Silence slipped between us like the silence of a card player deciding how many cards to toss.
“Seems like all you have to do is go back, face the music.”
“Y’all gotta go back, too. Go back and see that Daddy.”
“That’s the soul part,” I said. “Get right with Kurston.”
Cope nodded. “The body part is Petunia. Y’all know she’s coming.”
Would that she’d gotten picked up in Ft. Stockton after her SUV crashed into the radio station. That was bullshit. She was too good for that. By the time the cops arrived, she was long gone. The SUV had been registered to some old guy in Marshall, Minnesota, or somewhere who had crapped his pants when the cops showed up at his door. And chances were damned good she wore gloves while she drove, making sure there were no prints.
Cope was right. She was coming. For the plates.
“Why does this guy—this Jefe Arabalo—want these plates?” Nearby, a swing, rusty and worn, danced back and forth in the slight breeze. “Lot easier ways to crank out some fake dollars than actually using printing plates. Those things have to be engraved. Why not just do some up on a computer?”
“Like the high schoolers,” Cope said.
“Exactly. Getting those plates back and using them seems like a lot of work.” More importantly, I thought, lots of overhead. Basic premise of a criminal enterprise: Low overhead, high profitability. Hell, basic premise of any business. Why invest in something that takes tons of money and effort when nearly the same product can be cranked out with a high-end scanner, computer, and printer?
“Maybe Kurston know all about it,” Cope said.
I shook my head. “Not his case or his jurisdiction. Plus he’s suspended. He won’t know anything about it.”
“Y’all ain’t got much faith in him, huh? He seem to know about all kinds’a shit that ain’t his case or his jurisdiction.” Cope chuckled. “Hell, we’ll just call that freaky-ass judge, let him tell us ever’thing. Don’t matter Kurston knows or not, y’all need to get right with him.”
The swing moved back and forth, slowly along its inverted arc, slowing with every second. One place to another, then back again. It had two choices and was checking each of them out before deciding for sure.
Fucking swing is me. Neither of us can make a goddamned decision.
Five minutes later, I sat in the confines of the side car. The wind buffeted me, the cooler crowded me, the engine noise ate at me.
“Val’s?” Cope asked.
“Yeah. He’s probably asleep. Or maybe watching some old basketball game on ESPN Classic. Flogging his dolphin or some shit.”
Cope frowned. “Uh...okay...whatever. Y’all Kurston boys got a whole thing all to yourselves.”
“Pretty much.”
Eight Hours, Forty Minutes Ago
Val’s Barbershop
Barefield, Texas
Hand shaking, I opened the screen door. Kurston looked over from the TV, from the old basketball game.
“Chair number four,” I said. “I thought three was your favorite.”
Kurston snorted. “Three’s got a bad spring. I don’t like getting poked in the ass.”
“Who does?”
“Knew me a woman once, and she—” Cope stopped. “Well, don’t matter much right now.”
Silence fell, broken only by the announcers, the scoring, the referees’ whistles. An awkward silence now, it held none of the comfort or ease, none of the smile of a few hours earlier. My gaze, unable to stay on Kurston, wandered the shop, fell on my damned fourth grade picture. I’d been a thin school kid, a mop of longish brown hair radiating out over my skull. Freckles and washed-out hazel-colored eyes. Cheap JCPenny velour shirt, the maroon one. I’d loved the shit outta that shirt, wore it until the seams gave up on me and came apart. Damn near left me coming out of the shirt, young Incredible Hulk.
Kurston snapped the TV off. The place went quiet. “Why’d you come back?”
I shrugged.
“Why did you—” Kurston began to ask once again.
A mechanical voice interrupted him. “BA four.”
There was a pause, then, “Four. Go ahead.”
“The hell’s that?” Cope asked.
I jerked a thumb toward Val’s office. In the center of his huge particle board desk, he had a scanner. “He’s a scanner rat. Police groupie. Turn it on, did you?”
“Listening’s in my blood, I guess,” Kurston said.
The scanner was a big, expensive model, capable of scanning damn near anything within one hundred miles and Val always had it on. He didn’t chase the cars or gossip about the calls, he just listened, hoped his cop friends didn’t get hurt.
The dispatcher sounded bored. “Call from a motorist. Locked her keys in the car. It’ll be a silver and blue 1994 Dodge Ram. 4728 Bowie Street.”
There was a long pause and I knew what was going on in the squad car. Both cops sighing and snorting and bitching about the glamor of police work. Eventually: “Ten-four.”
With his ear still on the radio, Kurston turned back to me. “You never answered my question.”
“Which—”
“Why are you here? In this shop?”
“Uh...listen, boys,” Cope said. “Much as I’d like to stay, hear y’all’s secrets, I think I’ll just mosey on outta here, let y’all do whatever dysfunctional family thing y’all got to do.”
“Where to?” Kurston asked.
Cope jerked a thumb over his shoulder, across Val’s parking lot. “Got some fun over there still, looks like. Ain’t closed down for the night.”
“All running after hours.”
“Well, a’course they are, that’s where the real money is.” Cope grinned.
“Keep yourself careful,” Kurston said.
Cope was headed for the Flat. The wrong side of the tracks, filled with Barefield’s obviously lost and dispossessed, Barefield’s obviously poor and decrepit. Respectable citizens—mostly white—lived north of the Flat, in the high school district, in the garden district, around the country club’s golf course. The place was filled to overdosing with drugs and guns, with boozy barroom beatings, with the ravaged. With the dead and those who didn’t realize they were any of those things yet.
Barefield’s respectable citizens believed there were nothing but blacks living in the Flat, drinking malt liquor, shooting heroin, banging each other’s common-law wives and daughters. Barefield’s black community fervently believed there were nothing but illegal Mexicans in the Flat, drinking smuggled tequila and selling their daughters. The Mexicans thought it was nothing but smuggled-in Vietnamese, ditto booze and daughters.
But down in the Flat, nobody gave a shit about skin color. The only color that mattered down there was of the cash.
“Yeah, sounds like fun,” Cope said, staring out the barbershop’s single window. The window faced Terrell Street, the Flat’s grand avenue that teemed, twenty-four hours a day, with people.
“Be careful, Cope,” I said. “Don’t let Monea roll you and don’t get killed.”
Cope tried on a grin but it didn’t fit quite right. “Ain’t got to tell me about getting killed anyway. Been there already.”
“Fifty years ago?”
“Well, I meant I been to the Flat already, but yeah, that answer works, too.”
Without a word, but with a tiny nod, Cope slipped out of the barbershop and into the din of voices and screaming cars. Engines and stereos filled the air, along with their drivers’ laughter and angry shouts. Music—old school R & B—blared from King’s Room just across Terrell. More music, Tex-Mex, screamed out from under that, from the Dew Drop Inn further down the block.
“You want some tea?” Kurston asked, his voice solemn as a priest in mass.
“No, thanks.”
Kurston poured himself a cup, stirred in a bit of honey, a squeeze of lemon juice. There was no humor in his voice, no levity or lightness as the police radio continued to crackle. “Why were you in that church?”
I hesitated. It had seemed so obvious—banging my own redemption while eating both mine and Fagan’s sins—but now it just seemed stupid. Standing there, beating myself until I cried like a baby and apologized to everyone I could think of. It didn’t seem stupid, it was stupid. Self-indulgent.
“Cope would say blooding it out.”
Kurston frowned. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Trying to get all the bad out of me.”
“Did it work?”
My laugh was sharp and brutal. “Fuck no. How many more bodies are there now than the one I thought there was? The priests. Esther. Guy. Lucas. The lunatic at Johnny’s.” My voice caught. “Even Johnny.”
Neither of us said anything. Of all the bullshit I’d caused, that was the hardest to take. Johnny had been one of the great men I’d known. He helped people, gave free meals sometimes or jobs for someone impaled on shitty luck even when business wasn’t so good. He wasn’t an angel. He drank too much, swore too much, and had a bit of a jones. But none of that negated what he did for folks.
“You have a pile of shit at your feet, Darcy,” Kurston said. “There is no doubt about that. But Johnny ain’t in that pile. What happened at Johnny’s was going to happen, regardless of who else was there. The Judge’s driver was busting a nut to do his thing and that’s nobody’s fault but his.”
Kurston’s face softened a bit, the edges disappeared. He waved his arm, a bird’s broken wing. “Damn good thing you and Cope were there, I’d say.”
Yeah. One good thing has come from all this crap. We—well, Cope—saved my step-father.
“So,” Kurston said. “Regarding this pile of shit. What are we going to do?”
“We,” he had said. Both of us, together. Just like with the running away from home. Let’s go and talk it out, let’s figure it out...together.
Thirty years later, I was still running away with my pillow and Kurston still wanted to sit down and figure it out together.
I had wanted to do nothing but get Kurston the pendant and then dis-a-fucking-ppear. Out of town, out of state, out of country. Fix what I could, then opt out. But the border didn’t seem to be on the agenda anymore. On the agenda now was not patricide, but G-Man-icide. Whack a Secret Service man this close to the border and you can lay Fagan’s phantom one hundred large that border’s going to be sealed virgin tight.
Secret Service. Border patrol. County cops between here and there. Texas Rangers.
“I don’t know,” I said with a tired sigh.
Kurston nodded in that suspect-questioning way of his, the way I’d seen a thousand times through the one-way mirror. Okay, it said, I can accept that for now. Not quite the answer I wanted, but let’s move on to something else.
“Okay, let’s do it this way. Let’s backfill a little. Why were you going town to town?”
That tone, that I’m-the-cop tone, drove me insane; automatically made me want to say nothing. Don’t get crazy here, I thought. This guy can help me if I’ll pull my head out of my ego enough. Let him get me out of this mess...if it can be done, he can do it.
With a dry swallow, I said, “Banks.” I pointed at the number on my arm. “101645.”
Kurston nodded. “I saw that. I always thought if I were going to get one, it’d have to be absolutely dead-on cool. You know? Thought about a blues guitar when I was younger. Thinking more lately about a shadow...I don’t know why.”
A tattoo? Kurston? Mr. Straight Arrow? Never happen. Probably never happen. Well, maybe never happen. I had seen a couple signs the last little while that SuperCop wasn’t quite as straight as I’d thought.
“That why you went to Staind Skin?” Kurston asked. “For the tat?”
I rubbed the number. “This one isn’t a tat. It’s a black marker.”
A soft, comfortable laugh came out of Kurston. The sound managed to set me at ease a little.
“Fagan wanted me to get two tats. This was one of them.”
“And the other was Fagan.” Kurston shook his head, as though it didn’t matter to him. “You know what the number is?”
“The safety deposit box.”
Kurston shook his head. “Right, but why that number?”
I shrugged. “Bank gave it to him.”
“Yeah, could be.”
I held up a key. “I got this from Hopper. I think there’s a pretty good chunk of change in that box.”
Even after all the years I’d spent with Kurston, I’d rarely managed to read the man, rarely managed to discover what the real temperature was behind the temperate mask. But in that sliver of a second, I saw the man clearly and perfectly.
“Cash? You were chasing cash?”
“Uh....” My brain froze. I’d been chasing the pendant, but for some reason couldn’t mention it right now. Somehow it seemed so sappy and dumb. Running all over the state, getting people killed, so my step-father could have a piece of cheap jewelry.
“I have cash, Darcy. You could have come to me.” His head, just before he turned away and walked into Val’s office, shook just the slightest bit, the way Mama’s used to when I got caught doing something stupid with one of my friends...usually a kid called Junior who later got popped for molesting his niece. “You could have come home.”
There had been times, damned few and miles and miles apart, when I thought the same thing. But we’d never been able to connect. There always seemed to be some stumbling block, school work or friends or Kurston’s being too much of a cop or whatever. But really, so many of the somethings were just stupid bullshit, items tossed out by two guys desperate to stake out a territory.
Dogs pissing on hydrants.
“Get a hand?” Kurston said, coming out of the office. The blood from his wound had gotten on his shirt. He held one of Val’s shop shirts in his hand.
We managed to get his shirt off pretty quick with not much grimacing on Kurston’s part. I pulled the bandages and cleaned the wound the best I could. After new bandages, I helped my step-father into the shirt.
“I’ll be fine,” Kurston said.
“Sure thing, Val,” I said, nodding toward Val’s name stitched over the left tit.
With a tired smile, Kurston said, “I miss her.”
He’d said it before, a thousand times. I’d said it myself. Hell, in spite of the too-frequent fights, we’d said it together, sometimes at the cemetery, sometimes over a plate of hot links at Johnny’s. But it felt different now, more than just a husband missing his wife. Maybe a best friend missing the other half of that equation. Maybe a family missing part of itself. Whatever it was, it was the exact same thing that ran—that barreled, that rampaged, that stormed—through my head every moment of nearly every day.
“I think you do, too,” Kurston said. “I can’t quite imagine it, Darcy.”
“What?”
“Getting rid of the blood. I mean, I understand wanting to get rid of Fagan’s, I wanted the same thing when I was a kid, get rid’a my dad’s blood. But you gotta remember, half that blood is your mother’s.”
My face flooded with that blood now. I turned away.
“Can’t get rid of Daddy’s blood without losing Mama’s blood, too.”
“I wish she were here,” I said. “She could fix this.”
Kurston laughed, again as gently as the spring rains that dotted the desert scrub. “I think maybe you graduated outta her league, buddy.”
I laughed, too, surprised at how clean it felt, how dry and right.
Wrapping me in his arms, Kurston whispered in his ear, “I know you miss her, I’ve always known. That’s why we don’t get along, we both miss her too much.”
I pulled away. “I thought it was because we hated each other.”
Another chuckle, louder but not forced; a genuine laugh, slipped out of Kurston. “Well, there is that sometimes, isn’t there?”
“Sometimes.”
“But maybe not as often as we thought.”
“Maybe not.”
We both l
aughed quietly, maybe a little embarrassed, maybe a little hesitant. It had been so many years, so many bad days and nights, so many fights. To bare ourselves this much was tough, both to do and to see each other do.
Hesitating, nearly unable to get the words off his tongue, Kurston said to me, “Did he tell you why he was in town?”
“Said he came for me. He wanted to get to know me.” Embarrassment ran as hard inside me as white water rapids. “I know, I know...it was bullshit, but at the time, it didn’t seem like it and besides, that was all I—”
The shop fell silent except for the radio, dispatchers still moving squads around town.
“All you wanted, right?”
I wiped a hot, stinging tear away. “Yeah. But I don’t want it now, I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“Don’t worry about that.” Kurston took my hand in his and squeezed softly. “That ain’t no problem, Darcy, don’t worry about it. Ain’t no big deal to be curious, no big deal at all.”
“But you—”
“I’m just a tired, old cop who sticks his nose in where it doesn’t belong.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“Yeah, and I’m sorry, too, I probably shouldn’t have, either.”
The hug was electric, filled with so many things we’d never been able to say. It wasn’t perfect, both of us turned our heads the same direction and crunched our noses together, but it was a decent start. It was a hug that said, “yeah, let’s try this and see what happens.”
The radio separated us. From one dispatcher to two, both calling cruisers, both hammering out ten-codes, addresses, both suddenly tense.
“Kurston?”
“Yeah, yeah, I hear it.”
Though I’d grown up surrounded by them, most of the ten-codes I didn’t recognize. They’d always been around when I was young, on the radio, on reports Kurston wrote, a second language. Even in the jokes that regularly flew between Kurston and Mama. But I’d never really understood them. They were secret words for crime, for murder and hate, for death.
But now Val’s was full of them. More voices had joined, other dispatchers, at least two other cops calling back. They were all edgy and scared, flying on the edge of out of control.
Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2) Page 20
