I slammed his gun hand, bowled him backward. We tripped over Petunia and fell back down the stairs. My gun skittered away when we smashed hard on the ground.
“Let the fuck go of me,” Fagan said. His voice was high, piercing, slicing my ears open.
“You are my father.” A mantra now, repeated over and over and I wasn’t sure who I was trying to convince. Maybe myself, maybe Fagan. Maybe the entire world. “Say it. Say it.”
“Fuck off.”
“Say it.”
Fagan’s fist came up, hard and fast, connected with my jaw. My head snapped back, my vision filled with gold and orange flecks. I lost hold of Fagan, but rather than backing away, Fagan charged forward, drove his head into my chest.
I banged my head against the lawn. Fagan leaped off the stairs, landed on my chest, one leg to either side. Then a chorus of fists, left right, left right, to my face, to my chest and gut, to my arms and legs.
I tried to turn, to curl into a ball, tried to cover myself, tried to ignore the tears on my cheeks.
“I ain’t your daddy.” Spit and blood filled the air between us. “Gimme the plates and the money.”
The man kept pounding, his fists long since transformed into bricks, into hardened mortar. Pain, like red hot piano wires coursing through my veins, was everywhere.
This is how you die. Not a bullet to the head, not the electric chair for murder. You die beaten to death by your sperm-donor.
Who then kills your father.
My head snapped around as I furiously tried to find Kurston. Still on the porch, still taped to the chair, but conscious now, his head slamming side to side as he tried to free himself.
And Fagan, his face bloody and somehow battered though I hadn’t believed I’d landed any punches, jumped off me and reached for my gun.
I twisted and tried to stop him by going for the gun myself. Fagan’s own foot snapped the gun backward, closer to me than to himself as he ran toward Kurston.
When I got to the pistol, it slipped from my bloody fingers, plopped to the grass. Again and again, like it didn’t want to be held, didn’t want to be aimed and fired. Then somehow it was in my hand. A round in the chamber, the slide racked, ready to shoot.
“I need the money, Darcy.” He was on one knee over one of Petunia’s guns. His hand hovered a few inches above it. “I need the plates.”
“Do something stupid and you’ll never see either of them.”
The man’s voice was gone, pure hysteria. “Please, I got nothing left.”
“Yeah? How much do you think I had when you left me?”
“It was thirty years ago and it wasn’t even me.”
“Four weeks ago, Daddy. When Petunia chopped the guy up. You ran. You left me in that room.”
“Give me the fucking money.”
“She should have been wrong,” I said.
Fagan went for the gun but I calmly squeezed the trigger. It was being left behind, it was being lied to, being babysat with a .45. It was every moment of every day for an entire lifetime, wasted on wanting something that could never be and probably never was in the first place.
“I just needed—”
When the gun exploded, when the bullet tore through the barrel, trailing burning powder behind it, there was nothing else.
The top and side of Fagan’s head burst in a summer rainstorm of red. He fell backward against the house, left a blood-soaked head print, and slumped to the porch, one foot twisted sideways, the other hidden beneath his calf.
I sat, my face wet—maybe blood and maybe tears but probably both—and rubbed the tattoo on my back.
Fagan.
Blood it out.
Twelve Minutes Ago
“I went kill crazy, Cope.”
“Yeah, y’all did do that.”
“I could have stopped it.” I freed Kurston from the tape and sat him upright.
“Couldn’t’a stopped nothing. This started when y’all’s ol’ daddy left. Ain’t no way y’all could’a stopped it today.”
Kurston grimaced, though the wound didn’t seem all that bad. Shot through and through on his thigh. “Oh, son of a bitch, that hurts.”
“Thought you said you’d seen tougher in juvie lockup.” I wiped the blood from his eyes.
“Ooowww, shit. Total lie.”
“Y’all sure tough as nails.”
“We’ve got a few decisions to make real quick,” Kurston said. “You know they’re coming quick. Petunia managed to get them across town again...probably some kind of call about me and you and I don’t know what all. But they’ll get ass here pretty quick on a shots fired call.”
My eyes flicked toward my dead father. Flies had already found him. The heavy black pregnant-looking sons of bitches, strolled in and out his nose, and I didn’t feel dick.
I killed him. Absolutely killed him. And I don’t care.
Blood it out.
That would never happen. The blood was here forever. Which meant I was probably the monster Mama always thought Fagan to be. The blood ran hot, like it wasn’t blood at all but acid. It scorched my veins, oxygenated my body with endless toxicity.
“Blind bad luck, man,” Cope said. “Blind fucking bad luck.” He pulled the two last rings from his pinky fingers, handed one to Kurston.
“What’s this?” Kurston asked.
“You’ve made a decision, haven’t you? You’ve been giving them away since we left the church.”
Cope shook his head. “Y’all always too smart for y’all’s own good, White-Boy Darcy.” He handed the last ring to me. “Most of them were my daddy’s. These two were my mama’s. They were good, a little fucked up, but good people.”
Then he held his wrists out for Kurston. “Y’all a helluva man. I’m glad I got to know y’all a little. Snap it up, Five-O.”
“What?”
“Time to be done.”
It had been coming, as obvious as the truck running down Bassi at Johnny’s Barbecue. Cope had been working his way up to it, getting himself in the right frame of mind, giving away his rings. I suspected that his telling of the killing helped put him here.
“Cope, you don’t have to do this,” Kurston said.
“‘S my time.” His deep breath was, maybe, the last free breath he would ever have.
“Cope,” I said. “I don’t know what—”
“Don’t say nothing. Y’all got me where I needed to be.”
“Maybe you can get some peace now,” Kurston said.
“Mayhap.”
“I’m pretty sure I love you,” I said. I went to him, kissed his cheek, hugged him. “I think maybe you saved me.”
“Not me, Monea.”
“The whore?” Kurston asked.
“God.” Cope blew a hot breath. Dust danced on the air current. “This get y’all outta that suspension? Catching a big time crook like me?”
With a quiet laugh, Kurston nodded. “Probably shouldn’t ’cause I stank the shit outta this case, but yeah, the chief knows good press when it falls into his lap. I’ll be fine.” He looked around. “Shit, we’ve got a mess. Two bodies. Two dead suspects. One man in custody.”
“Who’s gonna catch this call?” I asked. “Irwin?”
Kurston laughed. “The cop with three names. Yeah, he’ll get it. He’ll love this mess.”
“What about me? I’ve got some stink going, too.”
“Yeah, you do.” He said nothing else.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
Kurston ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “I know.”
“It was never supposed to be like this.”
“I know.”
“I really fucked this up, didn’t I?”
“Maybe not one of your best decisions, Darcy.”
“All I wanted—” I stopped, angry at the tears in my eyes. I slapped at them. Didn’t want them staining my cheeks. “I wanted to know him. Now I’m sorry I met him.”
“You didn’t.”
Somethi
ng inside me tightened.
“That wasn’t Joseph Fagan,” he said.
I traced an aimless line in the dirt on the window. “He said that. Didn’t believe him, but yeah, I think I knew that.”
Kurston said, “Haley Fagan. First cousin. Looks pretty close.”
“My father never came back for me.”
“Darcy, listen to me. Your father was a fuckhead. A liar, a thief, and a bad con man. But he loved you.”
The man’s eyes, so often cold blue while I was growing up, weren’t as blue, weren’t as cold. It struck me like a punch to the balls. “How do you know that?”
“Two years after Fagan left, your mother and me were already married. I popped him for hanging paper out at JCPenny.”
The two fathers had talked. For hours. Kurston had stayed with him through booking and they sat in a holding cell until daylight. “He lied about everything he said, except that. Must’ve said a thousand times he loved you.”
“Yet he never came back.”
“Hard to come back when you’re dead.”
I wasn’t surprised. Somehow, I’d known it for years. He wasn’t the kind of guy to grow old. Which meant that the tiny moment I had lived for, that moment of glory when son met father, was done before it began. “How?”
“Shot trying to hold up a bar in New Mexico. September, 1974.”
“Just before the money ended.” The money he’d been sending to Hopper. The last entry was August, 1974. “How long have you known?”
“A couple of hours. Irwin called me about it. Finally got an AFIS match on Haley Fagan’s prints from Staind Skin. Regional lab’s a little behind.”
“I guess.” I nodded, unsure what to feel. Obviously, the man had been in debt, owed some heavy green. Obviously, he’d known something about Fagan’s deposit box. But the rest, the radio stations and where the box was and Fagan’s birthday and all the rest of it, were bullshit to him.
From down the block, the whine of an engine.
“Here we go,” Kurston said. “A uniform. We’ll get this show on the road.”
But it wasn’t a cruiser, wasn’t a uniform or some Barefield PD brass. It was the freight delivery truck. It stopped and the man bounded out, cigarette hanging from his lips, Phil stitched across the left tit. The .357 floated between us.
“I dug all them plates at Johnny’s,” Cope said. “Getting us some more?”
“Taking them this time.” He motioned me to Kurston’s car. “Open the trunk.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Open. The. Trunk.”
“With what?”
The roar of the gun damn near made me piss my pants. The trunk popped open, a giant hole in the metal. “Put the plates in my truck. Now.”
“What are you talking—”
Phil fired again.
Cope crumpled, his face gone.
“Shitshitshitshit.” I ran to the car, wrenched the trunk all the way open. I didn’t want to see the plates buried beneath blankets in Kurston’s car. “Don’t shoot anymore.”
“How’d you know?” Kurston asked.
“Shut up.”
“Hey,” an old man called from across the street. “What the shit is going on out here with all this noise? I’m trying to take a crap. Damnit, Kurston, why is it always your place—”
Absently, casually, Phil fired through old Mr. Peart’s front window. The glass shattered and sent him flying back inside with a yelp.
“Oh, God,” I said. It was beyond all control now, beyond sanity and rationality and any others limits.
“Get. The. Plates.”
“Dad?” I moved the plates one by one, playing for time, praying some PD will drive quietly around the corner rather than blast down the street, lights and siren splitting the morning air.
“Tattoo artist was the seller. Had them in the ceiling. It’s where he put the hundred grand, too.”
The green confetti. When the gunfire started, some of the bullets had gone through the ceiling. Must have shot the money to pieces.
“I found them two days ago. Me and Irwin.”
“One plate is one bullet, asshole,” Phil said. “Get them all. Get them now. Get them on that truck.”
“Hang tight, Fed,” I said. “I got them.” I moved quick, trying not to drop any. I sat them on the floor, in the blanket Kurston had them wrapped in, and jumped off the truck.
“That all you need?” I asked. “Can you leave us alone now?”
The man said nothing. His face twitched, his eyes up and down the street somehow without his head moving much at all.
At that moment, I knew. “Dad, I just wanted some more ice cream.”
Kurston frowned, puzzled. “What?”
“I love you,” I blurted.
“And I love—”
But Phil fired, cutting off Kurston’s words. Then Phil turned toward me. And I was damned sure I heard the bullet, heard the twist and turn, heard it tear through my skull.
Now
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Eric Campbell and Sandra Loper-Herzog for thoughts and ideas.
Musical thanks (during the writing): Joe Ely, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Dwight Yoakum; (during editing) Metallica, and Rush.
And to the writers who listened or read: Craig Johnson, Lori Armstrong, Tom Picirrilli, Sean Doolittle.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Trey R. Barker's varied past has included writing for magazines, radio, and television as a journalist; a couple years as a karaoke salesman; a stint as a pizza cook; and 8 1/2 hours as a doll assembler. His fiction, running the gamut from crime to mystery to horror to science fiction and western, has been seen a great many places. His most recent books include 2,000 Miles To Open Road (ebook edition), Road Gig (ebook edition), Remembrance and Regrets, and The Cancer Chronicles. He is currently a deputy sheriff in northern Illinois, where he lives with three Canine-Americans, while banging on his drums or taking photographs.
http://www.treyrbarker.com/
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Other Books by Down and Out Books
By J.L. Abramo
Catching Water in a Net
Clutching at Straws
Counting to Infinity
Gravesend
Chasing Charlie Chan (*)
By Trey R. Barker
2,000 Miles to Open Road
Road Gig: A Novella
Exit Blood
By Richard Barre
The Innocents
Bearing Secrets
Christmas Stories
The Ghosts of Morning
Blackheart Highway
Burning Moon
Echo Bay (*)
Lost (*)
By Milton T. Burton
Texas Noir
By Reed Farrel Coleman
The Brooklyn Rules
By Tom Crowley
Viper’s Tail (*)
By Frank De Blase
Pine Box for a Pin-Up (*)
By Jack Getze
Big Numbers (*)
Big Money (*)
Big Mojo (*)
By Keith Gilman
Bad Habits (*)
By Don Herron
Willeford (*)
By Terry Holland
An Ice Cold Paradise
Chicago Shiver
By Jon Jordan
Interrogations
By Jon & Ruth Jordan (editors)
Murder and Mayhem in Muskego
By David Housewright & Renee Valois
The Devil and the Diva
By David Housewright
Finders Keepers
By Jon Jordan
Interrogations
By Bill Moody
Czechmate: The Spy Who Played Jazz
The Man in Red Square
Solo Hand (*)
The Death of a Tenor Man (*)
The Sound of the Trumpet (*)
Bird Lives! (*)
By Gary Phillips
The Perpetrators
>
Scoundrels: Tales of Greed, Murder and Financial Crimes (editor)
By Lono Waiwaiole
Wiley's Lament
Wiley's Shuffle
Wiley's Refrain
Dark Paradise
(*) Coming soon
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Here’s a sample from Bill Moody’s The Man in Red Square.
Prelude
At first glance there was nothing to distinguish the slightly built man, body thickened by a heavy parka, standing opposite the Lenin Mausoleum. A look, a nervous gesture, a tell-tale tic behind the wire-framed aviator sunglasses, none of these would have been evident to the casual observer. It’s difficult to recognize a man poised, however reluctantly, on the brink of his own destiny.
He’d been standing there for nearly an hour, squinting into the glare of an unseasonal sun that had briefly thawed Moscow and brought its bewildered and confused citizens out in droves to bask in the unexpected mid-winter warmth.
A lot of the snow had melted, still scattered about Red Square, thick jagged patches remained, like a chain of white islands stretched from the dark, red stone walls of the Kremlin to the incongruous onion-like domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral.
The icy wind blowing off the Moskva River swirled briefly about the Kremlin towers and whipped across the square towards the GUM Department Store, stinging the faces of lunch time shoppers scurrying in and out of its ornate facade.
Was it an omen perhaps, this freakish weather? Nature bestowing her approval? He couldn’t decide. He only knew the earlier confidence and assurance had deserted him now, vanished like the puffs of his own breath in the wind, leaving him with only a cold knot of indecision clawing at the pit of his stomach.
It wasn’t going to work. He was sure of it.
But even now, as his mind flirted with abandoning the whole idea, playing with the notion like a child with a favorite toy, he could feel several pairs of eyes, watching, recording his every move, tracking each step. There was no turning back now. One step and he would set in motion a chain of events from which there was no retreat.
Exit Blood (Barefield Book 2) Page 26