Bean sat up tall, tried to muster the presence that served him so well in his court room. He took off his cowboy hat, ran a hand through his silver hair, scratched his left foot with his right boot, made sure he kept his holster out of sight.
And said dick.
Because he couldn’t think of anything. Years of law school and law practice. Years on the bench in Barefield, years more behind the bench in Langtry West. And not a damned thing came to mind. No excuse, no story, not a single word.
Silence punctured the afternoon like a hollow point round to the heart. The air bled tension. The young warrior stared, expecting something.
“Magic.”
Everyone looked at Faith.
“Thought I could get out.” She rattled the cuffs, staring directly at the older cop, her face soft smiles and innocence. “Turns out...” A shrug and then turned to the young officer. “Getting stuck in cuffs in front of your grandfather is kinda creepy.”
Bean tried on a chuckle. Fit like underwear two sizes too small.
The older cop bit back a grin. “I’ll bet.”
The younger one, his eyes still hard, said, “Okay. How about a license, buddy.”
Not a single moment of hesitation this time. Faith said, “Uh...yeah, he doesn’t have it.”
“No?”
She nodded at the older cop, her grin an embarrassed thing. “My fault, too. See...” Her face flooded with red. “Was doing my magic show and I disappeared his wallet. It was a great trick and I did it right but...But I dropped the wallet when it was behind my back. Didn’t realize it.”
The warrior cop’s eyes were wary. “And?”
“Buster ate it.”
“Buster?”
“My beagle,” Bean said. “Her trick cost me eighty bucks, two credit cards, my license and social security card, and two rubbers.” Bean winked at the old-timer. “Viagra’s a great thing...except my missus hates it.”
“No doubt,” said the young cop.
The older cop chuckled. “My wife’s got a mutt. Eats everything. Hang tight.”
They disappeared and Bean knew they were running the SUV’s plate. What were the chances Echo snagged this from some shit bag well acquainted with the Barefield PD? “Damnit.” Sweat broke on his balls.
As they came back, Bean heard the young one. “Probably a fucking pedophile. All cuffed up for easy access.”
Faith ground her teeth.
“Stop it,” the older partner said. “Guy with his granddaughter.”
“Whatever. Let’s get lunch.”
“Ain’t doing Johnny’s, I guess,” the older one said.
“Place sucks anyway.”
The older cop laughed. “How the hell’d I ever get stuck with a punk like you? Gardski’s okay, then?”
“Like I give a fuck where you harden your arteries.” The young cop headed back to the squad while the older guy came to Bean’s window. “We’re good, Mr. Zimny. You guys be careful.” He chuckled. “Locked up is about the only way to keep the grandkids safe, ain’t it?”
Bean nodded. “Seems like.”
When they were alone, she rattled the cuffs again. “Get ’em off. Now.”
“Why didn’t you tell them?”
Rattle rattle.
Bean unlocked her. She held the cuffs, stared at them, maybe even glared at them, then tossed them in the backseat.
A quick restart of the SUV and they got into traffic, weaving in and out of thinning traffic. They passed the courts building, which Bean gave a hearty middle finger, then turned left from Big Spring Street to Wall Street. Two blocks down, past the shiny City Hall, past the row crammed with law firms, he hung a right and soon they passed beneath Highway 80, slipping through the underpass and coming out dirty on the other side.
Dirty because south of the railroad tracks and highway was the shitty side of Barefield, a place Bean both loved and hated. The drunks and derelicts, those not in elected office, squatted down here, bouncing between the bars and flops. The women, and more than a few men, with nowhere to go strolled the cracked streets, selling outta their pants as often as shooting in their veins. At night, this entire area was seductive, filled with cheap neon lights and the boom of music. During the day, with the shadows harsh and angular, it was desolation, filled with blowing sand and lost people trying to stay a step ahead of that sand.
“Why didn’t you tell them?” he asked again.
Faith was quiet, her hand on the automatic lock.
Does she realize that, the Judge wondered. Not on the handle to get out, but on the lock. Trying to keep the World out? I’ve been trying that for years and years...it doesn’t work.
Something always got in. A memory or a demon...usually they were the same thing.
Bean kept his eyes on the road. He didn’t want to see this part of Barefield. Hell, he didn’t want to be in this part of Barefield because if he saw his secret places with their comforting stench, he’d want to feel the soothing prick of needle again.
Even driving south, even headed back to Langtry West with a stolen girl at his side, he could feel the memory of the warmth in his blood.
Always soon followed by shards of glass in your head.
For at least two miles, maybe longer, she said nothing. As the broken buildings of the outskirts of Barefield limped past them, she said, “Because you let me watch.”
“Huh?”
“The pictures.” Her jaw bulged, angry clenches that traveled down her body to her fists. “When you burned them. You let me watch.”
Bean flushed. “Well...yeah. I’m sorry he did that to you.”
“He did more.” She stared straight ahead. “Did you mean what you said?”
“What did I say?”
“To the black man...when the truck was burning. You told him you would get me home.”
“Yes, I meant that.”
“You said I was someone’s daughter. You said my family has a right to have me in their lives. Do you believe that?”
He turned and held her gaze as hard as he could. “I believe that with all my heart.”
“Been a while since I seen my family. I miss them.”
Bean licked his lips, thought again of Angela, and pushed them—hard—south toward Langtry West.
12
Grab that gun. Quick. Deadly if need be. Sitting on the passenger seat. Winking in the sun. Easy to reach. Just in case. ’Cause if some fucker needed shooting? Get it fast, superfast, leave them where they lie after you shoot the shit outta them.
Then wait for the gravity rods. Because that’s the only way the UFOs work.
It was a quick drive...Lubbock to Barefield. Not even a couple hours if the car’s moving slick. Drove with breath locked tight and hot, with the razor-hot tips of knives pricking skin, with the car gobbling the highway, chewing through yellow center lines like bullets chewing through flesh.
The Judge was close. The air was thick with his smell. Skunk funk.
Judge Royy, nee Jeremiah, Bean, II was in town.
Back in Barefield. Interesting place to finally find you, Judge. Who’d’a thought we end up here again.
Laughed and stopped at a red light. Stared at all the people in their little mobile boxes with their music too loud while they texted and emailed and got blowjobs and breathed poison and ate carcinogens. All of them mice who had no idea Buddhism was six hundred and fifty-three years older than Christ...which changed everything.
People...mice...insects...
Like that man turning through the intersection. Headed south in his big SUV like he owned the fucking world.
You don’t...I do.
Salt and pepper beard, a girl next to him. Her face streaked with black poison while he looked terrified of his own shadow. His gaze swept everything. Why was he running? What from? Didn’t matter. He and the girl were sheep, just like the rest. Or mice. Or buffalos charging along with the herd over the edge of the cliff.
“’S where we’re all going. Eventually. Some sooner
than others.”
Light changed and the man was gone, the crying girl gone with him.
“The Judge sooner than everyone, Gracie.”
13
An hour later she asked, “Why?”
When he looked, she pointed at his empty holster.
“Seems kinda stupid, being empty. I know you carry. You used it on the black man.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I’ve got a .380 I carry in my boot. Right now it’s in my back pocket.”
Her dark eyes held genuine curiosity.
“Holster belonged to my grandmother. I wear it to remember her.”
“Without a gun.”
He said nothing else for a couple miles. He assumed she was fine with his answer because she dropped it. Ten minutes later, he pulled into a parking lot in the tiny town of Rankin.
“Why are we here?” Faith asked.
A rundown building, age and anger set deeply into the wood and large windows. The building was on the far side of the lot, as though it wanted to see customers coming before they got to it, give the business a chance to size up the customers first, like maybe it could keep its door closed if it didn’t like what it saw. Sip’N’Tan the sign said. Other signs hung crooked in the window and listed all kinds of exotic coffee and tea blends. Columbian Velvet Roast, Columbian Terrazu, Peaberry from the best locations high in the Andes.
And donuts.
“You recognize it?”
Faith frowned. “Hell, no. Should I?”
Shot in the dark, a shot that maybe Faith was tied up with the finger and the note. A stupid idea. She was part of his Bassi problem, not his finger and Ranger problem.
They lied to you.
Bean’s jaw clenched as he drove into the lot. He’d been chewing those four words since he got them. He was thoroughly bipolar about it now, one moment believing she absolutely lied to him and the next moment believing she never had.
Never had? She wasn’t an angel, she was a regular everyday person. More than that, she was a cop and more than that, a Texas Ranger. Are you telling yourself she never lied?
“Not to me,” he said, his words lost in the desert heat.
A tanning salon and coffee shop and Bean had no idea what the fuck Tommy-Blue had been thinking. This was the heart of west Texas. Nobody was going to pay for a tan in a place that had seven hundred sunny days a year. And there was damn sure no way these people were going to pay for fancy coffee. What they have in Rankin, aside from a whole lot of nothing, is sun and straight black coffee. Tommy-Blue had always been the dimmest of The Quartet, but opening this place might have been the dumbest thing he’d ever done.
The parking lot was paved but cracked. On the far edges, weeds pushed through asphalt that was faded from black to a lifeless gray. They hovered like midget soldiers standing guard over the lot, some of which was invisible beneath a fine layer of wind-blown sand. Near the lot’s entrance, a truck sat with its hood open. Two men, both obvious good ol’ Texas boys—Wrangler jeans too tight and dirty, scuffed boots sharpened to a stiletto point, round can of snuff in their hip pockets—worked on the motor. Stared at it, rather. One had a wrench and one had greasy hands, but neither looked like they had any idea what to do.
Bean and Faith had moved steadily but just under the limit. They’d blown out of Barefield on 349, a rickety state highway that connected a shitload of nothing with even more nothing. Oil wells, patches of cattle bellowing and crapping prodigiously, scrub, and endless miles of the brown that painted the landscape as though there were no other colors. Shades of brown, degrees of brown, hints of brown.
It was a harsh landscape, but it had a subtle beauty. A beauty that matched, even still, Mariana’s angular face and full lips, that matched her blazing eyes and her hair as black as pitch. This desert was Mariana’s land. She’d grown up a few miles outside of Odessa and had blossomed in this desert and married in this desert and procreated in this blasted land.
Then she’d died here.
Which left Bean with his ever-present need to ride a brown Horse.
He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles bled white. “I love you, Mariana.”
Faith said nothing but he felt her gaze burning his face like a blowtorch.
The Sip’N’Tan was a lonely joint, nearly lost in the desert. Hidden off the road near the Rankin Cemetery.
“Sip and Tan? Nothing like a little java and melanoma.”
The Judge nodded as he parked. “Run by an old...friend.”
“Just one little stop on the way to getting me home? Why’d we stop here?”
“The million dollar question.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a little short right now.”
A chuckle slipped from Bean before he could stop it. “Need a few bucks?”
The blowtorch was back, burning through her eyes, incinerating him. “We aren’t friends. Don’t laugh like we’re friends.”
“Fair enough. I apologize.”
As he headed inside, he saw another truck, this one parked on the far side. A man was splayed out in the back, his feet hanging over the open tailgate. A white guy, pale from a cushy life spent indoors. Had a brand new, but battered, sombrero perched over his face and held a maraca in one hand and an empty bottle of whiskey against the truck’s bed in the other.
The border was only two hundred miles south. It was easy escape for high school boys, college boys, mid-life crisis men. Women, too, Bean supposed. Though the Mexican landscape was riddled with cartels and the corpses those cartels created, there were still a few hidden places that were a touch exotic, a hint mysterious; places that offered a high school or college explorer cheap booze, women for a price, barfights that drew blood and disgorged teeth but didn’t interest the Federales.
Call it Mexico-lite, Bean thought.
Not the disaster the real place had become, but enough of a whisper of violence that high school boys and brats wearing frat rings could be spout off about how tough they were.
“You passed out somewhere relatively safe and friendly,” Bean said to the man hidden beneath the sombrero.
Passed out or died.
Either way, Bean didn’t give a crap.
“Yo...compadre,” the man said. His head lolled up. “Tha’s a sweet ride you rollin’. Wanna sell it?” The guy banged the empty bottle against the truck. “Mine a little under the weather.”
Ignoring him, Bean went inside. Whatever Sip’N’Tan had been when Tommy-Blue opened it, it was shit now. The hand-painted signs, with all the house rules about the tanning beds and arrows to rooms in the back where the beds awaited, were askew. One had stains that could have been coffee or dried blood. More signs, still hand-painted, gave customers all they needed to know about Tommy-Blue’s coffees. That sign was better than ten feet wide and was hung behind the counter, and it had been painfully modified; each exotic coffee marked off, one by one, a visual representation of the march of time and the lack of interest by the local citizenry.
This part of the store was a medium-sized room, populated with tables that matched and chairs that matched, but neither of which matched each other. Each table was topped with a bowl of individual packet of sugar and creamer, and God alone knew how old those were, and a napkin dispenser.
There were exactly no customers.
In fact, there was no one at all, the entire place was empty.
Bean stood, the finger and note still in the mailing envelope but now deep in his pocket. The entire package was warm, as though it could catch fire and burn him down where he stood. The .380 was in the small of his back, just as warm, just as capable of burning people down.
So today we burn?
You are so melodramatic, Jeremiah. One of the things I always loved about you.
“And hated,” he said.
No, baby, I didn’t hate it, I just found it...amusing. What is your business with Tommy-Blue?
“I don’t know, Mariana. Perhaps you can tell me? What happened that night?”
Silence, as ever
when he asked unanswerable questions.
“The hell you doing here?”
The voice was the same...that of a five-pack-a-day smoker, though Bean knew Tommy-Blue had never smoked. Or maybe a fifth-a-day drinker, though Tommy-Blue rarely drank anything harder than beer. He’d had that voice, grating like gargled glass shards, as long as Bean had known him. It sat completely sideways from the man himself. Tommy-Blue, at least the Tommy-Blue of twenty years ago, had been slight. A non-descript five and a half feet, maybe a hundred sixty-five pounds light. Hands that were bare of scars or memories of hard labor or fighting with arrestees.
Right now, he hesitated between the safety of the back office and what might happen in the front room. “Asked you a question.”
“Looking for you,” Bean said.
“Here I am. Enjoy the view. Now get out.”
The view was startling. Yeah, it had been years and that was probably it. But this guy seemed like a completely different man from the one Bean had known. The right now Tommy-Blue was shrunken, swimming in Bermuda shorts and a tattered button-front shirt that reminded Bean of a Tiki bar floating in the South Pacific. Tommy-Blue wore flip flops and even those were too big, his toes and heels far from the rounded edges.
The flesh of his face had grown loose and leathery. It had been a good looking face back when The Quartet was running criminals to ground. Not beautiful, but beautifully matched to a dry personality that wanted to do the right thing, grow up his kids and give his wife a good life. His hair had thinned considerably and gone white from blonde. He had it pinned back in a thin and weak pony-tail. His ragged teeth were crooked nubs that were just as tired and weak as his eyes.
He’s on the junk, Bean realized. Has been for years.
“Got a couple of questions.”
“Get ’em answered somewhere else.”
Bean stared at the tattered former cop. The taste of his hostility was a new dish. “How long you been riding, Tommy-Blue?”
Tommy-Blue shook his head. “Hah! Good one. Takes one to know one, yeah? What you see is the result of not one, not two, but three dances with cancer. And this time, I ain’t able to call the tune.” He took a deep breath. “Nothing’s working anymore.”
Death is Not Forever (Barefield Book Book 3) Page 7
