“You mean Petunia’s plates?” I asked.
Fagan’s face drained, as though I were looking at him through a lens that had been suddenly changed from color to black and white. “You talked to Petunia?”
“Talked? No, we argued and she threatened and I pissed on myself.”
“Shit,” Fagan said under his breath. “You didn’t give them to her, did you?”
“I don’t—”
“Haven’t given them to anyone yet,” Kurston said, sliding smoothly over me. “Haven’t made a decision.”
“Well, then, lemme make that decision for you,” Fagan said. “Give them to me, we’ll all walk away alive, and I’ll be sure Jefe gets them.”
“Was that the deal?” I asked, thinking of Petunia’s one million bucks. “You take the plates from the seller and get them to Arabalo so he could crank out some fakes?”
“Y’all getting seven percent like a real estate agent or what?”
Fagan’s laugh bombarded the barbershop, caromed off the tiled floor and long mirror. His hands shook, as though he might punctuate the laugh with bullets. “Crank out some fakes? He’s one of the big boys, so big they don’t mention his name along the border. Hell, they don’t even whisper it.”
“Drugs,” Kurston said.
Fagan snorted. “Drugs is the least of what he’s into, dumbass.”
I raised my hands to both my fathers, palms out. “Everyone chill out.” Getting my hands up was a calming move, at least that’s what Kurston always told me. Police 101, he called it. Said it not only calmed suspects and arrestees, it also means your hands are already up in case things go south.
“Jefe wants to buy those plates. But I get them? Shit, that means I get all that beautiful money he’s got sitting out there for them.”
“The million.”
I wanted to be angry with Fagan. I wanted to yell and stomp and throw a six-year-old’s tantrum about how unfair it all was. I’d just wanted to get to know the man. Didn’t want to live with him, didn’t want to travel with him, didn’t want to build a relationship, just wanted to know him and let whatever happened happen.
“How’d you find me?” I asked my father.
Fagan laughed. “You ain’t no Special Forces superstar, Darcy. You’re pretty easy to find. Shit, how many times you talked about this barbershop? Coming here with daddy oh daddy. Made me sick to my back teeth.” He laughed. “You gotta have funds to travel, Darcy, and you ain’t nothing but white trash. Welcome to the family.”
“You offering to bankroll me?”
The man’s face twitched. “Yeah, absolutely. Bankroll the shit outta whatever you wanna do. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I was saying a month ago. He’s offering a million, Darcy. We’ll sell those plates to him...get things smoking.” He grinned. “And I know you got that Fagan killer instinct. All us Fagan boys got it. That’s what makes us successful.”
“Is that a joke?” My hands clenched. The collar of my T-shirt, still stained with blood and soot, suddenly felt tight. “Killer instinct? You know I killed a man.”
“Right, the Secret Service killer.” Fagan kept the gun on Kurston. “Who the fuck cares? Secret Service shouldn’t scare you, they ain’t nothing but some hopped up Federal cops.”
“Yeah, well, they scare me. I killed one.”
“That what you think?”
“That’s what I know.”
Another laugh, coupled with the unnerving grin, rolled out of Fagan. “Then you don’t know much. You didn’t kill nobody. When that blood got to flowing, you fainted dead away. And that dead guy wasn’t no Secret Service. He was a bar rat, trying to make a pot on a poker game.” He laughed again, shook his head. “Secret Service. Where’d you hear that?”
“From me, fuckstick.”
As though there were no one else in the room, Fagan’s gaze swiveled to Kurston. “From you, huh? From Mr. Detective Kurston...Mr. Bigshot Policeman.” A bright smile slid over Fagan’s face. “That’s not the name, is it, Darcy? That’s not the name you used. It was...wait...let me remember. SuperCop. Well, SuperCop, you got that part wrong.”
Superheated blood rushed into my face, filled my cheeks and skin, nearly burned my eyes from the inside.
“Why don’t you tell me, then?” Kurston capped his words with a snort.
For two heartbeats, no one said anything. Fagan watched Kurston and Kurston returned the stare, two hard men trying to decipher the other’s next move.
“Poker, like I said.”
Bullshit, I thought. “This would be the game with a twenty grand entry?”
Fagan frowned. “How’d you know that?”
“Five players, a hundred large pot. Seems pretty obvious. You wanted to get in the game. Came to town looking to get in, thought you could beat them all, take the pot.”
With a smile, Fagan shook his head. “No, like I told you then, I came to town for you. A good game of cards just happened to be in the deck, too.”
“You never mentioned the cards to me.”
“Ain’t gotta tell you everything, boy.”
“So where’d you find twenty large to get in?” Kurston asked.
Keeping the gun solid on Kurston, Fagan spread his left arm and hand out wide, as though offering a product for sale. “‘S’why I needed the number.”
I put my right arm behind my back. “The deposit box.”
“Figured out what it was, huh? I’m not surprised. I thought you’d figure it out, you’re pretty smart.”
“Not as smart as I’d like to be.”
“Eat some ginkgo biloba. Now, give me the number.”
“Why? The poker game’s over.”
“Ha. The game ain’t the only thing in life.”
Fagan took a deep breath and in it, I felt something change. The man’s body slumped a touch, though his gun never moved. His eyes went slightly out of focus, as though looking backward at something he’d done or something he’d wanted to do. “That number is the only way I can fix it all.”
There were so many problems, he said. So many things that needed setting right. A lifetime’s worth of mistakes. “Like leaving my boy alone for thirty years.”
“Thirty-five.”
“Thirty-five, then. That money clears the road, Darcy. We can get moving, do all the things we talked about doing, all the things you’ve ever wanted to do.” Fagan paused. “You give me that number and we can be...finally...father and son.”
“What about the plates?” I said.
“Yeah. We got two ways out.” His grin grew. “A fortune for you and one for me. Money for Dad, money for Son.”
“You’ve got a fortune in the box?”
“It’s how I was going to get in the game.”
Oh, it was so seductive. The promise of it all. In those long, lonely nights after Kurston had arrested me on some petty charge, I would lie in bed and dream about the moment Fagan would take me away from everything bad. But right now, this moment full of the potential for blood was the same con it had been when Fagan first showed up those many weeks ago. I had thought I would recognize it when I saw it again, but even as my breath hitched in my lungs and my skin warmed, I felt myself buying into it. I’d been so wrong about so many things. Look at the man’s eyes, for Christ’s sake. There was no deception in them, no trickery. There was a lifetime of guilt, a mile of asking for forgiveness, but nothing else.
“Darcy.” Kurston spoke softly. “You’ve been down this road, son. It’s time for a different road. Don’t let—”
“Your road?” Fagan said. “He’s been down that road, too, ain’t he? Thirty-eight years old and he’s fucking miserable. You ain’t done such a good job raising my boy.”
“Having a hard time remembering the box number, aren’t you?” I asked.
For a split second, Fagan looked surprised. The look disappeared quickly, replaced by the confidence I had come to expect. “Hell, son, I opened it when you were two or something. When I left town I was...well, fucked up is the only way I can say
it. I was fucked up. Stoned most of the time, drunk, pissed at your mother, maybe a little pissed at you, too.”
Quietly, turning away and furiously wiping away tears, I said, “You left me.”
The barber pole sliced and sliced, drilling through the concrete, through the hard packed dirt. Moving and moving and moving and not getting anywhere, I realized.
“Taken me awhile to get over that,” Fagan said. “It’s taken me awhile to get to a place where I could own up to that.”
“He’s lying, Darcy,” Kurston said. “He’s a scumba—”
“No.” I spoke more sharply than I’d intended. “Don’t say it. Everyone always says it. Don’t say it.”
“Say what?” Fagan said. “That I’m a scumbag? A liar? A thief? Worse? Shit, I’ve heard that all my life.”
“Darcy, listen,” Kurston said. “He is exactly—”
“Then what am I?” My voice boomed through the barbershop. “Don’t you get it? If he’s so awful, then what the fuck am I? I am his son.” I pounded the veins in my arms. “This is his blood. So how am I any different?”
A cool hand slid around my shoulders. “Calm down, White-Boy Darcy, don’t y’all listen to them boys. Y’all listen here.” He tapped a finger against my temple. “And here.” Another tap against my heart. “This’ll tell y’all how it is.”
“But I can’t hear anything.”
“Hear me, boy,” Fagan began.
“No, Darcy. Don’t listen—” Kurston said.
“Shut up,” I said. My anger, blazing hot inside my skull, turned on Kurston. “You’re not even my real father.”
Kurston’s voice lost its edge. “True enough. He’s your father. He’s the guy who never came back; the one who never saw you in YMCA basketball when you ran the wrong way and scored the winning basket for the other team. He never saw you nail ‘synchronicity’ in that ninth grade spelling bee.”
“Eighth grade and I only spelled it because you wouldn’t quit playing the damned album.” My hands clenched to fists as I paced.
“So,” Kurston said finally. “The album helped, right?”
Maybe it was the sheer amount of blood-stilling anger. Maybe it was the depth of confusion. But something brought a deep, jagged laugh out of me. “Helped? I guess it did. Still sing some of those songs, too.”
Fagan shook his head violently. “What the fuck is this happy horseshit? Give me the number. Give me the plates. No more crap.”
But it wasn’t just the Police album, was it? Kurston had always been there, had never left me. When I was eight I had run away. Snatched my pillow, jammed some beef jerky in my pocket, and hit the road. We lived near the outskirts of town and after a trip through the town dump, I was on a lonely farm-to-market road. I walked for nearly an hour, endlessly north, until a sheriff’s deputy car passed me. The car never slowed, the cop never came back, never talked to me but I knew the radio crackled with my description.
Twenty minutes later, Kurston pulled up
“What’s up, hoss?”
“Running away.”
“Why?”
“I—I don’t— I don’t think I like you.”
Kurston had nodded, snapped the car’s radio off, and popped open the passenger door. “You know, I don’t much like you, either. Maybe I should run away, too.”
I had frowned. “Did you bring a pillow?”
“No, but I’ve got a blanket in the trunk. You have a blanket?”
I didn’t.
“Well, maybe we should run away together.”
“That’s stupid. You can’t run away with someone you don’t like.”
“Yeah, maybe it is. Tell you what, then, let’s go to the DQ, get some ice cream, see if we can’t maybe work this out. If we can’t, then I’ll put you back on the road and I’ll run away the other direction.”
Eight years old or not, I knew it was a con, but I couldn’t get past the DQ offer. They had a thing with M&M’s in it, vanilla ice cream and M&M’s and there wasn’t much I loved more than that.
My gaze moved slowly between the two fathers, between the two very different men, the two men I found alive and fighting deep within me.
“It’s been a while since I had any ice cream,” I said.
Fagan frowned. “What? Ice cream? The hell does that mean?” He shook his head. “Whatever. Look, I owe a few people. We’ll clean out that box, get them paid, and get moving. Got a lot of lost years to get back.”
“Darcy.” Kurston looked at him somberly. “Don’t leave me, okay? That’s all I ask. Even if you go with him, don’t leave me again.”
Those last four words muddied everything, those and Kurston’s tears on the porch when I had hopped in Fagan’s Continental.
“Damnit, boy, gimme the number—”
“Please don’t leave—”
“Shut up.” I screamed so hard and loud my throat howled in pain. “Shut. The. Hell. Up.”
“Where y’all going?”
Wherever my head isn’t cracked in two directions.
But I said nothing, choosing instead to slam the door open, grab an alley, and head deeper into town.
Eleven Hours, Twenty-One Minutes Ago
Random Streets
Barefield, Texas
My watch said midnight.
Only fucking midnight.
The hours stretched like a condom pulled to the breaking point. I’d wandered the streets, Cope at my side. I’d sucked down bad whiskey, listened to bad music, tried to ignore drunks with bad stories breathing bad air in my face. Felt like eight, maybe ten hours; maybe a lifetime in those hours. But it had only been three.
“Five-O was crying when I left,” Cope said. “Not like woman blubbering...but all stony-faced. Bottom lip a’going. Like that.”
“Yeah.”
We sat deep in a booth at a nameless Tex-Mex joint. I hadn’t even known it was here. We were hungry, we walked, we found it. It was that random.
“Like my cousin,” Cope said. He shoved his plate across the stained table, picked up the cucumber stump the waitress had brought him and crunched loudly. “Been crying for fifty years.”
“Your entrée to the church” I shoved my plate away. “I don’t get it, man, just don’t get it.”
“What?”
“Why it’s so hard?”
“’Cause it’s love. Hardest thing in the world. Hard as diamonds.”
Maybe that was what I was talking about. I’d been struggling with the “it” of the two relationships for years and maybe that was it. As simple and complicated as that.
“What’s hard, Cope, is trying to be with them, either of them.”
“Y’all looked pretty good with SuperCop.”
“Give it some time, we’ll be at each other’s throats before too long.”
My eyes wandered to the front window. Dark, peppered with neon business signs, with heads and tails of cars up and down the streets, of people wandering the streets with the glow of their cell phones lighting their faces, stared back indifferently. I’d always loved getting out in that dark, reveling in shadows and depths that weren’t there during the day.
“Y’all havin’ a tough time...can’t figure out what’s what.”
“Meaning?”
“They two different men and y’all trying to make yourself into both of them. Trying to be the best of both parts and that ain’t ever gonna happen.”
“You don’t think a person can be the best of everyone?”
“Fuck, no.” Cope picked his teeth. “Be who y’all are, man. Tough enough just to do that.”
After I tossed a ten and a five on the table, we headed outside. It was still warm, wouldn’t cool much between now and sunrise. A street-sweeper moved slowly, sluggishly, along Wall Street.
“So who am I?” I asked.
We walked the half-block to the bike, the thump of our feet on the cracked sidewalk my only answer.
When Cope sat on the bike, he nodded. “I been to the ocean once. Soothed me pretty g
ood. Got the rhythm of those waves in my head, cleaned it right out.” He paused. “Got rid of everything except my cousin.”
“A little lost here, Cope, gotta roadsign for me a little better.”
“Got no idea what kind of man y’all are. Maybe, y’all hadn’t’a walked out on them, we’d both know.”
“I didn’t want to choose.”
“I know that. I ain’t stupid. They knew it, too.”
“Last time my choice was a disaster.”
Cope nodded. “Got that shit straight, baby.”
Walking out had been absolutely the right thing to do. Everyone had been full of adrenaline and piss, of anger and violence and walking out had kept that at bay, at least for now. But it also allowed me to avoid discovering that I probably wasn’t worth either of them.
“Shouldn’t’a walked away.”
“I’ve got no problem with what I did.”
“Shouldn’t’a done it.”
“What about you? Running for fifty years, right?”
“Been regretting it ever’ day since.”
“But not enough to go back and face the music, right?”
A sliver of a laugh slipped out of Cope. “No, boy, not that much. Maybe someday, but not right now.” Cope started the bike. “So, y’all gonna walk back in, make that decision?”
“No.”
Cope whistled. “Man, y’all fucked up.”
“I know I did.”
“Ain’t what I mean, White-Boy Darcy. I mean y’all are fucked up. That boy’s a good man, cop or not. I would’a given my left nut...hell, both nuts...to get with a guy like him. Y’all gotta go back, get right with him.”
Yeah, eventually, I’d have to face it, he’d have to stand up for whatever—whoever—I was. But now, as the night tried to cool some of the day’s heat, there was only one other thing on my mind.
“I have something else first.”
“The plates?”
I shook my head.
“The box?”
“The pendant.”
I’d thought the pendant was gone, slipped into an evidence locker when Fagan had been taken from the scene and autopsied into a million pieces. But when I saw him on the tape from the bank, and when he walked into Val’s, I knew that pendant wasn’t in an evidence locker. He had it and I was going to get it.
Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2) Page 18
