He held his chin and loins close against the bars and made a wet, chugging sound like a locomotive.

I went home and fixed lunch in the kitchen. The silence of the house seemed to ring and pop in my ears. I opened all the downstairs windows and pulled back the curtains and felt the wind flow through the hallway and puff open the back screen. The morning paper lay folded on an oak table in front of the hallway mirror. A full-length photo of Lucas in handcuffs stared up at me. He didn't have my eyes, I thought. They were obviously his mother's. But the hair, the cut of the jaw, the six-foot-one frame… None of those belonged to Vernon Smothers.

I went back into the kitchen and tried to finish the fried pork chop sandwich I'd fixed.

His mother and I had gone to high school together. Both her parents had been road musicians who worked oil field honkytonks from Texas City to Casper, Wyoming. When she was sixteen she met and married Vernon Smothers, who was ten years older than she. When she was nineteen she found me in Houston and asked for money so she could leave him.

I offered her half of my ancient rented house in the Heights.

Two weeks later a fellow Houston police officer called Vernon and told him I was living with his wife. He came for her at night when I was not home, in the middle of a hurricane that tore the pecan tree out of my front yard. I never saw her again.

A month after Lucas was born she was electrocuted trying to fix the well pump that Vernon had repaired with adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet.

I wrapped my unfinished sandwich in wax paper and put it in the icebox. When I turned around, L.Q. Navarro was leaning against the back doorjamb, his arms folded across his chest. His Stetson was the color of ash, his eyes as lustrous as obsidian.

'How's it hangin, L.Q.?' I said.