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"Because he has legitimate business interests here. He's committed no crime here. In fact, there's no outstanding warrant on this man anywhere. He's never spent one day in jail."
"I think that's the same shuck his lawyers try to sell."
He exhaled his breath through his nose.
"Go home. You've got the week off," he said.
"I heard my leave might even be longer."
He chewed on a fingernail.
"Who told you that?" he said.
"Is it true or not?"
"You want the truth? The truth is your eyes don't look right. They bother me. There's a strange light in them. Go home, Dave."
"People used to tell me that in bars. It doesn't sound too good to hear it where I work, sheriff."
"What can I say?" he said, and held his hands up and turned his face into a rhetorical question mark.
When I walked back down the corridor toward the exit, I stuffed my mail back into my mailbox, unopened, and continued on past my own office without even glancing inside.
My clothes were damp with sweat when I got home. I took off my shirt, threw it into the dirty-clothes hamper, put on a fresh T-shirt, and took a glass of iced tea into the backyard where Bootsie was working chemical fertilizer into the roots of the tomato plants by the coulee. She was in the row, on her hands and knees, and the rump of her pink shorts was covered with dirt.
She raised up on her knees and smiled.
"Did you eat yet?" she asked.
"I stopped in Lafayette."
"What were you doing over there?"
"I went to Opelousas to run down a lead on that '57 lynching."
"I thought the sheriff had said—"
"He did. He didn't take well to my pursuing it."
I sat down at the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree. On the table were a pad of lined notebook paper and three city library books on Texas and southern history.
"What's this?" I said.
"Some books I checked out. I found out some interesting things."
She got up from the row of tomato plants, brushing her hands, and sat down across from me. Her hair was damp on her forehead and flecked with grains of dirt. She picked up the note pad and began thumbing back pages. Then she set it down and looked at me uncertainly.
"You know how dreams work?" she said. "I mean, how dates and people and places shift in and out of a mental picture that you wake up with in the morning? The picture seems to have no origin in your experience, but at the same time you're almost sure you lived it, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"I looked up some of the things that, well, maybe you believe you saw out there in the mist."
I drank out of my iced tea and looked down the sloping lawn at the duck pond and the bright, humid haze on my neighbor's sugarcane.
"You see, Dave, according to these books, John Bell Hood never had a command in Louisiana," she said. "He fought at Gettysburg and in Tennessee and Georgia."
"He was all through this country, Boots."
