Lone Star Noir

by Bobby Byrd

  I rose and walked out of the house into the August earlyevening heat to get away from her gaunt face and accusing eyes. I walked for hours through the neighborhood, darkness finally coming around eight p.m. and sleep barely coming at all.

  Going to work was a comfort the next day—just as it had been for the last twenty-odd years. The bins of nails reflecting the morning light cleanly, as if they’d never bite wood. The tree trimmer blades shining like crescent moons above the Pacific all those years back.

  Linehan came in, but this morning he was excited and talking fast. “We got a great one last night. The body chopped up into so many pieces it looked like an explosion at a sausage factory.”

  My face went numb. It couldn’t be. He was dead—I’d read it in the morning paper.

  “The guy is one angry son of a bitch. He went to town—hacked off everything, even the nose.”

  I didn’t want to ask it, but I’d asked every other time: “What kind of weapon?”

  “Probably a hatchet, or a cleaver.”

  At lunch I walked home. Rosalie would be sleeping, but I didn’t intend to talk to her or Monty. I pulled my key ring out of my pocket and unlocked the side door to the garage. I flipped the light on, and looked for the first time in many weeks at my beloved tools. On the pegboard, they rested on metal supports, just as I’d left them, except for one. Except for the one I figured would be missing—the hatchet.

  A small sound behind me caught my attention. I turned and saw Monty, fresh from the shower, hair glistening wet as he stepped inside the narrow room.

  He looked me directly in the eye. As always, his pupils were too dark to read meaning there. In his right hand, he carried my small hatchet.

  “I’ve cleaned and oiled your hatchet, and I’ve brought it back.” He lifted it to its resting place, the keen blade beautiful against the brown pegboard. “I told Dave he should take the toaster to Southland’s because it’s the best for repairs. You did your best on it, didn’t you?”

  His eyes never left my face and the small bit of stoniness I’d seen in them earlier this summer had taken over completely.

  “You know, Dave taught me to appreciate tools. How to keep them perfect. How to use them and how to clean them. He taught me a lot, actually. Now, you’re going to continue teaching me. Daddy, you know how.”

  “How did you get a key for my tool room?”

  “Mom gave it to me. She knew I needed a particular kind of quiet place.” He smiled with the hardness of a man who knows his business.

  “What growed you up?”

  “Mr. Nichols taught me how to follow them at night and pick one out. How to talk pretty. He’d offer them drugs, food—whatever they wanted. Then we got one who kept trying to unzip his trousers with her dirty little freckled hands. I couldn’t let her do that, could I? It was so easy to do the rest, and even he couldn’t stop me.

  “Yes, you’re going to teach me a lot now, Daddy. No more sneaking out at night. No more worries at all.”

  MORAL HAZARD

  BY JESSE SUBLETT

  Austin

  The game warden, first through the door, threw up at the sight of it. The rookie deputy almost laughed, thinking it was a joke by neighborhood punks or looters scavenging the suburbs after the storm. The first thing that caught their eyes was the charred remains of a large chair with some junk piled in it. At the foot of the chair was a pair of latex zombie feet, like something from a costume shop. By some miracle, the only other thing seriously damaged in the room was the TV, blackened and half-melted, like the Salvador Dali painting of the clocks. The other strange part was how everything was coated with a nasty-looking pink dust. Plus the horrible smell. Hell of a weird joke.

  Crossing the den, the rookie touched the door frame. The pink stuff had a greasy feel to it. He could see now that the burnt debris in the chair had once been a man, that the zombie feet weren’t from a costume shop at all. As he stared, openmouthed, at the blackened skull, one of the teeth dropped out.

  The vomit appeared so suddenly it could’ve been the hand of God down his throat. Realizing that some kind of terrible miracle had taken place there, he ran out the front door, praising God and promising that he’d never again download pornography from the Internet or stare lustfully at the young blond clerk with the nose ring at the corner store.

  Owned by a former state legislator turned lobbyist, the three-story brick home spread its bulk around a cul-de-sac in an upscale, unincorporated community called Wildcat Oaks just west of Austin. It was one of the areas that had suffered the most in the previous night’s storms, yet the destruction seemed random. Two blocks away, an SUV had been blown apart by lightning, yet in the same driveway a child’s bicycle leaned against a plastic wagon. On the cul-de-sac, a tornado had erased one home down to the foundation and bypassed another next door, zigzagged across the street to obliterate two more, hooked left to make a cloud of splinters of three in a row.

  From the street, the brick home on the cul-de-sac appeared untouched, even serene. In the cobbled drive was a black Ford Excursion, its backside sporting two cheerful yellow Support Our Troops magnets. On the patio were painting supplies and a bright-orange extension ladder. The two men violently vomiting in the monkey grass made the only sound.

  On this hectic day for police, cleanup crews, and the media, the TV news van arrived ahead of the sheriff’s department and other officials. In the interim, the petite blond reporter interviewed the game warden, who explained how he came to discover the dead man’s body.

  The homeowner’s wife, he said, was in Mexico, and because she knew the game warden from their Bible study class, the dead man’s wife had phoned him at home that morning. She had seen footage of the destruction on CNN and was concerned about the condition of her home. Her husband, who traveled a good deal for business, had not answered her calls or e-mails for the past two days, and their only child, a student at the University of Texas, was “off the reservation,” whatever that was supposed to mean. The game warden told the wife that he’d be happy to go by and check things out. In fact, he called her as soon as he arrived there and reported that everything seemed just fine, that she and her husband were very lucky.

  The game warden had already given the reporter far more information than he would have liked. A month shy of his sixty-seventh birthday, the game warden was ready to retire next year and retreat to the two-bedroom cottage he shared with an aging, three-legged golden retriever.

  He knew that fortune had not always smiled upon the owner of the giant brick home. Raised on a small egg farm on the other side of Dripping Springs. Both parents killed in a car wreck when he was twelve. Worked two jobs to pay his way through college and law school. Elected to the state senate in 1972 or somewhere around there, defeated for reelection. Went into the lobbying business and apparently did pretty well for himself. After all that time, most people still referred to him as “Senator.” He traveled a lot, all over the world. Sometimes with the wife, but most times on business.

  Approaching the property from the left side, the game warden told the reporter, he could see the collapsed back quarter of the home. Possibly caused by lightning strike. The heavy oak front door was unlocked, the huge brass knob warm to the touch. Going inside, he saw the thing in the den.

  “But what would you say was the cause of death?” asked the reporter.

  The game warden shook his head. He said he did not want to speculate.

  The reporter was insistent. “Would you say it appears be a homicide?”

  No comment. What he wanted to say was, I’m not even sure that thing in there is human, but I guess it is. Fire can do some strange things to a body.

  When she came close enough to look inside, the smell was as revolting as what she saw. She wanted to describe the scene to her viewers as “what appears to be a savage and shocking crime,” but she was a professional, so she carefully chose her words to convey a sense of that same conclusion, by stating questions she believed were surely on the
mind of every viewer: “How could such a tragic death happen in this peaceful, picturesque neighborhood? And to a man like the victim, a friend of orphans and starving multitudes, whose brother was a prominent evangelical minister?” Of course, the reporter knew that the man was noted for his strident ultraconservative views on politics and society. There had also been rumors, watercooler talk, and political blogs about his lobbying firm’s use of prostitutes, bribes, and strong-arm tactics—including blackmail and complex money laundering schemes—on behalf of its clients.

  The dead man had a famous friend, a preacher known to his followers as “the Brother.” The Brother was an evangelist from Houston whose Sunday services were attended by tens of thousands. A vast media empire delivered his thoughts to millions more. Years ago, the Brother and his religious retreat, called Revelation Gardens, had been ensnared in a financial scandal. He had founded the retreat on a 5,000-acre plot near Houston in the 1980s. During the chaos of an election year, when the dead man was expanding his client list through prayer groups which were attended mostly by drillers, speculators, and executives in the then-depressed oil and gas business, the charges had been quietly and mysteriously withdrawn. The retreat thrived and grew, doubling in size in the past fifteen years.

  The reporter had seen secret video footage from Revelation Gardens showing the former state senator and the preacher cavorting in a golf cart like a pair of thirteen-yearolds. She had watched with a sickly fascination as the grayhaired men swilled vodka and raced the golf cart across the greens, tossing their empties on the ground, betting money on a pissing contest, giggling when they farted. After the video was over, the reporter felt a little sick to her stomach without knowing exactly why. Maybe it was a premonition.

  But so what if the dead lobbyist and his preacher friend acted like adolescent assholes when they got drunk? The real question was, What kind of person could tie someone to a chair and set him on fire? What kind of person could do that?

  He sat motionless on the edge of the steel cot, listening to the constant racket of the jail. He had the entire cell block to himself, as per orders from the top. The light was bright and he noticed that his body cast a narrow, crooked shadow on the wall. It resembled a letter of the alphabet, he thought, but couldn’t decide which letter it would be.

  Even now that he wasn’t quite as thin as he once was, everyone still used the old nickname, Slim. He remembered what a bitter woman had once said about the name. “It makes sense,” she said. “Because there’s not enough of anything inside there to add up. You’re slim on one side and hollow on the other.”

  He had a lean face and dark eyes. He might have had the chipped tooth in his smile fixed long ago except for the fact that it seemed to have a disarming effect on people. Accidents and tricks of nature now and then work in your favor.

  When he thought back to the night of the storm, he remembered how the thunder rolled in before the rain and wind like a ham-fisted omen from a B movie. Sitting in his car on a steep hill above Austin, waiting for Teo and Ric to show up. Nature was putting on quite a light show. The lightning would flash silver on the surface of the car and the trees and the ground, but the hillside below remained a pool of darkness, untouched. A few seconds later thunder would rattle the ground, as if the lightning had fallen down there and died.

  Replaying the memory now, retracing his steps. Flash, boom, nothing. He didn’t believe that before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. Whenever he’d been close to death, time went into fast-forward, not reverse, and he fought back, treaded water, or ran like hell, whatever it took.

  Flash, boom, nothing. Thinking about the mountains in Mexico, where he and some drug-smuggling buddies used to fly across the border at Falcon Lake. Those mountains had claimed a lot more smugglers he knew than the DEA ever did. He didn’t believe in hell or heaven.

  Flash, boom, nothing. Teo and Ric never showed up. A total of four of them had been directly involved in the heist. Teo and Ric were with him when they pulled the job. Afterward, Teo took the briefcase to Tom, the money man, who knew the guy who would launder it for them.

  But Tom got pinched on Tuesday, the day after the heist. They knew he’d already dropped the money off with the laundry. Question was, what did he tell the cops, if anything?

  Maybe Teo and Ric got themselves tagged too, copped a plea and snitched on him. Can’t fight human nature. That three musketeers crap was for fairy tales.

  Any successful thief knows when it’s time to split. Hang around too long anywhere, even when things are going great, and your luck runs out. His exit strategy: head to Houston, pick up his money stash and a new ID. He would contact no one, leave no tracks. Fade to black.

  But instead of heading east to Houston, he drove west, down the back roads on the edge of town, dodging the frightened deer and debris scattering ahead of the storms. Now and then the city would come into view, with the pink granite dome of the Capitol building, and behind it the UT tower, which Charles Whitman used as a sniper’s perch on August 1, 1966, killing fourteen. As a UT student, Whitman had once gotten in trouble for gutting a poached deer in a shower stall in his dormitory.

  Flash, boom, nothing. The lightning seemed to follow him as he pushed the coupe hard on the sharp curves. Lightning does strike twice in the same place, he knew that for a fact. Take the Kid, for example, he’d been struck three times in his life. He had to wonder if that had anything to do with the Kid’s talent.

  The Kid was a phenomenal guitar player. With the kind of talent he had, the Kid could’ve written his own ticket. He just needed a lucky break here and there, but now the Kid was dead.

  According to the statement from the police department, being hit by a Taser during his arrest was only incidental to his death and the Kid suffered from a type of cardiac arrhythmia “typically found to be endemic in hard-core drug abusers.” Never mind that the Kid wasn’t a druggie, that he only got high on playing guitar.

  The Kid was pulled over on a traffic violation when he supposedly “became violent.” Extra units were called to the scene, and at some point a Taser was used to subdue him. EMS was called but he was DOA.

  Slim had a guy inside the department, told him it was four Taser hits, not one. All four were special order, paid for with cool, green, in-God-we-trust U.S. dollars.

  Rain fell. What was the last thing the guy said?

  But I wouldn’t trust anybody. Know what I mean?

  Cell door clang, stench of vomit and disinfectant, darkness. When you came right down to it, Monday night’s heist was a briefcase job: you got two guys—a guy with heavy government connections and a preacher—with a briefcase containing $300,000. Maybe they were barracudas in the suit-and-tie world, but they sure weren’t streetwise. Taking the money away from these stiffs was a cakewalk.

  But somewhere, the job had gone sour. Real sour, real fast.

  Slim had already spoken with Tom’s lawyer. No charges had been filed yet, but the feds might be involved. Forty-eight hours later, still no word. They can’t hold you for longer than that without pressing charges. Except when Homeland Security is involved. Or just because they want to.

  By Friday night, still nothing, no arraignment, no anything. Tom’s in jail, the Kid is dead. Teo and Rick don’t show up with the money.

  Nothing. Zip.

  The thieves assigned code names to the two guys with the briefcase. The preacher was Church, the lobbyist was State. Some of the info the thieves had on the stiffs was public record, the rest was thanks to the hacking expertise of Slim’s friend, the Kid. State was the guy who had his tentacles inside the machinery of government. He had been inside, right at top of the food chain. He loved that power and the money that came with it. Ambition and vanity were Church’s addictions. God was talking in his ear. That’s what he said. Then, in the late 1990s, he found himself in the crosshairs of a grand jury, with Revelation Gardens on the verge of bankruptcy. He gave State a call asking for help. State flew to Houston to meet with Brother Church
at Revelation Gardens. The place had a five-million-dollar chapel, where daily prayer meetings were led by the Brother himself, two four-star restaurants, three spas, a golf course, and other luxury amenities. State saw the place immediately for what it was: a great place to move money around, make it seem fresh and clean. “Think of it as salvation for dirty money,” said State to Brother Church.

  With his contacts in the oil industry and foreign governments, State was in a unique position to help Church. After 9/11, the federal government had begun distributing large amounts of aid to the rulers of impoverished populations in Muslim countries, basically paying people in foreign countries not to hate and resent Americans more than they already did. Representatives from oil companies and other industries with interests in the region said they wanted to help too. They knew State as a skilled facilitator in this area. State could coordinate not only the U.S. funds going overseas but the bribes coming in from his corporate contacts. With the help of State, Church opened a laundry. The laundered cash was then dispersed to the respective business lobbyists, as well as certain right-wing conservative causes, with a skim off the top split two ways between Church and State. A special allotment was set aside for Church to use on improvements to the resort, and if any was left over, he could tithe to a real charity, like the Salvation Army or something.

  Slim laughed when he found out about the scam. He didn’t give a shit what they did with the money. The world was corrupt and rotten and most people were thieves and liars at heart, even the amateurs. The pros just get paid more for it. He belonged to no political party, had never voted. In his profession, you couldn’t afford to leave tracks like that. Even if he happened to give a fuck.

  * * *

  The Kid had dropped the whole job in Slim’s lap. Besides being a virtuoso on the electric guitar, the Kid was a blazingly talented hacker. Using a hot-rodded laptop and a broadband connection, the Kid had hacked his way into Church and State’s money laundering scheme. The beauty of the thing was that the four thieves would be stealing money that Church and State had stolen from the federal government.