2,000 Miles to Open Road (Barefield)

by Trey R. Barker

  Yeah, he's got all that and you got Brooks. Guess which one might get you killed.

  "But what's Templeton's stake?" Hal asked. "What's Brooks got to do with the disk?" Hal frowned and stared west along the highway. There were tens of cars, just as many trucks. Any of them could be another of Brooks' henchmen.

  "Goddamnit, pay attention." Her voice was sharp, a saw blade in the hands of an angry woman. "They're separate…two different things." She held both hands up. "Templeton--" She indicated her right hand. "Had a disk that you wanted. Call it Business Deal A. Dogwood--" She indicated her left hand. "Had some money that you needed. Call that Business Deal B. The money from B buys the disk from A but other than that, there was no connection."

  Hal stared at his shaking hands. "I stole the money from wrong guy."

  Shawn nodded slowly. "You think?" She climbed into the passenger's seat. "And now the wrong guy's boss is sending people after you. Templeton didn't get shot so Brooks is using him, that's it."

  "I don't have the money, Shawn. I made a grab but I couldn't get it. Hell, the cops probably divvied it up between themselves."

  "The money doesn't matter. The stealing matters. And I'll tell you this, too, you would do well to ask where Templeton got that disk."

  It had never occurred to him. His only concern had been getting a copy. Who Templeton stole it from or bought it from didn't seem to matter much.

  "You telling me it should matter?" he asked.

  She blinked. "I have no idea."

  Eventually, Hal cleared his throat, spat a juicy wad onto the highway, and climbed in the driver's seat. "Fuck it, I got to get to Texas."

  He pulled quickly into traffic, laying down a spread of rubber for nearly an eighth of a mile behind them. A semi-rig in their lane blasted his horn as Hal pulled in front of him.

  "Nice driving," she said. "And the name was my performance name. A wholesome name to go with a wholesome face. Blonde hair, blues eyes, perfect white teeth."

  "Picture at Jolene's wasn't any too wholesome. Leather? A riding crop?"

  "Yeah, well, to some customers, that is wholesome."

  He nodded. "How long you been performing?"

  "Couple of years. I started it after my last job."

  Again, that nagging sensation at the back of his neck, like the tightening of skin after a bad sunburn. He was beginning to know it meant something bad was coming. "And what was your last job?" He almost hated asking it.

  She grabbed her purse and pulled a small black wallet out. After opening it, she held it up in front of his eyes.

  A nice, shiny badge stared back at him. He almost threw up.

  "I was a cop. Captain Marc Brooks was my FTO."

  His heart stopped, he was pretty sure of it. It had never happened before but he imagined this is what it might feel like. A tightness and hollowness that he was pretty sure was the Almighty coming to take him. "Christ. Fucking cops everywhere. Can't swing a dead cat without hitting a cop."

  "Dead cat," she said. "From the casino, right? That's funny. Not as funny as invincible erection, but close."

  He frowned at her. "Was a cop? You ain't anymore, right?"

  "Technically no, but that badge comes in handy occasionally. Sometimes, I tell people I'm still a cop. I get free sodas and stuff."

  "So you and Officer Douglas are pretty much exactly the same."

  "Except one of us is dead."

  And wasn't that pretty much the ultimate leveler? Some are dead and some ain't.

  979 Miles

  Five miles further down the road, he called.

  Damn sure shouldn't, no doubt. If Templeton could track it from 1,000 miles up the road, he was probably still tracking it, jail or not. Who's to say he was in jail anyway? He didn't go after the shootfest, who knew where he was right now. If he got a call through to Brooks--and that was damn near a given--then Brooks was probably tracking the calls. Reading his little PDA or whatever the hell he was using, and calling in still more favors with the Texas Rangers.

  Yet in spite of all that, he couldn't keep his finger off the keypad. After punching in the numbers, he got the electronic buzz. Oddly comforting. Finally, she answered.

  "This is Natalie."

  "He in?"

  Her hesitation seemed longer this time. Was it possible they had tracked him, too? Was it possible they knew he was getting closer?

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Turnbull, he's in a meeting. There is no contact number, correct?"

  "I got the disk."

  "I asked him about a disk, sir, he had no idea what it might be. So is there any new message, Mr. Turnbull?"

  Nice inflection, bitch. Hit 'new' just a little harder. "Getting tired of the old one?" he asked.

  "It is getting a bit repetitive, don't you think?"

  "Well, ain't that what he pays you for?"

  "Do not get snippy with me, Mr. Turnbull."

  Snippy? Was that what she called it? Hal called it righteously pissed-off. Thirty plus years of always being the brother; younger, smaller, dumber, less cool, less hip, less happy. Did she have any fucking clue what it was like always being the cops' first call when something nasty went down in the neighborhood? Or what it was like to have constant fights with your Mama until finally she sent you away to a Boys' Ranch--"I just can't control you anymore." "Don't control me, love me."--where you got gang-raped in the showers, ignored by the adults because they were just as afraid of the boys as the boys were of each other?

  "You're going to end up in jail, Hal."

  "I'm too smart for that."

  "To smart to keep from ending up dead?"

  It was that harsh, the prediction. Dead or in jail.

  Just tried to make you proud, Hanford, that's all. Wanted you to smile when you said my name or when you thought of me. Mama wasn't there for me, I wanted you to be. But you kept turning your back, you kept pushing me away.

  And now Hanford believed Hal was a murderer.

  It was always something, wasn't it? Mama. The cops. Hanford's doubt. And now this shitty little woman answering Hanford's phone.

  "Working for Brooks?"

  "Excuse me?" she said.

  "Are you working for Brooks? Ain't a hard question, you stupid bitch. I bet he's got you just like he's got everyone else."

  "God, no wonder your brother hates you."

  "He doesn't hate me." Spittle dotted the phone and the steering wheel.

  "Christ, Hal," Shawn said. "What are you yelling about?"

  "He loves me and don't you forget it, you soul-sucking vampire bitch. He just couldn't do anything to help. You understand that?"

  "Hal." Shawn's voice spiraled up near panic.

  The car had crossed the median and drifted dangerously into oncoming traffic. A semi-rig's horn blasted as the truck flew toward them. They and the truck weaved left and right. The driver was clear as day, his eyes wide, his arms waving them off the road.

  "You're going to kill us," Shawn yelled.

  In a half-dozen jerky movements, he wrenched the wheel to the right. The truck jerked to its left, its tires smoking. Rubber laid heavy into the asphalt, a screech that filled the air. He pulled the wheel left and right but the car ignored him, as though it knew they would both have better luck dead.

  Hal's hands went up in front of his face. Won't do you any good at seventy-five miles per, dumbass.

  Then the car obeyed. Its tires grabbed the pavement hard, slinging the car sharply to the left. The car crossed the center, getting back into oncoming traffic. Hal banged his head against the doorframe as Shawn held the wheel. Exquisite pain, a hammer to the head, rocked him.

  Their car shot completely across the highway, missing the half dozen other cars and bumping into the drainage ditch. The truck's horn--joined by a chorus of car horns--scolded them as it receded down the highway.

  He jammed the brakes and brought the car to a stop. None of the drivers in front of them now had any idea what had happened. They stared quizzically at the car sitting on the wrong s
ide of the road but no one stopped to offer help.

  Just as good, Hal thought. Keep going, don't even notice us and damn sure forget us when the cops ask.

  His heart had stopped. Now it started again. Tentatively at first, as though trying things out, seeing if it was going to survive.

  "Question of the day," Hal said.

  "What?"

  "Nothing."

  Sweat coated him like the morning-after funk on his tongue when he got drunk. His teeth chattered as though he'd been left out in the cold for too long.

  "What in the fuck was that about?" Shawn said. "Are you crazy?" Her green eyes blazed fire. "Are you trying to get us killed?"

  Trying? Maybe. He hadn't really thought about it before. Maybe that's what all of this was about. Not fixing life, getting his road cleared out so he could ride into the sunset, but filling the road with death so he'd be a martyr, a James Dean, dead too young but what a beautiful corpse.

  Instead of answering, he rolled down the window and in one clean motion, tossed the cell phone out. Natalie's tinny voice faded into nothing.

  "Mr. Turnbull?….nbull?...ull?"

  The phone slid into the highway. A heavy tire on an SUV smashed it. Plastic flew every direction.

  "Oh, good, even better," Shawn said. "What do we do if we see Brooks now? We've got no way to call anyone."

  "Who would we call?" he said, climbing out and coming around to the passenger side.

  She said nothing as she slid behind the wheel and then watched for a moment when they could cross the west bound traffic and get pointed back toward Texas. "Anyway, you still have to pay for those minutes."

  "Cloned," he said simply. "I ain't paying no minutes."

  "Cloned. You're just like the asshole you got the phone from." Her hands shook but the anger had gone out of her eyes.

  "What does that mean?"

  "Cloned phone, no big deal. Stealing twenty K, no big deal. Got a disk of someone killing a woman, no big deal."

  "Bullcrap. That part is a huge deal."

  "Only because it allegedly wasn't you. You don't give a rat's shit about the dead."

  "Why you cutting my balls off?"

  "You almost killed me." She said it with a tinge of hysteria. "You'll know when I'm cutting your balls off."

  He tuned her and her sudden anger out, stared through the dirty front windshield at the passing world. Traffic and scrub, desert brush, trailer parks and mobile homes, campers on trucks with bumper stickers that read "I brake for guns," and "When guns are outlawed, who's going to shoot Hillary Clinton?"

  Mama had asked him to set the table once. A memory clear as the first night's shower at the Boys' Ranch and the sewage shootout yesterday. He had come back for dinner. Not really for dinner, just a short visit. Not even really a visit, just a blast through Barefield in search of a business partner and hardly even that. Just looking for someone with some money needed investing. Nothing more and somehow expecting so much less. Stop for dinner. Surprised him as much as it had Mama and Hanford. "Set the table, Halley," she had said. Simple request, had done it a thousand times before getting his ass shipped off to the ranch.

  Couldn't do it.

  Not couldn't as in he couldn't bring himself to. Couldn't as in just couldn't remember. She wanted it a certain way--a particular placing of plate and knife, fork and napkin--and it was right on the tip of his brain, like the name of the first girl he'd ever nailed the summer he was fourteen. Then gone quick as a rash cleared up by time. And it wasn't that Hanford had saved him by setting the places because he hadn't. Hanford hadn't even wanted to set the places, he wanted Hal to do it. He wanted Mama to see Hal do it, to have her understand that Hal was a good man, that he was capable of setting the places. But in the end, Mama had handed Hal one of her nauseating smiles, said something about how good boys never left their families, and put the plates in their appointed places.

  The thing of it was, Hal didn't give a shit what Mama thought, hadn't cared long before that and sure as shit didn't care even today on this highway. They had signed off with each other years before and neither cared to revisit the issue.

  He wanted to set those plates for Hanford, still did. If they were in a café right now, Hal would order the tables cleared and would spend as long as it took to set that table right.

  Because good boys never left their families. And when they did, only bad stuff happened.

  "What you running from?" she asked.

  He laughed. "Welcome to the Apple Valley cliché fest. Ain't you figured it out yet, smart as you are? I ain't running from nothing--Brooks notwithstanding."

  One of those awkward silences fell on top of them, a drunk stumbling over him at one of the blues clubs he loved so. Eventually, it dawned on her.

  "You're running to something."

  He sucked his teeth. "Old news, chick."

  "To Hanford. This mysterious being you call and who, for whatever reason, won't take your calls."

  It was all so cheap. Like a bottle of Thunderbird. Two brothers, one gone right, one gone wrong blah blah blah. Guess which one he was. Except, it wasn't just a matter of right and wrong or whether or not he remembered how to set the table. It was a matter of belief. Regardless of what he had said--dead or in jail, which he said as a motivator to shake Hal into doing the right thing--Hal always believed, had to believe, that Hanford believed in him. Hal needed--sometimes desperately--to believe Hanford knew he was a good man who had gotten bad breaks and compounded them with bad choices.

  From day one, from the first time Hal and Mama fought, from the first time the cops called and said Hal had been picked up for burning down a garage, every second that ticked past on the great eternal clock had been one more second that Hanford believed in Hal, believed he was a good boy, and then a good man, in spite of appearances.

  But since that awful night in a third floor bedroom in that terrible mansion just outside Barefield, with the single bulb hanging over the chair and blood on the floor and the mansion's owner and a passel of friends at the backyard pool laughing and drinking and eating crystal meth, Hanford's belief had been gone. Hal was certain of it. Hanford's belief in his brother was gone, shattered along with Missy's bones and washed away in the rush of blood.

  Actually, it wasn't that the belief had been gone. It was that it had changed.

  There was a warrant from Barefield, county of Zachary, state of Texas, and it had his name on the top line. Hanford believed his brother was a murderer. It didn't matter what Hal said in the thousand letters that went unanswered. It didn't matter what Hal's attorney said. It didn't matter what the scant evidence said.

  That belief was the why of the drinking of the six years since the murder, the why of the cheap cons that kept him moving and off the cops' radar, the why of the burglaries and the handful of assaults--always on people weaker than he. It was the why of the nightmares and the shakes and the blackouts.

  But it was also the why of the last six months, of the chase and stolen money and shootout and endless driving. Because the disk in his shirt pocket proved that Hanford believed the wrong thing, that he backed the wrong horse.

  The disk was, at its most basic, redemption. Dark and tarnished, but still vaguely shining. Yeah, it showed something scary and maybe evil, but it didn't show Hal.

  "No," he said, his voice as flat as the road onto which they had pulled. "He doesn't want to talk about it. But he will."

  "You're bleeding again."

  The bleeding wasn't bad. Shit, maybe it was penitent blood. "Don't give a shit, I gotta get somewhere."

  "Yeah, yeah, get to Texas." She snapped on the radio. "But I'll tell you this, Halford Turnbull, you might be running to something, but you're damn well running away from shit, too."

  912 Miles

  Well, wasn't El Paso a fucking shithole of a town?

  He'd been here once or twice, always looking for the easiest jumping off point to Mexico, and it hadn't changed in those years. Hell, it hadn't changed even since he
and his high school chums came west looking for cheap women and cheaper tequila. It was a giant slum that was more Mexico than Texas. Shantytowns and open sewage lines and boarded-up buildings and abandoned cars and the rest of it. Third World nation right in the good old U.S.A.

  She held the wheel so tightly her knuckles had gone five different shades of white. And those teeth ground together loud as a bell. "Shit," she said. "Is there anywhere nice in El Paso?"

  Traffic grew, more cars, more trucks. Every few minutes, Hal saw a panel truck headed north. The trucks might say 'Consuela's Lettuce,' and there might actually be lettuce in that truck, but beneath the greens were browns. Men and women, kids, all of them brown-skinned and looking for something else, something better.

  They were all just like him; just like everybody.

  "I'm sure there is," he said to her. "But I ain't never seen it."

  "Yeah," she agreed. "There are almost always nice places if you've got the time to find them." She looked at him. "You okay? You don't look good."

  "That a pick-up line?"

  "Absolutely. It's code for I want to fuck you until I can't walk. Wow, how'd you ever see through me? I'm as serious as the clap here, Hal, you're looking pretty pale. Vampire-pale. Between no sleep and getting shot, flesh wound though it was, you don't look good."

  He shook his head. "I'm fine. I'm tougher than I look."

  "Whatever you say, John Wayne."

  The truth was he was exhausted. Every move, arms, legs, even fingers or lips, was excruciating. And getting shot didn't help. Flesh wound or not, he hurt right now.

  As they moved into the heart of El Paso, Hal popped open a bottle of aspirin and ate six. Bitter powder ground against his throat when he swallowed.

  "Yum," she said. "Bet that was nice."

  "Shut up."

  "Yeah, shut up, no problem. Whatever you need, boss. Yes, sir, master, I am at your beck and call. Captain Marc Brooks used to order me around. Drive. Cook. Clean. Bend over."