Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2)

by Trey R. Barker

  “Right, the one gone missing.” Cope licked his teeth. “The one y’all coulda asked Fagan about if y’all ain’t’a walked out.”

  “Hopper’ll know what’s what.” In all the bullshit, we’d missed the connection with Hopper at Johnny’s. “He should be at work. If he’s not dead.”

  Cope looked surprised. “Uh...wasn’t we gonna meet him earlier?”

  “Yeah, but he was a heavy smokehound. Might’a gotten smoked and stepped in front of a bus or something. Could be dead.

  Cope shook his head as I climbed into the sidecar. “I don’t be understanding about half the shit comes outta y’all’s mouth.”

  Ten Hours, Seven Minutes Ago

  KCEK

  Barefield, Texas

  “You’re not dead, I guess.”

  Hopper coughed, snorted up a huge mouthful of phlegm, spit it into his empty soda can. “Alas, no such fucking luck.”

  “As much ganja as you smoke.”

  “Trying not to do the sacred herb no more, my young friend.”

  “Were getting friendly with heroin, if I remember correctly.”

  Hopper took a deep breath. “That is definitely some bad shit. Damn near left me dead more than once. Got rid of it. Got some new vices.”

  I stood in the doorway of the sound booth. “‘All The Way Right’ being one of those vices?”

  “The electricity bill waits for no man. Gotta work.”

  He didn’t sign on the air until the syndicated talk show ended, but Hopper was busy gathering four hours of music and stacking it all next to his two pound bag of cashews and unopened two-liter of Pibb. He’d go live and local for those four hours, then switch back to the network for news and talk.

  “Sooo...no dope?” Cope asked. “Damn, I was looking to get me a spliff or two.”

  Hopper nodded. “I like the black man, Darcy. You and he lovers?”

  Cope laughed. “He ain’t my type.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, don’t know if y’all noticed or not, but he’s...well...stupid.”

  Hopper laughed, the tiny, squeaky sound of a puppy’s yip. “What do you want?”

  “Can’t we be a little more sociable? I haven’t seen you in a while. Thought we might catch up.”

  “You call me to come see you at Johnny’s. I get there and the place is on lock down because, apparently, there was some sort of shoot out and a truck on fire that no one can seem to find. I don’t hear from you at all about that, and I’m thinking maybe you were setting me up to get rubbed out over some perceived slight, and now suddenly you show up on my radio doorstep. What do you want? I’ve got a show in...like...thirty seconds.”

  I glanced at the wall clock. “Ten minutes, thirty seconds until air. You digging this format? Wouldn’t have thought you’d shill for these guys.”

  “AM bullshit, man,” Hopper said. “Fascist political bullshit interspersed with music for old fogies to die by. They rant about terrorists and liberals and porous borders and spics and heebs and towelheads and nig—Excuse me, black man, I apologize for that.”

  Cope shrugged. “Yeah, ’cause I ain’t never heard that word before.”

  “Well, I don’t want you thinking I’m a racist.”

  “Y’all offer me a smoke if y’all gotta blunt?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Y’all offer me some leg if y’all gotta paid-for chick?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good enough for me.”

  Hopper laughed. “I do like the black man, Darcy. What the hell is he doing with you?”

  “Trying to save my soul.”

  “Well, everyone should have a goal, I guess,” Hopper said. He held up a CD. “Mantovani and bullshit covers of the Beatles and Doors so they can hum while their arteries harden and their hearts stop.”

  “Yeah,” Cope said. “That music is kinda...pussy.”

  “A big, hairy twat, eating everything it sees.” Hopper popped the cap on the Pibb and took a healthy swig. Then he plopped himself at the sound board and spun the chair until he faced me squarely. “What’choo want?”

  “I think you’ve got something of mine.” I licked my lips. All in reach now, it seemed. The pendant, the apology, the boogie-ing on outta town.

  “What’s that?”

  “Come on, Hopper, don’t fuck with me. I need that pendant.”

  His single eyebrow, a long, thick line of wiry hair snaking from one temple to the other, bent in the middle of his face when he frowned. “Uh...fill me in a little, Darcy, I’m hanging lost out here.”

  “It’s not mine, Hopper. The pendant. It belongs to—Doesn’t matter. Fagan stole it and brought it to you. I have to get it back.”

  “Fagan? I thought he was dead. From years ago. I have no idea what you’re talking about, Darcy. I don’t have any necklace.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  Hopper banged his hand against the sound desk. “Suck my crank, calling me a liar.”

  “Son of a bitch. You already fenced it, didn’t you?”

  Hopper flipped a hearty bird at me. “Again, I invite you to suck my rod. Strictly legit these days.”

  “The ganja notwithstanding.”

  “That’s different. That’s civil disobedience. Different than being a criminal.”

  I snorted. “Come on, Hopper, that’s crap and you know it.”

  “Yeah, that’s crap, you know it all, don’t you?” His eyes blazed. “How about this? How about I haven’t done anything remotely like fencing stolen shit since sucking down a year in the Zachary County crossbar hotel...courtesy of your father, don’t forget.”

  “A year long enough for you?”

  “Getting slammed against the wall and assfucked every other night was enough for me.”

  On air, the syndicated show—a retrospective of Lawrence Welk’s entire career—began to wind down. Hopper spun himself around, slammed the headphones on and savagely opened the mic. The red light On-Air blasted the sound booth, casting everything in a bloody skein.

  “KCEK,” Hopper said, his voice suddenly low and comforting, like a grandfather’s.

  Not naturally low. It had been pretty high-pitched when Hopper started in the biz. He used to walk the halls before his shows, trying to lower it. He’d grab a high note and slide down to a bass rumble, sounding more like an English cop’s broken siren than anything else. Over and over, “Yeeeuuuhhhhh, yeeeuuuhhhh, yeeeuuuhhhh.”

  Not anymore. No more of the boyish squeak. Now his on-air voice was deep and authoritative, soothing, and gentle. Advertisers paid damned good money to get that voice on their commercials.

  “At two a.m., this is KCEK, Barefield,” he said. “All The Way Right and righteous. Stay with us for the next few hours as we bring you the music of your life. Join us at six for the latest news updates and analysis, as well as the very best in talk radio.”

  He left the mic open and punched up a tune on the first of three CD players banked just in front of him. “And now some Duke Ellington. ‘In A Sentimental Mood.’”

  The red light and the mic snapped off.

  “Hip enough for fascist,” Cope said.

  “Sometimes, I manage to get in some Stan Getz, too.” Hopper nodded, ate a handful of cashews. His wiry brows relaxed and tensed two or three times, as though he were carefully choosing his next words. “Listen, Darcy, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any necklace. Fagan didn’t bring me anything, didn’t ask me to fence anything. He hasn’t sent me anything in twenty-five years and I haven’t heard from him in twenty. Like I said, I thought he was dead.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And I gotta say, I’m more than a little bent. You come storming in here, blowing fire and accusing me of selling some stolen whatever it is. You haven’t even been to see me in...what...ten or eleven years or something.”

  “I know, but this—”

  “I used to babysit you, you snot-nosed brat. I wiped your ass and I was there when you were
born, right in that fucking hospital with Fagan.”

  I clenched my fists. “Don’t talk to me about Fagan. He walked out on me. I don’t care if he was at the hospital, he left me.”

  Hopper nodded. “Yeah, he did, left you sure as shit. But he was in trouble, Darcy. He didn’t know how to have a baby. Hell, he barely knew how to fuck to make a baby, from what your mama told me.” He chuckled. “Sloppy and messy, jamming it in the wrong—”

  “Whooooaaaa,” Cope said. “Y’all ain’t gotta be telling us that.”

  “Here’s the point, Darcy, he didn’t just—”

  The Ellington wound down and Hopper faded into Chet Baker. The man’s lush trumpet filled the sound booth.

  “He didn’t just leave. Not like that. He didn’t walk out and go on to the next chick. It killed him to leave, but he didn’t have any choice. He loved you, man, but he had no job, no money, a bad addic—”

  “He worked here.”

  “Yeah, at one point. But he got his ass fired. Snarking equipment out the back door, selling it.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause of that monster addiction.”

  Except for the jazz, the room was silent.

  “White rabbit.”

  “Rabbit?” Hopper frowned. “What’re you, Jefferson Airplane’s number one fan?”

  “I meant drugs,” I said.

  “I know what you meant. He did his share of rabbit killing, but that’s not where the big trouble was.”

  “Gambling,” I said after a moment’s hesitation.

  “It was killing him. Always laying greenbacks down. Day and night, on anything. Hell, he and I used to bet on how many cars would get through green lights.”

  The great family secret. Except it wasn’t as secret as the family would have preferred. Fagan’s father, along with all six of Fagan’s uncles, each gambling most of their lives away. It had infected Fagan, too, and was the seed of most of the nasty stories my mama’s family told.

  “That blood of yours,” Hopper said. “Man, it was fucked for a good long while. Your daddy had it, your granddaddy had it. Hell, damn near all the men did. Lots of the women, too, Fagan told me. Uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews. Fagan caught his niece Carol Anne once laying bucks down on which Barefield High School football players would break a leg.”

  “She was the team manager.”

  “Yup. Who knows how many times she called her bookie.”

  Cope whistled, munched on some of Hopper’s cashews. “Good thing he walked out on them, huh?”

  I turned away from them, stared at the wall, at the list of public service announcements currently in rotation, at the color-coded disks of commercials, at the network download schedule, at the jockey rotation.

  It wasn’t good that he walked out. Even if he saved himself from his gambling nut, it was bullshit for me. He walked out. He left his son hanging in a fog of doubt and demons for his entire life.

  “Call it a gift, man,” Hopper said. “He never called it that, he just cried. But if he’d stayed, you’d have the bug, too.”

  “No, Mama would have stopped it.”

  Hopper’s face went slack, empty. His eyes darted to the clock, to the sound board, to the pile of CDs. “Sure,” he said, his voice flat, as empty as his face.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I don’t have whatever pendant you’re—”

  “Mama would have stopped it,” I said, more forcefully.

  “Whatever you say, my young friend.”

  “She would have. She wouldn’t have let it happen to me.”

  Hopper put his finger on the mic switch. “She couldn’t have done anything, Darcy, she was infected, too.”

  Then the mic was on, the red light blaring in the small booth, Hopper busy at his gig.

  Mama gambling? Mama doing the same bullshit Fagan had been? God, I’d love to say it was crap, bogus. But hadn’t I seen it? A small bet every once in a while, Dallas Cowboys here, Houston Astros there, Barefield High School here, Barefield Community College there. Five bucks, ten bucks, never more than twenty, and not very often.

  But only sometimes. Just for grins, for laughs, maybe a pitcher of beer.

  The red light popped off.

  “She bet, Darcy,” Hopper said. “But she was a good woman. She saved your ass as best she could.”

  “What does that mean? She was a saint.”

  “Hardly, but she was good enough. And she saved you by marrying Kurston. Stable and decent. He’s a good man and he kept your ass mostly straight, didn’t he?”

  “Arrested me...like...five times. Six times.”

  “Minor shit,” Hopper said. “At least I only ever heard about minor stuff.”

  “You heard about it?”

  “Every station I’ve ever worked gets the police blotter, Darcy. And I hear things. Yeah, he popped you but for what? Disorderly conduct. Public drunkenness. Pissing in the street.”

  “How’ya doing, Mr. Capone?” Cope laughed. “Y’all hardcore, White-Boy.”

  “He figured if he hit you hard on the little stuff, you’d never get to the big stuff.”

  I shook my head. “He didn’t do anything for—”

  “Bullshit, man.” Hopper snorted. “Open your fucking eyes. Your daddy’s family called for you all the time. Wanted to ship your ass back to New Mexico.”

  The ground shifted, maybe slid north or south, or maybe just tilted. They had wanted me, someone with the same blood as his wanted me, needed me to be part of the family, of the clan.

  “Get that fucking look off your face, Darcy. They were trash. White trash in the worst way. Fucking traveled like a bunch’a carnies, ripping people off, barely ahead of the cops.”

  “That’s crap.”

  But it wasn’t, was it? Hopper’s words were all the stories Mama had told, that Grandma had gleefully told, cackling while her beloved Shostakovich symphonies boomed in the background. More to the point, the jock’s words were the stories Kurston had never told. Kurston had never said a single bad thing about Fagan until last night.

  “Ain’t sounding like crap to me,” Cope said.

  “Your mother loved you. So did—does—Kurston.”

  I turned to Cope. “Remember? In town for a game.”

  “Twenty to enter.” Cope nodded, ate more of Hopper’s cashews.

  “He came by, Hopper,” I said. “A few weeks ago. Came to see me.”

  “I figured. You say he brought me something and I didn’t even know he was in town. That’s some gratitude, ain’t it?”

  Cope shook his head. “Y’all go to jail for a guy, y’all expect a thank you, maybe a beer or two.”

  “Well, that one’s partially on my credit card. He did the stealing, but I did the fencing. I do the fuck up, I’ll do the time.”

  “You did something else for him.”

  Without a word, Hopper rubbed his face, a tired old man who only wanted to play his music. The smoothness of his face was gone, made jagged by the years, by the dope and alcohol. From his wallet, he pulled a dollar bill, bits of paper, receipts, two condoms.

  “Got quite the pile of shit in there,” I said.

  “But not what I’m looking for.” His lips pressed tightly together. “He asked me for a favor...an on-going favor. You tell him, when you see him again, I did it. Every month until the money ran out.”

  From a plastic credit card sleeve, he pulled a key. When he held it up for me, I almost expected it to wink in the dim studio light.

  “His deposit box.”

  “Tha’ss it, right there,” Cope said. “Magic key...key to the Kingdom or some shit.” He pulled a ring from his finger and handed it to Hopper.

  “The fuck is this for?” Hopper asked.

  “’Cause y’all a good man and a good man ought to have it. Came from a good man...going to a good man.”

  “From you to me?” Hopper asked.

  “Shit,” Cope said. “Y’all the only good man in that equation. Naw, came from somebody else
.”

  “Who?”

  But Cope didn’t answer. Instead, he grabbed the key, stuffed it in my hip pocket, and walked out of the control booth.

  Nine Hours, Thirty-Four Minutes Ago

  A park

  Barefield, Texas

  Barefield National, Hopper had said.

  “Box 1016—”

  “45,” I had finished.

  “Bank’ll be open in a few hours.”

  “Yeah,” Cope said. “But y’all know that pendant ain’t in that box. Y’all known it since day one.”

  “Yeah.”

  Barefield was quiet, quieter than I would have imagined. The moon hung gently over the far rim of town, a single, pale eye. There was a Neville Brothers song about a yellow moon watching everything, but I couldn’t remember it exactly, just the part where the singer asked the moon to tell him what was going on.

  “He’s got some cash in that box, doesn’t he?”

  “Sounds like,” Cope asked. “But y’all got something else to worry about right now.”

  “The pendant.”

  “Man, fuck that pendant, okay? Been talking about that pendant like it’s the second coming of Christ.”

  “Blaspheme.”

  “I’m gonna kick me some white boy ass, he don’t back that mouth up.” Cope’s words hung heavy in the air.

  “Sorry.” I cleared my throat. “What do I need to worry about?”

  “Y’all got two things: One’s y’all’s soul, the other’s y’all’s body.”

  “This is where you do God’s duty? Save my soul, make me righteous, like God told you to do?”

  I paced around the picnic table where we sat. The park was quiet, filled with nothing at this hour. The street lights were fairly gentle, casting a blue-white over the park, softening the shadows, dulling the edges.

  “Again, y’all got that center of the universe thing going on. God ain’t told me to save your soul. She could give a shit whose soul I save. She just wants me to save a soul.”

  Cope stared into the sky, but it didn’t look as though he was gazing toward his Heaven or his God. He was just staring, maybe into his own self and his eyes just happened to fix outward. “Wants me to save my own soul.”