Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set Read Online Free PDF Page B

overhead, and said, “I need to get to the airport.”
    Then he died.
    His fall partner in the home invasion was another matter. Raised in a state-run orphanage, released from juvenile court at age seventeen to the United States Marine Corps, Michael Charles Ruggles served eight years in the Third World, received a general discharge, and began to get into trouble again, as though his time in the Corps was simply a respite from his true career.
    But the charges filed against him were those consistent with a run-of-the-mill miscreant rather than a professional killer: solicitation of a prostitute, jackrolling an elderly person, possession of marijuana, failure to pay child support, drunk driving, solicitation and battery of a prostitute, and passing counterfeit currency at a racetrack. In each instance the charges were dismissed without explanation.
    But I knew none of these things until the following day, when Johnny American Horse called my office from the jail.
    â€œHave you been charged?” I asked.
    â€œNo. They’re just talking to me,” he replied.
    â€œCops don’t just talk. As of this moment you answer no questions unless I’m present.”
    â€œAmber’s with me,” he said.
    â€œDid you hear me?”
    At the courthouse a deputy escorted me to an interview room, where two plainclothes cops were sitting with Johnny at a wood table on which there was a can of Coca-Cola and a Styrofoam cup, a video camera mounted high on the wall. Johnny could not have looked worse. He had washed his skin clean, but blood splatter had dried in his hair and horsetails of it were all over his clothes.
    â€œThis ends now, gentlemen,” I said.
    One of the detectives was a towering, bull-shouldered man named Darrel McComb, whose clothes always seemed to exude a scent of testosterone. “We were talking about baseball. Think those Cubbies are cursed?” He grinned.
    I sent Amber and Johnny across the street to my office and went downstairs to see the district attorney. “Put Darrel McComb back in his kennel,” I said.
    â€œTreated unfairly, are we?” she said, looking up from some papers on her desk.
    â€œMcComb questioned Johnny without Mirandizing him. He also ignored Johnny’s request for a lawyer.”
    â€œYour client is not under arrest. So get lost on the Miranda. Also quit pretending Johnny’s an innocent man.”
    â€œThese guys tried to kill him, in his own house. What’s the matter with you?”
    â€œHe lay in wait for them with a tomahawk and a knife. Why didn’t he dial 911, like other people?”
    â€œThe Second Amendment says something about telephones?”
    â€œDon’t drag that right-wing crap into my office.”
    â€œI don’t want Darrel McComb anywhere near my client.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with McComb?”
    â€œFor some reason the words ‘racist’ and ‘thug’ come to mind.”
    â€œGet out of here, Billy Bob.”
    Twenty minutes later, after Amber Finley had driven Johnny back to the res, I glanced out the window and saw her father cross the intersection and enter my building, his face effusive, his hand raised in greeting to street people who probably had no idea who he was. Romulus Finley’s political detractors characterized him as an ignorant peckerwood, a Missouri livestock auctioneer who fell off a hog truck and stumbled into the role of United States senator. But I believed Romulus was far more intelligent than they gave him credit for.
    He sat down in front of my desk, pulling a wastebasket between his feet, and began coring out the bowl of his briar pipe with a gold penknife. The indirect lighting reflected off the pinkness of his scalp.
    â€œMy daughter has already retained you?” he said, his eyes lifting into mine.
    â€œYes, sir, she has.”
    â€œI wish she’d called me. It’s hard to keep them down on the reservation