Death is Not Forever (Barefield Book Book 3)

by Trey R. Barker

  Digger saw it then. He nodded. “Yeah, yeah, gotcha. It comes out he was back-dealing the cartels and everything was a lie, that’ll pretty well fuck that dream.”

  “How about an indictment or two on multiple state and federal felonies?”

  The two men, each lost in their own thoughts Bean knew, headed toward the rubble. A dust, thicker than normal, hung in the air over the last bit of the pile. The men Digger had cleaning the bar site were just about finished. They stood, watching the last construction dumpster get loaded onto a truck. What was left on the ground was inconsequential.

  It’s all inconsequential, isn’t it? If Jim Dell isn’t in that pile of garbage, then none of it matters.

  Except...Jim Dell was Jim Dell.

  Which meant, ultimately, it would be quite consequential.

  40

  By evening, they’d been through each of the few buildings in Langtry West. They’d been through rooms and attics, through outbuildings. Bean had led the way, whispering Angela and Mariana’s names while Digger remained stone-jawed and silent. They checked the trunks of the Estate’s few cars and the bed toolboxes of the single truck. Sweat clung to them, a second skin that refused to cool and instead made them somehow hotter. Dirt was a constant companion, crawling up from their boots to their shins, covering their thighs as it covered their stomachs and backs and ultimately their necks and faces. Bean blew out hot breath, maybe tinged with a bit of fear, with every few steps, as though he might be able to conjure her up from deep inside him. That was, after all, where she’d come from...deep inside him. From his loins and heart, from his soul, from his madness.

  Digger searched with his .45 but Judge Royy Bean, II was unarmed. He’d left his gun at home. Angela might be dangerous, was definitely crazed, but she was still his daughter. And truly, Bean wasn’t yet convinced she was dangerous. He understood Digger’s reasons for believing, but he simply didn’t...couldn’t. He could not bring himself to believe his daughter, from deep inside him, was dangerous to him.

  She wasn’t going to kill Chelle. She wasn’t going to hurt Chelle. Angela wanted Chelle. Chelle was a replacement daughter, a replacement love. That need for that love would keep Chelle safe.

  But there was something else, too. Angela had to prove to Bean that she was the parent he’d never been.

  “Where else?” Digger asked after three hours.

  They stood again at the broken glass door of Digger’s place. Bean stared at the glass. In the gathering evening, the jagged angles and tossed glimmers of sunlight from the shards were gone. They’d been replaced by muted oranges. Less violent but more ominous.

  “There’s nowhere else. She left town.”

  Digger nodded. “Yeah. So where do we start? Del Rio? Uvalde?”

  Bean’s heart sank. San Antonio wasn’t terribly far east. Houston a bit east of that. El Paso west of here and the entire fucking state was spread out north of them.

  “There’s nowhere to start, Digger. We can’t check the entire state.”

  “But you know people, Judge. Hell, you knew exactly what was happening with Kurston’s son. You knew what was going on with Little Lenny when he was making his move and killing everyone south of Amarillo. You knew—”

  “I don’t know this time, Digger.”

  “Make some calls.”

  Calls wouldn’t help. She was new, an unknown to the people Bean knew. Her name would lay empty and unexplored on their ears. “She’s gone, Digger.”

  Digger took a deep breath, kicked at a rock on his back porch. “And Chelle?”

  What else was there? She was gone. Bean had gotten her away from Bassi and the torture of Bassi’s need for young flesh. That had been an accident. Bean hadn’t known she was there, hadn’t know there was a girl who needed saving.

  “We’ve done everything we can do for her. She’s a smart girl. She’ll figure it out, she’ll slip away.”

  Who you saying that to, Jeremiah? You telling Digger or yourself?

  Not now, Mariana.

  Are you angry at me, Jeremiah? Are you pissed off? You think I withheld information? Or are you angry that you didn’t want to see it?

  Bean startled. “Didn’t want to see what?”

  “Judge?” Digger said, staring into the desert. He spat and headed inside. “We don’t have time for you to talk to—”

  The money, Jeremiah.

  “What money?” Bean asked, but he already knew.

  A small satchel, given him by his beautiful wife when she was completely suffused with the warm glow of pregnancy and with only hints of the shooting still in a bandage or two. The satchel was brown, maybe? Black? With a copper-colored zipper across the top that was tight and tough to open. “From family and friends. Good people who believe in you.” She’d hugged him, crushing the satchel between them while he tried to be gentle with her wounds and her growing child. “I love you.” Her voice had been a husky whisper. “You’re going to be the best justice of the peace Texas ever had.”

  At the time, he’d thought she wiped a tear away while her head was on his shoulder.

  Inside the satchel had been twenty-five grand, and ultimately it had been just enough to buy him a last few radio and TV ads and put the election away. His campaign manager had been overjoyed to see the money and had immediately bought a full-page newspaper ad that was seemingly on every page in every section of every day’s paper. It was a 1930s truck, shot through with rust and sitting in an empty cotton field atop four flat tires. Bean’s opponent’s name was adorned across the truck’s hood.

  “Tells the voters he’s old and busted,” Bean’s campaign manager had said. “And has not the slightest idea how the World works.”

  The second ad they’d done as a newspaper ad and a TV ad. The TV version had been particularly effective. A kid, all dressed up for Halloween, rings an old woman’s door bell.

  “Trick or treat,” the kid said, his voice processed and made slightly eerie and intimidating.

  Before the lady could say anything, the kid said, “Give me more candy...more and more and more candy. If you don’t give me enough candy, I’ll have to let them out.”

  “Them who?” the woman asked.

  By now the kid’s voice was completely transformed, and it sounded both scary and vaguely like Bean’s opponent’s voice.

  “Them...” The kid pointed behind him and just before the ad ended, there was a split second shot of jail cells opening and criminals pouring out.

  Maybe, just maybe, Bean had always had questions about where at least some of that money had come from, but he’d taken his wife’s word. And her word was that the money was as clean as the day was long. Except now it turns out she’d lied to him about what happened that night. And if she lied about that—

  “Yo!” The voice boomed out of an old pick-up truck. The thing had rattled up on the dusty road but Bean hadn’t heard it. “Looking for Judge Royy Bean...the second.” The man didn’t make a move to get out of the truck, but he started laughing. “The fuck kinda name is that?”

  Bean didn’t take a step, but suddenly wished he had the .380.

  “That you? I got something for you.”

  “From who?”

  “Wasn’t paid to talk to you, just to give you this goddamn thing.” He reached across the cab and quickly tossed a long, flat box to the ground. A deep wetness seeped through the cardboard, staining the white a dark gray. “Shit bleeding and stinking all over my truck. Should’a asked for more cash.”

  With a howl apropos of nothing, the man hammered the accelerator, whipped the truck around and was gone in a spasm of dust that hung in the air like bail bondsmen hanging around Bean’s court waiting on the drunk and disorderlys.

  When the dust cleared, the box stared at him.

  “Judge?” Digger was on his porch, .45 tight in his right hand, left hand clenched to a fist.

  Bean went cautiously to the box. It was stained with blood, dried, but not to a rusty brown. It was still a deep red.

/>   “That blood ain’t too old,” Digger said.

  Bean kicked the lid open with his boot.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Digger breathed heavily, looked around as though the owner might suddenly pop out of the dust and start shooting.

  “No finger,” Bean said.

  The arm lay in the box, the white sleeve tattered and bloody, white bone peeking out from a ragged shoulder cut. Blood had stained the entire inside of the box.

  It was a right arm.

  Missing the forefinger, a dirty bandage taped over where the finger had been.

  “That’s our guy,” Digger said.

  “Yeah.” Something tickled the back of Bean’s brain.

  “Dead?” Digger asked.

  “Will be soon enough if he keeps losing body parts.”

  Digger poked at the arm with the barrel of his gun. “Wasn’t just cut off, Judge. Got a pretty big bullet hole. In one side and out the other.”

  Bean looked at it and for a long moment, it was exactly the hole that had been in his wife’s leg. Through and through. Good amount of blood loss, but hadn’t torn up anything vital. She’d been off her legs for a while, then walked with a limp and a cane, then finally on her own but with a tiny gimp until she died.

  It was then, staring at the hole in the arm that the hole in Mariana’s leg in his head, that Bean realized what his dead wife had been talking about only moments earlier.

  “Damnit.” He kicked at the box, sent the arm spilling to the dirt.

  “Judge?”

  He stared at his right hand man. Sweat rolled down Digger’s face, his eyes were hard with just a bit of fear in them. “The money, Digger. The twenty-five large. It didn’t come from family and friends.”

  Digger shook his head, confused. “I don’t—”

  “The campaign cash that Mariana brought me a couple of weeks before the election.”

  “Okay. I remember...I guess.”

  “She told me it came from family and friends, people who wanted to see me elected judge.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It came from Jim Dell.”

  Digger gaped. “It came from Jim Dell? What the hell for?”

  “A pay-off.”

  41

  “For?”

  The sun was heading toward the hard, flat line of the horizon. Shadows were lengthening, losing some of the definition of their edges. Somewhere, a truck, or maybe an ATV, blasted through the cactus and scrub. Drunks out four-wheeling, no doubt. Probably with shotguns and a cooler of Lone Star already half-quaffed. Hard to tell where they were. Sound traveled goofy in these hills and gullies.

  Bean licked his lips. “Shooting her. Jim Dell was in the bag for the cartels. He was working back room deals and Mariana found out.”

  “Old news, Judge.”

  Bean eyed his man. “Yeah? Try this: none of them knew it until JD got in the truck with the soldiers. When he showed back up in Ozona, she was furious. She’s not a crooked cop. She probably told him she was going to Captain Ezrin or somebody. Maybe the district attorney.”

  “So he shot her. Shut her up.”

  “Except she lived.”

  “Mother...fuck.” Digger looked shocked. His eyes blinked fast, like someone had turned up his speed. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t get him last night.”

  Bean waved it off. “We’ll get another chance.”

  “Good.” Digger surveyed the land around his house. “Feels like it’s all going bad, doesn’t it? Like maybe our time is up.”

  “Yeah, Digger. I think it is.”

  Bean stared again at the arm, rolled in dirt now, the blood drying in the dying sunlight. The bandage over the forefinger picked at his brain, but really what did it matter? Somebody knew something had happened that night. Bean had figured it out but would he be able to get any justice for it? Fuck that, would he even be able to get some revenge for it?

  Or would he die trying, felled by Jim Dell’s twin 1911s?

  And what about Angela? Suddenly she’s alive and Bean didn’t think he’d have any more time with her. She blew in like a sandstorm and blew out just as quickly.

  “I don’t get it,” Digger said.

  “What?”

  “Just seems odd. Both of them at the same time? Jim Dell and Angela. Not same year or same month, but same fucking day? Within hours of each other? I ain’t much of a believer in coincidences, you know that.”

  “And that strikes you as a hell of a coincidence?”

  Digger held Bean’s eyes hard. “Not. Even. Fucking. Close.”

  “Karma, Digger. I’ve been headed down this road my entire life. I finally had some peace, except for losing her badge. I was going to her, Digger. Do you have any idea how peaceful that made me? My head quit screaming and my heart quit pounding.” He slapped his right arm, near the elbow. “My fucking arm stopped hurting.”

  “I know, but—”

  “But nothing,” Bean said. His voice had risen, taken an edge he hadn’t heard in years, since he’d lived his life in a bottle and syringe. “This is it. This is karma. This is where all my roads come together. Chelle? A fucking fourteen-year-old girl? Suddenly thrown in my path? A chance to redeem myself for what I did to my own daughter? Then JD? A chance to redeem myself for taking his blood money?” He stormed toward the ruble of the bar. “Then my daughter shows up? Come on, Digger, what can it be except karma?”

  Jeremiah, you be careful, you’re getting—

  “Shut up, Mariana!”

  Digger’s eyes went wide.

  “You lied to me. You lied to me about the girl. You lied to me about the money. You lied to me about how you got shot. I’m not here in this fucking pisshole place, Langtry West, if you hadn’t lied to me.”

  My lies didn’t put you in the bottle, Jeremiah. They didn’t put the needle in your arm. That was your choice.

  His steps pounded the dirt as he ran to what was left of the bar’s rubble. “My choice? My fucking choice, Mariana?” He stomped into the pile, his feet cracking broken board, grinding glass into even more shards. He grabbed some splinters and threw them straight up. They crashed down around him and he threw more. “This bullshit—all of it—is God’s choice, not mine. If He had cared for us at all, He wouldn’t have done this to us. Why, Mariana? Why has all this happened to us? You were a woman of faith, a woman of God. Why did He do this to us? Does He hate us that badly? What did we ever do to Him? I wasn’t observant enough? Weren’t you enough for His fucking ego? He had to have me, too? And so because I refused...He did this to us?”

  Bean pounded and kicked at the rubble. He threw boards and broken glass, a piece of a chair, part of a table top, into the street. His howl ripped the air and the nails and broken glass ripped his hands. “Fuck Him! Do you hear me, Mariana! Fuck Him!”

  “You gonna be long with this little rant?” Digger asked. “If so, I’m going to eat.”

  And suddenly the energy, the anger, was spent. As quickly and completely as a fourteen-year-old boy blasting his first orgasm into his own hand. He stood in the middle of the pile of crap, his hands bloody and his chest heaving, snot and spit heavy and thick on his nose and lips.

  Bean wanted to laugh, and maybe to be angry. Instead, Bean felt nothing. Empty and closed, dry as the desert and as flat as West Texas. He was too tired, years-tired, to feel anything anymore.

  Oh...bullshit, Jeremiah. You are the most feeling man I’ve ever known. That’s why the failure of our family hurts you so badly.

  “Our family didn’t fail, Mariana. God failed our family.”

  No, Jeremiah, circumstance did. Or karma. Or maybe it wasn’t failure at all, maybe it just...was what it was.

  “I miss you so much, baby,” Bean said. “I don’t know how I’ve managed for so long without you.”

  Because you’ve never been without me, honey. I’ve always been here and I’ll always be here. It doesn’t matter when you come to me, I will be here. I’ve got all the time in the world...well, in the heavens...to w
ait for you and I’m not going anywhere.

  And then he saw her, just as he always saw her. Beautiful, slipping out of her early thirties and on the way toward her forties and getting more beautiful every day. He saw her with the glow of her pregnancy but with the mischievous grin of their first few dates and the first time they felt body against body with their hearts at different speeds and different rhythms.

  But he also saw her holding a gun, sighting down the barrel and laying three or four shots downrange.

  “Mariana? They let you pack in Heaven?”

  She fired again, but badly. They do. Endless ammo and the range is always open.

  Bean laughed. “Been a while since you shot? Your rounds are all over the place.”

  Doing the best I can, Jeremiah, under the circumstances.

  “What circum—”

  He stopped when he saw it. A dirty white bandage was over her right forefinger. “The hell is that?”

  Baby?

  Son of a bitch. The thing that had been tickling his brain slammed hard into it now, obvious and forceful and screaming to be recognized.

  “Judge?”

  “She’s got a bandage,” he said.

  “Mariana?”

  “Yeah. On her right forefinger.” Bean ran his left hand over his own forefinger. “Right here. It’s fucking up her shooting. She was a crack shot. All Texas Rangers are.”

  “I’m not following, Judge.” But when Bean looked at him, Digger had gone pale. His .45, always held tight like a talisman, was shaking. “Who’s finger is that? Who’s arm is that?”

  “That’d be mine, motherfucker.”

  42

  It happened with brutal speed.

  Jim Dell appeared from an SUV parked on the far side of one of the outbuildings, his face a twisted roadmap of rage, teeth bared like an attacking wolf, his eyes blazing. With a howl, he let fly with one of his 1911s. Bullets shredded the air.

  “Gun!” Bean dove into the last of the rubble and took a broken, sharp board to the underside of his chin. Pain flared. “Get down, Digger.”