Heartwood by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online

Deitrich place. We found a vial with two rocks in it under the seat,” the same deputy said.
    “Is Hugo inside?” I asked.
    “Yeah, but the office is closed.”
    “I’ll just take a minute,” I said, and went between them and pushed open the heavy oak door.
    Hugo Roberts was sitting behind his desk, bent forward, his elbow propped on his blotter, toking on his cigarette while he watched a deputy shake down Esmeralda Ramirez against the wall.
    Her palms were high up on the logs, her ankles spread, her midriff exposed above her jeans. Her dark hair hung down on both sides of her face. A uniformed deputy ran his hands down her armpits and ribs, his fingers brushing the edges of her breasts, then over her buttocks, up her thighs, until one hand came to rest firmly against her genitalia.
    “You better get a female deputy in here, you sonofabitch,” I said to Hugo.
    “And you’d better get your ass out of here,” he replied.
    “Fuck you,” I said.
    “
What? What
did you say to him?” the deputy shaking down the girl said, straightening up now, his right hand clenching and unclenching. When I didn’t answer, he shoved me in the breastbone with three fingers. “Boy, I’m about to turn you into a serious Christian.”
    Hugo’s head was wreathed in cigarette smoke. “Kyle won’t abide interference with an officer in the performance of his duty. I won’t, either, Billy Bob,” he said.
    The deputy named Kyle snipped the cuffs on Esmeralda Ramirez’s wrists again, this time in the front, and stuck his hand inside the back of her blue jeans and panties, knotting the fabric, his knuckles wedging into her buttocks, and pulled her toward a chair.
    I grabbed his upper arm and spun him toward me.The skin of his face tightened against the bone, his teeth showing, his eyes glinting. He pulled a lead-weighted blackjack from his back pocket and wrapped his palm around the braided grip. I swung with my right and caught him just below the eye, snapping his head back, driving him into the wall.
    Then I felt the old curse have its way, like kerosene evaporating on hot coals and igniting in an enclosed space, a yellow-red flash that burned away all restraint and always left me numb and shaking and unable to remember what I had just done.
    I felt my fist sink to my wrist in his stomach, then my boot arched into his face, the heel raking his mouth and nose, splitting the back of his head against a log in the wall.
    But three other men were swinging at me now, with fists or batons or both, the blows showering across my back, and I knew I was about to slide into the bottom of a dark well where I would be safe from the angry faces that shouted down at me from above.
    Then suddenly the room was still, speckled with blowing rain, the only sound that of the deputy named Kyle, on his hands and knees, spitting blood on the oak floor. Temple Carrol stood in the doorway, her extended arms and rounded shoulders and chestnut hair etched with the sun’s last fiery glow.
    “Ah, the testosterone boys in uniform at work and play. Hugo, you sorry sack of shit, please give me an excuse to blow your other lung out,” she said.
    At the same time that I, an officer of the court, was brawling with rednecks, a small man with thick glasses named Max Greenbaum was leaving a synagogue in the old Montrose district of South Houston. The rabbi, whohad known Greenbaum for years, waved goodbye from the doorway. Greenbaum stopped at a post office and picked up a priority envelope, then drove into Herman Park and stopped by a tree-shaded lake and was writing on a legal pad when three cars filled with Mexican gangbangers pulled into the parking area, sealing off Max Greenbaum’s Jeep.
    It was dusk now, and the only other people at the lake were an elderly black couple and their grandchildren picnicking on the grass. The gangbangers’ stereos roared with such ear-pounding volume that the water in the lake trembled. A kid who wore a bodybuilder’s shirt