2,000 Miles to Open Road (Barefield)

by Trey R. Barker

  "Holy shit."

  He had been creeping up on Domingo, but he had fired too early. He'd missed Domingo's heart or head, leaving Domingo more than able to shoot him. Didn't that suck all to hell? Getting killed was bad but getting whacked by a man you already shot was worse. And to get your balls blasted away in the process was just the final, bloody cherry on top, wasn't it?

  Hal, still yanking the trigger even though the clip was empty, turned back to VPN Guy. The office door stood wide open. Through it and the back door, framed like a bad black velvet painting, was the alley and the moon.

  "Son of a bitch," Domingo said, heading for Hal's car. He shoved the dead man off the hood and climbed in. "Let's go. Can't you hear that?"

  Sirens climbed up out of the sudden silence. A helluva lot of them. Probably both of Nueva Rosita's cars, a couple of county deputies, maybe some Texas Highway Patrolmen. God knew who else.

  "Again with the fucking cops," Hal said.

  "Ain't that what life is all about?"

  This was why Hal had left the keys in the ignition. The car belched to life and they left, the breeze filling the cab since all the windows were shot out.

  "Played this scene already," Hal said.

  "I heard."

  Domingo kept his eyes straight ahead while his voice was dark and quiet, filled with all kinds of hostility. Or was that just physical pain? Shit, was there really any difference?

  "Turn here."

  "But this ain't--"

  "Turn here."

  Hal did as he was ordered and somehow they managed to never see a cop. Four or five blocks straight west, then a couple south, two more west, then four miles south, straight into the desert. Straight toward Mexico.

  "How far is Mexico?" Hal asked.

  "Twenty-seven miles. Turn in right there."

  A faintly visible path that might once have been a drive-way. At the end of the lane, about a quarter-mile, an old house stood as hunched over as an old lady.

  "Abandoned?"

  "This is where my girlfriend lives. What's wrong with it?"

  "Uh…nothing."

  They parked behind the house. Before getting out, Hal looked at Domingo. "Thank you. I'm pretty sure you saved me."

  "I did."

  "Listen, Theresa and I are going to Mexico. It's gonna be damned hot here for awhile, maybe you should go, too."

  Domingo shrugged. "Maybe. I'd like to go to San Antonio, I never been there. Maybe even leave tonight."

  Inside, Theresa, Shawn, and some woman Hal didn't know sat on the couch, watching satellite TV. Something on the women's channel about how to keep a male mate in line.

  "Only one thing keep me in line," Domingo said, a slightly cracked grin on his face.

  "You just had some this afternoon," the unknown woman said.

  "Time for some again."

  "Domingo, please," Theresa said. "The less I know about your sex life, the happier I am."

  "What happened?" The girlfriend's eyes went wide at the bloody hole in Domingo's shoulder. "They kill you?"

  "Yeah, Angela, they killed me. 'S why I'm standing here."

  A snarl on her face, she thumped the wound. "Watch it, boy."

  Domingo blinked, whimpered, but still managed a smile as he followed her down a darkened hallway. A second later a door closed.

  "They gonna screw right now?" Hal asked.

  "She's a veterinary student," Theresa said. "She has some medical knowledge. She's probably going to clean it out, sew up both sides and then they'll screw."

  On the corner of the couch, Shawn winced. Though she was clean, only bruised instead of bloody, she obviously hurt. Her face was streaked where she'd been crying and her lips trembled. "I am so sorry, Hal. I tried to tell you."

  "Brooks is dead," Hal said to Theresa.

  "I know. Why do you think I sent Domingo after you?"

  "What's the guy's name?"

  "Roby Trenton." Shawn swallowed. "A major player. Drugs, guns, whores--"

  "DVDs of murder."

  Shawn nodded.

  "Both his guys are dead but he disappeared."

  Shawn paled.

  "He offered fifty large for the disk, then showed me Brooks, getting cleaned up in a washing machine…minus his body."

  "Holy God," Theresa said.

  She sat heavily on the couch, near Shawn. Her face had gone slack, her eyes empty and dark. Absently, she played with her hair, but even it seemed to have lost its shine. The moonlight spilled in on her now, as it had earlier in the night, but now it threw her into stark relief. Now she was all angles and lines.

  "Don't matter, we're getting out." Hal raised Theresa off the couch and kissed her gently. "Get your shit and get it in the car. I'm driving to Mexico in two minutes."

  Theresa nodded and went back to the bedroom where her brother and his girlfriend were. Shawn stared up at him, her swollen eyes somehow puppy-dog big.

  "He said you were going to get the disk back for him."

  "I was supposed to get it from Templeton."

  "By hanging out with Dogwood?"

  "I knew Templeton had it and I knew when you guys were sealing the deal."

  There was a bitter taste in his mouth. He licked it off his teeth and spit into an ashtray. "I thought you were running from Brooks."

  "I was, Hal. Whatever else was going on, I was running from Brooks. I had to do this one thing for Trenton and then I was leaving town. With Dogwood, with Templeton, with fucking Mary, Mother of God. I didn't care who took me, only that they took me."

  "You jumped in my car."

  She stood. "Like I said."

  "He also said you owed him a favor."

  Her eyes, battered though they were, rested hard on him, as hard as when he'd been haranguing her about being a junkie. "It wasn't a favor, it was blackmail."

  "Over what?"

  Her eyes never left his. "Are you taking me to Mexico or leaving me here?"

  Theresa came back down the hallway. Domingo and Angela stood behind her, each of them watching Shawn and Hal.

  "Let me ask it this way: are you going to leave me behind again?"

  When they left five minutes later, kisses hanging between Theresa and her brother, Shawn sat in the back seat. She didn't complain about the wind from the shot-out windows, but Hal knew it was bothering her.

  Angry as he was, he didn't give a shit.

  419 Miles

  Del Rio rode up hard and fast.

  Almost as hard and fast as Missy and Tyler each on opposites sides of the road. They both waved, smiles on their faces, pink on their cheeks. Shit, they weren't dead, they were one big-ass happy family, all grinning and teasing and having a grand old time.

  All in your fucking head, you lunatic, you've got to know that.

  But with the echo of bullets in his head--again--he didn't know that. With the road unspooling behind him and maybe everything unspooling in front of him, he didn't know anything for sure.

  Shawn was quiet, crammed against the far door, her head resting against the glass, her eyes closed hard, her brow crunched, her lips twitching a little. Maybe she was seeing Tyler and Missy, too.

  No, they were his demons. She was seeing all different demons.

  With a swallow, Hal clicked on the radio. Tejano music washed the inside of the cab. Theresa sighed deeply next to him, turned the volume down a bit.

  They drove Janice's truck. The woman, a friend of Theresa's, had gladly tossed Hal the keys. She'd told him where to park it when they went over and wished them well. Theresa and Shawn had followed him while he drove the car to an arroyo seventeen miles out of town and parked it there. After tossing some tumbleweeds over the top, they'd hit the road.

  And now the road was hitting back. Tyler, hundreds of Tylers, sat in chairs every 100 feet or so along the highway. But not just any chair. Shit no, they were all the special chairs.

  Friggin' electric chairs.

  Thousands of electric chairs and that wasn't even how they did it anymore
. It was injection anymore, the humane way to whack somebody. Go to sleep and don't sweat waking up. Didn't have anything to do with frying his brains out.

  "Hal," Tyler said. "You forget about me? You gonna leave me here, let them toast me like a fucking bagel?"

  "I loved bagels," Missy said. "Daddy and I used to get them fresh from Ranty Buff's. You remember them, Hal? Over on Neely Street? We used to go get a bag every Sunday and take them to Mama. We'd sit in the garage and eat and Daddy would tell us about whatever wood project he was working on." She turned to him, a thousand faces lining the roadway. "Do you know what they did to me?"

  Dead girls don't talk.

  Through clenched teeth, Hal snorted. It was a T-shirt. A dead girl, mouth open, inside a red circle with a line through it.

  Of course this was all bullshit. It was the last few wobbly steps of somebody going over the edge. It was all in his head, playing with him like a kid torturing ants with a magnifying glass.

  The rear view mirror was empty. For the last twenty minutes, he'd been expecting the flash of red and blue, but the road behind them, Highway 377, was dark. Ahead of them, the skyline was getting awfully light.

  Del Rio.

  The truck rattled and Hal thought maybe this was how the shackles sounded when somebody walked to the chair. Shackles rattling on the concrete, banging against the legs of the chair, being unhooked and tossed to the side by a guard. They called the chair Old Sparky down in Florida but he had no clue what they'd called it in Texas. Probably the same thing, prison screws weren't the most imaginative brutes on the planet.

  He turned the radio up and damned if the percussion in the tune didn't sound like more shackles, more rattles.

  "Mmm mmm mmm, good," Tyler said. He reached down and tightened the leather straps around his ankles. He pulled his pant leg up to reveal a hairless leg. "You like bagels, Hal? Maybe with a little spread. Something red, like that fat old guy's blood down in Florida. Did you see those pictures? They screwed up his electrocution so bad he bled right through the black mask and all down his front. Looked like jelly on a bagel."

  "Shut the hell up," Hal said.

  "What's that, baby?" Theresa, sitting tight next to him, her hand around the inside of his right elbow, leaned closed to his ear. "What'd you say?"

  Shawn shifted, blinked, wiped the sleep out of her eyes.

  "I don't do bagels," Hal said.

  She laughed, stifled it behind her hand. "What?"

  "I love bagels, if you're making a stop," Shawn said.

  Pour on the music, he thought, drown Tyler right out. But not Missy. She didn't have to say anything. All she had to do was stand there by that simple wooden chair. God, how many times had he battered his way out of nightmares of what that chair had been for?

  The one time he'd seen any of the disk, and that had been when Templeton played a few seconds' worth twelve hours before the buy, he'd watched only enough to know he wasn't on it. He'd refused to watch anymore.

  "Then you don't know," Missy said. "You have no idea what they did to me."

  He rubbed his eyes, knowing that wouldn't empty them. All it did, when they were closed, was give him different images to look at: bullets and blood, the way the green shirt man thudded sickeningly onto his car, the way Domingo had casually shoved the dead man to the ground.

  And the glass, winking winking winking.

  And the priests, bloody, brown bowling pins.

  And the car exploding at the sewage plant

  He wasn't getting used to this shit. He wouldn't in a million years. This shit wasn't him, not at all.

  Hal couldn't do the things Brooks and Trenton and even Domingo could do. He stole cars. He stole credit cards and wallets, social security numbers and even Christmas gifts. But he wasn't a killer. Though, to be brutally honest, and that was the only kind of honest that interested him right now, for most of the time he'd been with Roby Trenton, he had wanted nothing more than to kill him.

  Things changing inside'a you?

  Fucking dead people sitting in chairs along the highway and you got to ask?

  He pumped the dial a bit more. The volume grew. From the corner of his eye, he saw Theresa frown a little.

  Things aren't changing. You are not a killer, you never have been. It doesn't matter what the DA in Barefield thinks, it doesn't matter what your brother thinks, you are not a killer.

  "I could be," he said quietly.

  He could start with Shawn. This was all her fault. Telling him one thing while something else entirely was going on. Nearly getting him killed lotsa times and staying quiet about the real reason she'd been in Dogwood's car. She had been a problem this entire time.

  "Bullshit, this is the problem," Tyler yelped from the side of the road. He jerked a black hood over his head and jumped around, as though someone were giving him the juice. After a few seconds, he was laughing so hard he had to stop. "This is the problem, butthole." He pointed at the chair. "Right here."

  Across the road, even as yellow lines blasted through the vision of them, reminding him they weren't really there, Missy said nothing. She sat in the chair.

  Tyler was right. Shawn wasn't the problem. Neither was Trenton or Brooks or Dogwood or any of the rest of them. The DVD, he thought as he picked it up from the dashboard and let the star light wink from it, was the problem. And not even the DVD, really. The DVD represented the problem, illustrated the problem, but it wasn't the problem.

  Him being in that place--in that Barefield mansion with a thousand rooms all painted different colors--was the problem; him being there to buy a shipment of hijacked Jack Daniel's to sell on the cheap and somehow knowing--hearing in that one particular man's thin, agitating laugh--what might be happening to Missy and doing nothing about it was the problem. Tyler being on death row was the problem.

  Theresa turned the radio down. "Hal?"

  "Yeah?"

  She nodded toward Del Rio. "If you want, you can exit onto Highway 277. Take it about thirty miles down. There is a place we can cross. We park the truck like Janice asked and we can be in Jimenez in an hour."

  She squeezed his arm and he knew she was looking at him. But in the darkness, with her brown skin only barely visible from green dashboard light, he couldn't see her eyes, they were cyphers, as if they didn't exist.

  "If I want?"

  "Don't take 277." Her voice was hushed suddenly, urgent. "Take 90."

  U.S. 90 right through San Antonio, straight east to Houston and north to Huntsville. Because it really does matter what your brother thinks but that's not even really the thing anymore.

  The thing was them…Missy and Tyler. Missy was dead and there wasn't anything he could do about being a stone-cold coward while she was being murdered, but he could do something about Tyler's death. And he was afraid if he didn't, he'd see Tyler in that chair for the rest of his life.

  417 Miles

  He never stopped in Del Rio. Didn't even see it, really. It was just another crappy town. Another Bagdad, another San Simon. He drove through, keeping the truck below the speed limit, watching the highway signs. Ahead of them somewhere lay two different highways, but he was only watching for one.

  "Where you going?" Theresa asked.

  His lips were rough, dry. He licked them, glanced up at Tyler and the dead Missy. "You don't see them, do you?"

  "Who?"

  "Tyler and Missy."

  "Tyler?" She leaned up in the seat. "From the prison? Where?" She craned her head, looking along all the side streets. "How can he be here?"

  "Not here," Hal said, pointing at the streets. He lifted a finger to his head. "Here. Missy, too."

  "This isn't about Hanford anymore, is it?"

  "It never was," Shawn said.

  "It's about Tyler and Missy?" Theresa asked.

  "Ask Freud." He jerked his head toward Shawn. "She got all the answers. Found 'em in a crack pipe, I guess."

  A tired, sad little laugh limped along for a moment. "Touché. Maybe someday I'll tell yo
u what else I see in that crack pipe." She squeezed Theresa's knee and Theresa held her hand. "It's about Hal. That's the only thing it's ever been about."

  Confusion radiated from Theresa. With her free hand, she reached up and held Hal's arm.

  "It's about his own uncertainty. He's never been sure he was good enough for you and Hanford, but mostly you." Shawn spoke quietly.

  "What?"

  Even facing the road, not seeing her, he knew Theresa was frowning, he could hear it in her voice.

  "He's a thief," Shawn said. "You're a teacher."

  The truck got quiet and again he felt her looking at him. Maybe still frowning, maybe getting more confused. What confused him, confused the shit outta him, was how'd Shawn known that? That was the shit that kept him awake at night, that kept him sweating all the time.

  "So?" But Theresa's grip tightened on Hal.

  It was comforting. The meat of her hand against his bare arm, the tip of her nails digging the slightest bit into his flesh. Desperate for more contact, he took a hand off the wheel and took hers in his. "You teach 'em better'n me."

  Again, that stifling, oppressive silence. As though there wasn't anything else left in the world, just his soul, open and bare for everyone to laugh at. Should'a never said anything, here to Mexico, should'a shut the hell up.

  Theresa shrugged. "Well, first of all, it's not 'you teach 'em,' it's 'you're teaching them.' It's about verbs and not dropping syllables. Also, I'm teaching them to be better than you. There has to be that second verb, otherwise the sentence means I teach them better than I teach you, which is something else entirely."

  He looked at her, surprised. "What?"

  She laughed, tried to stop it, then just let it go. Shawn joined her and eventually, Hal did, too.

  "Hal, listen, you stupid ape." She pulled his head toward her, held his eyes with an iron grip. "I love you. I know you're a thief, but you won't be for much longer. And you never were a murderer."

  "Yeah, can we get his eyes back on the road?" Shawn asked. "He might hit something."