some coffee?”
    He pawed at his cheek with three fingers. “Yeah, I think that’d be nice,” he said.
    I went into the house and brought back a pot of coffee and a paper sack full of tin cups. His friends, two girls and two boys, all of them wearing caps backwards on their heads, sat on hay bales or walked idly through the stalls, touching saddles, coils of polyrope, rakes, hoes,mattocks, bridles, a pair of chaps, axes, and fire tongs as though they were historical artifacts.
    I rasped Beau’s hoof smooth and reshoed it, then led him toward his stall. Ronnie Cruise stepped behind him to get to the coffeepot, and Beau’s back hooves slashed into the air like jackhammers. Ronnie grabbed his shinbone, his face white with pain, his shirtfront drenched with coffee. I grabbed him by one arm and eased him down on a hay bale.
    “You all right?” I said.
    “Oh yeah. I always like getting my spokes broken.” He rocked forward, squeezing his shin with both hands.
    “Let me show you something. You