Billy Bob and Hackberry Holland Ebook Boxed Set by James Lee Burke

at the rodeo, then.”
    Lucas continued to tune his Martin and didn’t answer. Wyatt Dixon was framed against the light like a scorched tin cutout.
    â€œJohnny American Horse has got your old man jumping through hoops,” Wyatt said.
    Don’t bite, Lucas told himself, his heart tripping. “How?” he asked.
    â€œAmerican Horse ain’t no shrinking violet. He’s a stone killer. Ask them two men he cut up with an ax and a knife. You get an Indian mad, run his pride down, make fun of his woman, he’ll either come at your throat or turn into a pitiful drunk like that ’un I just kicked out of here.”
    Lucas looked into space, this time determined not to speak again.
    â€œHere’s what it is,” Wyatt said. “American Horse’s sixteen-year-old nephew got executed by a white man. The word is executed. Boy was breaking into the white man’s truck and the white man come up behind him and put a bullet in his brain from three feet. That white man was turned loose with just an ankle bracelet on him. American Horse ain’t no mystic holy man. On the sauce he’s a mean machine out to put zippers all over white people. Take care of yourself, kid.”
    Wyatt set his coffeepot and cup on the bar and walked out the front door, his boots loud on the plank floor.
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    â€œDIXON JUST DIDN’T seem like the same fellow,” Lucas said that night at the house.
    â€œBelieve it, bud, he’s the same fellow,” I replied.
    We were eating dinner at the kitchen table; the moon was yellow on the side of the hill behind the house and up high snow was drifting on the fir trees.
    â€œPeople change. That’s what your church teaches, don’t it?” Lucas said, his eyes playful now.
    â€œThe Bible doesn’t have a chapter on the likes of Wyatt Dixon,” I said.
    Later, the three of us washed and put away the dishes, then Lucas went out on the front gallery and watched the deer grazing in the meadow. He looked pale and handsome in the moonglow, his body lean and angular, his jeans high on his hips, his flannel shirt rolled above his elbows.
    Before he was born, his mother had run away from her husband, a hapless and violent man, and had moved in with me when I was a patrolman with the Houston Police Department, living in the Heights. After Lucas was born, his mother was electrocuted trying to fix a well pump her husband had previously repaired with adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet.
    Lucas’s early life should have embittered him against the world. Instead, he became a loving and brave and decent kid, with an enormous musical talent. As I watched him leaning against a post on the gallery, his hat cocked on his head, serene inside his youthful thoughts, I wished I’d killed Wyatt Dixon years ago, when I had the chance.
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    THE NEXT MORNING, Wednesday, I saw Darrel McComb coming hard from the courthouse, crossing between cars to get to my office. I saw him glance behind him, almost getting hit by a truck in the bargain, then I heard him talking loudly in the reception area.
    I went up front to meet him. “What’s the problem?” I said.
    His face looked heated, the skin under his nose nicked by his razor.
    â€œSorry, Billy Bob,” Hildy said.
    â€œIt’s all right. Come on in, Darrel,” I said.
    He followed me into my office and closed the door.
    â€œLeave it open,” I said.
    â€œScrew you.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou sent your wife down to Stevensville to question this woman Greta Lundstrum. Your wife told her I was following Lundstrum around. Lundstrum just called the sheriff and gave him hell over the phone.”
    â€œYou deny you were in the woods above Romulus Finley’s house while Lundstrum was there?”
    â€œI was following Wyatt Dixon. I filed a report on that,” he said.
    â€œI bet you did.”
    â€œWhat’s that supposed to mean?”
    There were circles under his