I gaped. “My old man? Other than blowing a nut, you haven’t done shit for me.”
“Christ, here we go.”
His eyes rolled around in their sockets, sarcastic and bored. But they reminded me of a user in the last throes of that cheap crack high or at the beginning of a meth binge, rolling around, loose like gumballs tossed on a table.
“You are such a fucking whiner.” Fagan pounded his chest. “My old man left me, too. Didn’t bother me none.”
I frowned. That was crap. The man had died in ‘47, massive heart attack while attempting to unhook a small trailer from a truck.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “It bothered me.”
“What the shit for?”
I gaped. “What for? What...?”
Could the man be that stupid? Did he really not understand why I’d been angry for so long?
“You left me.” It was both that complicated and that simple.
Kurston, taped to the chair, trying to loosen himself, shook his head again. He moaned, trying to force some words through the tape.
“So?”
“I missed you.”
“And?”
“Damnit, I wanted to know you.”
“Well, now you do.”
“But it was supposed to be perfect. You would come back and we’d spend a few months just talking. And then maybe we’d go somewhere together.”
The man’s laugh scalded me. “What kinda bullshit is that?”
“My kind,” I said, through clenched teeth and tight jaw.
The kind where one father didn’t take a second father hostage, where there was no need for a second father.
“The kind where Mama was wrong.”
“About?”
“Everything. I wanted you to show me she was just a bitter old woman. I wanted all the stories to be lies.”
Fagan laughed. “Want a decent daddy, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, how fucked up is that? We’re standing here, there’s a lotta blood flowing, and all you can think about is making sure your mama was a lying bitch.” With the gun still at Kurston’s throat, Fagan nodded. “You remember what I said that first night? When I got back to town?”
“You said you weren’t as bad as she said.”
“Straight up truth.”
“Yeah, except you’re not as good as you said either.”
“Bullshit. I’m a great guy. Your mama was a cheap-trash liar.” Fagan laughed. “You don’t want the truth. You want some bad fantasy. Ain’t anybody good like you want.”
“That’s crap.”
“Believe what you want, I could give a shit.” His knuckles so tight around the gun’s butt they bled white, he pressed the barrel deeper into Kurston’s neck. “The money.”
“I don’t have—”
Fagan fired.
It was a sharp pop, the bang of a .45.
Somewhere behind me, Cope yelled as I threw myself forward. Under the shade of Fagan’s triumphant grin, I tripped, fell on the first step, crashed to my face. When I glanced up, Fagan was stone-cold, a statue of a man.
Kurston breathed hard, his eyes wide but somehow not scared.
“Next time, you asshole, I’ll blow his head off.” Fagan jammed the gun into Kurston’s ear. “Now let’s try this again. The money.”
“Fine. Straight up trade. Money for Kurston.”
Fagan’s laugh boomed over the morning air, the howl of an inmate in the county lock-up. “I knew you fucking had it. I knew it.”
“Money for Kurston.”
“You’re getting the shitty end of that deal.”
“Goddamnit. Deal or not?”
Fagan’s face bunched up. “Whoa, hang on. Now you wanna play? Now you wanna give me what you got? How do I know you got the money?”
I pulled the key from my pocket. It caught the sun, glinted a reflection off Fagan’s face.
“Hopper gave it to me.”
“Who?”
“Hopper. Your friend? The guy spent a year in lock-up for you? Christ on a shingle. You gave him the damned key.”
What the hell is with Fagan’s face? It was totally wrong. Wrong for three hundred bucks. Wrong even for a few thousand. But it was exactly the right look for a safety deposit box with ten or twelve grand.
Which is what would be there if he’d kept his monthly payment going.
Something else was going on here and it was fucking me up because I couldn’t see it.
I toyed with the key, laid it flat in my palm, then slowly wrapped my hand around it until it disappeared. “How much do you owe?”
“We ain’t doing this. Give me the money and I’ll get everything paid off, you and I will hit the road and figure it all out.”
I shook my head. “You were gonna rob the game. Five players, twenty grand entry each. That the debt?”
“Bigger than that, but snatching that stash would have made a good dent.”
“How much are you into them for?”
Fagan’s eyes narrowed. “Them who?”
“Whoever ‘they’ are this time: Dealers, bookies, whoever.”
Somewhere, in the back alleys where Fagan lived and bled, he’d heard about this high stakes game in Barefield. Decided he wanted to get in, get himself a winning hand or two together, maybe see his son while he was doing it. No doubt he figured he’d take a chance on the college money still being there, which seemed incredibly half-assed to me, use that dough to somehow shoe-horn his way into the game. If he won, great. If not, he’d steal it all.
“But that ain’t what happened.” Cope laughed like an old man watching his grandkids play in the lawn sprinkler. “Always goes different than we expect.”
“I fucking stumbled onto the score of my life, you snot-nosed little fuck.” Fagan’s face twisted into a sneer.
“Haven’t been snot-nosed in a couple of years, Daddy.”
“If y’all’d been here, y’all’d know that. ‘S blind bad luck, man, blind bad luck.”
“What’s the nig talking about?” Fagan’s grip on the gun tightened.
“Y’all come to get the money outta the box. Too many drugs and y’all cain’t remember where the damned thing is. Hell, you cain’t even remember what the number is and it’s y’all’s birthday.”
Fagan snorted. “Shut up, darkie, my birthday’s in June.”
“Man, y’all’s racism ain’t even interesting.”
“What happened?” I asked. “You hear about the game and somehow find out there are counterfeit plates involved? You thought either—” I held up a finger. “There would be lots of cash around to buy the things and you’d just snatch that or—” A second finger popped up. “You’d snatch the plates and print up whatever amount you needed.”
Sweat beaded on Fagan’s forehead. He wiped it away and it was back almost instantly. “This fucking place. How can you people stand to live in this heat?”
“So you somehow convinced Jefe to let you broker the deal. But everything went bad for some reason and now you don’t want to touch the plates because Petunia scares the crap out of you. Hell, she scared you into hiding for a while, didn’t she?”
“You’d be scared, too, you had half a brain. Should’a seen what she did to the Fed.”
“Thought you said there wasn’t one.”
The man’s gaze bored in hard on me. He wiped the sweat again, and the handful of flies buzzing around his head. “Yeah, well I’m telling you she carved his ass up like a fucking roast beef sandwich.”
“I prefer to think of it as more of a New York Strip. Or perhaps a filet mignon, to go along with my cognac.”
Forty-Seven Minutes Ago
Petunia slipped from the house, pressed her gun against the base of Fagan’s skull.
“Holy fuck.” I managed to keep myself upright. Wasn’t this ever going to end? Kurston, bound to a chair, a gun against his head. Fagan, holding that gun while another gun was pressing his skull.
And if I could get close enough, I’d
put my own gun against Petunia’s head. Quite the fucking Mexican standoff.
“I am so delighted, Mr. Joseph Fagan, to know you noticed my handiwork at Staind Skin.”
“Hard not to.”
“True enough.” She sighed as though they were all at a picnic, comfortable in each other’s company.
“You killed the Fed,” I said. “How’d you get out? There were four other guys there, the poker players.”
Plus the man smoking the cigarette in the side room. Jefe? Watching over his money and the plates he wanted?
“Boom boom boom boom,” she said, alternately tapping the gun against Fagan and then Kurston’s heads.
“You popped them all?” I asked.
“Welcome to the World, Darcy. Get the shit over it,” Fagan said.
“Extreme circumstances, Mr. White-Boy Darcy,” Petunia said. “Extreme measures.”
“Why the foot in my pocket?”
She chuckled. “A half-way decent man who’s balding, too heavy, kind of slow-witted, and who passes out at the first sight of blood? What better way to amuse myself than to torment you?”
“But what about the Secret Service man? He had to have been wired. He had to have back-up close by. Cops, especially Feds, always have back-up.”
“Always?” Petunia asked.
“Always.”
Her face, so soft and delicate, sharpened. Her lips curled. “Are you certain?”
My mouth opened, but I said nothing. Because her face froze me. It asked a question and somewhere, in the lines and eye shadow, in the tanned skin and lipstick, was the answer to the question.
Something hard dropped in my gut when I looked at Kurston. “Off the books.”
“Motherfuck,” Cope whispered. “Cops off the books, Feds off the books. Man, ever’body working on they own thing and we got nothing but blind bad luck.”
“Mr. Federal Agent,” Petunia said. “Doing a little financial research, looking into expanding his retirement plan. He wanted to broaden the scope of his 401(k).” She grinned as though it were of no importance. “Now, shall we get down to business?”
“The printing plates,” I said.
“Absolutely.” She nodded toward the key in my hand. “Hand it over and let’s be about the day.”
“Tourists,” I said.
Her face broke into a wide grin. “You’ve been thinking about my employer.”
“Not Disneyland tourists. Tourists for employers who don’t particularly like employment taxes.”
The kind of men I saw digging trenches, working gardens and construction, working the cotton farms and cattle ranches that dotted west Texas like syphilitic lesions on a whore’s skin.
“Illegals.” I dangled the key. “Counterfeit money. Before his mules smuggle the tourists over from Tijuana or the valley or where ever, those mules sell them American fives or tens—something small ’cause no one wants to be noticed—at a hundred to one or worse. The illegals have hard cash for this side of the border, he has their pesos...which he exchanges at the going exchange rate. Makes a shitload of profit.”
One of Petunia’s eyebrows rose. “That is quite the scheme, Darcy. Nicely done.”
“Arabalo is an idiot,” I said. “Why spend so much money on printing plates? There are lots easier ways to crank out bad money.”
Her laugh, in spite of her heavy voice, was light in the morning air, a woman amused on a summer’s day. “First of all, let’s change the dynamics here just a bit, okay?”
In a blur of skin, Petunia wrenched the gun from Fagan and shoved him to his knees. Both men now had a gun at their heads.
“The plates aren’t for printing fives and tens to sell to illegals. His fake money grows on computer trees.”
“Wha’s up, then?” Cope asked.
I saw it. Seemingly random comments from Petunia. Arabalo worked with his hands. Apprenticed with an engraver...with a printer. “He engraved those plates.”
“Now the picture comes clear. At least, some of the picture.”
“The old man made them?” Fagan asked. “What the fuck he want them for?”
“When I want you to speak, I will tell you.” She tapped his head with the barrel. “Those plates are dear to him from an aesthetic standpoint. Some number of years ago, they were stolen from the employer who commissioned them.”
“The thief croak?”
“Well,” she said. “He’s dead, anyway.” She cleared her throat. “Jefe Arabalo wants the plates back.”
“You carved up the Fed to keep the plates out of his hands...or the government’s hands. But somehow, in the all the insanity, they managed to slip out the door.”
“I know exactly how they slipped out the door, my friend. The time for disingenuousness is over.”
The guns were racked, ready to shoot, but Petunia racked them again anyway. Shiny brass rounds popped out, tinkled to the porch.
“You choose. Plates or dads.”
I swallowed. “I don’t have them. I’ve never had them.”
Petunia raised the gun from behind Fagan’s head, left it against Kurston’s head. “Hmmmm, which dead dad?” She raised and lowered each gun in opposition to the other.
“Petunia, please—”
“Where are they, Darcy?” Petunia’s voice fell, lost the girlish affect.
“Damnit, Petunia, I don’t know. I never knew—”
“Too late for that, my friend. The plates or I will de-father you by one.”
Still I played for time. “How did the Feds know you’d be there for the plates?”
“If only I had the answer to that, my friend, if only I had the answer. Please quit insulting me with the stall, Darcy. Know I will kill one of these men here and now.” She slammed the gun against Fagan’s skull.
He grunted. When his head came back up, his eyes were glazed, blinked absently.
“Ah, does that not bother you?” she asked. “Then how about this?”
She banged the other gun into Kurston’s head. A puff of air blasted out his nose, but he made no sound. He slumped sideways. The chair to which he was taped rocked slightly.
“No, don’t. Don’t hit him anymore.”
“So you’ve made a choice by who you’ve spoken up for. Fine, I will kill Kurston.”
“Wait. I’ve got the key.” I licked the sweat off my upper lip. “The key to my fathers.”
“To your father’s what?”
“That’s funny, Petunia. Y’all a funny gal.”
“My humor is running thin, gentlemen.”
“Wait, Petunia, please, can’t we talk—”
“An object lesson, then.”
When she fired, I was certain there had never been a louder sound on the planet. I screamed, my howl mixing with someone else’s.
Kurston’s.
“This is becoming so tiresome, Darcy.”
Kurston’s thigh bled. His face had gone pale.
“Shit, stop. Stop! Dad? Daddy? You okay? Damnit, Petunia, he’s dying.”
“As far as I’m concerned, he probably should have died in the fire at the barbershop. How he ever managed to get out of that I’ll never know.”
My hands shaking, I held the key toward Petunia.
Fagan sneered. “Damnit, boy, if you’d’a given them to me, you and me could have cleaned this shithole out. We get those plates and set up in Vegas or L.A. or somewhere? Damnit...we couldn’t gotten over on everybody.”
“Ah, the regrets of middle aged men,” Petunia said.
“Shut up, you fucking freak.” Fagan made a move to stand, but Petunia banged the gun across the back of his head.
Instead of going down, Fagan turned and head-butted Petunia’s knee. Her leg bent backward just a bit. Kurston rocked himself sideways, teetering the chair over.
I yanked my gun, closed the distance between us. Fired just as she looked from Fagan to me.
“Damn it all,” she said.
The rose, when it bloomed, covered most of her chest. A .45 slug at close
range leaves a pretty good hole. She slumped, her face surprised. “I just...wanted the plates.”
“Well, fuck you,” Fagan screamed at her, his spittle spraying her. “You didn’t get shit. I’m taking your plates and your money, you motherfucking bitch.”
Somehow, in the grimace, Petunia grinned. Just a little. Just a curl at the edge of her lips.
“You think this is funny?” Fagan screamed.
“Funny is still on the card.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“No Fed, off the books or on, ever works alone.”
And then it was over. Petunia was dead. Both of the fathers were alive. Somehow, in the space of a second, maybe less, it had all worked out.
“Darcy,” Cope called. “Watch—”
Fagan spun toward me, one of Petunia’s guns in his hand, and jammed that gun against Kurston’s face.
Thirty-Eight Minutes Ago
My own gun stayed pointed down. “Bad way to go, Fagan.”
“Give me the fucking key and it don’t have to be bad.”
“It’s already been bad. Since the day you drove up to the house.”
“Fuck off, you don’t know me.”
“A used up loser, falling off his last legs, chasing all over the state trying to remember where he stashed his own money, putting a gun to a man who raised his son.”
Fagan’s mouth opened, wide and gaping and I expected a howl, an angry scream. Instead, the man laughed. Laughed until his face turned red. “You think I’m dumb? When are you going to figure it out? I’m not even your fucking father.”
My teeth snapped together, snipped through the tip of my tongue. Warm blood filled my mouth. “What did you say?”
“I ain’t your daddy.”
“Yeah, you are.” Clenched fists.
The man’s head shook. Slow. Contemptuous. “Can’t pin your defects on me, boy, I wouldn’t have had your mama if she were the last bitch on the planet. Never squirt in that skanky hole, not in a million years.”
I didn’t plan it, didn’t even think about it. It just happened. My hands reached out, my legs carried me up the stairs. My father’s neck was hot and sweaty, junkie-thin. His throat bobbed up and down while he croaked out a muffled scream and tried to get his finger inside the trigger guard.
Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2) Page 25
