Lone Star Noir

by Bobby Byrd

  By hacking his way into their accounting program, the Kid was even able to predict, within a day, when the skim had to be withdrawn from the money laundry, which meant that Church and State would meet and divide the money. Stealing it would be easy.

  But that wasn’t what the Kid wanted to do. He wasn’t a crook. He was a do-gooder, an artist, an idealist. The Kid told Slim he wanted to stop these men, “to take these assholes down and expose them to the public.”

  Slim told him wait, he had a better way. He told the Kid to be cool. “Leave it alone for a while,” he said. “These dudes are well connected, and they might fuck you up.”

  But the Kid kept hacking the system, building more of a case, finding more dirty secrets. He rarely slept.

  Meanwhile, Slim got the crew together. Ric, Teo, and Tom were up for the takedown. The Kid told them the skim would be withdrawn Friday afternoon. Not because he wanted to help rob Church and State, but because it was a matter of pride. He was a hacker. He had to tell somebody.

  The job was on. Teo and Ric kept a tail on Church, who rode in a black Lincoln Town Car. Slim followed State’s black Ford Excursion.

  The meeting happened on Monday at a restaurant in the suburbs. State lifted the briefcase from the trunk of the Town Car in the parking lot. The two men froze when they saw the guys with guns. The thieves took the briefcase and split.

  Nothing to it. Except for what came next.

  It was a little over a week ago the last time Slim went to see the Kid play. The Kid was on fire. Making ungodly sounds with his guitar. Sometimes, facing the teeth-rattling wall of noise pouring out of the Kid’s amp, time and space seemed to fall away like a broken curtain. Slim realized it was a kind of insanity to feel that way, but he didn’t care.

  He couldn’t play a lick of music himself. He didn’t buy many CDs and usually listened to whatever was on the radio or whatever came with the environment he happened to be in. But he supposed that the Kid was the main reason he had stuck around Austin longer than other places. Six months or so. He enjoyed the Kid’s company. You could say they’d been friends.

  The Kid, the idealist, had left a message on Slim’s cell phone Saturday after midnight. “This will bring their whole fantasy kingdom tumbling down.” Sounding nervous, as if he thought someone might be listening, the Kid spoke a sequence of three letters followed by a string of numbers. He repeated the sequence once more and added, “I’d say guard it with your life, but I know you don’t value anything that highly.” There was a laugh at the end.

  Slim memorized the sequence and deleted the message. Obviously it was some kind of code or identification.

  That was the last time he heard from the Kid.

  “Some people here to see you,” said the jailer. “Supposed to be your parents.”

  “Why not?” said Slim, his chipped tooth a hole in his smile.

  A few minutes later, they were as close to him as a sheet of bulletproof glass. The man supposed to be his father said, “The D.A. seems very intent on the death penalty.”

  The woman supposed to be his mother kept staring at a spot in space just above and to the left of his head. “I want to pray with you,” she said.

  “Try it and I’ll tell the guard you smuggled in plastic explosives by sticking them up your ass,” he said.

  That shut them up for a minute or so.

  He couldn’t remember just when, but at an early age he’d become convinced that these two people were not who they said they were. Fake parents, maybe even fake people. Or maybe he was the imposter. The physical resemblance was slight at best. He felt nothing for them.

  The man supposed to be his father said he would like for him to consider donating his body to science. That way, he said, something positive might come out of this someday.

  He told them he’d already put in a request to be torn apart by wild dogs.

  The woman supposed to be his mother wanted to know how could anyone pour lighter fluid on another person and set him on fire? And just watch them burn alive? How could one human do that to another?

  “Didn’t you hear?” he said. “It was spontaneous human combustion. The guy was so rotten with corruption he just blew up.”

  Her upper lip twitched to the side, giving her the appearance of a cleft palate.

  “The D.A. didn’t like that story any more than I do,” said the man supposed to be his father. After a long pause, he continued, “Wouldn’t you like to know you did one good thing before you died?”

  Slim laughed and for some reason felt obligated to explain. “That’s the same thing the old fart said.”

  Twitching, the woman said, “You mean, the man you … ?”

  The man tugged at her arm and said, “Let’s go.”

  The rain was still heavy Friday night when Slim arrived on the cul-de-sac. He parked a block away and walked back. State had company. A little Saturn with Mardi Gras beads hanging from the rearview. The kitchen window proved to be the easiest way in. As he entered he could hear groans of faked ecstasy upstairs. Seventeen-years-old, with braces and fake boobs and a shaved package, Jennifer charged five hundred dollars an hour for house calls.

  Slim had known her since she was twelve. There was no connection between her presence and his being here, just one of those coincidences that happen in a community of pirates and thieves. Small world. No telling how long he had to look around, so he got busy. Checked the garage first. A white Lexus, power tools, guns. A ladder, painting supplies, and other stray items were stored on the patio.

  In a downstairs bedroom closet, he found some diamond rings, and in a locked hideaway drawer that took him all of two minutes to jimmy, he found a bag of stones, a few emeralds, some diamonds, and eighteen gold coins. He also found $800 in cash—about $250 in a money clip in a man’s overcoat and the rest in one of the wife’s designer purses.

  Plus a safe-deposit box key.

  There would be more loot upstairs. He settled into an overstuffed leather chair in a corner of the den and waited. They were still going at it, Jennifer shrieking every few seconds, followed by a low grunt like a dog barking. Sometimes the timing worked out so that Jennifer’s shrieks followed a thunderclap. Flash, boom, shriek, bark. Flash, boom, shriek, bark.

  And then it was over. It was quiet upstairs but the storm still raged outside. He settled into a comfortable chair and waited. The .380 automatic in his lap kept him company.

  On the wall were signed photos of former U.S. presidents: Reagan, Bush, Bush. There were other photos on the mantel. In one of them, a man in a clergy collar, Church, stood in a dusty village surrounded by dark-skinned children staring up at him as though they thought he might be lost. A mangy-looking dog warily sniffed the man’s pants leg. In another photo, State was shaking hands with an Arab man wearing an expensive suit and a headscarf. There was one photo of State with his wife and daughter. The daughter was good-looking in an anorexic way. A flap of skin on the wife’s left eyelid was the only sign of relief on an otherwise hard, tight countenance. State was broad and jowly and tanned the color of roast ham.

  On a side table next to the chair was a leather portfolio, and atop that, a hardcover novel in a red dust jacket. Keeping one eye on the staircase, he flipped open the portfolio and leafed through the contents. Corporate documents and memos, the jargon so dense and odd it could have been from an alternate universe. There was a handwritten note from someone named Eric. Bob, it said, we need to run through all this with a fine-tooth comb. Need to check the precedents on moral hazard because it will probably come up.

  Leafing through the rest of the document, he found the words moral hazard, punctuated with a question mark, scribbled in the margins of almost every other page. The handwriting appeared to be the same as the guy who had scrawled the note.

  He tossed the portfolio aside and picked up the novel in the red dust jacket. The title was No Country for Old Men. Post-it flags jutted out like yellow teeth. Flipping through, he saw that lengthy passages had been underscored wit
h a red felt-tip pen. Weird.

  A creak on the stairs. Jennifer, not exactly tiptoeing but carrying her high-heeled boots under her arm. Tucking some folded currency into her purse.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He still hadn’t replied when she reached the last step.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s out. He sleeps hard.”

  Slim nodded. “I’m not here.”

  A quick glance around the room, her eyes coming to rest on the .380. She swallowed hard. “Baby, I’m so not here, either.”

  “Right.”

  She paused to slip on the boots and zip them up, then left. He locked behind her.

  He started for the stairs, then decided to give her more time to get down the road.

  He went back to the chair and picked up the novel, using the gun barrel to hold it open. The book started out with a drug deal gone sour out in Big Bend. Bodies piled up quickly. The killer had some of the best lines, but the real pontificator was the old Texas sheriff. Gruff and as reactionary as the Old Testament, the old fart seemed to believe that all the violence and decay in the world today is our own fault, because we’ve been too liberal and permissive and have lost our faith in God. The passages expressing these sentiments were the most frequently bookmarked and underlined.

  Almost half an hour passed before State came down. White-haired and wearing a sweat suit, as if he was going out for a jog. Smoking a cigarette.

  The old man made a sour face when he saw the .380 automatic pointed at his midsection. “My God, what in hell do you want now?” he said, recognizing Slim from Monday night. “You’re gonna be one sorry son of a bitch.”

  The thief smashed him in the face with the gun, then dragged him by his collar to the leather recliner and strapped him in tight with duct tape.

  “You made a call about the Kid, right?”

  The old man glared at him. Both the upper and lower lips were split, causing blood to cover his teeth and pool in the creases on either side of his mouth. “What do you think you’re going to accomplish here? You want money?”

  Usually, the person staring at the goodbye end of the gun did not ask questions that sounded like demands. Incontinence is common, along with profuse sweating and shaking. The old man displayed none of these symptoms.

  “No,” said Slim. “I want answers.”

  “You’re a son of a bitch, coming in here like this.”

  “Yeah, I am. What’s moral hazard?”

  “Huh? What the fuck you want to talk about that for?”

  “Moral hazard, you tub of lard. What is it?”

  “It’s a legal concept,” he said, his face distorted by an ugly scowl. “It’s a little fuzzy and subject to interpretation, but say you have a business where people end up taking advantage of you, cheating you out of money or breaking the law some other way. If your business is set up so that it tempts people to cheat or break the law, it’s called a moral hazard and a court can hold you liable for it.”

  “Is that like saying the devil made you do it, or you did it because you ate too many Twinkies?”

  The old man shrugged. “Well, like I say, it’s kind of a fuzzy area.”

  The windows rattled as thunder rolled through. Rain peppered the roof.

  “You’re a corrupt piece of shit,” said Slim, “but I don’t care about that.” He faltered for a moment, surprised at the sound of his own voice. “I came here because you and your people killed the Kid. You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “He was a criminal just like you and the other three.”

  “You’re a bigger criminal than me and my crew ever dreamed about being. And the Kid was no criminal, he was an idealist. Stealing the money, that was my idea.”

  “I’m sure these are all fine distinctions,” said the old man, turning his head to spit blood. “I could use a cigarette, though. How about it?”

  “Kill yourself on your own time, not mine.”

  “What the hell do you really want?”

  Slim picked up the novel and thumbed it open. “You really believe the things this sheriff character says?”

  “I surely do,” he said. “That’s a wise man wrote that book. He’s one of us for sure. A true believer.”

  “You can’t go to war without God. You put a big red star next to that line in the book. You believe that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I guess that’s why the war we got now is going so well.”

  “You’ve turned away from God’s love,” said the old man. “That’s the one unforgivable sin, you know. God can’t help you if you don’t accept His grace.”

  “You hired some dirty cops to kill a twenty-six-year-old musician who had a naïve idea of saving the world from guys like you. And you’re upstairs banging a seventeen-year-old girl. What’s that shit?”

  Color rose in the puffy folds of flesh in the old man’s face as he grinned. “Let me ask you, son, have you ever committed a worthwhile deed in your whole, sorry life?”

  “Not unless it was by accident.”

  “Look here, I can get you a half million and change. But you’d have to work with me on it.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll go to a certain bank. You wait in the car or somewhere you can keep an eye on me because you could be recognized and arrested. You’ll have to trust me, but I know you won’t do that. I suppose you could hold someone hostage—”

  “You mean like a family member?” Slim interrupted with a smile. “Like your wife or daughter? A preacher, like your brother?”

  “I’d rather not go that route.”

  “But you didn’t say absolutely not, no way. How about telling me the box number?”

  “It would serve no purpose. You can’t do anything without me.”

  “Let’s see if I can trust you.”

  Reluctantly, State recited the number. It was the same sequence the Kid had left on his machine, except the last three digits were transposed.

  “Try again,” said the thief.

  Color drained from the old man’s face. He recited the number again. This time it was exactly the same as the message from the Kid.

  “Good boy,” he said.

  “We have a deal?”

  “So what’s in the box besides cash?” asked the thief. “A little black book? Some disks with names and dates and figures showing how your scam works, and if you ever find yourself behind the eight ball, you can extort your way out?”

  The old man wouldn’t answer.

  “But it would be trouble for you if the stuff came out now, without any control on your part, right?”

  “You can’t get in the box without me,” said the old man. “You need me.”

  “Actually, I don’t, I know a guy,” he said, placing the muzzle of the .380 against the old fart’s forehead and then watching him squirm as he wet his pants, like they always do.

  You could be in the life a long time without ever having to kill anyone. Maybe there was nothing he’d ever wanted badly enough.

  “You don’t need to expose me,” said the old man. “You’ll have the money, there’d be no purpose in it. You say you don’t give a hoot about morals and hypocrisy. If you’ve got a shred of humanity at all, you’ll do me a favor and destroy those disks in that box. You’d just end up hurting a lot of innocent people.”

  Slim made no promises. What he did was loosen the tape binding the old man’s right hand just enough to allow him to light a cigarette. He removed the pack from the old man’s robe, grabbed a lighter from the side table, put both items in the old man’s palm, and walked out the door.

  He was halfway to his car when he visualized himself being pulled over, cuffed, jailed. Getting caught was always a possibility, but he hated the idea of it happening at this moment, the way things stood. The old man, sitting in his big fucking house, smoking his cigarettes. That superior look on his face.

  The rain had let up but the wind stung his cheeks and there was a low howling coming from the
east. Something in the tone of it made him think of one of the Kid’s best songs, the one that seemed to turn time and space inside out.

  He went back for one last thing.

  * * *

  Two months later, three young men were scarfing candy and energy drinks in the break room on the tenth floor of a highrise overlooking Lake Austin. They’d been working overtime for several weeks processing insurance claims from the storm. All three looked haggard and stoned. Sometimes their topic of conversation was pornographic, more often it was a gruesome joke at the expense of a policyholder.

  The rich old fart who burned alive in his recliner, for example.

  “What do you think?” said Carney. “Coulda been lightning. The house did get hit, no doubt about that. We don’t have a lot of ‘Act of God’ cases anyway. What’ll the boss say?”

  “Bullshit,” said Willet. “I’d rather chalk it up to spontaneous human combustion. I’d love to see the look on old Rickstein’s face when he reads that.”

  “Sorry, dude,” Carney said. “People don’t just up and bust into flames. I can’t go for that.”

  “Too bad that guy got shivved to death in jail,” said Lamont. “He could’ve told us how he did it.”

  “You mean the asshole they caught with booty from the old guy’s house?” said Willet. “The murder charge against him was bullshit, purely circumstantial. I say the guy just exploded.”

  “Question is,” Lamont said, “did the old bastard climb up on his roof and paint that message there before he exploded, or did somebody else do it?”

  Lamont still had the aerial photo in his hands. His girlfriend, the television reporter, had given it to him. Taken by the pilot of a traffic helicopter, it showed a sea of ravaged roofs, uprooted trees, and crap blown all over hell. In the exact center was the old man’s house. Someone had painted the words MORAL HAZARD in huge block letters on the roof, and below that, a sequence of letters and numbers. Lamont didn’t know what they signified, but his girlfriend was working on it. A veteran investigative reporter from Fort Worth was helping her out. They were calling it “The Church and State Case.”