by Jim Nesbitt
The top floor was their target. On the left side of the house, where the bushes ended in deep shadow, a darkened iron staircase ran from the ground to a dormer window that had been converted into a doorway. It looked like the only way out, unless an interior staircase led to the front door.
“Don’t like it, Wynn.”
“Don’t worry, sport model.”
To do what Moore wanted to do, they had to play it alone. Backup would mean questions from up top. Backup would make their business T-Roy and murder instead of a grab for a lever on Ross.
“Don’t like it ay-tall, Wynn.”
Moore grunted and got out of the car.
“Bring the pump.”
He grabbed the 12-gauge Winchester, jacked a round of buckshot in the chamber and joined Moore. They circled the block on foot and searched for the alley. They worked their way down the muddy track, hoping a dog didn’t bark.
There was a garage behind the house. Its closed door faced the alley. Ten yards of mud, grass and bushes stood between the garage and the house. The mud and grass were a guess. The bushes were smudges of black against the light color of the house.
Light streamed from a window at the left rear of the house, probably the kitchen of the bottom-floor tenant. The top floor was dark. They could hear the accordion runs and waltz-time beat of Tex-Mex music from one of the rear windows.
Moore motioned him to a shadowy spot on the far side of the alley, a position that let him cover the dormer door and the rear porch. It also gave him quick access to the front. He thumbed off the shotgun’s safety. He pulled the thumb catch off the holster of the Colt, but kept the gun in leather.
Moore pulled his own gun of choice, a Smith & Wesson wheelgun in .44 Special, and slipped off his hand-tooled boots. Burch watched as his partner eased up the staircase in his socks, pausing every two or three steps to listen and catch his breath. The staircase faced the street, forcing Moore to keep his head cocked up and to the left to keep an eye on the windows and door above. The music played on.
Moore made it to a small deck that topped the first flight of stairs. The deck also marked a sharp turn for the second flight. Moore climbed the first three steps, facing the door and windows head on, arm and pistol extended.
The door slammed open. He heard the boom of a shotgun and saw its flash stab down toward Moore. Burch brought his own gun up and started to fire. The nude body of a young woman filled his sights. Her head was thrown back. Someone was holding her by the hair, using her body as a shield. A second somebody was throwing buckshot at Moore, who was sprawled on the stairs, his gun pointed toward the girl and shooter.
The girl pitched forward, pushed from behind. She tumbled down the stairs, slamming into Moore as the shooter let loose another blast. Burch fired his first shot toward the door. As he pumped the next round into the chamber, he saw a flash of white scoot out and swing over the railing.
Another flash and boom from the door. Lead shot whickered into the tree branches above his head. Burch pumped two more rounds that way and heard a wet smack, a grunt and the sound of metal clattering on iron. He looked toward the bushes below the staircase, searching for whoever had dropped over the side. He heard a car fire up with a rattling roar.
A black `63 Impala peeled away from the near curb as he lumbered toward the street. He fired two rounds, blowing out the back window and the left tail light. The car swerved, sideswiped a parked pickup and sped out of range.
He heard a loud groan from the staircase. Moore was sprawled on the deck, facing the door with gun still in hand. His sock-clad feet were on the stairs, his shoulders and head jammed against the bottom of the deck railing. The girl’s body rested across Moore’s stomach. A long bloody groove ran a ragged path up her back. He started to climb the stair and check out the shooter. Moore stopped him with a raspy voice.
“Sumbitch is dead.”
Quick, ragged breaths.
“Saw his chest blow open, sport model.”
“Easy, Wynn. Save it.”
“Ahhhh, I’m gone. Always did want to die with my boots off and a young girl on top of me.”
Moore’s gun dropped out of his hand with a loud, solitary clank. Burch heard the first siren in the distance.
Chapter 5
The captain’s breath held the stale stench of cigarettes and coffee, a smell that started out sweet, like a fresh Lucky, and ended up like a blast from an uncovered sewer.
It was a smell from his teens, the breath of a dead aunt who popped pills, drank gin straight from the bottle and babbled about blood pressure medicine and the drinking habits of her husband, the best house painter in Coppell. When sober.
She took him riding one summer Sunday near dusk, out into the prairie nothing north of Fort Worth where the light was fading on what little there was to see -- rusted barbed wire, the heads and rumps of cattle, the occasional frame house.
They were headed toward a small country church outside of Roanoke, his aunt’s latest religious fancy. Something with Free Will or Holiness or Primitive in the title. As they topped a small rise she turned off the engine and let the car drift downhill.
“Hey-hah! Look at this, boy -- freewheelin’ I call it. Savin’ gasoline and havin’ our fun at the same time!”
Her dark hair was pulled back from a puffy face and piled up on her head in a style last popular when ration cards got you gas and meat. The wind caught lose strands and blew them across her face. Her dress was dark silk with a floral print and covered a big-boned body. The wind caught the gaps between buttons and gave him a glimpse of white underneath.
The sound of the service drifted into the night as the tires of his aunt’s ’56 Fairlane crunched across gravel. A hymn. Call and response. She slipped her arm into his and leaned against him heavily as they headed toward the white, clapboard church. She stumbled twice.
“Damn but you’re gettin’ to be a man, son. Feel that arm of yours. Good thing you’re my nephew or I might get ideas about you.”
They sat in the back pew. She tapped the shoulder of one lady, then another, her voice rasping a greeting that was two stops past whisper and shot into the quick silence of the song’s final amen. Heads turned. His aunt waved. The heads snapped back around.
She sat close. She leaned across him to reach for a hymnal or Bible, her breasts brushing his arm every time. As they shared a book for scripture or hymn, she rested her arm on the inside of his thigh. He felt the first stirrings of a hardon and tried to slide away from her. There was no room between him and a fat farmer in bib overalls to his right.
“... leaning on Jesus, leaning on Jesus ...”
His aunt’s high, warbly voice. And her breath -- sweet, then the bite of something rotten. The song ended. She folded up the hymnal and aimed it toward the rack. The book dropped to the floor and his aunt leaned across his lap, her breasts pressing into his thigh.
“Better get your mind on the Lord, boy. Let his spirit chase away those bad thoughts about your old auntie.”
Twenty years later, he flinched every time a blast of the captain’s breath hit his nostrils and saw the face of his dead aunt, her bright red lipstick and boozy smile, playing the churchly whore with a young nephew.
The volume of the captain’s voice stuck with him, but not the words. So did the bottom line -- the first and biggest black mark in a steady slide toward the street.
They both fucked up. But Moore was dead and only he was around to get the hammer -- suspension and a recommendation for dismissal. The personnel board rejected the recommendation but upheld the suspension and put a stinging rebuke in his jacket that stopped just short of blaming him for Moore’s death.
T-Roy was the luckier bastard. Nothing in his jacket and new status in the Ross stable. He crossed the river and continued working both sides of the border as an enforcer and foreman of Ross’ drug operation. But not before he pulled one
more trick that was crazy-quick and mean.
After roaring away in the night, T-Roy dumped the Impala and its buckshot scars, switched to a new ride and drove straight to the apartment of Chita Alvarez. They found her wrapped in a bedsheet, her throat slashed, her lips pulled back across clenched teeth and a dinner candle shoved up her vagina.
“Guess she made the call,” he said, fingering the double sawbuck Moore had left by the phone.
Sewer Breath nodded, watching an evidence tech snap pictures of the body.
“T-Roy’s got a nice touch with the ladies. You know, you two shitheads got her killed too.”
That made two girlfriends in one evening; the dead girl on top of Moore was Consuela Martinez. The dead shooter was Rene Estaban, one of T-Roy’s dealers, Moore’s killer in fact but not in Burch’s mind.
There was a trap door under his feet. He could do one of three things -- quit now, stay on board and try to lightfoot his way to retirement as a nervous do-nothing or stomp on that trap door like he didn’t care if it ever sprung open. Big feet made it an easy choice. He donned the tough guy act like a thrift store leisure suit, pretending to have balls of brass and a hide that could take on all comers.
The truth was another matter.
He was afraid to leave the department; it was the only job that made him feel worthwhile. He had to carry the scorn of fellow officers and his own sense of shame; it was the price of redemption. Any good Baptist knew that. Just ask his dead aunt.
Burch did his work and survived the early shit assignments of supervisors trying to get him to turn in his badge. He weathered graveyard shifts and a stint with vice, peeping through a vent in the men’s room at the bus station while the other guys hustled hookers on Harry Hines, ignored call girls at the Adolphus and checked out pasties and G-strings at strip joints.
There was a certain freedom here. He knew the suits would boot his ass, but he didn’t care and took pleasure from the job, working it the way Moore taught him, taking chances and landing another berth with homicide when the D’s murder rate spiked so high that old sins were forgiven for any murder detective with a pulse.
Forgiven, but not forgotten.
He also landed another marriage and another divorce, the second of three and the one that hurt him least. She was a cocktail waitress who popped bubble-gum bubbles the size of the Goodyear blimp. It barely lasted the weekend in Ruidoso that kicked it off.
A pro on the street and a fuckup at home -- the cop’s perfecta. All part of the steady slide. And all a reminder of better times, bad memories and the gulf between how things were now and how things used to be.
Burch tried not to think about Moore or T-Roy -- one was dead, the other out of his reach. He fought off thoughts of his first wife and tried to ignore the pain from all the severed wiring and ripped-up circuitry that the death of a long love leaves.
It didn’t help much. Life kept blowing up on him, tearing the lid off stuff he was trying to bury.
He found himself walking along, thinking about the night of Moore’s death, hearing the rattle of his gun on the iron deck. At night, he would dream of T-Roy, standing on the banks of the Rio Grande, laughing and pointing at him. Or a dream vision of his first ex, smiling, her breasts swaying, taking another man’s cock into her mouth.
The anger and shame would rise, filling his throat with a tight ball of tension and making him feel like there was nothing but a gaping hole under his feet. He read through the small hours of morning, filling his mind with another man’s words, hoping they would keep him awake and hold off the images that came with sleep.
He lashed out at partners, citizens and soon-to-be-former girlfriends. He took long plods down the back streets off Greenville, reciting the names of cross streets as he huffed along -- Monticello, McCommas, Marquita, Llano.
But Burch was too slow to outrun blame and bad dreams.
A gunfight in an apartment complex on Gaston brought him the next round with Captain Sewer Breath, now a hot rod with IAD. He was riding alone, answering a call for backup from two detectives searching for a guy using stolen credit cards.
Three crunched cars hung him up on Henderson. The two cops, Silvers and Morton, didn’t wait. Their knock drew five rounds of 9 mm from a side window, killing Silvers with a slug through the neck and wounding Morton in the belly and leg.
As he wheeled around to the rear of the building, he heard the last of the dull, short pops, muffled by a cold mist that hid the downtown office towers. He ran toward the sound, edging his way up the raised squares of concrete that served as patios for each unit.
A screen window was open. He could see a Kenmore gas stove in pea green, a clock with a cracked plastic face and the archway above the counter that gave him a partial view of the front room.
The shooter edged into view, his head facing the front window, his pistol in a two-hand grip and angled the same way. His chest faced the kitchen, framed by the archway. Four Flying Ashtrays from the Colt slammed the shooter into the wall, dead from two slugs to the chest.
Burch didn’t yell “Freeze!” He wasn’t sorry.
A holdup artist named Johnny Zanger was the shooter, wanted for killing a liquor store clerk near Waco. Sewer Breath tried to make much of his late arrival as backup.
“Fucked up again, didn’t you cowboy? Grabbin’ donuts or a taco, weren’t you?”
“Naw, I was eatin’ a fender sandwich on Henderson.”
“The hell you talkin’ about?”
“Three car pile up. Jaws of life. Ambulances. Garlic with lunch today, sir?”
“What? Lissen to me, you needledick piece of shit ...”
“No, you listen, cockbite. You got a dead cop because they got careless and ran into a badass. Not because I was out slappin’ my monkey.”
The traffic report saved him. For a time.
Saloons -- that’s where he felt at home. Bars with icy beer and headbusting whiskey, not ferns and cute happy-hour gimmicks. Joints with smoke and big drinks, not franchise outfits with a lot of brass and loud talk. Waitresses jaded and sharp-tongued. Tenders with a dead-eyed look for strangers and troublemakers, a tight smile and a fast pour for a regular.
He hit Joe Miller’s on Tuesdays, Thursdays and sometimes Fridays, bumming Luckies off Louie Canelakes, the best Chicago bartender ever born to a mother from Forth Worth. On Wednesday nights he would have huevos con chorizo at El Rey’s. When he had that itch he’d call Darlene or Ginny or Carol Ann, a nurse, a secretary and a court clerk who had a taste for him and Friday night steaks at the Hofbrau.
Carol Ann was a chunky clerk with clear blue eyes, hair the color of Silver Queen corn and one of the best pickup lines a drunk woman ever put on him.
“I got one rule, just one rule ...”
She held up one finger, steadied herself against the bar with her other hand and tried to focus on his face.
“One rule.”
“Tha’s right. Quit interuptin’. One rule. If there’s two pairs of jeans slung over my bedpost at night, mine gotta have the smallest waistband.”
“Helluva rule.”
“Damn straight.”
“Rule like that might make me a candidate.”
She hooked a thumb under his belt, took a pull from her beer and pressed her breasts into his forearm.
“Just might.”
In winter, he would drink Maker’s Mark shots. When big heat hit the D, he would order a glass of ice water and a glass of Coke on the side to slake his thirst after a run or workout. The whiskey would be in a shot glass. The water and Coke in juice glasses. The tenders called it the Ed Earl Burch Summer Drinking System.
When Louie opened his bar on Henderson, he never had to explain the system. A nod and a smile would do. Then he could talk to Whitey, Deb or Louie. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and sometimes Fridays.
Burch was sitting in Louie’s, knocking
back shots and bitching about the Rangers to Whitey, when Lew Stuart told him T-Roy got killed in a Reynosa whorehouse.
It was a contract job after crossing Ross. It closed a circle and left him with work and the well-grooved routines of a man trying to fill up the empty time left by another busted marriage -- his third and last, he swore.
That one liked sculpting, nine ball and bass fishing. She hung on for almost three years. She loved Hemingway and learned to hate him when she finally figured out he wasn’t Papa and would never take her to Cuba.
For reasons Burch never understood -- other than the huge slice of his salary that flowed toward Louie’s bottom line -- he seemed to be a favorite. Louie ignored other regulars with barely concealed disdain, a scowl screwed on just beneath bushy, iron-and-black hair, an ever-present cigarette hanging off his lip, its ember almost touching the wiry hairs of his beard. But the wedding picture from Burch’s third marriage was still stuck in the frame of Louie’s liquor license and the man always broke away from talking and pouring for other customers to favor him with a grave and formalized greeting.
“Mr. Burch.”
“Mr. Louie.”
Louie would shake his hand and blast him with cigarette smoke.
“Always a pleasure.”
“What’s the line tonight?”
“Raiders and seven. I got the under and it’s sweet.”
Louie’s over-unders were never sour. One time he came in and asked about the presidential debates.
“I don’t know shit about politics, but I got the over on Udall and it’s sweet.”
Most nights, Burch talked to no one. He read the sports page or nursed a Dominican cigar in silence, surrounded by the soothing noises of a real bar.
It was sound to get lost in. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and sometimes Fridays. It was a place where he could forget Moore, the first ex and the varied shapes of the sphincters who wanted him to do his job someplace else.
But mostly there was work and long, lonely hours in a ratty apartment. It was all he had. Guys like Sewer Breath were always hanging around, waiting for a working stiff’s miscue. Burch tried not to oblige but too often did. When the meth freak muscle boy sculptor garroted the son of the skyscraper king, Burch got steamed at the father for making him wait at the security desk downstairs, downing two coffees, while the man finished a business meeting in a top-floor office with a chopper’s eye view of the city.