“Thought so,” Cope said. “Shit, y’all think if he’d got himself a box back in the day, he’d remember where he put it. I mean, he weren’t that stupid, was he?”
“Wondered that myself. Wasn’t particularly stupid, I guess, but was a bit of a junkie. And it’s been at least twenty years since he used any account.”
“Where he get after Barefield?”
I shrugged. In some ways, it was like Joseph Fagan had stepped into a giant, yawning emptiness. Nothing from him, nothing from people who’d known him. “Back to New Mexico, I guess.”
“Stomping grounds?”
“Where he was born.”
With an appreciative nod toward the woman, Cope said to me, “Y’all were gone less than an hour, but you came back with more problems than y’all left with. Dead cops and pregnant chicks and fucking burned hamburgers.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Not to mention a hundred grand.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Well, ol’ Mr. Security Guard was making shit up, no doubt about that, but he knew enough to get y’all’s attention. If he had some of it, maybe he got more of it than you wanna admit.”
“How though? There wasn’t any hotel, there weren’t any whores that night—”
“Too bad about the whores, I guess,” Cope said. “But there was Staind Skin and there was money.”
The thought that Lucas had even some of the details right bothered me. Was I a double murderer? Patricide and copacide?
I needed to talk to Mama. She’d been the only person I’d ever loved and wasn’t that the shit? I’d been married twice and had enough girlfriends to fill a women’s prison. But in spite of all that flesh, only person I’d ever loved was Mama. She’d know what to do. Or at least what direction to look.
“Should’a seen y’all come around that corner though.” Cope chuckled. “Arms a’flying, back all straight and stiff. Looked like a giant white boner walking down the road.”
“Thanks for that.”
“No problem.”
“Didn’t look any worse than you...stretched out on that bike and fucking eating a cuke. Where in hell did you find a cuke that time of day?”
“Found a nice little lady selling veggies.”
“Monea, no doubt.”
“Monea ain’t got no truck with veggies.”
We’d gotten back on the highway just a couple of heartbeats after I’d escaped the diner. I hadn’t said shit other than, “Go. Now.” Hour and a half later, just as streaks of darkness began to stain the late-evening pink, we rolled—quite the duo—into Fort Stockton.
“Home of Roy Orbison,” Cope had declared.
“The dead singer.” I sighed. “Not really the best omen.”
“Been living with bad omens for fifty years. Ain’t so worried about them.”
We’d checked into a roadside motel, cheap as they come. Forty bucks a night, two twin beds and a raised eyebrow from the desk clerk tossed in for free. The room was small, barely large enough for the two beds and twenty-one-inch TV, but what did we really need? It wasn’t as though we were on a grand motorcycle tour through the Texas southwest.
I’d fallen on the bed closest to the battered air conditioner.
“Yeah, well, I’m’a going out,” Cope said, spinning one of his rings.
“For what? Aren’t you exhausted?”
“Don’t matter. I gotta get some...well, I got things to do.”
“Monea ain’t in Fort Stockton.”
“Don’t y’all worry none ’bout my business.”
He’d come back an hour later, the ring he’d been spinning gone, a concentrated looked on his face, a need for booze on his breath.
“What songs should I play?” the woman asked.
“Gimme some old Conway,” a cowboy called.
“Fuck that, some Guns ‘N Roses or Disturbed. Music with balls.” The mid-twenties hardass slammed his pool stick into the cue ball. It bounced off the sides of the table, missing everything.
“Balls, huh?” the bartender said.
A few quarters and three punched numbers. Sinatra.
“The fuck is that?” the pool player asked.
“Culture,” she answered. “You probably don’t recognize it.”
“Fuck off, bitch.”
“My name is Petunia.”
“Fuck off, Petunia-bitch.”
“Watch that language, Jimmy,” the barkeep warned.
“Piss off, I ain’t the one letting a woman into a man’s bar.” The kid stopped playing, glared at Petunia even as he yelled at the barkeep. “Bitch won’t even dance with me? Fuck that noise. She’s probably a fucking carpet muncher. Worse than a fucking faggot; it’s a waste of pussy. God, I hate perverts. Why the hell ain’t the sheriff here, arresting her? Oughta be in jail, where the nigger crack whores can give it to her.”
Cope stood. I put my hand on the old man’s arm.
“That’s it, Jimmy, out.”
“All this fuss...over me?” Petunia said. “It’s enough to make a girl blush.”
Gracefully, she went to Jimmy. The fingers of her right hand, not particularly long or slender, trailed across the pool table. They rolled over the eight ball.
“Don’t touch my balls,” Jimmy said.
“Good enough,” she said. “How about this, then?”
It was a single movement. Graceful. Brutally fast. She slammed the eight ball into Jimmy’s nose. Cartilage snapped, a wet sound louder even than ol’ Frank. I had no idea where the speed and strength came from. It didn’t seem possible in that tiny package.
Jimmy howled, jammed his hands against his face even as he slumped to the floor. “Broke my nose.”
No one moved. But not because they were frozen with surprise. Mostly because they simply didn’t give two shits.
“What?” the bartender said. “Nobody broke your nose, Jimmy. We didn’t see nobody, Jimmy. Careful of those cue sticks though, they can be mean when you hit yourself.”
From the floor, Jimmy stared at the bartender. “That how it if?” His words came out a bloody slur. “Gonna pick a lefbo over a cuftomer?”
“Jimmy, please, you ain’t bought your own drink in a year.” The bartender jerked his head toward the door. “Get out and don’t come back for a month.”
While Jimmy stood, blood covering most of his face and shirt, Petunia stood nearby, rolling the eight ball from hand to hand across the smooth green felt. Faint traces of red streaked out behind the ball. “Did I do that? PMS, I guess.”
“Fuf you, fuffin’ bitch.”
Jimmy stumbled his way through the bar, knocking into a table or two, before slamming the door open and heading into the night. His howl, an angry snarl that stained the night air, filled the bar.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Cope said. “Do appreciate it.”
“I learned long ago I have to protect my honor. It’s rare that men even stand up to offer their help.” She nodded at him. “Thank you for the drink.”
“Yep.”
She returned to the far end of the bar. “Can I get a glass of cognac?”
The bartender frowned. “Sorry, ma’am, we don’t have that kind of thing here. Beer and booze, that’s about it.”
“Well, that’s too bad, isn’t it?”
I was stunned. Of everything I’d expected to happen here, a diminutive woman smashing a ball against a nose was, surprisingly, not on my list. But as fun as it had been to watch, it was bad news. Sooner or later, that redneck idiot was going to come back, pissed and with friends. At the very least, they’d kick Petunia’s ass. More probably, they’d shoot the place up. Which would bring the cops.
“That little ass whipping is going to end with the cops here.”
“Cops won’t show.”
“How do you know that?”
“Y’all think little Jimmy’ll tell anybody a woman whupped him?”
A fair point.
“I could really use a cognac,” Petunia said. “M
y nerves are a little on edge.”
The bartender shrugged an apology. “We don’t have any. This is Ft. Stockton, ain’t some fancy city.”
Cope watched her for a second, then scratched his nose and took a long pull off his whiskey. “It’d fuck me if they did come.”
“Fifty years, huh?” I asked.
Cope nodded.
“Which means what, exactly?”
“Dunno. There’s a warrant.” Cope looked away, as though trying to remember something. “At least there was way back when. Sometimes I think statute of limitations probably already took care of it.”
“No statute on murder,” I said.
“How y’all know that?”
“I’ve got a little experience with cops.”
“Yeah...seems like y’all know all kinds’a shit about the cops.” The old man’s eyes bored in on me. “Like that cop at the church. He said he was a cop and you said he wasn’t.” Cope snapped his fingers, a muffed pop tinged with the clang of oversized rings. “Just like that. ‘That’s crap,’ you said.”
“So?”
“Just wonder how y’all knew he wasn’t no cop.”
“Just knew...I don’t know.” I licked my lips. “Look, no decent cop would do a takedown that way, especially if he came all the way from Nevada. Alone? Never happen. There would have been a ton of other cops around.”
Hell, that guy would have come in on the backs of a brigade of cops, a phalanx of helmeted, SWAT-suited hut-hut boys, each bearing down and armed with a big-ass gun.
“Sounds like a cop running outside’a his oath.”
With a slow nod, I drank. “Someone else working off the books. Lot of that going around lately.”
Cope tilted his glass at the bartender. “Double.”
The man hopped to, laid out two solid blasts of whiskey.
The front door banged open, spilling a delivery man. Clad in a yellow uniform, striped in black and white, an ash half an inch long on his cigarette, the man sprang to the bar.
“Little late for a delivery, ain’t it?” the bar man asked.
The man shrugged. “Have to get it done.” He laid a small box on the bar, held a pad out for the barman to sign.
“Thanks...uh...Phil,” the barkeep said.
“Sure.”
I frowned. Why the hell did that ring a bell?
When he was gone, Sinatra sang. The pool game that started when Jimmy split moved just as slowly. The drinking continued, also slow. The barkeep absently began to open the box.
“Blood comes out at one hundred forty-five degrees.” A mirror ran the length of the bar, secured nice and tight along that wall. It reminded me of the mirror in the tattoo parlor. I saw my face. It was also Fagan’s face.
“What?” Cope asked.
“Blood. When it comes out of the body. It’s about one hundred forty-five degrees.”
“Blood it out, man, blood it out.”
“Good cognac looks like blood,” Petunia said. “Of course, no one around here would know.”
Frowning, I stared at her for a stretched-out moment. Something about her tickled the back of my neck. And it wasn’t just because she snapped that asswipe’s nose with a pool ball and went back for her drink as easy as you please.
“I can’t blood it out,” I said to Cope. “I tried for weeks. It’s still there.”
When Cope turned to me, his skinny frame was suddenly back lit by someone coming out of the bathroom. A yellow halo sprouted over his head. “It’ll always be there, Darcy, always and forever ’til y’all shuffle off and see St. Peter.”
“Then what’s this crap about blooding it out?”
“Blooding it out ain’t the end, dumbass, it’s the journey.”
“What he’s saying,” Petunia said, “is that blooding it out isn’t life directions, it’s life metaphor.” She tapped her glass on the bar. “Cognac, on the other hand, isn’t metaphor at all. Of course, right now, it isn’t anything.”
Don’t really have time for metaphor because they’re coming for me...murder, maybe cop murder, no metaphor involved. All I really have time for is the pendant; the apology.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I still believed I could find the pendant. Yeah, I was running from the cops and yeah, I was probably running into something just as fast, but stupid as it probably was I thought I could find the damned pendant. It hadn’t just disappeared. It had been on Fagan’s body so it had to be somewhere; in an evidence locker, most likely.
“It’s soul cleaning,” Petunia said.
“Well, I need blood cleaning,” I said. “Sometimes it’s like my blood’s burning me. Sometimes I can’t stand for it to be Fagan’s blood. And sometimes I don’t want anything but Fagan’s blood.”
Cope nodded, his eyes lost in the dim light of the bar. “Y’all pretty lost.”
“Figure that out all by yourself?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, White-Boy Darcy, this old black man got a brain and ever’thin’.”
“Lost myself when Mama died. She kept me grounded pretty well. Shit, I don’t know, maybe I got lost before that.” I slammed back a blast of Corona, wiped the sweat from my skin. “I didn’t like him much.”
“Who?”
“My mother’s second husband. Good enough guy, I guess, just didn’t dig him. They were married for nearly twenty-five years. He raised me. Just didn’t click.”
How could we ever find a groove when I constantly reminded him he wasn’t my biological father?
“You want to know what kind of man he was?” Mama asked once. “I asked him to baby-sit you once. He was sleeping on the couch when I got home.”
“And?” I’d been sixteen years old and it had been hard to impress me.
“His two-year-old son, that’d be you, was running up and down the hallway with his .45 pistol, sucking on the barrel.”
Even in this bar, twenty-plus years after she told me that, I could still remember the sudden onset of vertigo. I wasn’t the most graceful guy on the planet, fell down plenty of times, tripped over my own feet constantly. If I’d fallen...well, yeah, the slide probably wasn’t racked, and the gun probably wasn’t loaded, and it probably wouldn’t have gone off. But the image of the back of my head disintegrating all over the wall was one I couldn’t shake.
Around us, the Sinatra ended, leaving the few drinkers in silence. Outside, traffic thinned, too. Through the open door, cars full of kids passed headed one direction, then came back the other direction a few minutes later. Over and over, the same track, the same circuit, like there just wasn’t anywhere else they could go.
Somewhere in the back of the bar, an old evaporative cooler kicked to life with a roar and filled the place with a buzz that reminded me—as did so many things anymore—of the tattoo gun.
Petunia whispered now, her finger constantly tapping the empty glass in front of her. “Cognac. Is it so much to ask?”
Get the hell over it, I wanted to say.
“Darcy got two daddies.” Cope’s thin hand clapped my shoulder. “Shit, I’d kill to have any daddy at all and look at you, got two of ’em.”
“Cope, I’d drive a thousand miles to slip out of this skin.” I pulled at the skin on my arm.
“Why you call him that?” Cope asked.
“What?”
“Sperm-donor.”
Because that was all he’d done. Because he squirted and then left a wife and kid in his wake. Because other than the sperm, he’d given me nothing.
Until a few weeks ago. But beginning a few weeks ago, he’d given me a shitstorm. It all began with just a few words—some crap I couldn’t remember—then, “I guess I’m your daddy, Darcy.”
“Damnit,” Petunia said. She stood, stormed to the jukebox and punched up more Sinatra, ‘Strangers in the Night.’ Immediately, music washed over the bar and she calmed down.
“Y’all say y’all want that pendant. That ain’t gonna happen. Y’all know that, right? Ain’t no way in hell it’s gonna ever happen.”
>
Cope was right. That pendant, stolen the night of the murder—or murders—was long since gone. It was wherever Fagan’s body was. And the shitty thing was I thought maybe I realized that long ago. I ran, continued to run, because I had no fucking idea what else to do.
I am a killer, a killer of my own father, and I don’t know what that means. I never really knew what it meant to be a Fagan and I sure as shit didn’t know what it meant to be anyone else and now there is a new identity—killer—and I don’t know what that means, but if I run fast enough or long enough or far enough, I might not have to even face that question.
“Hell, y’all run fast enough, y’all won’t even hear the question.” Cope winked. “Shouldn’t talk out loud.” He laughed. “Same at the church. Why y’all think we always chanted when we atoned? Just to sing? Got a good beat, I can self-mortify to it? Nah, man. It was so we wouldn’t hear what was driving us to do the beating.”
What could I say to that? It was a peek into Cope’s brain, or maybe his heart and soul. I hadn’t expected it and wasn’t sure what to do with it.
“Ain’t no lie about my warrant, son, ain’t no percentage in lying about it. It was there. It existed. It exists.”
“Uh,” the bartender said. He stood behind the counter, the box open, a plate in his hand. “He call you Darcy? I think this is for you.”
“Fuck me backwards,” I said.
The barkeep handed over a plate. Another Barefield commemorative. More rope letters. Don’t Just Pass Through.
The place spun, like there’d been too much to drink, too many spliffs to smoke. The bar itself tried to crawl away from me while I grabbed at it to steady myself. I ran outside, but the lot was already empty. Cars honked at me when I hit the street, looking for a delivery van.
“Son of a bitch.” My voice boomed up and down the street. A couple of teenagers, hanging out of car windows, laughed and cat-called their agreement with my sentiment.
“Tell it, Daddy,” someone yelled.
Back in the bar, I banged a fist against a table. “Damnit, I have no idea who that is.”
“What’s he want?” Cope asked.
I sat back at the bar and laid my head across my arms, eyes closed. It was the same move I made back in elementary school when I wanted to go home and thought playing sick might get me there.
Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2) Page 10
