Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2)

by Trey R. Barker

  Fagan had chosen to leave.

  What was so fucking bad in me, so horrendously terrible, that it sent my father running away?

  “So I just go see Petunia, face Fagan, and leave? Hell, I don’t even know where they are.”

  “No, y’all take Petunia what she wants and get her the fuck outta this little soap opera.”

  I grinned a little. “Leave her to you?”

  “Well, we’ll see how it shakes out. After y’all got her done, y’all get on that sperm-donor, ask him all those questions been eating at you since he left.” Cope smiled. “Y’all think I didn’t know that part? Shit, that’s the easiest part of you to figure out.”

  I cocked his head. “And why are you doing that, anyway? Why did you come with me? You’ve been running your entire life and you’ve nearly been caught how many times since you met me?”

  “Oh, whole lotta times.” Cope nodded. “Yeah, you ’bout the worst thing ever happened to me. But I got me a dream one night. Monea came to me—”

  “Who’s Monea?” Rose asked.

  “His whore,” I said. “Calls every hooker he visits Monea. He’s a crazy old man.”

  “You dream about a whore?” Rose asked.

  “Ain’t really a whore.” Color flooded Cope’s dark face.

  “What?” I said. “I thought she was a whore.”

  “Well, yeah, she is, but—”

  “But what? Who is she?”

  A thoughtful deliberation filled Cope. “God, I think.”

  “God’s a whore named Monea,” I said.

  Rose laughed and headed back to the restaurant. “Crazy ass nig.”

  “God’s a whore. Named Monea,” I said again.

  “Well, God sure as fuck ain’t in no church.” Cope’s eyes blazed, challenging me to challenge his God. His fists clenched and his nostrils flared. “Ain’t no priest or no TV man, stealing money from anybody sick enough to believe in bullshit.”

  “Calm down, Co—”

  “She ain’t my Grands’ God, fucking straight about that. Ain’t no God who wakes y’all up at two in the morning, feeds you out of a box, screams hellfire in your face, then sends you back to bed to dream about burning forever.”

  He went quiet and where the patio had been filled with his voice, angry, righteous, maybe a little scared, it was now dead silent. Even the hum of traffic on Spring Street seemed to have stopped. It was as though there were nothing but us.

  “What did your grandfather tell you?” I asked. My voice was quiet, the sound of a mouse scurrying along a wall.

  Cope’s lower lip trembled. His face, still full of fire, filled with agony.

  “It was your fault, right? He tell you that?”

  The old man tilted his head back, tried to keep the tears from falling. “Yeah.” His head came back down until it hung near his chest. Tears dropped, dime-sized, to the floor. “Said they hated me. Didn’t want no kids, fucked up all them dreams. Got drunk and high and parked on that track. Waited for that train.”

  My mouth went dry. Holy fuck. Went to the track? Parked in front of whatever train might come along?

  Abandoned, I realized. As abandoned as I had been.

  That’s why he won’t leave me. He’s been left before...and he’s left people before...and he’s decided—or Monea decided for him—he won’t leave me.

  Without hesitation, I grabbed Cope and pulled him into my chest. Hard and fast. I wrapped my arms around the old man and squeezed and for that moment, loved Cope more than anyone I’d ever known.

  “Bullshit, Cope, it’s not your fault.”

  Cope nodded. “I know that. If they’d’a hated me, they’d’a put me on the tracks.”

  With a nod, Cope pressed his face into my shoulder. “Killed my uncle ’cause my cousin gave me shit about them leaving me. Took his father ’cause mine was gone.” He pulled back from me, his eyes red. “Ain’t no chance he ain’t been hurting since then. I hurt him. I gotta pay for it.”

  “Haven’t you been paying? Every day since you did it?”

  “Yeah. But I gotta pay more. That’s what God told me.”

  “Monea.”

  The old man’s laugh was surprising in its weakness. “Yeah, the whore told me to pay up full on that bill.”

  “How do you do that?”

  Cope sucked a tooth. “Ain’t quite sure about that. Keep hoping she’ll tell me or point it out or something. Maybe some smoke signals or graffiti.”

  “That why you frequent the ladies? Hoping the sign will be there?”

  “No, dummy. I frequent the ladies ’cause I love to fuck.” He wiped his eyes, shook his head as though clearing it. “What we doing about Fagan?”

  “I’ve got nothing for Petunia.”

  “Yeah, y’all do. Whatever’s in the box.”

  “It can’t be the plates. Same reason it wasn’t the pendant.”

  “Right, but it is damn well some money. That’s what he keeps yelling about. So y’all got a little leverage. Ain’t great, but ain’t too bad.”

  I checked my watch. “Bank should be open soon.”

  “Give us just enough time to find a beer and a whore.”

  “I’m not up for talking to God this morning, Cope.”

  “Ain’t talking about talking. Talking about tomcattin’.”

  Two Hours, Fifteen Minutes Ago

  Barefield Security Trust

  Barefield, Texas

  The bank had once been the Barefield National Bank. Now it was called Barefield Security Trust and was across the street from KCEK. Most of the jocks at the station, at least in the old days when it was a rock station and they were hippies with long hair and dirty jeans, did their financial deeds there. Walk across the street, cash the check, and hit the roadhouses that lined Highway 80 and were only too willing to participate in the debauchery.

  The Triple D motel was down there, too. Just across 80 from where I stood right now. Call it a half-mile down. But that fucking nasty hotel loomed large in the New Myth, didn’t it? That was where Fagan had crashed while he was in Barefield. It was also where he’d planned the best way to reacquaint himself with his son...he said. The sign, brown on top and green on the bottom, with three D’s stacked like stairs.

  The inside of Barefield Security Trust was every other bank in which I’d been. Clean, neat, efficient tellers and loan officers going about their jobs, elevator music piped in through speakers set every few feet in the ceiling.

  But there was a difference this time: No bullshit I’m a cop story. This time, I knew what I was looking for, knew where it was, and had everything I needed to get it.

  I pulled the key from my pocket as an older woman approached him. “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Deposit box.” I flashed the key. “101645.”

  Her smile, a plastic thing, never moved. “Right this way.”

  Down a long hallway, through two sets of doors and we were in the vault room, still one secured door away from the vault itself. Three cameras watched everything.

  “Wait here, sir, while I get our vault manager.”

  Then I was alone. No Cope, no bank woman, no one. For the first time in how long? Strange as shit, too. No one talking, nothing banging in my ears and filling my brain. It was the kind of quiet I dreaded. Because in that quiet, I could hear everything.

  And everything from that night: The roar of Fagan’s car, the flush of the toilet when he let himself into Kurston’s house, the thump of the wooden box closing when he stole the pendant. “Gotta lotta miles and a lotta whiskeys ‘for the night’s over, Darcy, let’s hit it.” I heard the clink of shot glasses, the whoosh of pouring booze, the bang of change on bars and tables all over Barefield. “Let’s get us some tats, boy.” The buzz of the tattoo gun, Fagan’s laugh while his son got tattooed, my squeaky moan while the guy inked Fagan on my back. The tat artist’s voice had been squeaky and whipcord thin in spite of his steroid-laden body. “Get that number, too.” My promise to get it later, when my back stopped h
urting, when I wasn’t so drunk. The slap of cards on the table in the other room, like slaps of hands against flesh. The cheap jokes and endless clinking of shot glasses while the players—Fagan along with them—cracked their knuckles in anticipation. The tat guy’s voice, still thin, but excited now. “Ante up, boys, twenty large and we’re smoking.”

  And a man was smoking. A cigarette hanging from a mouth, tip glowing orange while he watched the play, in a smaller room off to the side. Comfortable where no one could see him.

  Except me. ’Cause I had an angle.

  Then the back door opened, the click of heels against a tiled floor and the vault was suddenly bone-cold. It was as though someone had dumped the entire works into a vat of liquid nitrogen.

  “Where are the plates?”

  Petunia had been there.

  “Son of a bitch.” My voice bounced around the vault room, pinging off the metal.

  It was fucking Grand Central Station in that tattoo joint. People everywhere. Assassins, Secret Service agents, Fagan, me, God knew who else. The Feds had known there were going to be plates there. The Feds had known Petunia, or someone, was going to come pick up counterfeit plates that someone else had dropped off. Fagan had shown up, that night of all nights, looking to win or rob the game.

  And I’d stumbled into all that bullshit.

  Blind bad luck. Blind bad fucking luck.

  “Okay, sir,” a man said. “Box number 101645, you said? You have the key?”

  He hustled me into the vault room, looking discreetly up at the cameras to get the last secured door opened. He led me to the box, slid his key in, and turned it. When I had done the same and the box door opened, he pulled his key and left. The door closed behind him, locking me inside.

  Breathing heavily, I hesitantly worked the box free. Its lightness surprised me. I set it on the table in the middle of the vault. What was I expecting? The plates? The hundred grand?

  Whatever it was, a small spiral notebook and three hundred dollars sure as shit wasn’t it.

  Each page of the notebook had a month and year on the left side and a space on the right side. Every space and every page, except the first, was empty. On that first page, amidst so many empty months, there were three entries. March, April, and August, 1974. One hundred dollars each.

  But it was the top of the page that stopped me cold. Darcy, it said. College Scratch. The notebook began in March, 1974 and listed every month until my high school graduation.

  Son of a bitch. This is the favor? The on-going thing he’d asked of Hopper?

  Every month until the money ran out, Hopper had said.

  It had only taken three months for that. The money or the will to send it. Either way, what could have been better than twelve thousand dollars had he given a shit about me had actually become a hidden three hundred dollars I didn’t know anything about until nearly twenty years after college.

  Yet he had tried, hadn’t he? I had to give him credit for that. For a few months, for one piece of one year, Fagan had tried.

  With a tired sigh, I pocketed the money, grabbed the notebook, and locked the box.

  Now the son of a bitch was on everyone’s hit parade and expected me to somehow save him.

  The problem was I had no fucking clue where the plates or the one hundred big were.

  One Hour, Thirty-Seven Minutes Ago

  “Where the hell did you get this?”

  My voice was thin and cracked, full of every fear and demon that had eaten at me since long before Fagan rolled back into the World.

  Cope stood next to the bike and we both peered into the sidecar.

  “Got no idea. Went to get a soda while y’all were in the bank. Came back and here it was.” He glanced at me. “Y’all ain’t looking too good. This means something, ain’t it?”

  “Means I was wrong.”

  “Well, there’s a newsflash. Y’all been wrong most of since I know’d you.”

  It meant, this simple wooden box sitting gently on the seat of the sidecar, that I had misunderstood the pendant. It also meant that I had badly underestimated Petunia.

  I don’t have your plates. I don’t know where they are. I don’t know what else I can do for you.

  Morning traffic answered me with an indifferent mechanical hum. Cars and trucks passed, some quick, others slow. Pedestrians strolled, headed from the radio station to the bank, or the bank to the Denny’s half a block down, or from the chiropractor’s office to the Triple D motel.

  I thought Petunia snatched you, got the pendant from you and sent it to me as a sign. I was wrong.

  Actually, only partially wrong.

  Petunia had snatched Fagan, but this box, hand-carved by some kid in Mexico, emblazoned with cheap paint declaring Land of the Aztecs, meant Petunia had been busier than I’d thought.

  “Ain’t liking that look too much,” Cope said. “What’s that box?”

  “Kurston bought it for Mama. To put the pendant in.”

  “The pendant?”

  I pulled it from my pocket, absently held it up. “Yeah, the pendant.”

  “So Fagan had the pendant and I’m’a take a guess and say the box was at Kurston’s crib.”

  I nodded.

  “Motherfuck.” Cope sighed, flipped a leg over the bike and started it up. “Petunia’s on it this morning, ain’t she?”

  “She’s got them both.”

  “Damn straight, she do. Y’all know where they are?”

  Without a word, I climbed into the sidecar.

  One Hour, Two Minutes Ago

  Home

  Barefield, Texas

  Kurston’s porch was empty.

  Like no one lived there anymore. As though it was an old haunted house, the kind kids always wanted to have at the end of their street where they could taunt each other and pretend something might get them, some monster might find them and cart them away never to be seen again.

  You’re losing it, Darcy. Get your head outta your ass and on the here and now. Get your mind on the fact that you’re probably going to have to kill Petunia.

  “No problem.”

  The entire block was as empty as the porch. Where the hell were the cops and why weren’t they watching anymore? My teeth clicked with anxiety.

  A ball of fear the size of my fist sat heavy in my gut while the skin on the back of my neck chilled, then crawled down my back. My hands were clammy, my tongue seemed to swell, and the stench of my fear just about overwhelmed me.

  It was maybe too easy to imagine Petunia strolling onto the porch, resplendent in the green velvet dress she wore at Staind Skin and saying something pithy. Something like “Finally, the prodigal son comes home.” And I’d splutter, unable to answer that this had never been home, even when I lived here.

  If she did stroll out and say something clever, I would answer by yanking the gun from the small of my back. I’d empty the magazine, save the fathers, and get the frick gone.

  The morning air bulged with west Texas heat, with Barefield’s dust and grit, its stench equal parts oil stink and cattle shit. The heat, along with my own adrenaline-stained fear, wormed through me like a blood-sucking, psyche-sapping parasite.

  The front door opened.

  Go now. Rush the door, rescue the fathers. Get them out, whack Petunia. Hit the road with both men, live together, travel together, get it all worked out together, get on to the next thing together.

  I never moved. The ground had swallowed my feet.

  Opening and opening and still opening. From the darkness, from deep inside the house, a hand touched the screen door. I imagined prisoners’ hands coming out of their dark cells at Huntsville to touch the bars looking exactly the same.

  “Fuck me backward.”

  “Who ‘dat?” Cope’s voice was urgent. “Don’t look too feminine. Must not be Petunia.”

  The hand pushed the screen door open and then someone slipped into the light.

  Kurston.

  Bloody and hands bound by duct tape as he
stumbled to one of the porch chairs. His face bled, his arm bled again. Even his pants and shirt bled. The ground let go and I fell forward. Cope grabbed me, kept me upright.

  “Avenging angel better hang tight, see what’s what.”

  “She hurt my father.”

  “But getting y’all’s ass blasted ain’t gonna help nobody.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Kurston called to me. “This ain’t nothing I can’t handle. This is penny-ante bullshit, Darcy. Go on, get some breakfast. Bring me a burrito. I’ve had harder people in the fucking juvie lock-up downtown.”

  “Yeah, you’re a stud, ain’t you?”

  Shoved from behind, Kurston stumbled onto the porch, fell to his knees, just managing to stay upright.

  “Petunia, don’t—”

  “Guess again, boy.”

  Fagan.

  Behind Kurston, reaching around him with a gun, pressing the barrel tight against Kurston’s throat. Fagan shoved Kurston into the chair.

  “The hell is this?” I said.

  Without a word, Fagan went to work taping Kurston into the chair. A few turns of tape around each ankle, securing it to the legs of the chair, a few turns of the tape around his chest, securing him to the back of the chair.

  And two turns around his head.

  “Been squawking for a friggin’ hour.”

  “Darcy,” Kurston started. “Don’t listen, he’s not—”

  “Shut up.” Fagan slapped Kurston, hard. The detective’s head snapped back. “Say shit and I’ll kill you now.”

  “Fagan, don’t—”

  Fagan turned to me, cut him off with a finger. “I’m done asking. Gimme the money.”

  Violently, Kurston shook his head.

  “Shut up, old man.” Fagan hit Kurston with the gun butt. Kurston’s head snapped forward.

  “Whoa,” I said. I rushed forward, but froze when Fagan’s gaze swiveled out toward him. “Yeah? You think that scares me? Bring it on. Bring your ass out here and let’s get to it, you asshole son of a bitch.”

  “That any way to talk to your old man?” Fagan grinned, a predator’s grin.