Death at the Black Bull

by Frank Hayes

  “Yes,” Virgil said. “I need to speak to Micah.”

  “I’ll see if he’s inside. Do you want to come with me?”

  “No, we’ll wait here. Just tell him the sheriff wants to see him.”

  “I know who you are,” she said, looking directly at Virgil.

  “Wow!” Jimmy said again, as Virginia walked away. “This place is out of sight. And that girl . . .”

  “You’ve been here before.”

  “Only from the front of the house. On the driveway.”

  Virgil thought back to his first time. Here in this house, with a different girl. Long before the pool and the patio were put in, sitting with Rusty at the end of a long trail ride in this very same spot. The horses breathing a little harder while they watched the slanting light creeping over the hills.

  “Virgil.” Micah’s voice brought him back.

  He introduced Jimmy to Micah and told him of his plan, emphasizing that nothing would happen until Dave and Alex got there from Redbud.

  “This thing has more than a few moving parts. Some federal officers will be in the area shortly. If everything happens in sync, it will all be over tonight. Are they on the ranch now?”

  “Yes. I saw two of them earlier, but a third one has recently joined them. I’m sure the third one is around. I’ll point them out to your deputies and any agents with them.”

  “Good. Then I want you to get out of the way. I’m hoping they can be taken by surprise, but I don’t want any innocents in the line of fire. Keep Virginia in the house.”

  “Should we leave?”

  “No, because if you do, they might also. I want to get these guys. If there’s going to be any kind of confrontation, I’d rather it be here than in a populated area. Get in touch with the rest of the ranch crew. Send them off to areas on the ranch, ostensibly for work-related jobs so there are as few people around as possible.”

  “I’ll call down to the foreman as soon as I can to take care of that. You’re not going to be here, Virgil?”

  “No. Like I said, this thing has other moving parts. I’ll probably get back here later. In any event, I’ll be in constant contact with my guys or the other agents. Do these guys leave the ranch often?”

  “Not often. I’m pretty sure I’m their priority, especially since Buddy Hinton. The only place I’ve seen them off the ranch, before they started focusing on me, was at the Black Bull.”

  “That brings me to another question. That night that you met Wade, did he refuse your offer to pay back the money?”

  “No. It wasn’t his money. He was only a go-between. He had to check with the people who put up the money.”

  “How did he do that? I mean, how long did that take? To get an answer?”

  “I don’t think I understand. What do you mean?”

  “It was the night Buddy went missing. You met Wade at the Black Bull. You told him you could pay everything back, pay off the loan because business had gotten so much better than you expected . . . Right? Well, when did you find out you couldn’t get out of your deal with the devil?”

  “That night. A short time later.”

  “Did Wade call someone? How did he find out? Think, Micah. How exactly did that play out?”

  “I don’t know. I mean he left us, me and Buddy. I was standing out there on the road. He stopped by the truck, said something to Buddy, who stayed in the truck, then he went inside, into the Black Bull. He was in there awhile, maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes, then he came back out. He told me it wasn’t over. I remember his exact words. ‘They’ll tell you when you’re done.’”

  “Okay,” Virgil said.

  Jimmy saw Virgil’s jaw tighten. He saw that same darkness come into the man’s eyes.

  * * *

  Wade was seated at his desk, visible through the large glass window that looked out on the showroom. Virgil didn’t knock. He blew right past the salespeople in the showroom like they were made of stone.

  “You sleeping good these nights, are you, Wade?”

  Wade looked up from the papers on his desk.

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Well, I was thinking . . . Since you pretty much built this place on the dead body of your so-called best friend, that maybe that’d gnaw at you. Just a little. I mean, what does that feel like?”

  Wade rose to his feet, his face flushed, his knuckles whitening as they gripped the arms of the chair he’d been sitting in.

  “You son of a bitch half-breed. Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “I’m the son of a bitch half-breed who’s going to take you out of here in handcuffs. And enjoy every minute of it.”

  “Fuck you, Virgil.”

  Wade pulled out the drawer of his desk. Virgil saw the shine of metal come into his hand as he leaped across. A roar exploded in his ears. He felt blood streaming down his left cheek. Everything on the desk flew in all directions. They both crashed into the wall behind Wade’s desk. Framed pictures fell to the floor, their glass shattering. They fought for the gun. Virgil broke two of Wade’s fingers and the gun fell from his grasp, sliding out of reach. Virgil bashed Wade’s head against the wall, then started to pull himself to his feet by gripping the edge of his desk. Wade tried to rise with him, but Virgil punched him in the mouth with such force that his knuckles were ripped open from the contact with Wade’s teeth.

  Virgil stood up. He saw the audience of salespeople looking through the gaping hole in the huge window which had exploded as Wade’s bullet went through. Beyond them, he could see Kyle Harrison and a couple of agents running into the dealership.

  “You could have waited, Virgil.”

  Virgil sucked in a couple of long-overdue breaths as he wiped the blood dripping down his cheek with his sleeve. He looked at the swirl of debris, then at Wade being picked up and handcuffed by two other agents. Then at Kyle.

  “I know,” Virgil said, “but I didn’t want it to be clean. I owed Buddy and those two kids that much, at least.”

  Virgil followed Wade as he was led out of the building. While he stood outside, Kyle came over with a first aid kit.

  “You’re damned lucky. An inch to the left and you would have lost half your face. As it is, you’ll probably end up with a crease to match the one on the other cheek. By the way, I just checked with your deputy. Sounds like a good guy. They got those three thugs, so we’re just about done.”

  Virgil winced as an astringent was lightly dabbed over his wound.

  “This will tighten the skin and slow the bleeding. Before you head home tonight, stop at the ER in Hayward.”

  Virgil nodded. Then he left.

  * * *

  It was a little after six when he pulled into the parking lot of the Black Bull. The gravel in the lot sounded loud as it crunched beneath his feet. The soreness in his body, the ache in his head, they were all displaced by something else crowding his mind. He was only dimly aware of anything else now. The thud of his feet on the steps leading up to the porch, the noises that engulfed him as he went through the door. The people lined up at the bar, those dining at the tables in the restaurant areas, the servers bustling back and forth . . . It was all a tableau, but he was not part of it. He was detached. Invisible.

  “Hello, Sheriff,” a waitress said. “Can I help you?”

  He saw her reaction when she looked at his face. That’s all the answer the woman needed, as she nodded in the direction of the stairs. “She’s in the office.”

  He climbed the stairs, feeling a burden that grew heavier and heavier, until at last he reached the landing and stood before the office door. She was sitting at her desk. Even in the midst of her work, she was desirable. Without a word, he sat heavily into the chair opposite her. She looked up at that exact moment.

  “You look like you’ve had a really rough day.”

  “Yeah, and I don’t think i
t’s going to get any easier.”

  He laid his hat on the corner of her desk. She drew in a deep breath as she saw the left side of his face.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Wade Travis tried to shoot most of it off, but I spoiled his aim. The ER people at Hayward Memorial put it back together with a bunch of staples. They said it won’t be as noticeable when it heals as this other scar from the barbed wire fence.”

  “I always wondered about that, but never asked.”

  “You could have. A pissed-off bull threw me headfirst into some barb I’d just strung when I was about fourteen. I’ve hated wire ever since. But then, I guess we never spent a lot of time talking about our past. If it even matters . . .”

  Ruby pushed back a little from the desk. “What do you mean, if it even matters?”

  Virgil crossed his leg, took his Stetson off the desk, and laid it on his knee.

  “The other night when you came by,” he said, “I had just a moment when I wondered if what was happening was real or part of a dream. Then on the way here I remembered something Micah Hayward said to me, about life never turning out like you expected. I realized he was right. It wasn’t real, was it . . . this thing between you and me.”

  “What are you talking about, Virgil?”

  “You don’t have to say anything else. I think I pretty much got it figured out.”

  “Where . . . When . . .” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “When? Is that what you’re asking? Guess I’m not the brightest bulb in the pack, but all along there was a constant itch in the back of my mind. So now let’s start with Wade Travis, who I figured as the front man for some kind of south-of-the-border drug cartel. Until I came to find out it wasn’t drugs at all. It took a while for me to wrap my head around that notion, until everything finally came together. But still, that was all I had. Wade Travis.”

  Virgil shook his head, uncrossed his legs, winced a little, then set his hat in his lap while he fingered the brim.

  “I guess it all began to come together when Jimmy happened to mention old Bob and that beam that knocked him senseless, and how he put most of this place together before you came along. Then all of the pieces of the puzzle started to fit. You know how it is. You got a bunch of little parts, but you need that one thing to see how everything is related. How it all fits together. Well, Jimmy did that for me when he reminded me about how old Bob was distantly related to the Talbots. How he had no close kin and was sitting in some nursing home somewhere, trying to figure out how he got there. That got me thinking. Again, you know how it goes. One thought leads to another. Even though I didn’t want to go down that road.”

  Virgil stopped fingering the brim of his hat, once again crossed his legs, and perched the Stetson on his knee.

  “You don’t have to go there, Virgil.”

  He looked at her. She was as beautiful as ever, and he could reach across and touch her like he had so many times. Smell her sweet smell. Feel her soft skin.

  “Yeah, I’ve got to,” he said. “For both of us. When something dies, you can’t move forward until you bury it. I came to realize that whoever gave Micah the money to build that factory was going to keep an eye on that investment. That wasn’t Wade. I knew that. It all came together when Micah told me the night he tried to end his connection, Wade went into the Black Bull and came back later with the refusal. The Black Bull. The centerpiece of this whole puzzle. Everything came together. Old Bob, who was nobody’s father, Cesar telling me that your Mex was more fluent than your English. I heard it myself when you talked to the workers in the kitchen, but denied what my own ears heard.”

  He stopped. Their eyes locked.

  “It was you,” he said.

  “You don’t understand, Virgil. You don’t understand.”

  He shook his head, then put his hat on the edge of the desk and stood up. He walked around the edge of her desk, reached down, and pulled Ruby to her feet. He could feel her stiffen in his grasp. The ache to crush his lips into hers was overwhelming. He took a step back, but still held her.

  “You’re right. I don’t understand. Probably never will. Are you two different people? I mean, you oversaw, hell, maybe even okayed murder, traded in body parts. What kind of a person does that?”

  Ruby wrenched herself out of his hold. She stepped back to the opposite end of the desk.

  “Two people. Yes, I guess that could describe me. You want to know? I’ll tell you. My mother was a picker coming across the river with all the others. She ended up outside of Las Cruces in the arms of a rancher’s son who kicked her to the curb when she became pregnant. I was born there. She had no support, no way of making it on her own with me, so she went back. An uncle took her in, but she was broken. Broken at seventeen. Her dreams of a better life were shattered. Before I was five, she was dead of an overdose, and my uncle did the best he could with me. He saw that I got an education, but as I grew I came to realize I wasn’t like the other kids. My mixed race made me an object of contempt for some people. Racism doesn’t stop at the river, you know. But for other people it made me stand out. When he died, I got caught up in the life. I felt desired. Special. I didn’t realize I was looked on as just a commodity. When I finally did . . . Well, this was the only way out. They needed somebody over here, and I had something they could use. I was an American by birth and looked more like a gringo. I was intelligent and educated. They even had an English tutor for me. They told me they would set me up here. So I became a kind of broker between them and what Wade did. They said they would even let me stay here and eventually buy the Black Bull. That was probably all lies, but I wanted to believe it.”

  “Wait, go back. What Wade did? He was part of a system that harvested kidneys. Body parts that were sold to the highest bidder.”

  “When was the last time you walked across the bridge into Juárez, Virgil? It’s the third world over there. In some parts worse. These people that gave up a kidney got more for that than they’d earn in a year. So don’t get moralistic on me.”

  “That may be, but where does the morality come in when it comes to killing? Buddy Hinton and the two young kids who came here, just like your mother . . . They didn’t deserve to end up like they did. They had dreams, too. You sacrificed their lives for yours. Which you didn’t have to do. You could have come to me, but then, like I said, we never were real to begin with.”

  Ruby slumped back down into her chair. When she tried to speak, nothing came. Virgil finally turned and walked away. Before he reached the door, he heard her.

  “I had no choice. No choice.”

  He opened the door. Then he turned to face her.

  “There’s always a choice, Ruby. There are a couple of agents outside waiting for you. This is out of my hands now.”

  “Virgil, you have to believe me. This started off as one thing, me keeping tabs on you, but it became something else. We weren’t a dream. I swear. It was real.”

  Her words lingered long after he left the office and walked to his car.

  * * *

  Jimmy was waiting for him when he got to Hayward Ranch. Virgil could see how juiced he was from his experience, and he related it blow by blow. When he started to tell him the third time, Virgil said it was time to get back to the office. Micah asked if he should go with them, but Virgil said it wasn’t necessary. He would be questioned by federal agents to determine if there was any complicity on his part, or if any federal or state laws governing transit or money laundering had been broken.

  As Virgil turned away, a voice stopped him in his tracks.

  “Try to take better care of yourself, Sheriff. After all, we have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Virgil looked at the girl who had come to stand alongside Micah. He wanted to respond, but the words would not come to him. So he just nodded to Virginia, touched the brim of his Stetson, then got into his car.

/>   They rode in silence for a while.

  “Sorry, Sheriff,” Jimmy finally said.

  “No need to be.”

  “It’s just that I’ve never felt like this before. This was the first real serious police work I’ve actually been in the middle of and I . . . I mean . . .”

  “It’s okay. It’s the adrenaline flowing. It’s something you can talk about, but until you actually experience it . . . Well, let’s just say it’s nothing you can prepare for.”

  “Do you get used to it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Virgil, how did you know they weren’t smuggling drugs?”

  “Well, first, the dogs. They didn’t pick up on anything and they hardly ever miss. But the clincher was the ice cream truck. I knew the semis weren’t refrigerated, so whatever was in that small space had to be kept on ice. Maybe a combination of ice and dry ice. When it was unloaded, whatever it was had to go into refrigeration right away. Kinda sad to think that giving up a kidney can make the kind of money that tops drug running, but I guess if you’re desperate enough you’ll pay a lot for something that’s going to give you a second chance at life.”

  The rest of the trip into Hayward was pretty quiet. Virgil pulled into the parking lot. All of the lights were on. When they stepped inside, Virgil saw that all the deputies, some of the agents, and Rosie were there. There was a shout of greeting and then they were engulfed. Kyle Harrison pulled Virgil aside.

  “Good day’s work, Virgil. Your instincts made it happen. I think you can expect some federal job offers coming your way. This was big. Real big.”

  Virgil watched for a few minutes as people intermingled, telling war stories to one another. He was trying to make his way to the door when Jimmy waylaid him with one more question.

  “Virgil, that girl Virginia . . . When you walked in and she saw what had happened to your face, and she said you’d better take better care of yourself because you have a lot of catching up to do. What did she mean by that?”

  A slight hint of a smile showed at the corners of Virgil’s mouth.