The Last Second Chance: An Ed Earl Burch Novel

by Jim Nesbitt

  One buck had sunglasses. Another had a bandana around its neck and a Rangers’ cap perched above its horns. A fifth trophy sat in the middle of the horns and mangy fur -- a doe’s hindquarters, tail pointing toward the ceiling and a red, cardboard arrow pointing toward the anus. A white sign was taped below the arrow -- File All Complaints Here.

  Ten more minutes passed. Then it was fifteen. Cortez came back to the table, mopping his face with a folded paper towel. He waved at the waitress, pointing one finger at his coffee cup. Cider spat out some tobacco juice as she walked up with the pot.

  “Tell him how disgustin’ that is.”

  “Hon, I don’t tell customers their bidness, no matter how bad it makes them look.”

  “See, I told you.”

  “Besides, you two are still here and haven’t left a tip yet.”

  She was past forty, but could still turn a man’s head, with flaming red hair that gave unavoidable testimony to the horrible wonders of chemistry and a chest that caused the top four buttons of her blouse to strain. Her eyes were green and full of carnal fun. Her legs and thighs were well-muscled and filled the cowboy cut Wranglers she wore over scuffed boots with cracked leather. Cortez eyed her.

  “You best take care of your other customers. This one’s gettin’ set to ask you out.”

  She shot Cortez a cool look and placed a hand on Cider’s shoulder.

  “He’d be kinda cute -- if he had your hair.”

  She flicked a fingernail, long and blood red, at the lank, black locks that fell over his collar.

  “Now, if you was to ask, a girl could like that.”

  From the counter came a gruff voice.

  “Maxene -- move your ass and stop hustlin’.”

  “Kiss it, slick. I’m tryin’ to get a date.”

  “You got orders up.”

  “They ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  Cider laughed and arched an eyebrow.

  “How’s Saturday? If I’m back in town by then.”

  She whipped a pen out of her apron and wrote a number on a napkin, leaning close, giving Cider a good glance at her cleavage and a good whiff of perfume with the strong hint of sandalwood.

  “Maxene!”

  “Movin’ it, boss. Call me Saturday, sugar.”

  “You don’t even know my name.”

  “Don’t need to now. You’ll tell me later.”

  Cider laughed again and shook his head as Maxene gave him a languid, walkaway show that featured swinging hips and a muscular ass. Body of a horsewoman was Cider’s guess. Cortez glared at him. Cider ignored him and walked up to the pay phone.

  “Two more exes and one long-time squeeze. One of the exes lives up here, same as the first one I told you about. Cross them off your list. Now, the squeeze and the third ex are possibles -- both live down your way. I remember the squeeze now -- hot little Chicana that used to tend bar up here. Just about as bad an attitude as the first ex, more than a little semi-wild. Both of ‘em used to lead our boy around by the cock, then dumped him flat.”

  “What about the third ex?”

  “The one I told you about. Juanita Schmidt.”

  “Smith?”

  “No, Schmidt. Hill Country German. Lives down there now. Place called Mason.”

  “S-C-H-M-I-D-T, Juanita? Mason, Texas?”

  “You got it -- five-six, 130, DOB 2/5/51. And get this, she makes earrings and shit from the bones of dead animals. Road kill. It’s the wildest damn thing I ever did hear. Can you feature it -- some snooty New York woman payin’ big bucks to have armadillo bones hanging from her ears?”

  “Everybody’s gotta have a gimmick. Girlfriend?”

  “Lessee -- lives in Uvalde. Aguirre, Ana Patrice. Five-three, 110, DOB 3/20/62.”

  “They both dumped him, huh? So I guess he don’t feel too charitable toward either one.”

  “No sir. Way I see it, it’s pick ‘em -- our boy probably hates ‘em both and no tellin’ if either one would let him in out of the rain.”

  He spelled back both names, hung up. Cortez stepped up, mopping sweat off his brow with a paper napkin, leaving small curls of paper on his forehead.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “A squeeze and an ex. One in the Hill Country, the other in Uvalde. Both dumped Burch. Which would you go see?”

  “The one I’m payin’ alimony to. She owes me.”

  “Not this ex -- she’s married to somebody else.”

  “Then I’d pick the squeeze.”

  “Uvalde it is, then. Let’s see if the boss man will spring for a quick flight to San Antonio.”

  “Hell, it’s only a four-hour hump. We’d be there before supper.”

  “Still got to call the man.”

  Cider picked up the phone again and glanced across the street where a large black man in a white shirt sat in a parking lot, looking like he was waiting for someone to come out of the grocery store.

  Cider couldn’t see the plug in the black man’s ear. And he couldn’t see the pinpoint of laser light that hit the plate glass of the cafe and picked up every word uttered within five feet of the pay phone.

  By the time he hung up, the black man was blocks away, winding a burgundy ’78 Eldorado flat out toward Hobby Airport, a satellite phone pulled from the side pocket of those black fatigues and the speed dial ripping through the numbers of a Mexican exchange.

  A chopper to Uvalde. A visit from the Badhair.

  Chapter 19

  Her leg hit the nightstand, sending the lamp flying and shooting long, jerking shadows onto the opposite wall. Her heels spurred his kidneys. Her nails raked his back. Her fingers held the shaggy curls near his neck in a death grip, pulling his face to hers. She bit his tongue.

  “Dammit, you drew blood!”

  “Shut up and give it to me.”

  He started slamming her harder. She pitched her head back and gripped his ass cheeks with both hands, nails and fingers digging and kneading. Each thrust brought them closer to the edge of the bed. He tried to drag them both back to the center of the mattress. She kept pulling him forward.

  Sweat kept them stuck belly to belly as they crashed onto the floor. He felt sharp pain stab through both knees and shoot down to the heel of his bad leg. She braced herself on one elbow and pushed him back. He slipped out of her with a loud, sloppy plop and fell to one side, sweeping boots, jeans, panties, spurs, a lariat, a bridle and a saddle blanket out of the way with a forearm.

  He drug a throw rug and a saddle toward him, sliding the rug under his ass and leaning his back into the curving side of the saddle. She grabbed the back of his hair again, crushing his lips with a killing kiss, stabbing his mouth with her tongue as she gripped his cock and hoisted herself up, over and down on his hardness.

  She rode him rough, hands pushing down on his chest, hauling her hips and ass into the air, holding there for one second, two seconds, three, then slamming down with a loud grunt, filling the small, dark room with the sound and smell of sex and two sweaty bodies.

  He could see the wet gleam that ran from her face, down and over her upturned breasts. His hands gripped her wide hips, feeling the muscles of long hours on horseback, helping her movements, guiding her lightly as she lost herself in the rhythm, watching as she started to grin.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Not a damn thing, so shut up.”

  She sprung up, breaking his grip and grabbing the pommel, yanking the saddle out from under him. He saw a white flash when his head smacked the bedpost.

  “Dammit, you always got to make sex a contact sport.”

  “You gonna get your old ass up off the floor and fuck me or do I have to call the hired help in here?”

  He looked up at the bed. She was in the middle of the tangled sheets, on her knees, sprawled across the saddle, her ass high in the air, her f
ace turned back over her shoulder, waiting for him.

  “You talk too damn much.”

  “Give it to me, old man.”

  “Where’s your husband, Juanita?”

  “Well he sure ain’t here, is he?”

  Chapter 20

  She could hear them banging and grunting in the back bedroom. In the dark, the high ceilings and solid walls guided the sound to the parlor and her place on an old-timey, overstuffed couch, where she was wide awake under a scratchy Indian blanket, listening to the sex sounds of relative strangers, smoking in the dark, watching the stars wink above the Hill Country ridgeline that cut through the moonlight above the rooftops and steeples of downtown Mason.

  Which was an overstatement. Mason was one of those dying market towns that used to draw its life from the ranches and farms trying to make a go of it in the scrubby, rock-strewn land between the Llano and San Saba rivers. From her perch in the pepperbox parlor, she could see more of the Hill Country’s deception -- the modest skyline that rose from the narrow valley looked like a postcard of some little town in Germany or Switzerland.

  From a distance, it was easy to see why those land-hungry Germans settled in country like this at the dawn of the 1800s. From a distance, it must have looked like home. Up close, as always, it was a different story -- heat from the hand of an angry god who looked to be keeping his promise to never again wash away the sins of man with a flood, death from savages who gave no quarter, expected none and took anything they pleased.

  But there was a flintiness that bolstered the distant beauty of this country, one that struck a chord with Carla Sue’s mountain ancestry. It was land she could live in, if living was in the cards. She took a deep drag on one of Burch’s Luckies, taking the smoke way down, listening to crickets, watching the star-pocked sky for nothing in particular.

  The couch ran across the open end of the hexagonal pepperbox, each wall dominated by a high window that ran almost from floor to ceiling, making the parlor a breezy place in the night heat, the coolest spot in this old house with the wrap-around porch and the graying, gingerbread trim.

  A slow-turning ceiling fan stirred the air. She tried to imagine living here in the 1860s, with no air conditioning and the Kiowas or Comanches a threat to sweep down from the Brady Mountains, a Sharps carbine and a blackpowder Colt Dragoon at her side instead of the blue semi-automatic with the Pachmayr grips.

  Close to the house, peeking around a porch post, was the dark, grinning grillwork of a `65 Chevy pickup, dog-turd brown, powered by a 350 cubic-inch engine with a four-bolt main, a four-barreled Holley carb and a four-speed transmission with a Hurst shifter. The rusted-out bed had been replaced by diamond-patterned steel plate, the kind used for the decking of a boiler room. The front window had a long crack running from the passenger side to the middle of the glass.

  Carla Sue picked it up on the outskirts of Ballinger, at Bucky Roy’s King of the Road used car lot. You Like It, You Buy It -- And I Tote the Note! Bucky Roy himself hustled her, cutting a chunk of Bull Of The Woods plug and working up a thick stream of juice to torment the dust of his lot while he made his pitch. She could tell because he wore a stained Resistol straw that had `Bucky Roy’ branded on the crown.

  “Lemme tell ya little lady, this ol’ pick-em-up will flat pick-em-up. Ol’ boy who owned it put ever’thang in her -- tach, four-barrel, Impala drivetrain and chassis. Ever’thang `cept a wet bar `an a bed.”

  Spuh-lattt! She backed up. The juice looked like it was headed for her boots.

  “Course it mighta saved ol’ Chester some trouble if he had put a bar in the damn thing. Might notta got killed in that knife fight down Junction way. His mama asked me to sell it for her -- Miss Kate.”

  Spuh-latt! She stood her ground, flinching only slightly.

  “Strong woman. Has to be to see her only boy killed like he was an’ her husband, Mr. Sam, dead and gone. She don’t want much for it, see -- just a grand and a half. It’ll help cover Chester’s funeral costs.”

  Spuh-lattt! She shot him a cold look.

  “Now, I tol’ her she could get more than a deuce for somethin’ this fine, but Miss Kate put her foot down. Not a penny more than a grand and a half -- don’t want people thinkin’ she’d try to make a dime off her boy’s death.”

  “Will it haul a stock trailer?”

  “Why, shore.”

  Spuh-latt! She ignored the jet of juice.

  “Got a hitch an’ ever’thang. You wouldn’t be haulin’ more than one or two mounts, right?”

  Spuh-latt!

  “You rodeo doncha? Barrel-racer, I bet. Seen you over at Fort Stockton. Knew I had. Back in May. You was ridin’ that deep-chested buckskin. Fine damn piece of horseflesh, you don’t mind me sayin’.”

  She smiled.

  Spuh-latt!

  “This’d be nigh perfect. Couldn’t ask for a better rig. An’ Chester and Miss Kate’d be proud to know it’s goin’ to a rodeo gal.”

  “Crank it.”

  The engine sounded rich and smooth, like the Cutlass, its power coursing through dual exhausts, well-muffled. She ran the RPMs up, then double-clutched it out of the lot for a quick spin around the block, listening for rattles, pings and other telltales of a dud engine. On a sidestreet, she slammed on the brakes with her hands off the wheel -- no pull.

  She wheeled back into the lot, stopping next to Bucky Roy, climbing out of the cab.

  “Eight.”

  “Little lady, this thing rides better than your horse. I couldn’t let it go for less than what Miss Kate is askin’. I couldn’t look that woman in the eye on the street. Engine’s worth that much alone.”

  “Yeah, but that engine needs a tuneup for sure -- timin’s off. And look at that damn windshield -- that’s three, easy. Unless I don’t care about drivin’ down the road one day and gettin’ a lapful of safety glass at eighty miles an hour.”

  “It looks bad, but that crack will hold. Nothin’ that will keep you from usin’ that truck right away. Shoot, you’ll get that fixed out of your next winnin’s and have a rig that’ll be the envy of ever’ ranch hand between here and Fort Stockton.”

  “There’s still the tuneup. The steerin’s loose and the front end’s got some shimmy. That’s another couple of hundred.”

  Spuh-latt!

  “Naw, now. That engine’s tighter’n a tick, little lady. And the rest -- well, this is a truck, not a see-dan. You know that. Shore you do. You’re just tryin’ to pull ol’ Bucky Roy’s leg, ain’tcha?”

  “I don’t want to pull your leg, mister. I’d kinda like to buy me a truck. This one, if I can get the price right. Another, if I can’t. Nine.”

  Spuh-latt!

  “Now, you’re talkin’ much better, but not good enough. I c’ain’t come down lower than a grand and three. I gotta live in this town and folks wouldn’t take it too kindly if I didn’t look out for Miss Kate. She taught second grade to just about ever’body in this town. Great God in the mornin’, you understand that, don’tcha?”

  “Mister, I understand I’m done dickerin’ with you.”

  Carla Sue peeled off ten hundred-dollar bills.

  “Do the deal. Do up the papers. I’ll be back after I gas her up.”

  She handed him a sheet of paper with a name, a Social Security number and a rural route scrawled on it. For Fort Stockton. Sometimes you get lucky.

  “You got insurance? Them state boys will want me to have a policy number. If you don’t, no nevermind, I can sell you a liability policy. Cost you two Franklins. Best damn deal in Runnels County. None better.”

  Spuh-latt!

  She peeled off two more hundreds.

  “That’d be fine. Write me up.”

  “Yew bet.”

  Smoking in the dark, she laughed at the memory of ol’ Bucky Roy, tobacco chewer, dust tormentor, truck-hustlin’ fool. He enjoyed th
e dickering. So did she, except for those dark, brown streams of punctuation that seemed to land closer to her boots than his. Every time.

  She met Big ‘Un at a roadside park just north of Sonora and I-10, the type of place that had two, count ‘em, two picnic tables with molded concrete legs and a stone slab top, a raked pebble yard and trash cans chained to solitary concrete posts. He had dumped the Monaco behind a boarded-up service station and had swiped a license tag from god-knows-where.

  They made it to Juanita’s just after dark.

  The back bedroom grew quiet -- low voices, a laugh or two, then silence. Two hours had been enough. At least, for one of them. Big `Un, probably. His face had been pale with pain and lack of sleep since they left the Ross ranch. Getting thrown down two or three times by an ex-wife probably didn’t help the ol’ boy, no matter how wet it got his wick.

  The ex didn’t like her looks worth a damn, that much was certain. When they walked through the door, she lamped Carla Sue with sharp, angry eyes, deep-green lasers, framed by an unruly sweep of long, jet-black curls, set in a windburned face with high cheekbones and creases and lines that pointed to the onset of middle age.

  There was a hardness settling along her jawline, turning rough beauty that once reveled in wildness and laughter into something edgy and cutting, ready to make someone pay for the fact she was now only passing handsome and didn’t like her life very much. Most likely, the man unlucky enough to get close.

  Poor Big ‘Un. Overmatched from the get-go with that one. Good sex the only tradeoff. But only at her beck and call. A smart man would have seen that. Smarts weren’t Big ‘Un’s long suit. And he got a sudden case of vapor lock on his smartass when the ex started in with the claws.

  “Glad you decided to drop on by, Double E. Been a long time. But I don’t know if we’ve got enough room for you two to shack up.”

  “Look, Juanita, it ain’t that way...”

  “Course it isn’t. Never is until it is, is it? I think she’s cute. A definite improvement on all your other girlfriends and exes. Maybe a little young, though. But you always did like to check the talent in the schoolyard. Didn’t know you liked them this petite.”