I frowned. “How’d you know—”
“The tattoo artist made a sketch of it. I found that sketch. I knew who it was, the other detectives knew who it was. Hell, the damned uniforms knew who it was. Everyone had heard me bitching about the asshole for a solid week.”
Some of the cops, Kurston said, thought Kurston had whacked Fagan. A handful of cops thought he’d had enough, had taken as much grief from his son’s father as he could...or should have to.
“Scary thing is no one had a problem with that,” Kurston said.
“What about Irwin?”
Kurston laughed. “The officer with three first names. Said something about putting the guy in the sewer.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Who ‘dat?” Cope asked.
“Kurston’s very first partner, back before electric lighting.”
With fingers more deft than I would have imagined, Kurston fished a new bandage from the box. He yanked off the bloody bandage, made a clumsy attempt at cleaning the wound, wrapped a new bandage around his head, and finally sucked down a pain pill.
“Then you disappeared...ergo, you’re the killer.”
“Sure as shit,” I said. “They got that one right.”
He could remember, Kurston said, the meeting with his captain. The man’s already stern face had been more stern, more grave.
“You can’t work this anymore,” the captain had said. “Conflict of interest.”
“Chief and deputy chief and the commissioner stood right behind him,” Kurston said. “Heads going up and down like Dallas Cowboy bobbleheads.”
I laughed. Kurston was so disgusted, so annoyed. He sound like he’d just discovered dog shit con queso on his dinner plate.
“Took me off the case.”
I cracked a grin. “With or without?”
“With or without what?” Cope asked.
Kurston nodded. “Got a check yesterday.”
“So lemme guess,” I said. “Since you were getting paid, you figured you might as well work it.”
“Yep.”
“Off the books.”
“Yep.”
“Asking questions, talking to people.”
“Yep.”
“Writing shit down in your blue notepad.”
“You expect any different?”
We fell silent again, but now it was a comfortable silence. Under Cope’s gaze, I walked with Kurston around the room, lap after lap, through and between the four barber’s chairs, around the TV stand, until Kurston shoved me aside and mumbled that his wound was his head, not his legs.
“I can walk just fine, dipshit.”
“And you say I’ve got language issues.”
“Shut the hell up, pissface.”
“Pissface? That’s new. Where’d you steal it?”
“One of the jailers at the sheriff’s office. An inmate flipped out on him and they had a little tussle. Had to put the guy in the restraint chair. He called the jailer a pissface.”
Some of Kurston’s color had come back. It wasn’t what it had been at Johnny’s, but it was better than it had been when Cope grabbed him up and drove away from the barbeque joint.
Johnny. An all-time mess. “Johnny’s dead.”
As he poured himself more tea, Kurston nodded. Slowly, he stirred in a bit of sugar, a squeeze of lemon juice. His voice, when he spoke, was somber. “Yeah. But so’s the asshole who killed him.”
“Hardly a consolation.”
“Sometimes that’s the best we can do.”
“To get the getter? The getter ought to damn well pay more than that.”
“Sometimes letting the getter live is punishment enough,” Cope said. “Getter gotta get with what he did...gotta get with it every day.”
Kurston frowned. “What are you guys talking about?”
I sighed deeply. “I’m not really sure. It’s been that way for a while now.”
There had been so much violence. I had never been a physical guy, I was scared of violence, uncomfortable with anything more physical than soft sex. But since Fagan appeared, fine and replete with the coolness of the World in his Continental, there had been nothing but violence. It was as though Fagan’s very breath was a bellows that cast violence in its breeze.
“There’s something else, too,” I said. “A cop. Valentine Police Department.”
Kurston nodded. “Officer Roy Guy.”
“I think he got hurt. At this theater we were at. We were trying to get out and I’m pretty sure he got hurt.”
“Damn.” Kurston’s face tightened. “That was you? At the Cultural Arts Playhouse?”
“Shit, he know the name,” Cope said. “Y’all know what happened?”
Kurston’s jaws flexed. “Guy did get hurt. In fact, he got dead.”
“Dead?” I sat heavily in Evileen. That had to be what Lucas had been talking about. Guy had died and in the confusion, Lucas got the who and where, the when and how, all the smaller details, wrong. But he got the big one right, didn’t he? Knew there was a dead cop laying at my feet.
“Damn.” Cope stood at the window. The last of the evening sun blasted down on his black skin. “Y’all get outta bed thinkin’a ways to fuck me? Y’all say ‘Hmmm I wonder how I can get ol’ Cope in the shit?’ How I’m s’pposed to make amends when y’all keep getting me closer to going up?”
“Hang on, Cope,” Kurston said. “Calm down before we have a big problem.”
I recognized the voice; the one he used to deal with suspects and inmates, the voice that told everyone he was in charge and that they shouldn’t do anything stupid because he was the cop and he’d always win.
“Ain’t got no problem with y’all, copper, just got a problem with your boy, with how much trouble he getting me into all the damned time.”
“What about Esther?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The woman who fell on Guy.”
“Well, first of all, her name wasn’t Esther, it was Gladys Heing.”
“That ain’t her. She ain’t no Gladys.” Cope glared at Kurston. “Y’all boys got your info all wrong.”
“Six-two, three hundred pounds? Red-haired, green eyes? Mole on her left cheek and scar across her right eye?”
Cope didn’t answer and Kurston took it as a positive ID. “She broke a few bones, fought with the next cops on the scene.”
“You go, Esther,” Cope said.
Kurston fell silent, stared at Cope. “You a cop hater, buddy?”
“I ain’t no such thing, but Guy was shaking her down and putting the hurt on her.”
“That’s what I heard,” Kurston said. “Well, it won’t happen anymore.”
“Too dead for that, I guess.”
“Both of them,” Kurston said.
“What?” Cope’s voice boomed, larger and more harsh than I’d ever heard it.
“For Guy, she got charged with capital murder. Killing a police officer in Texas, accident or not. Beyond that, they dug up the rest of her story.” He held up one finger. “One count of deceptive practices in Colorado.” A second finger shot up. “Three counts of fraud and impersonation in Oklahoma.” His ring and pinky fingers rose. “One count of embezzlement in Houston and one in Shreveport.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with trying to make a few bucks.”
My head spun. “What happened to her?”
“Took her jail uniform, tied one leg around her neck and the other around the bars in the cell door and sat down. Choked to death.”
Cope’s moan, a dirge, rose through the air. “Esther, Esther. What in hell y’all done? What in God’s name?” He sat heavily in the chair as tears stained his dark skin. When he looked at me, his eyes held the red lines of a boozer.
“She was a good woman, Kurston,” I said. “We only got away because of her. And she helped me—” I blushed, hated how easily my pale skin gave me away.
“Helped you what?”
“Helped me figure some things out. Whatever else she di
d, with us she was a good woman.”
“Maybe so, but there was some bad mixed up in there, too.”
“Ain’t there in ever’one?”
“True enough, Cope.” Kurston went to the old man. “Look, I know you’re not too comfortable with cops. Don’t know why, don’t care. What I do know is that you helped my son and for that, regardless of anything else, I’ll always be grateful. If Darcy says she was a good woman, that’s good enough for me. With one exception, he’s always been right about people.”
In spite of the sadness surrounding him like a summer rainstorm, Cope chuckled. “That exception being me, copper?”
I shook my head. “That exception being Fagan.”
“Ah,” Cope said. “The big ‘ol hippo in the living room.”
“The big ‘ol dead hippo in the living room.” I felt another pang of regret, but couldn’t tell what it was tethered to: Regret at having killed Fagan or at having connected with Fagan.
“Not quite as big as you might think,” Kurston said.
“What? How do you know that? Aren’t you off the case?”
Kurston shook his head and waved a hand, as though the answer meant nothing. “Bullshit politics.”
I snorted. “Tell me why—exactly—you’re off my case?”
A single eyebrow rose while a smirk reached across Kurston’s face. “Your case? This is your case now?”
“Isn’t it?”
“I thought it was the case of a murder in a tattoo shop.”
“Yeah. My murder.”
“Not your murder.”
I spun the silver ring on my pinky finger.
“Your great-grandfather owned it.”
Fagan’s words, maybe true and maybe crap. But I felt something when I wore the thing, the connection, however tenuous, to the Fagan family I had always wanted.
“Listen to me,” Kurston said to me. “This was not your murder.”
“I killed him.”
The air changed, suddenly thick with the smell of dirt and heat. Maybe the winds had shifted from the southeast, the direction of Barefield’s tiny little zoo.
“This is not your murder.”
I swallowed. “Maybe you should suck down more of those meds.”
“Because you don’t like what I’m telling you?”
“Because I don’t believe what you’re telling me. If I’ve learned anything since Fagan got here, it’s that I’m capable of killing.”
“Damnit, it’s not that I think you can’t, it’s that I know you didn’t.”
Kurston snarled and suddenly I was a ten-year-old boy again, getting yelled at for leaving my bike in the driveway. Suddenly I was an eleven-year-old boy, getting that same bike run over because I left it in the driveway one too many times. That sneer always managed to force me into childhood yet again, to force me to realize that my own father, my real father, would never have treated me this way.
Yeah, your real father got you drunk, got you inked, then got involved in something that left him dead and you holding the bag.
The bagged foot, actually.
“I did, too.” I went to that cooler, opened it, hauled out the foot. I held it aloft like a spoil from a particularly vicious war. “This is his foot.”
“It’s a foot, but not Fagan’s,” Kurston said. “He’s not dead.”
I held the foot out. “Can’t you see this? It’s right in front of your fucking eyes, for God’s—” I looked at Cope, whose face was already tightening at the blasphemy. “For crap’s sake.”
His knees creaking, his joints popping, Kurston stood and motioned us both back to Val’s office. In the corner, on a crappy little Kmart TV stand sat a mammoth TV/VCR combo. Kurston pulled a key from his pocket, unlocked the desk drawer, and withdrew a tape.
“I gave it to Val to hold,” he said, shoving the tape into the machine.
A few seconds later, the screen flickered, then burst into a grainy black and white life.
My stomach rolled forward nice and slow. “Holy shit.”
Andrews’ First National Bank.
The first bank on the list. I had visited it first after the murder, knew that Fagan had been there, but didn’t know what he’d asked the bank employees. Just like so many other banks, they remembered the man, but not his words. Hell, they couldn’t even remember exactly when he’d been in. But the tape told me exactly. Time-stamped in the corner was August 4. Three days before I got there.
“I was so close.”
The tape was from an outside security camera. Mid-morning and only a handful of people around. An older lady wearing a sweat suit and walking fast like this was her exercise for the day. A younger man with a hard-hat. Maybe construction, maybe working one of the oil rigs that dotted the west Texas landscape. A few more women, a few more men and—
Fagan.
Grainy and hard to see, looking heavier on the tape than in real life, but obviously Fagan, obviously my biological father.
Alive and well.
Alive and well days after the murder.
I fell back into the desk chair as I watched my father blast down the sidewalk, moving quickly and constantly craning his head, seeing everything.
Alive and hitting the banks on that list, looking for the safety deposit box.
His own safety deposit box.
I looked at Kurston. Kurston wasn’t watching the tape, wasn’t watching me or Cope. Instead, he stared at an empty spot on the wall.
“Why are you off the case?” I asked again.
Kurston pointed to the screen.
Fagan entered the bank and the seconds ticked past. Two minutes. Three. Five minutes. Seven minutes.
Kurston breathed heavily, tied his fingers together in knots.
“Kurston?” I said, pinching my own fingers into those same knots. “Why are you off the case?”
Eight minutes, forty-six seconds after going in, Fagan came out.
Kurston confronted him, coming from the bottom of the frame, as though he’d been waiting for the director’s cue to enter the picture. He stood face to face with Fagan. Fagan’s mouth moved a bit, but I couldn’t see Kurston’s.
Kurston’s hands and fingers jabbed the air, jabbed Fagan’s chest, threatened to jab his eye. Fagan bobbed and weaved but Kurston kept his feet moving, kept himself always in front of Fagan. Jabbed the air some more. Yelled until Fagan’s hands covered his head, until Fagan was actually physically slumped, looking for a way out.
Finally, in a single, slow motion move, one that I knew I would see over and over in my head like a porno loop, Kurston boxed both of Fagan’s ears. When Fagan stumbled backward, Kurston kneed the man’s balls. When he slumped forward, Kurston landed a hellacious uppercut to the man’s jaw.
Fagan’s legs wobbled, his arms went slack, and he fell slowly. Down to his knees, then to his ass. His head was back, his mouth open and a dark gray stain spreading over his mouth.
Then to the ground. Kurston stood over him, one foot planted on either side, waiting. Fagan never got up.
“Look like how y’all was standing over SuperCop,” Cope said. “When I came in, that’s exactly how it looked.”
Like step-father like son. I don’t have any of Kurston’s blood, but maybe I’ve got some chunks of that temper of his.
“I didn’t kill my father?”
“No.” Kurston shut off the tape.
“Then who did I kill?”
“Well, I’m not convinced you killed anybody.” Yet there was a spark of uncertainty in Kurston’s tone. “But there is a Secret Service man missing.”
“Secret Service?” a voice said. “Well, ain’t you the killer? Ain’t you just the killer man?”
An invisible hand grabbed my throat painfully. I knew the voice.
“You and I got a little date,” he said to Kurston. “But first I gotta know: Where the fuck are the plates?” He raised his gun, kept it on me.
“Who y’all?” Cope asked, his gaze back and forth between the tape and the man.
The man’s eyes gleamed. “That’s right, Blackie, I’m the sperm-donor.”
Fourteen Hours, Forty-Five Minutes Ago
Alive and well.
And holding a gun on me.
Was it the same .45 I had sucked on so many years ago?
“Man, this is fucked up,” Cope said.
“Ain’t that about the truth?” Fagan said. His hand squeezed the butt of the .45 over and over. The barrel skirted around a bit and a tiny grin played at the corner of his mouth, but it wasn’t the grin I’d seen in the strip clubs or in the bars when a blonde in fishnet stockings with tits hanging half out of her dress came through. This was different.
This was the Staind Skin grin, and it unnerved me.
“How’s my boy doing?” Fagan asked. “Guess it’s been a pretty wild few days.”
“Days? It’s been a god—” I looked at Cope, whose face flared. “A month since you drove up.”
Fagan shrugged. “Time flies when you’re dead. Where are my plates?”
It made sense, as suddenly as a crack whore might yank her knife and get to work.
Plates.
Petunia’s word. Petunia’s demand. The reason Petunia drove through a damned radio station. The reason Petunia shot up the bar’s parking lot. Also the reason all those delivery men—all named Phil—delivered Barefield Centennial plates all over the damned state, regardless of where I was.
Jefe Arabalo’s plates.
Secret Service only has a couple of jobs. Protecting the President, the Veep, their families, Senators and Congressmen, being a step or two behind the terrorists, etcetera etcetera.
And counterfeit bucks.
Maybe Staind Skin wasn’t just a tattoo parlor, wasn’t just a place where metalheads and biker boys and girls and mid-life yuppies got a taste of tequila and smelled the leather and talked about how cool they were. Maybe, like the church fronting a meth lab, Staind Skin was deeper than that. Drugs and whores and homebrew booze, sure.
But maybe a fucking bank, too.
Shit, no one had been there to get tattoos. They’d all been there for a card game. A card game with a fairly high buy-in. Call it $100,000 total. But a card game that also had something to do with printing plates.
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