Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2)

by Trey R. Barker

  Lucas’ eyes narrowed. “Who else?”

  I took an expansive breath. “The killer, maybe. Killed our guy and snatched his money.”

  “You are the killer, asshole. Least that’s what all the cops in the state think.”

  So my name was plastered all over TCIC.

  “If I’m the killer, how come you haven’t arrested me?”

  There were so many years burned into Lucas’ face. Leather and loss, time and thousands of miles, maybe millions. That map shifted a little beneath an invisible weight. “I was a good cop once. I’m a security guard now. Milner pays me $9.87 an hour, but once I was a good cop.”

  He toyed with his coffee, his finger idly stirring. “I haven’t been a good cop in a long while.” His face tightened. “I want the money; I don’t care about the rest. You got the balls to kill a cop, more power to you. But if you don’t cough up that dough, I’ll blast your ass to God and get a medal for it.”

  A cop? No way in hell. The foot I woke up with belonged to a cop? Bullshit. The dead guy wasn’t a cop, he was Fagan. Patricide, not cop-a-cide.

  My balls shrank, tiny peas drying out and shrinking. If that was true, that I was a cop killer, then everything was different. Not just a life term in the Texas State Prison, but a death sentence in the Texas State Prison.

  At that moment, I nearly called for my mother. Her name just about slipped across my tongue and lips. In that sliver of time, as thin as a needle to the vein, I forgot about the bodies and the money and Fagan. I wanted to walk with Mama at the crappy Barefield Zoo, like we used to. Hold her hand. Listen to her stories about being a Girl Scout; going to Round-Up in Canada or the time her troop went to the Air Force base and watched it go on full alert just after they arrived because the Commies were maybe attacking.

  Lucas’ mouth squiggled. The smile of a serpent. Smug and arrogant and now caressing the gun on the table. He winked. “I know all about it, buddy. The dead DEA man, the money, the hotel, the whore. I know everything.”

  I remained silent.

  “I know all about Staind Skin, too.” He paused a beat. “Don’t fuck with the man holding all the cards. Now. Where. Is. The. Money.” Each word punctuated by a forefinger jabbed on the table.

  “In a week I can have fifty large.”

  “Fifty thou? In a— dude, you better do way better than that.”

  “But I don’t—”

  He shook his head. “No, no. If I’m gonna steal your money—and I am—there ain’t no half bullshit that’s gonna get it. I want it all. I know it all so I want it all.”

  “You know dick.” I wanted my words to be a .357 to the head.

  Bingo. From deep in Lucas’ face, I saw it. The man did know a few things, but not everything. There were details he didn’t know and his eyes gave it away.

  “I know more than enough. This is Kurston’s case.” Lucas bored right in on me. “It’s the only case he’s worked since it happened, by the way. If you’re going to lie, you’d better get some practice in. A DEA man gets whacked and Kurston isn’t working on anything else. You don’t think I heard about this thing the moment it happened? Shit, I’ve got tighter connections than that.”

  “And here I come, waltzing into your bank, playing my game.” I kept my voice from getting too light, too flippant. There was no dead cop, no hotel, no whores or missing money. Lucas was obviously bullshitting, trying to put together a vacation or second retirement fund on my back.

  And yet why would he lie about something there was a good chance I’d know was a lie? Kurston would never have played it that way.

  “Your game is a bad game to play when I know all the players, cop killer.”

  Cop killer. A nasty phrase; as nasty as a shank to the heart, or a hard hand to the side of a baby’s head.

  “Last time, cop killer, where is the money?”

  “I wish I had it. I wish I could give it to you. There’s nothing I want more than to slip on out of here. But—” I fell silent. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could offer.

  With a surprisingly pleasant shrug, Lucas pulled a cell phone from his pocket and jammed his meaty thumb against the numbers.

  “Don’t do this.” The panic began deep inside me. “Please.”

  “Not my doing.”

  “Jeremy?” Jennie was still near the counter. “I really need to talk to you.”

  He took a breath and his thumb stopped, hovering over the fingerpad. “Okay, Jennie, no problem. Hang on just a minute, sweetheart.”

  The right words, but the sentiment was wrong, stilted and formal, and by the look on her face, she knew it.

  “Come on, we can fix this,” I said. The panic had already bubbled through my guts, into my heart and brain.

  “Fix it with one hundred large.” He held up a finger. “Yeah, Detective Kurston, please.”

  In a burst, I grabbed across the table for the phone. With a contemptuous snort, he leaned back again.

  “Detective, it’s Jeremy Lucas over in Marathon. I got your boy. Yeah, from the killing. Sitting right here.”

  I lunged across the table. My chair kicked out behind me and I slammed full force into Lucas.

  He fell backward and the chair tumbled violently over him. As he fell, Lucas grabbed for his gun.

  “No.” My voice boomed. “Leave it there.”

  “Jeremy,” Jennie called. “What’s going on?”

  “Officer needs assistance,” he shouted into the phone. “Fuck me I need some help.”

  His words filled the reeking air, banged against the walls like a drunk’s car against a highway guardrail on a sharp turn. “Damnit, Jennie, get me some help.”

  When the phone came away from Lucas’ ear, I heard Kurston yelling.

  I jammed a forearm across the man’s throat, desperate to shut him up. Lucas responded with a fist into the side of my head. Shimmering gold filled my vision.

  “Get the hell off’a me,” Lucas said.

  I managed to land two punches. The first sent the phone bouncing across the dirty linoleum floor. It banged against the counter, Kurston’s voice still came out, the cackle of angry ants. The second punch tore Lucas’ cheek open down to his chin. Blood, and a terrible, primal scream, saturated the air.

  Lucas kept trying for his gun, but it had skittered a few feet away.

  I tried to untangle myself and get on my feet, but Lucas grabbed at my legs even as he crawled sideways to reach the gun. He brought me back to the floor just as he managed to get his fingers on the thing. He yanked it toward me and the first shot ripped the air near my head. I screamed and threw the hardest punch I’d ever tossed in my life.

  Mostly, it missed.

  What I did catch was the tip of the barrel. The gun tumbled from Lucas’ hand, hit the floor, and slid.

  All the way to Jennie’s feet.

  Everything stopped. A blanket of silence slammed down on the diner, hard enough even to muffle the rising hiss of the burger burning on the grill.

  “Take it, Jennie,” Lucas said. “Keep him covered while I get him cuffed.”

  Tears stained most of her face and I hurt for her. Young and pregnant and no way she was going to come out of this clean. She’d spend the rest of her life in this shitty town, raising three or four kids by two or three different men and wondering why everyone thought life was such a fucking blessing.

  “Jennie?” Lucas said.

  When she picked it up, the gun’s weight seemed to surprise her. She toyed with it a minute, then glanced toward the grill. A thin wisp of white smoke floated toward the ceiling. “Guess I burned my meat, huh?” She moved the gun from hand to hand. “Got burned by my meat is more like it.”

  “Jennie,” Lucas said. “Be careful, don’t hurt yourself.”

  “Fuck you.”

  She brought the gun around slowly, as though searching for a target, until she found Lucas.

  “Bad choice,” he said. “Bad, bad choice, Jennie.”

  “I told you I was sick.”
/>   “And I told you all pregnant women get sick.”

  “And I told you it’s not like that.”

  Her finger slipped neatly inside the trigger guard.

  “Whoa whoa.” Lucas raised both hands, palms out toward her, and took a small, hesitant step. “Hang on, baby, can’t we talk a little?”

  Where she had been a mousy woman, stoop-shouldered and bent at the waist and resembling nothing so much as a tired ragdoll, she was now her full height. Her shoulders straightened and seemed to broaden. Her jaw set and she brushed the dirty hair out of her eyes. “I tried to talk, you told me to fuck off.”

  “I never said fuck off,” Lucas said, blood dripping from his chin.

  “Might as well have. Damnit, Jeremy, I’m sick.”

  “Damnit, take a few days off. Go to the doctor and get some medicine. You need a couple bucks, no problem. Why do you keep telling me that?”

  “Medicine? Medicine ain’t gonna save me, you fucksnort.” With a disgusted shake of her head, she sucked her teeth. “Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky. Maybe you and your prissy-ass wife won’t have to worry about naming your late-life baby.”

  “Jesus Christ, you are such a fucking blonde. What the crap are you babbling about?”

  “HIV, you son of a bitch. You gave me HIV. I’m going to get AIDS. I’m going to die.”

  “Wait, Jennie, that’s not—”

  It was one, smooth, crisp motion, the way she racked the slide and squeezed the trigger.

  Lucas didn’t make a sound. He startled, jumped a little like he’d gotten a bee sting, and slumped to his knees. The thick, rotten stink of his bowels filled the diner.

  Jennie looked surprised. Maybe the recoil, maybe the sound, maybe the ease of killing. She stumbled backward and her finger squeezed off two more rounds. One went through the front window, the second through a fire sprinkler pipe. Glass shattered and water began raining down at the same time.

  In the middle of the diner, Lucas gurgled once or twice before falling over.

  “Holy shit...hang on....” I swallowed. “Don’t shoot again, Jennie, just put—”

  She dropped the gun and walked calmly through the kitchen. A second later, the back door banged as the hiss from the burned meat began to play louder than the water sprinkler.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  Bullets and blood, madness, jammed through my head, filled it with smoke and fog. Kurston’s voice broke through, barely audible over the sound of the sprinkler and the hiss of the burger. I picked the phone up.

  “Yeah...it’s Darcy...no, he’s dead...no...some waitress...he knocked her up...made her sick.”

  I paused, but Kurston didn’t put anything in the space.

  From the kitchen, there was a loud pop. For a second, I thought Jennie had come back and shot herself. But the gun was still where she had dropped it. The pop was the sprinkler directly over the grill, snapping with heat and spewing its water down over the grill.

  Then all the sprinklers were going, and the burger wasn’t hissing on the grill, it was screaming, the entire hot grill sprayed with cold water. Steam started to roll forward, toward the dining area, toward the smashed out front windows.

  Simple physics, I thought. That breeze is sucking that steam right along.

  Which means someone is going to see it pretty quickly. They won’t know there is no fire. They won’t know there’s no reason to call the fire department.

  Darcy, this place is about to be crawling with law enforcement.

  Can’t a guy who whacked his own father catch a fucking break?

  I’d known a guy once, name of Sandy. Not a bad guy. He was a racist and maybe not too bright and had more than a few run-ins with the cops. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor, public intoxication, disorderly conduct. Petty charges. He’d gotten hooked up with a psycho woman and at least once a week, they fought like drunken frat boys from rival houses and didn’t stop fighting, usually, until the boys in blue showed up.

  Visiting the jail once, I’d tried to tell Sandy he wasn’t going to catch a break. I’d tried to tell him that she would always be given the benefit of the doubt.

  “You’ve got a record, she doesn’t,” I’d said over the beat-up visitation phone in the jail. “You get food stamps, she works at the First Baptist Church. You will always get arrested. She could stand over you, gun in hand and a bullet in your brain, and they would still arrest you for assault and battery.”

  Sandy had thought it was crap, even after the fourth time she had punched him and he had been arrested for domestic violence. He had never gotten a break.

  Welcome to my world, I could imagine him saying to me now.

  On the floor, the blood had stopped geysering from Lucas’ throat. Now it dribbled and eventually mixed with the fire-sprinkler water to became a pale pink that reminded me of a river in the early morning.

  Kurston’s voice buzzed in my ear. Words that made no sense.

  “I won’t be here, I’m leaving,” I said. “I can’t wait. I don’t know what’s going on...it’s like...my head’s full of mud and I can’t get it pumped out. Listen, I didn’t mean to cause you all this trouble. Yeah, I did and I didn’t mean to. I’m really sorry. I really am. Nothing was supposed to go this way.”

  Knowing I should stop, knowing I should wait for Kurston, that if anyone could help me—or hurt me—it would be Kurston, I snapped the phone closed, dropped it on the floor near the gun as I snatched that up, and hurried out the front door.

  Two And A Half Days Ago

  Whiskey’s Bar

  Fort Stockton, Texas

  Cope stopped mid-chew. Green guts hung from his teeth and lips like seaweed on a water-zombie.

  “Cope?”

  I followed his gaze and ate back a laugh.

  What had interrupted his cuke, bought on the cheap from an old blind man hawking semi-fresh produce down the street, was a woman.

  We were in a crappy bar, the kind I didn’t really care for, where the stains from countless amounts of spilled booze, as well as blood from endless fights, hardwaxed the floor. Dark and dirty. This was exactly the kind of joint I tried to stay out of because it reminded me too much of someplace Fagan might have gone.

  “Cope?”

  “That is a beautiful woman, White-Boy Darcy.”

  “Come on, man, are you listening to me? I’m trying to tell you—”

  “Ain’t listening now ’cause’a that woman. Wasn’t listening while ago ’cause I just didn’t feel like it.” To the bartender, Cope said, “Another of whatever she’s drinking, on me.”

  The bartender looked at her, rolled his eyes when he looked back at Cope. “Don’t get too interested in Petunia, boy. The locals all gave her a run and she ain’t having none of it.”

  “They ain’t running right, then.”

  The bartender shrugged. “Or she’s not interested in men. Could be that.” He thought for a moment. “But could be what you say. Most of my local boys are just about as stupid as a box of rocks.”

  “Ain’t passing no judgment on that, but maybe she just ain’t never made acquaintance of a city boy.”

  The woman sat at the far end of the bar. She was decent looking, no doubt, but not the earth-shattering beauty Cope seemed to think. Short hair, almost a pixie’s, standard hazel eyes, mostly smooth skin, lips slightly too big for her round face. Medium hips, narrow waist, average breasts. Her face was pleasant in a comfortable sort of way and she had delicate hands topped by fingers that were thin, but not so long. She wore loose jeans, a Sears kind of blouse. The leather jacket surprised me. It was actually very cool. Bangles and baubles and zippers and pockets. Didn’t match the outfit or woman at all.

  “I’m good if you make a run at her,” I said. “But I thought we were a little busy here.”

  “Never too busy for love.”

  I finished my Corona. “That so? Well, I guess just put a sock on the handlebar or something, let me know I can’t come home tonight.”

  The
bar wasn’t overly full; a handful of drinkers in the corner, a few spread out along the length of the bar. A barkeep and single waitress moved effortlessly, spoke when they needed to but otherwise stayed quiet.

  “She said, ‘thank you,’” the bartender said.

  “That all?”

  The man nodded.

  “Ain’t much of a talker.”

  “Well, certainly not to strange men in a bar who are on the run from a murder and whose sidekick is also running from a murder...murders.” I said it quietly.

  “Could be,” Cope said. “Barkeep, y’all know her?”

  “Nah. First time I ever seen her was late last night, just before closing. I know pretty much everybody in Ft. Stockton that likes a little sip. Don’t know her. Might be from the area, but I don’t think so.”

  Cope motioned for a refill and while the barkeep refreshed his glass, he pulled a folded map from his pocket.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Cope smoothed it out. “Map.” He had cut it neatly along Interstate 35, leaving only the western half of the state. Nickel-sized red circles dotted far west Texas. “Been thinking about the towns on y’all’s list.”

  “Fagan’s list.” In the bar’s mirror, hanging the length of the bar, I saw the woman watching us. When our eyes met, she held me for just a moment.

  “Yeah, whoever. I’m thinking: Why them towns?” Cope’s withered finger, shimmering gold with three separate rings, tapped each circled town. “Easier to see this way.”

  Andrews, Kermit, Pecos, Valentine, Marathon, Ft. Stockton, and Barefield. The first two sat north of Interstate 20. Pecos was on the highway while Valentine and Marathon were south of 20. Ft. Stockton sat astride I-10. A giant circle of smaller circles, moving inexorably toward Barefield.

  Cope flicked his dreads out of his face. “Didn’t y’all say something about working—”

  “Son of a bitch. His radio gigs.”

  Darcy, you idiot, why the hell didn’t you see that?

  The towns were just empty names. I’d grown up near them, been to or through most of them, but they were flyspecks on the shit of the desert. Didn’t mean dick to me. And yeah, I’d known Fagan had been a jock all over west Texas, but I’d never put it together. “That’s where he worked. All those little towns.”