by Eric Beetner
Her smile disappeared in the darkness of the ballroom, in the darkness that was theirs alone. “I want to see you, baby, I really do.”
He eyed her as they moved semi-gracefully. “But?”
“Someone needs you first.”
He shook his head. “I don’t give a shit.”
“But someone needs—”
“Don’t care. I need you, Mariana. Twenty-one damned years. I’m tired, I want to be with you.”
“But you don’t remember so many of those years.”
Bean ground his teeth, stung by the criticism.
“Honey, if it were some old man, some bullcrap politician or some damned attorney, I’d say eat a bullet and come home to me.”
Bean snorted. “No, you wouldn’t it. Mortal sin.”
She laughed. “No, I wouldn’t. But I wouldn’t be so upset if you had a horrible car crash or something, plunge into a ravine, the car explodes into flame, fries your skinny ass to a cinder.”
Bean laughed. “You don’t care if I burn to death?”
“I love you so much that I don’t care if you burn to death.”
Their laugh faded into the lush trill of the saxophones, into a liquid flurry of piano notes up and down.
“A girl needs you. You have to get her home...to her mother.”
“Put her ass on the bus.”
“Jeremiah.” Her voice sharp, scolding.
“I don’t have time to rescue wayward girls.”
“Baby, I’ll be here whenever you get here. Tomorrow, next week, next year, I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.” She grabbed his eyes tightly, held his hand just as tight. “I’ll wait forever.”
The ballroom tightened around him. “There’s something else. What is it?”
How could her eyes be so brilliant, shining in a sea of mocha skin, when she had been dead so long? How could her hair still be as shiny as onyx?
“Someone’s coming.”
“For me?”
With a nod, she forced him to twirl her again. “Yes, Your Honor, for you.”
2
The finger shocked him.
It was nearly lunch time. The poker game, just another anonymous game with vague promises of Mariana’s hunk of tin, had run through the night, the players’ moods as black as the west Texas night, and had fallen apart amidst clenched fists and hot spittle and vows of retribution for the assumed cheating by the big winner. That had been six hours ago and ultimately there had been no word of her tin. Bean had walked out angry and tired and five hundred and sixty bucks lighter.
Now he was all those things AND seriously hungry.
Johnny’s Barbeque was on tap for lunch, then a quick meeting with a Barefield detective, an even quicker meeting with the delivery driver. Then Bean was back on the road to Langtry West and some sleep, the sleep he should have gotten last night for all the good the poker game had done him.
Troubled sleep, Mariana would call it.
It was all troubled anymore.
When Judge Bean walked in to Johnny’s joint, which he used as an off-the-books mailing address, a package waited. Inside the thick, padded mailing envelope was a small box and a note. Inside that small box was a human finger. At least a couple weeks detached and stinking to holy hell.
The note was a shitty photocopy of a Texas Ranger badge, and the words, They lied to you.
3
The hammer cocked. A metallic click explosively loud in the tiny room.
Hardly a room, just a flop for a cheap whore. Empty whiskey bottles and old pizza boxes. Smelled of menstrual blood and shit. Of piss and despair.
“Know that smell, baby.” Pressed the gun against the whore’s throat. “Now...how many times I’m gonna ask?”
It was a woman again. Made no fucking difference...man...woman...they all knew where the Judge was.
“Please...I swear to God—”
“This might sound kind of...I don’t know...but God does everything I ask.”
The whore cocked her head. “What?”
“The Judge, woman.”
“God? What?”
The gun nuzzled her neck, a metallic lover.
The whore’s eyes slammed closed. “Haven’t seen him since he did me a favor a couple months ago. In Barefield.”
“Done us all a favor or two, ain’t he? Should’a drowned himself in a fucking river. That would’a been a good favor.” A hefty sigh. “I sent a package to Barefield. Far as I know, he ain’t even picked it up yet. Those little boys told me you know where he is.”
“What little boys?” The prostitute’s eyes popped open and then she frowned, highlighting the aged map of crevices that made up her face. “Who you talking about?”
“All of them...they all led me here. Right to you, doll.”
The woman’s mouth flapped, like so many mouths had before her. Flapped and flapped. Sometimes they said something useful, sometimes they just begged.
Eventually, the woman spluttered, drool white and frothy, ran down her chin. “Yeah...well...they lied. People lie about me all the time. I’m just a pro. They lie about me and think they can get over on me or not pay or do nasty stuff to me. People lie all the time, how can I help what they say?”
Her words rushed, tripped over each other like drunks in a dirty gutter. The whore tried not to cry, but her tears came and smeared black mascara into long scratches from cheeks to neck.
“Your conversations are so petty.”
“What?”
“So petty...the World is about to end.”
“What? My world is about to end? Please...no.”
“The World, junkie whore, the World, and you’re gassing me with petty conversations.” A pause. “Where is the Judge?”
Confusion sat on her face as one of her fat tricks might have. “But...but why you need to see him? I mean, if the world’s about to end.”
“Because accounts have to be set straight. Now talk, you goddamn whore junkie bitch, or I’ll kill you right the fuck now.”
When the gun fired, two shots through the wall and into the next apartment, the hooker screamed. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t see him anymore.”
“Yeah, wrong answer, Gracie.”
4
They lied to you.
Resting his hand over his empty holster, Judge Royy Bean, II crunched ice. Cold shot through his mouth, a counterpoint to the damnable heat that dripped sweat down his back to the crack of his ass. His ice crunching had always driven Mariana batty. She’d berated him constantly for doing it. But always with a smile and a twinkle in her eyes.
Are my eyes sparking right now, Mariana?
Not in the least, baby.
Her voice was in his head but he knew it was only his heart wishing it so. She wasn’t actually talking to him or dancing with him or making love to him. Everything that was Mariana, for the last twenty-one years, was self-inflicted, a guilt-inspired fantasy.
He used the barbeque joint as a mail drop. Johnny didn’t mind, for the occasional cannabis consideration, and it was the one place Bean always visited when in Barefield. Today, as he ordered his two-meat combo, Johnny had casually given him the package. Plain, free of writing or addressing or markings of any kind other than Bean’s name.
Now the finger, blood dried to a crusty brown, sinew and bone ragged and peeking out from badly-cut flesh, sat heavy in his pocket. He had no idea who the fuck it belonged to or who sent it. But the note, four harsh words, They lied to you, scrawled in jagged handwriting beneath a bad copy of a Ranger badge, told him everything.
Except not quite everything.
A lie? From Mariana? Impossible. His wife had been no angel, she had been a cop in a world filled with the evil and the vile, with predators and corpses, with victims and the vanquished, and no one ever came out completely clean. Dirt and stains and blood clung to everyone, but lying? He couldn’t conceive a situation where she would have lied to him.
Did you lie, baby?
So the note told
him nothing concrete, but it did make him ask a question or two, didn’t it?
And who, exactly, might know the answers? Tommy-Blue? Andy? JD?
Crunching ice, Bean stared at the Barefield PD detective across the table from him. They sat at an outdoor table and the air was redolent with the aroma of Johnny’s delectable barbeque sauce. It put a pleasant tang in their noses, the fat scent of Johnny’s cherry pie just behind it. The Judge’s fav joint; this was where he’d learned to eat barbeque and where he’d consummated most of his deals, legal and not.
Bean squirmed, pulling at the vest beneath his western shirt. “Damned thing.” He hated wearing a ballistic vest, but years ago Digger had insisted and Bean had long since learned to completely trust Digger’s instincts.
“I lost him,” the detective said.
“Pardon?”
“My son,” the detective said. “I lost him.”
The Judge nodded. I lost one, too.
The detective had been suspended from the PD behind some bullshit involving guns and money. And the line of questions he tossed at the Judge made it obvious he was working off the books in trying to gather his son back to him.
The Judge bit back a bitter laugh. Careful, Detective, working off the books in Barefield can put you in a ditch with a bullet behind your ear...metaphorically speaking.
“Or running tail between legs down the highway.”
“Excuse me?” the detective said.
Bean shook his head. “I’m sorry, Detective Kurston, you were saying?”
“I lost my son.”
Each time the detective said it, his face broke a little more. He was desperate to have some word of where his son was, and he believed the Judge—and the Judge’s extensive network of low-brow contacts—might have some information.
I lost one, too. I lost her mother. Then I lost her.
Because he’d been chasing the dime. Hell, a damned sight more than a dime. He’d been chasing the promise of dimes, tens of thousands, if not millions, of dimes. He’d been thirty miles away, enjoying cigars and Tequila Don Julio and making promises to powerful men whose wallets he needed to finance his campaign. He’d missed what should have been the most important night in his life and the resultant guilt, thick and heavy and all-consuming, kept his boots clacking down the highway every day and night since then.
Bean took a deep breath. “What makes you think I know?”
“Give me a fucking break. You know everybody.”
“In certain worlds. And from time to time, I hear things from those worlds.” Bean told the detective what he knew, then said, “You understand all this information adds up to quite the little favor.”
The detective nodded.
“And that favor is going deep in my pocket.”
“I get it, Judge, I get it. Something you’ll need if you and the law ever cross again.”
“If?”
The Judge flexed his calf, relieved at the feel of the .380 Sig in his boot. Another suggestion from Digger. Though Bean had never actually been convicted of anything, he knew it wasn’t particularly intelligent of him to roam the state armed. But while Barefield had once been home, now it was where he felt most naked. Thus the .380 and the bullet-proof vest and sometimes his Glock 26 subcompact at the small of his back.
Shouldn’t’a left the Glock at home...dumbass.
He’d told Digger the .380 was a just-in-case gun; a pistol just-in-case he need to blast someone to hell and back. That had been the truth, but not quite all of the truth.
The truth was that he was tired of being alone. That he was tired of a twenty-one-year death and a seven-year death and he was pretty sure it was just about time for him to cash everything in.
But also? He could feel it coming: the madness that had simmered in his blood since birth. It was beginning to boil. It was the same madness that had scalded his great-grandfather and his grandmother and his father. He’d known since childhood it would burn him just like it had them.
It’s coming. It’s in my bones and muscle, in my nerves and blood. It’s a cancer and no amount of chemo or radiation will fix it.
So before the madness left him babbling and pissing down his leg and unable to remember wife or daughter, he’d planned to snap back that hammer and lay that fucking .380’s trigger down.
“Judge? You okay?”
Except now it was different. Now there was a note and a picture of a badge.
Wait for me, Mariana, I’ll be a little while longer yet.
A mortal sin, Jeremiah, but I will wait for you forever.
The detective stared at the Judge’s hand, which bounced over the table. “I’m missing something.”
“Need me to find it for you?”
The Judge narrowed his eyes. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you the man who lost his son? Are you anymore adept at finding missing trucks?”
For a span of heartbeats, the detective glared at the judge. For a moment, the Judge thought he might get up and leave. Instead, the man wiped his face and kept his trembling hands on the table. “A truck?”
“Should have been here an hour ago. A delivery...all points south and more than a few north.”
The detective picked at his fingernails. “How about I stay out of whatever illegal shit you’re distributing all over the western half of the fucking state.”
“Yeah...probably best.”
Around them, Johnny’s was mostly silent, the outdoor patio peopled with only a few customers. This was the Judge’s favorite table and had been since long before he’d been forced to flee Barefield and set up shop in the far desert of the Texas-Mexico border. From this table everything that was anything in Barefield was visible. All the movers and shakers, all the cops and political robbers, the wildcat drillers—what few were left—the bankers and swindlers.
Frequently the same people, the Judge thought, the same motherfuckers who dictated his life after Mariana.
Calm down. Water under the burning bridge.
“Don’t understand the empty holster,” the detective said.
The Judge swallowed some ice.
“I mean, come on, this is Texas. We let anybody carry a gun. Hell, we almost force them to.”
“So you think it’d be a good idea for Judge Royy Bean, II to openly carry? In this particular town? I think I’ve pushed certain Barefield citizens just about as far as they’re going to let me.” He laughed. Mariana always said his laugh had an edge sharp enough to cut a throat.
The detective shook his head. “Well...fair point.”
Again, not the total truth about the empty holster he always carried, but enough for this detective.
The Judge shoved a forkful of brisket in his mouth, chased it with thick, buttered toast. Bean was irritated. The detective’s face was so alive with want, so riddled with anxiety about his son. You want to know where your grown son is? And if he really shot a cop? Was he really carrying around a dismembered foot he believed to be his biological father’s? Had he really left a church in ruins beneath fires and automatic weapons fire?
Well, maybe he did want to know that, but that at least meant this man had a child who could get himself into a nightmare of bullshit.
The Judge didn’t have that.
Not anymore.
Sometimes, when the days left him bathed in heat and sweat and the nights’ relief could only be measured by multiple fingers of Tequila Don Julio, the Judge imagined both of his women alive. A few healthy belts and Mariana hadn’t died in childbirth and their daughter hadn’t died in a house fire.
Let me tell you about the World, the Judge wanted to say. Let me tell you—
The words died in his throat because he finally heard it.
The hulking thrum of eighteen wheels against asphalt. Could have been any of a million different trucks, each running cargo through Barefield to somewhere else. But something about this truck sounded familiar, though the Judge had never seen the truck before and what did that matter? A truck was a truck w
as a truck. But as the sound grew, easing up from faint to distant, then to near and then distinct, he knew. The air split with the whine of engine braking and the purple nose came around the corner a short block away.
“Bassi.” His voice was a relieved whisper.
“Judge?” the detective said.
“The day just got better, my friend.”
The truck stopped, clearly visible across the outdoor seating area. Johnny’s few early lunch customers looked at the gleaming white trailer. “Streets of America Caskets” was painted in huge, powerful black letters along the side. The letters flowed over the top of a soft, Norman Rockwell road. The road wound its way into a quintessentially American small town dotted with flags and cafes and a cop directing traffic and kids playing baseball. On the far side of town, the roadway lifted and faded into Heaven. A trailer designed to disappear, to escape notice. Supposed to leave a trail wholly unremarkable and unmemorable.
The truck’s engine rattled to a silent death and then?
Not a goddamned thing.
The Judge waited for the driver’s door to open. It never cracked. The window was down, the driver’s arm hanging out and deeply tanned, but Bassi never moved to open the door.
The Judge’s jaw tightened.
This was wrong. All wrong.
A sliver of sunlight gave Bean a glimpse of Bassi, hidden deep in the truck’s cab, his head turned slightly as though he was looking in one of the mirrors, or listening to someone else in the cab.
“You have someone with you, Bassi?”
Even with his face in shadows, the Judge knew Bassi was staring at him. Was he answering that question by his very silence?
“Damnit,” the Judge said.
This was not going to play well.
Not at all.
5
“Judge?” The detective never looked over his shoulder.
“Yes?”
“What...uh...what’s the problem?”
“It’s nothing.”
“What’s nothing?”
“Nothing is nothing.” The Judge drank deeply, crunched some ice even as hot, fresh blood pounded into his limbs.
