Lay Down My Sword and Shield by James Lee Burke

said.
    “You really want to push it, Mr. Holland?”
    “Yeah, I do. From what I understand you have a b.c.d. from the Marine Corps and you do most of your law enforcement on helpless winos in a drunk tank. So why don’t you get off the badass act?”
    “You’re under arrest. I don’t expect you’re going to get out of our jail very soon, either.”
    “You’re fucking with the Lone Ranger, too, peckerwood,” I said.
    He brought his billy out of his back pocket and caught me right above the temple. A shotgun shell exploded in my head, and I fell against the car door and hit the ground on my hands and knees. He kicked me once in the stomach, and my breath rushed out of me as though someone had opened a large hole in the middle of my chest. The inside of my mouth was coated with sand, my eyes bulged, and I started to vomit, then his boot cut across the back of my head with the easy swing of a football player kicking an extra point.

CHAPTER 4

    S OMETIME IN THE early morning hours I woke up on the stone floor of a cell in the bottom of the courthouse. The cell was almost completely black, except for the dim circles of light through the row of holes in the top of the door. Moisture covered the walls, and the toilet in the corner had overflowed. I pulled myself up on the iron bunk and touched the huge swelling above my temple. It was as tight as a baseball, and the blood had congealed in my hair. My head was filled with distant bugles and claps of thunder, and I felt the cell tilt on its axis and try to pitch me off the bunk into the pool of water by the toilet. Then I vomited between my legs.
    I raised my head slowly, my eyes throbbing and the sweat running down my face. I found a dry kitchen match in my shirt pocket and popped it on my thumbnail. I held the flame over my wristwatch and saw the smashed crystal and the hands frozen at five after one. My white pants were still wet and streaked with mud, and my shirt was torn off one shoulder. I stumbled against the door and leaned my face down to the food slit.
    “Hey, one of you sons of bitches better—” But my voice broke with the effort of shouting. I tried again, and my words sounded foolish in the stillness.
    “Cool that shit, man,” a Negro voice said from down the corridor.
    I lay back on the tick mattress with my arm across my eyes. I could smell the urine and stale wine in the cloth, and I imagined that there were lice laying their strings of white eggs along the seams, but I was too sick to care. I slept in delirious intervals, never sure if I was really asleep or dreaming, and my nightmare monsters sat with spread cheeks on my feet and grinned at me with their obscene faces. They appeared in all shapes and sizes of deformity: hunched backs, slanted eyes, split tongues, and lipless mouths. Major Pak was there with his fanatical scream and the electrician’s pliers in his clenched hand, the guards in the Bean Camp who let our wounded freeze to death to save fuel, and then Sergeant Tien Kwong leaned over me and inserted the end of his burp gun into my mouth and said, smiling, “You suck. We give you boiled egg.”
    A deputy slipped the bolt on my cell and pulled open the door. I winced in the light and turned my face toward his silhouette. His stomach hung over his cartridge belt. Behind him a Negro trusty was pushing a food cart stacked with tin plates and a tall stainless-steel container of grits.
    “You can go now, Mr. Holland, but the sheriff wants to talk with you a few minutes first,” the deputy said.
    “Where’s the man who brought me in?”
    “He’s off duty.”
    “What’s his name?” My head ached when I sat up on the bunk.
    “You better talk with the sheriff.”
    I got to my feet and stepped out into the corridor. The Negro trusty was ladling spoonfuls of grits and fried baloney into tin plates and setting them on the iron aprons of the cell doors. The uneven stone on the floor hurt my bare feet, and my right eye, which had started to