“I got all kinds of costumes.” Esther pushed the unmarked door open. “I always find what I’m looking for.” Costumes were everywhere, hanging on the backs of doors, on mirrors, on an array of bars attached between walls. More were folded neatly and stacked on the floor.
“Where the poh-leece?” Cope asked.
“Don’t worry about him.” She indicated the costumes. “Whatever you want.”
Within a minute, Cope had found what he needed. He stripped to his shorts and slid into the designer jeans, complete with brightly stitched logo across his left ass cheek. The T-shirt was yellow, a locomotive booming out of his chest, the words Soul Train exploding out of the smoke. A reddish leather jacket with a wide collar and a pair of purple suede boots finished the outfit.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked. “That’s a joke, right?”
“What’s a joke?”
“What you’re wearing. You look like...I don’t know...a—”
“Pimp Daddy, is what he ain’t saying, Elmer. You look like a cheap pimp.”
Cope tucked in his shirt. “I was a cheap pimp for a while. But this ain’t what I wore.” A wistful look slipped across his face. “I danced on Soul Train once, too. Dumbfuck thing to do. Anybody could’a seen me.”
A jagged silence fell between those two. Esther’s eyes were hard on Cope while his were closed, his head tilted back as he leaned against the wall. She loved him and it was obvious. As apparent as a crack whore jonesing for the next rock. Esther loved someone at least twenty years older; who wore too many rings and had something bloody hidden in his past.
But when he was in trouble, he came to her and that had to be at least part of why she loved him so hard, harder than I’ve seen anyone love anyone else for a while.
Did Mama ever love Fagan like that? She loved her second husband that deeply, no doubt, but was that how it had been with my biological father? Or was that just a quick thing that turned into a three-year disaster?
Eventually, Cope opened his eyes. They fell gently on Esther. “Damn, honey, this shit makes me feel thirty years younger.”
She pecked his cheek. “You ain’t old enough to be thirty years younger.”
I grabbed two sets of clothes. One relaxed with jeans and a T-shirt, the other more formal. The slacks and tie and nicer shoes I’d use at the banks I had left to visit. As I dressed, I glanced at the number on my forearm: 101645. Beginning to fade just a bit, probably all the sweat. I’d have to touch it up soon.
“Y’all look good in this one,” Cope said, tossing a shirt. It had the flag of Kenya on the chest.
“Kenya? How’s that work? I’m Irish.”
“Well...now y’all can be black Irish.”
“Yeah, that’s funny, Elmer,” Esther said.
I stripped and looked up to see them watching me. “What?”
“What that?” Esther pointed at my chest.
A hand went over it quickly. “A scar.”
“Damned thing must’a been awful hot to scorch you like that.”
“I—” I ground my teeth together. “I did it myself, okay? Don’t ask me why, I just did.”
Esther nodded. “Huh. What it is?”
“A pendant. Belonged to my mother. She’s dead and it’s how I remember her.” I put the T-shirt on and left the dressing room.
“You don’t have the pendant?” Esther asked, following him up the stairs.
“Fagan stole it,” Cope said.
I whirled on him. “How the fuck do you know that?”
The air in the basement thickened. Esther’s gaze moved back and forth between Cope and me.
“Y’all got to calm down, boy.”
“Calm down bullshit. How do you know Fagan stole the pendant? Did SuperCop send you?”
Cope backed up a step. “Didn’t nobody send me nowhere. Wanna keep secrets, y’all shouldn’t oughta talk in your sleep when I’m rifling your room.”
“What?”
“Lips flapping like a whore’s,” Cope said.
There was a beat of silence, an angry silence. Fucker had rifled my room? Looking for what? A damned cucumber? More rings? I sputtered, trying to work up a serious headful of righteous anger. But there was nothing there. I was so burned with anger about Fagan and SuperCop and my own failures over the last thirty-eight years; I didn’t have much anger left.
When Esther started laughing, her voice full and clear even as she went into the kitchen, I shook my head. “Stay the hell outta my place, old man.”
He held up a hand in an oath that wasn’t any too fucking solemn. “I promise, I ain’t never gonna rifle y’all’s room again.”
“Whatever.”
In the kitchen, sitting around the table, the night pressed in against us. Far across the lot, somewhere in that night, sat the motorcycle. It was an invisible beacon and it called me—hell, it yelled at me—to hit the road. My feet itched to cover some miles, but I knew we couldn’t leave yet. It was entirely too hot to leave. Every cop within fifty miles was crawling through and over Valentine and probably would be for the next few hours.
“So,” Esther said. “The lab finally blow up?”
“What?”
“Boom boom,” Cope said.
“What are you talking about? It was a church.” I ignored the tea Esther poured.
“Yeah, but churches need money, don’t they? They never asked you for money, did they?”
“No.”
“‘Course not. It wasn’t a cult, they didn’t want your wealth.”
“When she’s right, she’s right,” Cope said.
“Want that body, nothing more. Enough bodies gives ’em a good cover.”
“Selling that dope,” Cope said.
With a graceful nod, Esther said, “Cooked up in the basement lab.”
“Basement?” I shook my head. “It was some mobile homes, Esther.”
Esther giggled. “You didn’t get around there much, did you?”
Truthfully, I hadn’t seen anything but the sanctuary, my room, and the bathroom. I had been too focused on the illusion of soul-cleansing.
“Underground,” Cope said. “Vented through the sanctuary. Cain’t tell me y’all never smelled the place.”
My face flamed hot. “I thought it was the candles.”
“That’s what you were supposed to think,” Esther said. “But show me a candle that ever smelled like starter fluid.”
Those few times I had smelled chemicals, I’d thought the wind had shifted, brought the odor up from the factories just across the Mexican border.
“What’s the number?” Esther asked. She nodded at my arm.
“Nothing. Doesn’t mean anything.”
She sucked her teeth. “Everything means something. All Elmer’s scars mean something, no shit about that.” After a short laugh, she said, “You guys, all you church guys, are all nuts, you know that? Whips and drugs and robes. Bunch’a freaks.”
“Excepting me,” Cope said.
“Including you,” Esther said.
The conversation settled into a comfortable groove for a few minutes. Cope and Esther talked and held hands and rubbed thighs together. This leaving was hard for both of them and it occurred to me that leaving someone behind should have been just as difficult for me when I stepped off Mama’s beloved porch for Fagan’s Continental. But getting in that car was as easy as breathing. Or pissing. Easy and natural and I didn’t worry at all about my step-daddy’s tears.
“Y’all’s face looking serious.” Cope knocked back some tea. He coughed and blinked rapidly. “Damn, Esther, too much whiskey.”
She shook her head. “No such thing.”
“The pendant,” I said.
“That one?” Esther said, pointing to my chest.
“Yeah. I’ve got to get it back to the owner.”
“I thought you were the owner.”
“Belonged to my step-father. The sperm-donor stole it.”
“Sperm-donor?” she said. “Wow, that’s some love.
So you’re taking it away from the man you hate and giving it to the man you love.”
“No big spiritual reckoning, Esther. I’m just trying to find the thing. I find it, I’ll take it back.”
We sat in silence a bit longer. Outside, the sirens had all stopped, but the cars still prowled. Every once in a while, a fire truck would drive by, sent by a nearby small town to help beat the fire back, now done and headed home. I knew Valentine FD would be on scene for at least a day, maybe two. A fire that hot would burn unseen for a while.
“Well,” Cope said. “Cain’t go anywhere ’til those roadblocks come tumbling down. How long, you think?”
Esther shrugged. “No idea.”
“A few hours,” I said automatically. “Until they decide we’ve gone to ground or slipped out before the stops went up.”
“Roy said they knew who was at the church,” Esther said. “That true?”
“Maybe,” Cope said. “But ain’t any too many of us gave our real names when we got there.”
“Cops’ll run those names,” Darcy said. “Real names or aliases, TCIC will probably spit out hits from here to Rapture.”
“What’s that?” Esther asked.
“Rapture is when y’all get sucked away to Heaven, Esther.”
“Shut up, old man.” She turned to me. “What’s TC—whatever?”
“Texas Criminal Information Center. Statewide database tied to the national one. Warrants and Amber alerts, shit like that. If I get stopped in Nacogdoches and I’ve got a warrant in El Paso, cop’ll know as soon as he runs my name.”
“Y’all got a warrant in El Paso?”
It was a nice try on Cope’s part, but I kept my information to myself. “Not that I know of. What about you?”
“In El Paso? Not that I know of.”
Esther chuckled. “Not that I know of, not that I know of.” In those few words, she managed to both mimic and mock us. “Both of you were at the Church of Bloody Stumps, you both got blood on your hands.”
“Bloody Souls,” we said together.
“Whatever.” She stood. “I’m the only one here hasn’t killed anybody. But I got blood on my hands, too, don’t I? Whole theater came from my sister’s blood. I guess everything goes back to blood, doesn’t it?”
Esther and Cope headed for the bedroom together, but I sat for a while longer. She was right; it all came down to blood. I’d wanted to discover my ancestral blood and now what filled my veins stained everything.
A Little Less Than Seven Days Ago
“Three in the morning and pissing in my parking lot. You know, I have no problem shooting you just like you was one of them drunks.”
A full moon hung in the west Texas sky while coyotes called across the desert, answered by flea-bitten yard dogs. A breeze, carrying the stench of the Rio Grande, fetid and wicked, filled with garbage and sewage and tinged with the chemical tang of a burned meth lab, wafted over Valentine.
I looked at the back door. Esther stood on the landing, smoking a cigarette.
“Should I laugh? Is that a joke?”
“Not to the emergency room staff.”
“Picking rocksalt out of asses?”
“’Bout once a month. Sometimes buckshot.”
I zipped up. “Can’t sleep.”
“Not surprised. I don’t know how any of you guys sleep.”
And what if I told her I hadn’t really slept since I’d killed him? What would she do if I told her I had visions—daydreams, demons, PTSD, whatever the hell you want to call it—every single moment of every day, but the night dreams were the worst? Because they had an immediacy the daily visions—which were nothing more than spotty memory—didn’t have. The night dreams were the absolute essence of that night; every detail and breath, every blink of eye and curl of fist.
And it all evaporated when I woke up, leaving me scared and sweaty and angry.
On the landing, Esther sucked a long pull on a cigarette before strolling toward me.
“Got a lot on my mind,” I said.
“I’d guess.”
The night air toyed with me. One minute it was just hot, then there was enough of a breeze to cool the sweat running in rivers down my bare chest. The next minute the breeze was gone as though it had never been there.
“You don’t even know.”
“I’m sure that’s true.” The tip of Esther’s cigarette glowed in the night as though a star had somehow slipped and fallen and become trapped in this cracked and bruised parking lot. “How’d you come to join the church?”
Done deal as soon as I found Fagan. When his car pulled up and his engine idled and he jumped out, reeking in the too-sweet aroma of his aftershave. Screeching about bars and whores and Staind Skin.
I ignored her question. “All I wanted...all I wanted...was to get to know him. When I was little, Mama told me all these stories. She was so pissed off about it all. But Grandma’s stories...holy shit, Batman, they were the nasty stories. She used to cackle. Had these Shostakovich symphonies booming on her stereo and just cackled away talking about him.”
“Him?”
“The sperm-donor; walked out when I was three.” The constant, slow ache that had lived permanently in my chest every moment since he’d left suddenly flared to life. “The shit of it is I don’t even know how everything went so wrong, haven’t got a fucking clue. It just...did. One night I was fine and then he and I were hanging out and then...everything was all wrong.”
Matching tats. Father and son kind of bullshit and I swallowed his entire load, right down my throat. A family coat of arms, but we’ve always been white trash so there was no real coat of arms. Laughed about maybe tattooing his name on his arm ’cause his memory was so bad and then thought getting 9½ on his six-inch dick was funny.
“Tell me about the church.”
“No.”
“Tell me about leaving your step-father on the porch.”
“Cope tell you? Son of a bitch.” I toyed with the cooler, moving it this way and that with my toe. “I hopped in with Fagan and drove off. Left my step-father standing there, crying like a baby. Too late to take that back now. Even if I go home, the memory’s still there. I abandoned him.”
“Like Fagan did you.”
“Fruit doesn’t rot far from the tree, I guess.”
“Oh, stop it.” She blew a giant ring of smoke around her head. The street light caught it, illuminating the shape and sheen of a halo for just a brief second. Then it was just cigarette smoke in a small town. “Don’t be pathetic. Your biggest problem is you’re lost. Ain’t the world’s newest problem. Whole lotta other people lost, too.”
“You?”
“You betcha. Why you think I act? I get to climb in and out of other people, get to test drive all kinds of other people. My brother was a con man before he got jacked in prison and he was the same. Shit, we’re pretty much all con men, aren’t we? I got a writer friend and he wrote me a play once. Terrible stuff, he ain’t much of a writer. He writes because he doesn’t know who he is. Maybe none of us do.”
“Cope does.”
“Horseshit. Cope’s the most lost of all. He hears messages from God and listens to a whore named Monea...probably a big-tittied woman...he likes us that way.”
“‘Tittied?’ Isn’t that a man’s word? I thought women said ‘boob.’”
“For Elmer, it don’t matter the word, just the size. And all either God or Monea have told him to do for fifty years is run.” She chuckled. “It’s not God’s voice; it’s the Don’t-Go-To-Prison voice.” She looped her arm through mine. “The church?”
“I remember the confetti.”
“The hell’s that mean?”
“Shit came out of the ceiling. Seemed like tons of it. All green and it stuck to the blood.”
She didn’t talk for a few minutes. The dogs continued to bark but the coyotes were quiet.
“Darcy.” Her voice was soft, as though she were trying to fit it gently into the early morning air. “What’s
in the cooler?”
“Why I’m running.”
With no hesitation, she retrieved the cooler, and snapped the lid open. She dug around beneath the whip and the cuke and ice and pulled the foot out. It was still tightly wrapped in plastic, bound by rubber bands, but there was no mistaking what it was.
“I woke up with that in my back pocket.”
“The cucumber or the foot?”
When I didn’t answer, she looked away. “Yeah, the cuke is probably Cope’s.” She held her palm flat, the foot in it, and stared at me for a long while. Then she tucked the ice over it and snapped the lid closed with a harsh finality. “Helluva wake up call.”
“Fagan and I got drunk. Went for tattoos. Then I woke up and everybody was dead and his foot was in my back pocket.”
“So he’s dead.”
“Yeah.”
“You killed him.”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds like a bad night all the way around.” She rubbed the back of my neck, then kissed my cheek. “So you’re a tough man likes his booze and has a history of violence.”
“It’s not funny, Esther.”
“I don’t think I laughed. My sister was killed by a man like you.”
“I’m sorry about that.” I toed the cooler to a place behind me.
“Fuck your sorry, that doesn’t bring her back, does it?”
“No.”
She whirled away, shaking her head in a way that reminded me of Mama when she talked about Fagan. “You guys. Every one of you is just like every other one of you. You all drown in your violence. You think it’s hip and cool and shit. Crime groupies, getting off on cops and robbers and wishing you could be one of the players.”
“No, ma’am, I don’t want to be a player and I don’t like it.” I paused. “I think I hate it.”
“You feel any remorse?”
For a long while, long enough for the dogs to have quieted and the breeze to shift, I said nothing. Then I retrieved the cooler. “More than I can say, Esther, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be that way forever.”
Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2) Page 4
