Lone Star Noir

by Bobby Byrd

  “Yeah,” Sammy said. He was the broad-shouldered, deadeyed one. Or perhaps his eyes were more reptilian than merely dead. “Fart smellow,” Sammy said and laughed again. Carlos’s instant assessment of him was bleak at best. He was all gristle and fat with little brain. If Sammy ever graduated high school, Carlos was willing to bet he’d been in his mid-twenties at the time.

  “Okay, kid,” Smiley said. “Her name is Linda Sneed. That’s two e’s. Remember her?”

  “The penthouse deal. Haven’t talked with her in six months. Lost my ass on the deal too. What do you want to know?”

  “See, Sammy? I told you today something was gonna break.” His eyes never wavered, but the tone of his voice dropped a whole scale. “Where is Ms. Sneed, pepper-belly?”

  Carlos considered. The moment had arrived. The moment he’d known was coming the instant he’d seen Sammy’s dead-fish eyes.

  Sammy’s hand went into his suit jacket, and what came out was exactly what Carlos McDaniel knew was going to come. It was a gun. A black 9mm.

  “Tell him,” Sammy said.

  Carlos’s control of his bladder slipped for just an instant. He knew without looking there would be a small spreading stain on the front of the towel. It felt like hot lava in the chilly room.

  “She’s … gone. Long gone. I’m not lying. I tried to reach her. Everybody did.”

  “Yeah?” Smiley said. “Who’s everybody?”

  “Me. My broker. The title company. The lawyers. Last I heard she was somewhere in West Texas.”

  “Yeah? That’s a pretty big area. You mind narrowing it down for me a bit?”

  “Littletown. No. Littlefield. That’s northwest of Lubbock.”

  “Thank you, Mr. McDaniel,” Smiley said. He turned toward Sammy and nodded.

  Carlos stood frozen.

  Sammy shot him three times: once in the leg—he had been aiming for Carlos’s groin and missed by half an inch—once in the stomach, and once in the chest.

  The two men left him for dead.

  Carlos McDaniel didn’t hear the sliding door close behind the two men. He was concentrating on the ocean of pain that had suddenly invaded his life. He hurt. The pain was deep—a fundamental thing that could not be ignored—and blackness was coming. He was already graying out.

  His hand moved, touched the widening pool of blood soaking into the old carpet beside him. He brought it to his stomach and traced five letters.

  He pulled his finger away and looked at it. There was a tiny speck of green in all the red.

  Duckweed, he thought, because for some reason he couldn’t speak, and then the blackness rolled over him and carried him away.

  Carlos McDaniel was either a fortunate or unfortunate man, depending upon one’s point of view.

  He was unfortunate to be in the path of the two-man tornado which was composed of a couple of Brooklyn hoodlums named Sammy “The Gootch” Rosario and Victor Cicchese.

  Carlos was fortunate in that he initially survived the tornado. The three muffled reports were heard by a man named Charles Lyman, who was walking the power-line cut on the north side of the property that had the idyllic little lake and the cabin. It was the last property on the line, and when he was done he was supposed to turn around and head back. But there was a little glade near the end of the line where it was his custom to stop and have a smoke before returning. Lyman was grinding the spent cigarette butt into the earth near all the others that he’d smoked at the spot over the last twelve years when he heard the reports. He was two hundred yards away and instantly knew what the sounds were.

  A person can hear all kinds of things when walking through the east and central Texas woods. A gun going off is not uncommon. It was, however, an uncommonly hot day and the only game in season at the moment was the kind of game that was always in season: rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, and other varmints that weren’t worth shooting in 105-degree weather. Moreover, these shots had come from indoors. A gun being fired indoors has a peculiar and particular sound to it. Most of the noise rattles around inside, crossing and recrossing itself, and consequently has a distinctive muffled, and yet hollow, rattle quality to it.

  Charles Lyman ducked through the brush and a barbed-wire fence and was behind the cabin within a minute after the last shot was fired. A pair of ducks had taken to the air and were beating their wings hell for leather to the south, just disappearing over the line of trees past the lake.

  Glancing out from around the rear corner of the house, well hidden by brush, he saw two men walking back down the lane toward the main gate and the road beyond. They wore business suits.

  It was hot, powerfully so, but the blood in Charles Lyman’s veins felt as though it had been transfused with ice.

  He stepped around the side of the house with the lake, away from the two departing men, stepped up onto the porch from the side, peered through the window, and saw a man who was busy dying.

  It took thirty minutes for the ambulance to arrive from town. During that time he had resuscitated the dying young man three times.

  The EMTs, when they did show up, would have bet against Carlos McDaniel. The odds were too long and the kid had lost an ungodly amount of blood. They went to work in earnest. They were both veterans who had seen their measure of curtain calls.

  There was severe internal bleeding, the kid’s pulse was thready, and according to the grisly-looking gas company fellow who had called them, he’d been repeatedly pulled back from the grave.

  The representative from the Brazos County Sheriff’s Department arrived as the kid’s gurney was being loaded into the ambulance.

  The deputy didn’t have time to say “howdy.” He walked up as the kid was trundled past, took a snapshot picture of him with his eyes, fished a pocket notebook out, and wrote one word on it: Linda. It must have been a hell of an effort making those letters in his own blood on his stomach, he thought.

  “Don’t wash that name off his stomach, fellas,” he said. “Take a picture of it. Especially if he … doesn’t make it. Where you fellas takin’ ’im?”

  “To meet the life-flight chopper.”

  “Oh. Where’s he going to from there?”

  “God only knows. Excuse us, officer.” The younger of the two paramedics hopped down from the truck and closed the door behind him. “Gotta go,” he said.

  “See ya,” the deputy said.

  Charles Lyman was sitting on the porch of the cabin looking out onto the still duck pond. There was a half-ring of floating landscaping timbers out there tied end-to-end. One end of the daisy chain was anchored to the opposite shoreline and the closest end was lodged in the mud on the nearby bank.

  “That’s what he was doing,” Lyman said.

  The deputy wheeled around.

  “What?”

  Lyman pointed.

  The deputy glanced away, quickly, and then back to the man sitting there. It was difficult to look away from him. He was a craggy-looking fellow, mid-fifties, with sparse, rustcolored hair and large freckles all over him. He wore a dark blue jumpsuit with some kind of logo embroidered on the chest. But none of these things were as notable as the amount of drying blood covering the man. His hands were two dark red gloves. His arms, chest, and face were spattered with it. And he just sat there, looking toward the lake.

  “He was skimming the lake when they came along,” the blood-covered man said. “He was in his birthday suit and was still wet. He had duckweed all over him.”

  “You’re the fella that saved his life. Lyman, right?”

  “Not if he don’t make it, I ain’t. Yeah, I’m Lyman.”

  “Okay,” the deputy said. “My name’s Ralph Bigham. We need to talk.”

  Charles Lyman looked at the deputy, then back toward the lake. “Have a seat,” he said.

  Carlos McDaniel gave up the ghost three days later. When he went, his hand was gripped by that of his new best friend, the craggy-faced angel who was there whenever his eyes opened, swimming into focus when consciousness slowly y
et inexorably returned.

  “Who’s Linda?” the angel asked him.

  Carlos blinked, smiled, and uttered the name in a whisper: “Linda Sneed.”

  Two weeks later, when he got the word that the case had been closed on the shooting, Charles Lyman left his job with Central Texas Gas. At ten minutes till five, he stuck his head in the air-conditioned substation office in the little town of Kurten, Texas, and told the foreman he wasn’t coming back. The foreman—a forgettable fellow named Seth Sweet—shrugged at the closed door, lit another cigarette, and turned back to his weekly report.

  “Politics, that’s why,” Ralph Bigham told him.

  “Politics?”

  “Yeah. It doesn’t look good to have open files, so it’s easier to close them.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Charles Lyman said.

  “Tell me about the two men again,” Ralph Bigham said before the other fellow could start losing his temper.

  “One was big,” Lyman replied. “He looked like a big scoop of muscle and a dollop of fat poured into a suit, but he walked sort of like a penguin. The other guy was shorter and slim. Their backs were to me.”

  “What do you think all of this is about?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I found something you missed.” Charles dropped the leather binder on the cafe tabletop.

  Carlos McDaniel’s Day-Timer business calendar contained the details of his appointments for the six months leading up to the shooting. Bigham leafed through it. There were upcoming real estate showings, open houses, closings, and appointments scattered throughout. There was nothing for the weeks previous to the shooting that seemed to amount to anything, but then, leafing his way back, he saw one entry all by itself: L.S. Littlefield.

  “Who’s L.S. Littlefield?” Bigham asked.

  “L.S. is probably Linda Sneed. At least I hope it is. Now, the name Littlefield is about as Austin as you can get. There’s a Littlefield Building here, the Littlefield home, the Littlefield statue. You name it, and there’s a Littlefield ‘it.’”

  “That name is familiar to me somehow,” Bigham said. “But I’m not an Austonian.”

  “Austinite,” Charles corrected.

  They were in a little Mexican restaurant on College Avenue near downtown Bryan, Texas. A waitress came by and cleared away their plates and left a ticket. Lyman fished out a twenty and dropped it on the table.

  “Thanks,” Deputy Bigham said.

  “Sure. The guy everything is named after is George W. Littlefield. He was a Civil War hero and land baron. He owned the Yellowhouse Ranch up in the Panhandle. I think it was land trimmed off of the original XIT Ranch, which was how the state funded the construction of the new capitol building after the old one burned. I think that was back around the 1880s, 1890s. Littlefield was almost single-handedly responsible for the establishment of UT Austin.”

  “Seems to me like there might be a town with that name as well,” Bigham said.

  “You’re right. Why didn’t I think of that before? It’s up northwest of Lubbock, not far from the New Mexico state line.”

  Bigham nodded and kept rifling through the pages of the Day-Timer, while Charles Lyman, who actually liked the deputy, found himself wanting to slam it on his fingers.

  “You know,” Bigham began, “the name Linda Sneed keeps sticking in my craw. Seems to me there was some news item in the local paper some months back. If it’s the same person then I think she’s some kind of fugitive from justice. Something about some real estate dealings.”

  “Wanted, huh?” Charles said.

  “I think so. I’ve never been much of a newspaper reader, myself, but all you have to do is glance in the direction of the damned things and the stuff jumps out at you.”

  “That’s for sure. I’m stuck on that name myself. Not sure why.”

  “Okay,” Ralph said. “So what are you going to do now?”

  “I’m leaving town,” Lyman said.

  “I thought you might.” Ralph Bigham reached beside him, pulled up a leather case, and slid it across the table to Charles Lyman.

  “What’s this?”

  “Something you might need.”

  Lyman tugged the zipper on the side of the case and saw a round metal cylinder. It was the barrel of a .357 Smith & Wesson magnum.

  “I can’t accept this,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t hold a gun in my hands.”

  “Not a religious thing, is it?” Deputy Bigham asked.

  “Also, I can’t vote.”

  “You’re a felon.”

  “Yeah. I was a kid, and it was a long, long time ago. I’m only lucky we live in an age where they don’t brand your forehead or otherwise mark you.”

  “What did you do?” Bigham asked.

  “I killed a man,” Charles Lyman said.

  The next question was there between them, an invisible yet wholly tangible thing, and Ralph Bigham found himself asking it.

  “Who did you kill, Chuck?”

  Lucid, teal-blue eyes looked up at Ralph Bigham, measuring, weighing.

  “My brother,” Lyman said.

  A deep silence settled in around them. It was one of those moments where each was expecting the other to say or ask something first. Bigham waited long enough to be sure that Lyman wasn’t going to give him his life story.

  When Lyman didn’t, Bigham pushed the leather pouch directly in front of him and said, “Keep it anyway. Something tells me you’re going to need it.”

  Farmhouses, windmills, grain silos miles away, vaguely reminiscent of old, well-crafted dime-store miniatures of such, slowly dwindled in the distance as he passed. The Caprock is a true plain. He felt its solidity, its permanence, as he drove into town in his ancient battered Ford F-150 pickup.

  Charles Lyman whistled.

  He passed a population sign: 6,032.

  Somebody likes it here, he thought.

  A wind was up and dust was blowing from the west. It was fine dust, and it was coming in through the air-conditioning vent enough to make his nose itch.

  It wasn’t difficult finding downtown Littlefield. Phelps Avenue is an undivided street, with bluish-green metal seats covered by 1950s-style awnings near each intersection. Half of the businesses were closed, permanently, and there were no more than a few dozen cars along the four-block stretch leading from the train tracks to the courthouse.

  “I’d say this town has seen better days,” he said to himself. “Reminds me of The Last Picture Show.”

  Two blocks from the courthouse—which was not on a town square like most of the rest of Texas’ small burghs—he found a Mexican restaurant. A red neon sign in the front window declared it to be open.

  Inside there was red carpet in need of a good cleaning and a pleasant smell wafting from the kitchen.

  There was a hand-lettered sign on one wall that declared: Absolutely NO Table Moving.

  The waitress was a pudgy young lady of perhaps nineteen. She wore a burgundy apron and a beatific smile. She had dimples in her cheeks and her name tag read Cassandra.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  “You said it,” Charles replied. “Coffee first, though. Then bring me whatever you think I’d like to eat.”

  She glanced down at his ring finger quickly, saw that it was bare, then looked back up to his eyes. He winked at her, and she smiled, turned, and darted off.

  He was nearly done with breakfast and thinking about Carlos McDaniel when they came in the restaurant door. A smile flashed at him, all false teeth and malice. Lyman smiled back.

  The two men were the Undertaker and Lardman, Lyman’s new pet names for them in the two seconds that it took him to fully assess them. They were wearing the same clothing he’d last seen them in as they walked away from the cabin, three hundred miles to the south and what seemed a lifetime ago.

  And again, Charles Lyman’s blood froze in his veins.

  He waited until they took a seat before he fished out his wallet and d
ropped a hundred-dollar bill on the table. He’d liked the waitress, and he was already sorry for the trouble he was about to cause her if things didn’t go well. Then he reached down into his right boot and brought out the magnum. He stood, forgetting to put his truck keys in his pocket, turned, and walked to the table where they were sitting, the pistol with his finger lightly on the trigger behind him.

  “Hi,” he said. “My name is Charles Lyman.” He stood there and looked down at the two killers.

  The men looked up at him quizzically.

  He swung the gun around and pointed it between the two. Their eyes riveted to it. The two men tensed, as if to spring.

  “Not a good idea,” Lyman said. “Let’s make an agreement. You two guys be nice and we’ll take us a little ride and have us a little talk. That sound all right with you?”

  “Talk? What about?” the Undertaker asked.

  “About Carlos McDaniel. And Linda Sneed.”

  When he got outside he realized his predicament.

  There were two of them, and he had to cover them both. Also, he couldn’t find his truck keys.

  He turned back toward the diner for just an instant, but in that short space he noted the face between the still window curtains. It was Cassandra, the waitress.

  The face vanished, as if it had never been there.

  He made Lardman drive their black Crown Victoria while the Undertaker rode shotgun and he covered the two of them from the backseat.

  The late-model Crown Vic wended its way through town and out into the countryside where the sun beat down relentlessly on the stubby cotton and the tall corn.

  “You guys are pretty quiet,” Lyman said. “Remember our agreement.”

  “We ain’t got nothing to say,” the Undetaker replied.

  “See?” Lyman said. “We’re having a conversation already. Tell me where she is.”

  Lardman and the Undertaker exchanged glances, and suddenly Lyman knew what was coming.

  Lardman made an abrupt turn down a dirt road, then began accelerating.

  So much for agreements, Lyman thought.

  The Undertaker moved, quick and catlike. His hand went inside his jacket.

  Charles Lyman fired the Smith & Wesson point-blank into the back of the driver’s seat. Lardman jerked the wheel to the right as he crumpled over it. His foot came off the gas and the car slewed toward the ditch.