The why in the case he’s working on is clearly money. Three kids from the university are dead because someone wanted bucks badly enough to sell them rattlesnake seeds and jimsonweed without once giving a good goddamn about the consequences. Kids will buy anything, especially East Coast kids who haven’t been warned their whole life long about what grows in the desert. One seed of rattlesnake weed makes you euphoric, it’s like LSD growing free. The problem is, two can cause your death. Unless, of course, the first has already done that job nicely, which was the case with one of the kids, a history major from Philadelphia who had just turned nineteen. Gary was called in early by his friend Jack Carillo in homicide, and he saw the history major on the floor of his dorm room. The boy had had awful convulsions before he died; the whole left side of his face was black and blue, and Gary suggested that no one would consider it tampering with the evidence if they put some makeup on the kid before his parents arrived.
Gary has read the file on James Hawkins, who’s been selling drugs in Tucson for twenty years. Gary is thirty-two, and he vaguely remembers Hawkins, an older guy the girls used to whisper about. After dropping out of high school, Hawkins got into trouble in various states, Oklahoma for a while, then Tennessee, before returning to his hometown and getting sent to the lockup on charges of criminal assault, which, along with drugs, seems to be his forte. When he couldn’t bullshit his way out of a bad situation, Hawkins was known to go for his opponent’s eyes, using the heavy silver ring he wore to gouge and dig. He acted as though no one could stop him, but it’s pretty much the end of Mr. Hawkins’s criminal career now. The history major’s roommate positively identified him—from his snakeskin boots to the silver ring decorated with a cactus and a rattlesnake and the cowboy he may have imagined himself to be—and they’re not the only ones to have picked out his photo. Seven other students, who were lucky enough not to take the bogus drugs they bought from him, have identified this loser as well—and that should be that, except no one can find Hawkins. They can’t find his live-in girlfriend, either, from all accounts a good-looking woman who seems to have been a hostess at every half-decent restaurant in town. They’ve checked the bars Hawkins frequented and questioned all three of his alleged friends, and no one’s seen him since late June, when the university let out.
Gary has been getting into Hawkins’s life, trying to figure him. He’s been frequenting the Pink Pony, which was Hawkins’s favorite place to get drunk, and sitting on the front patio of the last house Hawkins rented, which is why Gary happened to be there when the letter arrived. He was sitting in a metal chair, his long legs stretched out so he could prop his feet up on the patio’s white metal railing, when the mailman walked right over and dropped the letter on his lap and demanded the postage due, since the stamp had fallen off somewhere along the way.
The letter was crumpled and torn in one corner, and if the flap hadn’t already been open, Gary would have just taken it over to the office. But an opened letter is hard to resist, even for someone like Gary, who’s resisted a lot in his life. His friends know enough not to offer him a beer, just as they know not to ask him about the girl he was married to, briefly, right after high school. They’re willing to do this because his friendship is worth it. They know that Gary will never deceive them or disappoint them—that’s the way he’s built; that’s the way his grandfather raised him. But this letter was something else; it tempted him, and he gave in to it, and, if he’s going to be honest, he still doesn’t regret it.
Summer in Tucson is seriously hot, and it was a hundred and seven degrees as Gary sat out on the patio of the house Hawkins used to rent and read that letter addressed to Gillian Owens. The creosote plant that grew beside the patio was all but popping with the heat, yet Gary just sat there and read the letter Sally had written to her sister, and when he was done he read it again. As the afternoon heat finally began to ease up, Gary took off his hat and dropped his boots down from the metal railing. He’s a man who’s willing to take chances, but he has the courage to walk away from impossible odds. He knows when to back off and when to keep trying, but he’d never felt like this before. Sitting out on that patio in the purple dusk, he was long past considering the odds.
Until Sonny died, Gary had always shared a house with his grandfather, except for his brief marriage and the first eight years with his parents, which he doesn’t remember out of sheer willpower. But he remembers everything about his grandfather. He knew what time Sonny would get out of bed in the morning, and when he’d go to sleep, and what he’d eat for breakfast, which was invariably shredded wheat on weekdays, and on Sundays pancakes, spread with molasses and jam. Gary has been close to people and has a whole town full of friends, but he’d never once felt he’d known anyone the way he felt he knew the woman who wrote this letter. It was as if someone had ripped off the top of his head and hooked a piece of his soul. He was so involved with the words she’d written that anyone passing by could have pushed him off his chair with one finger. A turkey vulture could have landed on the back rung of the chair he was sitting in, screamed right in his ear, and Gary wouldn’t have heard a sound.