Blackbird Read Free

from a couple of past interviews, a thin, tense woman named Mallory Peck with a big arrangement of black hair and a parsimonious smile. As Mallory stuck out an icy little hand to shake, a production assistant wearing tight, scruffy jeans out at the knees and a Soundgarden T-shirt appeared from somewhere with a makeup kit, tilting her head as she approached, assessing the angles and shadows of my face with an expert eye.
    Mallory said, ‘So, Jim, ready to reach out to the masses?’
    I was about to answer when I saw Ridout making his way toward us from across the room, wearing a crookedlittle grin of defeat as he cocked and fired an imaginary six-shooter in the air. He tipped his head toward Chief Royal’s office as he joined us, Mallory smoothly transferring her attention to him, saying, ‘Well, looks like I get the bull rider instead.’ Her smile notched up a few watts as she inventoried Ridout’s muscles.
    ‘Steer wrestler,’ he corrected, his own expression brightening. ‘Bull riders are those crazy-eyed little dudes that walk crooked.’
    ‘Mallory, Danny,’ I said. ‘Danny, Mallory.’ I headed for OZ’s office.
    Nobody who’d worked out of Three for more than a day would have misunderstood Ridout’s six-gun gesture, which harked back to OZ’s thirty years with the Texas Rangers, an outfit founded by characters who hunted their man until they got him and didn’t talk much about it; silent, fearless, incorruptible men who never complained, never explained and never quit. Superstitious nineteenth-century border bandits and Comancheros, watching them ride alone through the true valley of the shadow of death, the only law in a quarter of a million square miles of the most dangerous ground on earth, called them demons.
    The hunt that had made OZ the Big Gun had ended on a hot, windy afternoon in Starr County, where he’d faced down four Mexican dope dealers in the middle of the street, he with the .45 Colt Single Action Army revolver he still carried as a duty weapon, they with their nine-millimetre automatics. They took their shots, he took his. One of their thirty-three cut a clean hole through the crown of his grey Resistol and another ended up in the heel of his left boot, but OZ, ignoring their fire and working left to right, took out all four of the shooters with consecutive heart shots.The people who’d known him longest said he could tell you the names of these guys and every other man he’d killed, except for the two he referred to as Mal Tiro Uno and Mal Tiro Dos , who’d floated away on the Rio Grande by the dark of the moon without having told anybody who they were.
    OZ operated without organisational charts or middle management. There were no file trays, staplers, pencil cups or tape dispensers on his desk, just his phone, a computer monitor, a picture of his late wife Martha, and the calendar blotter in front of him. He kept his files in his head, and to him ‘accessories’ meant his Colt, his saddle and his hat.
    I found him sipping coffee from a plain white mug as he watched me from across his desk – pink, clean-shaven jowls, what was left of his silver hair standing out in leprechaun tufts above his jughandle ears, sky-blue eyes as hard as tungsten. Behind him the walnut panelling was covered with photos of famous fellow Texas Rangers and other old-time lawmen, Hall of Fame Dallas Cowboys stars and big-game guides.
    I walked over to the nook where his coffee machine stood and sniffed what was in the carafe. It smelled better than dishwater, so I poured some into a plastic cup from the tray next to the machine, settled back in the black leather chair in front of OZ’s desk and took a sip.
    OZ said, ‘You done anything to get sideways with our city fathers that I don’t know about?’
    ‘Don’t think so, why?’
    ‘Got a call from Dwight Hazen this morning.’
    ‘The city manager? What did he want?’
    ‘Could be something, could be nothing,’ OZ said. ‘He’s jawin’ about a