Leonard shrieked, backing toward the pump house, the twin barrels of the Remington wavering between Thorne and the tactical operators in the trees.
“If you give ’em the location, they kill us all!
It’s the only leverage we have!
Thorne, tell her!
Tell her you’ll give us the immunity papers if we sign the release!”
“Put the gun down, Leonard,” Clara said, not turning her head.
“I can’t, Ma!”
Leonard sobbed.
“They’re gonna execute me!
Roy Hicks… they think I killed him!
They think I was the one with the pipe!”
“You *were* the one with the pipe, Leonard,” a voice said.
The voice was quiet.
It did not come from Thorne.
It did not come from Veronica.
It came from the shadow of the smokehouse.
A man stepped out into the dying light, moving with a strange, lurching hitch in his left hip.
He was tall, gaunt, wearing a faded olive-drab field jacket with the patches ripped off, his gray hair cropped close to the scalp.
A long, jagged white scar ran from the corner of his left eye down across his jawline, twisting his mouth into a permanent, cynical half-smile.
His collarbone on the right side tented the fabric of his shirt—healed crooked, thick as an oak knot.
Veronica took two staggering steps backward, hit the front fender of the Ford Crown Victoria, and collapsed onto the gravel with a sound like a punctured tire.
“Jesus Christ,” Thorne breathed, her hand freezing on the grip of her concealed weapon.
“Hicks?”
The man with the crooked collarbone stopped five feet from Clara.
He did not look at Thorne.
He did not look at Veronica.
He looked at the old woman standing in the frosted grass with the powder on her shawl.
“Evenin’, Mrs.
Clara,” Roy Dale Hicks said, his voice a dry, gravelly rumble born of forty years of ditch tobacco and cheap whiskey.
“Your boy always was a poor hand with an iron.
He hit me across the cheek, but he didn’t have the stomach to lean into it.
A man who won’t follow through with his shoulder ought not to pick up a tool.”
Clara looked at him.
Her eyes softened, just for an instant, with the deep, bottomless grief of a woman who had seen too many working men ground into grease by people who never had grease under their fingernails.
“How’s the jaw, Roy?” she asked.
“Hurts when the north wind blows,” Hicks said, touching the scar with a blunt, three-fingered hand.
“Same as it has since seventy-two.”
Leonard’s jaw hung open.
The shotgun began to slip through his sweat-slick fingers.
“You… you were in the morgue…
I saw the ice…
Cobb said you were dead in the cooler…”
“Cobb was looking at what Cobb paid to see, you sniveling little worm,” Hicks said, turning his cold, scarred face toward the son.
“A hundred thousand dollars buys a lot of signatures from a county coroner who owes three million to the bookies in Shreveport.
Did you really think you were the only one who knew how to buy a dead body off the charity ward?”
Clara looked at Thorne.
“The man in the casket,” Clara said, her voice dropping into a rhythm as steady as the ticking of the Seth Thomas clock.
“The man you people were so anxious to put six feet under before noon today.
His name wasn’t Roy Dale Hicks.”
Thorne’s eyes flickered toward the road, toward the radio antennas on the Suburbans.
“Who was in that box, Clara?”
“His name was Thomas Vance,” Clara said.
A suffocating, dead silence fell over the yard.
Veronica began to crawl across the driveway, her fingernails tearing against the limestone gravel, her eyes wild, staring at the ground beneath Hicks’s boots as if the earth were about to open and swallow her whole.
“Thomas…”
Veronica whispered, blood bubbling on her lower lip where she had bitten through the flesh.
“Thomas died in ninety-four… in the hospital in Galveston…”
“Thomas didn’t die in Galveston, Veronica,” Clara said, her voice heavy with fifty years of accumulated disgust.
“Thomas was your father.”
The wind gusted through the post oaks, rattling the dry leaves against the tin of the barn.
“Jesse’s older brother,” Clara continued, stepping toward the shivering woman on the ground.
“The smart one.
The one who went to Austin, got the law degree, and went to work for the chemical syndicates while Jesse stayed here and plowed the rocks.
The one who drew up the paper corporations.
The one who told Jesse that forty canisters of cesium could be hidden in the limestone cap and nobody would ever know the difference.”
Clara reached into her apron pocket and pulled out the small, worn photograph she had pressed against her chest when she got off the bus from Waco that morning.
She didn’t show it to Thorne.
She dropped it into the dirt between Veronica’s trembling hands.
It was a photograph from a church picnic in 1968.
Two young men in white short-sleeved shirts standing beside a barbecue pit.
One of them was Jesse Vance, with his wide, gentle face and his plowman’s shoulders.
The other was a thinner, sharper man with a cruel, handsome mouth and a long, white scar running down his left cheek—the result of a tractor accident when they were boys on the Brazos.
“Thomas didn’t get sick in ninety-four,” Clara said, looking down at Veronica.
“He stole sixteen million dollars from the Longview syndicates, faked his death with a forged cremation permit from an outfit in Port Arthur, and went to live in a private compound outside Saltillo.
He left you behind in Dallas to marry my boy so you could keep an eye on the deed to this dirt.”
Veronica didn’t pick up the photograph.
She curled into a ball on the gravel, weeping into her dirty sleeves, her body shaking with dry, rattling convulsions.
“He came back six months ago, didn’t he?”
Clara whispered.
“The cancer finally caught him.
Real cancer this time.
Not the kind you buy from a coroner.
He came back to Texas because he wanted to die in the family plot at Oak Cliff.
He wanted to be buried under his brother’s name so the syndicate lawyers wouldn’t seize his offshore trusts.”
She turned her eyes to Leonard.
“And you helped him, didn’t you, son?”
Leonard fell against the pump-house wall, the shotgun clattering onto the concrete apron, its safety clicking against the stone.
He slid down the whitewashed boards until his seat hit the dirt, his knees pulled up to his chest, his face buried in his hands.
