Free Heartwood by James Lee Burke Page B

tiles. The bruises from the baton blows I hadtaken in Hugo Roberts’s office looked like purple and yellow carrots under my skin. I dipped a sponge in a bucket of water and squeezed it over my head, then lay on my back and stretched my muscles by pulling my knees toward my chest.
    When I walked into the shower two of the men who had beaten me were lathering themselves with the showerheads turned off. Their bodies were tanned and hard and streaked with soapy hair, their eyes malevolent and invasive. I put my head under the shower and turned on both faucets and let the water boil over my face.
    Temple Carrol met me in the courtroom, where a client of mine, a twenty-year-old four-time loser with alcohol fetal syndrome, was being arraigned for holding up the convenience store where he used to work. He had used no mask or disguise and his weapon had been a BB pistol.
    The judge’s name was Kirby Jim Baxter. His face was furrowed and white, like a bleached prune, and it stayed twisted in an expression of chronic impatience and irritability.
    “You back again? What the hell’s the matter with you? You want to spend the rest of your life getting pissed on by a prison guard’s horse?” he said.
    My client, Wesley Rhodes, had a harelip, a flat nose, an I.Q. of eighty, and wide-set reptilian-green eyes that seemed to contain separate thoughts at the same time. He stuffed socks inside his fly and wore motorcycle boots with elevated soles and two heavy, long-sleeve shirts that made his upper torso splay from his Levi’s like a cloth-wrapped stump.
    I began to run through the same old shuck that every judge hears when people like Wesley have their bail set.“Your Honor, my client has entered an alcoholic treatment program and is attending A.A. meetings daily. We’d like to request—”
    “Did I address you, counselor?” Kirby Jim said.
    “No, Your Honor.”
    “Then shut up. Now, you listen, young man—”
    It should have been a cakewalk. Kirby Jim was annoyed with the planet in general, but he wasn’t a bad man. He was sympathetic to the fact that people like Wesley Rhodes had no chance from the day they were born. He also knew that inside the system Wesley was anybody’s bar of soap.
    “It wasn’t armed robbery ’cause there wasn’t no BBs in the gun. I was in there to buy a magazine. My daddy said to tell y’all that and to kiss my ass. I ain’t afraid to go back. Horses don’t piss on people unless you get under them, anyway. So that shows how damn much
you
know,” he said, and turned his grinning, pitiful face on me, as though his wit had forever destroyed the Texas legal system.
    “Bail is set at ten thousand dollars. Bailiff, take him away,” Kirby Jim said.
    That’s what most of it is like.
    Outside, Temple and I sat under the trees on a steel-ribbed bench by the Spanish-American War artillery piece. It was warm in the shade and the trees were full of jays and mockingbirds.
    “It’s not your fault. That kid had a millstone around his neck when he was born,” she said.
    “I was thinking of something else.” I told her of the visit to my house by Ronnie Cruise the previous night and the fire that had burned down the empty savings and loan building on Earl Deitrich’s property in Houston.
    “You think these Mexican kids did it and Ronnie Cruise was setting up an alibi?” she asked.
    “Maybe.”
    “Who cares? They’re street rats. It’s not related to defending Wilbur Pickett, anyway.”
    “I don’t like getting used.”
    She straightened herself on the bench, pressing the heels of her hands against the metal. I felt the edge of her hand wedge against mine.
    “You want to feel these kids aren’t all greaseballs. The truth is they are,” she said.
    “You’re too hard, Temple.”
    “It’s a habit I got into down in Fort Bend County after I let a gangbanger ride in the back of my cruiser without cuffs. He paid back the favor by wrapping his belt around my throat,” she said.
    I looked at her