by Jim Nesbitt
Stevie Mack moved forward. Five followed, one of them the woman, moving down and across the slope toward the wash. Two of the deputies had battery packs on their belts and hand-held spotlights, the kind used on deer at night from the back of a four-by with monster mud tires and a fella named Junior behind the wheel.
In the brush above, a large, dark figure in baggy black fatigues and a black windbreaker watched the group, edging along quietly, like a big cat on home turf, hunting what it hunts best, the smell of a kill humming in its blood.
No claws, though. Just an Uzi and five clips.
Chapter 24
Burch leaned close so he could hear her through the respirator.
“Damn, Big ‘Un, these bats are the wildest things. Look at ‘em.”
Carla Sue whipped the beam of a flashlight across the roof of the cave. The light caught hundreds of bats in flight, heading out for a meal, heading back in to feed the pups.
She danced away, skipping across the dunes of guano, blasting sprays of brown and sugary bat droppings with her Wellingtons, almost losing her balance.
“Easy, slick.”
She couldn’t hear him, he was out of earshot. He wanted to go. But she was having a good time, studying the bats, exploring the cave, checking out the bones Juanita left like an offering to the flesh eaters crawling underneath their boots.
He was uneasy. She disappeared behind a boulder, moving deeper into the cave. He put a hand on the Colt that was riding his left hip, hammer cocked and locked with one round in the chamber, and wished he hadn’t left that smooth, ripping German chopper back in the trailer.
Walking toward her made him sweat. His feet sank and slipped in the guano, forcing him to take short, choppy steps like he was working his way across a sandy beach. He kept an eye on her wildly swinging flashlight beam and kept his own torch dark.
Dammit to hell, she could move fast in this stuff. The bats made her giddy, made her lose that nervousness she had ever since they got to the trailer. He knew where that bad feeling wound up -- right in his gut. Right now.
He was moving toward the back of the main chamber, a deep bowl that dropped steeply from the mouth of the cave like a laundry chute in a Flintstones cartoon. Glancing over his shoulder, he could see the opening etched in the rising moonlight.
Sudden blindness from two spotlights. Like the painful white flash of a hangover jarred by loud noise and quick movement. He stumbled and his bad knee plowed up a pile of guano.
“Right where you are, mister! Hold still!”
Hold still? The words bounced and echoed over the rocks. At least the sumbitch didn’t yell ‘freeze!’ He hated that. Back when he was a cop, he never yelled that silly word. It was always ‘grab some wall’ or ‘grab some air.’ Strong and edgy. Always up close where they could feel his bulk and know he had the big Colt ready. And know he was crazed enough to use it.
Crazed didn’t count now. The Colt was sitting dumb and useless on his hip. He felt the bats whir around his head, some slapping into his chest and back, all heading toward the stabbing lights and the night sky beyond. He hoped the girl was quick enough to get lost back there. If she wasn’t, she’d kill him for getting them caught.
“Hands high, mister! And step up this way!”
It was clumsy going. Whoever was working the lights was doing a good job of keeping the glare square in his eyes. He felt like a man trying to ride a bike and spin a plate on a stick.
“Where’s the woman?”
“She’s not here!”
“What?”
The respirator, you dumb shit. Can’t talk through it. Can’t be heard except close up. He waded across the guano, keeping his hands high, forcing his way through the loose footing by rolling his chest and hips from side to side.
“Where’s the woman, mister?”
Jesus, who are these guys? Cheap imports or locals who never discovered the joys of the world’s sixth-largest bat cave. He kept his arms up but curled one hand down, pointing twice at the goggles and double cans hanging from his face.
He was struggling up the steep slope of the bowl, heading toward the chute, the lights and the men he could hear but couldn’t see. Jesus, this gig is up. Jesus, get lost, girl.
The spotlights had a halo around them, light that spilled from the sides of the beam and lit up the boulders that flanked the cave mouth. He could just make out a silhouette or two. The only sounds were the rush of flying bats, his raggy breathing and the tattoo of blood on his eardrums.
Blinding beams jerked away from his face and juked across the roof of the cave, catching the swirl of bats that seemed to drop in front of him like a drift net full of flying fish. The twitching light caught dust spraying up from the rocks and an upturned face with its mouth pitched wide open, black and full of pain. A shotgun dropped from a gloved hand that had just lost its life.
Then it hit him, like the voice of a talk-show caller on tape delay. That sound he’d heard at the Ross ranch. A long chain dropping on a cement floor. Cold, sudden and deadly. Followed by screams.
He heard the whine of a ricochet and welcomed the quick darkness that surrounded him. He scrambled toward the pen where Juanita put her road kill, hoping his eyes would adjust quick enough to find the closest cover. His hand slapped at the Colt and cleared it from leather.
Wailing from the cave mouth. High like a woman.
“Mama, mama, mama oh Jesus fuck this hurts, this hurts, this hurts, mama, mama.’’
Two quick shots. No more wailing. Something large and black slipping over the lip. Quicker than he could snap off a round, quicker than he could swing the Colt.
Look away from the cave mouth and the moonlight. Move toward the pen. Sweep the eyes across the darkness. Don’t stare. Use the peripheral vision. Wish away a lifetime of hating carrots.
Rough wood banging into his hip with a sharp sound. Breath of pain fogs up the goggles. A half turn to get clear. Colt slams into wood, falls into darkness. Dead man, now. Flat out dead.
“Ain’t too good at this, are you, man?”
High voice. Squeaky. Like a thin-necked nerd with the pocket protector. Out there in the center of the cave. Fast mover. Got the prey spotted. Play with it now. Kill it later. When bored. Do it now, willya cocksucker? No damn games.
“Don’t know who I am, do you man? Don’t know where I am. Know who send me, doncha? That’s right. T-Roy. You gonna be dead. But you gonna be fucked up, first.”
Coughing in the darkness.
“Fraid Mr. T-Roy insist on it. That’s right. For doin’ his woman, you gonna be fucked up before you die. Then your head gonna be on T-Roy’s desk. Use your skull for an ashtray.”
Keep talkin’, asshole. Kneeling in the guano. Feeling for the Colt. Looking for the dark hulk with the high voice.
“I see you there. Dropped your gun, didn’t you. Chump. How’d a shit like you dust Astrid?”
More coughing. A voice with a file dragging across it.
“Don’ matter. Here’s what’s gonna happen. Shoot you in the knee first. Then walk over and start breakin’ bones. Maybe carve on you a little. Make you beg to die. Think about that.”
Light stabbing the eyes again. On his knees. Waiting for the wafer and the wine. Like his second ex-wife. Or was it his third? The Colt out of reach, a dull glint in bat shit.
More coughing. The voice down an octave.
“Think about this, too. Your wife was out there. Long black hair. Killer legs. Nice ass. Can you see me lookin’ at her? You see that, doncha? Black man lookin’ at white pussy. Piss you off, cracker? Well, see this -- I did her. Shot her down like a dog. That was her cryin’ just now. Did the double tap.”
Bile in the throat, sour and rising. Up on his feet, slogging toward the light. A grin, a gun muzzle pointing his way. Coughing and rasping behind the light. How close, motherfucker? How close before the first
shot?
“You never fuck her again, man. But I might. After you gone.”
Coughing. Twenty feet now. Maybe fifteen. The gun muzzle larger than a blackened cocktail coaster. Level on his churning knees. Closer, Jesus, closer. Close enough for two hands around a fat neck. No chance. Here it comes, that first shot. Got to be.
Ten feet. Nothing. Coughing and a bouncing beam. No shots. No words. Coughs and wheezes. No respirator. Nasty fumes and bad fungi doing their stuff. Big black man in black fatigues. Cut down by things he can’t see. Bad enough to choke him now or kill him later. Beam bouncing to his coughs, gun dropping out of his hand.
Boom from a Colt fills the cave. Big man down on his side. A spin toward the woman as she dances across the guano, Colt leading her through the steps.
“No! Don’t! Let him die this way!”
A flick of her flashlight beam across the man’s face. Raspy sound from the throat. Sucking for air. Getting something far worse. Her by his side now. Both watching. She leaned close.
“Not good enough, Big ‘Un.”
“You right.”
She slipped her Colt into his hand, hammer already back from the first round. The man was on his side, his toupee skewed, pillowing his head from the guano. A kick to the shoulder flopped him on his back. Burch standing astride him, a Wellington on either side of his chest, leaning down into his face.
“Beg.”
The eyes were bulging. Anger, gunshot pain and all those fumes. The mouth was gasping. Open, then closed. Like koi.
“Beg, you cockbite motherfucker.”
The eyes bulged more. Bloodshot ivory. Teeth bared. Burch rose, Colt in both hands. Two shots. One in the chest. One in the forehead. His own double tap. With hardball and a Flying Ashtray.
He handed her the Colt. He leaned down again and straightened the toupee.
“Got to look good for the beetles, slick.”
Chapter 25
She watched him strip off his respirator, his hair slicked with sweat and twisted into devil’s horns. She could smell the urine fumes coming off their clothes, strong but with a sweet and cloying backwash you didn’t expect.
He limped up and over the lip of the cave, the lost Colt back on his hip. He made his way to each body, checking out the entry wounds, eyeing the angle from the killing ground to where the shooter must have stood, flying on the old automatic pilot of an ex-cop, working every spot except the one.
A fat Mex in a bad khaki suit was sprawled over another guy in a cheap, blue sportscoat. The Mex’s bald head was thrown back, his mouth open, his gun still holstered. His still hands formed claws across the exit wounds on his chest.
Burch pulled the Mex down and away. There was a groan from the other suit, muffled by dirt, rock and a face turned the other way. He leaned over, grabbed a wad of sportscoat in each hand and pulled the suit into a sitting position, back against a boulder, ignoring a scream of pain.
There was a bloody welt on the man’s forehead, where skull struck rock as he fell. A round had smashed into his left shoulder blade. Another had splintered his left leg below the knee, canting the limb and foot at a crazy angle that drew a wince just to look at.
Burch worked fast, rigging a tourniquet with a belt. He shucked the man’s sportcoat and made a compress out of a dead man’s T-shirt and two knotted bandanas.
“You know who I am, I can’t say the same.”
“Jones. Houston homicide.”
“Doggin’ me for T-Roy’s skirt, right?”
“And three others. Maybe four.”
Cider spoke through clenched teeth.
“Gonna bring you in, sooner or later.”
“Naw, what you’re gonna do is sit here and try not to die. And listen to what this one’s got to say. It’s a good yarn. Got all your favorite characters in it.”
Burch stripped the torn khaki jacket off the Mex and waved Carla Sue to his side. She sat on her haunches and fixed the cop with those wide, cold eyes.
“Set-up deal. Burch as the patsy. Neville Ross pulling the string. Trying to get T-Roy either out in the open or killed by Burch. Made it look like Burch killed T-Roy’s old lady. Lawyer up in Dallas was the middleman -- Doug Bartell. Set up Burch, set up the deal that brought the woman to Houston.”
“How do you know?”
“I used to keep his bed warm.”
“Ross? You there when he died?”
“Yes and yes.”
“Burch kill him?”
“No.”
“Who did?”
“Mister, do you really give half a fuck who iced that old pimp? If it weren’t for the fireworks flippin’ out the feds and John Q. Citizen, you people would be throwin’ a party.”
“I got four other bodies.”
“Who.”
“Boyfriend of one of Burch’s old ladies -- head slammed through a toilet bowl. Two scumbags and a coke lawyer.”
“Can’t help you with the boyfriend, ‘cept to tell you we been here the past two days. The lawyer, though -- that’s a guy name Crutcher, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Crutcher did business with T-Roy. Did business with Ross, too. He was the one on the Houston end of the set-up.”
“How you know so much about T-Roy?”
“I took his money to keep tabs on Ross.”
“Risky business.”
“Kept life interestin.’ Got one other tale to tell. That big, black cocksucker that whacked everybody out here, that’s T-Roy’s maximum muscle. Called him Badhair. These folks were lucky -- Badhair likes to hurt people before he kills ‘em. Likes to break fingers, slice off skin, burn cigarette holes in someone’s body. Likes to hear ‘em scream and beg. Well, he used to.”
“Dead?”
“You catch on fast. In the cave. Resting in bat shit. Stupid fucker didn’t know you had to wear one of these.”
She held up a respirator. Cider sucked in his breath, hit by a sudden spasm of pain. She draped the sportscoat across his chest, tucking it under his chin and under his body.
“You rest easy. If I know Big ‘Un, he’ll have somebody out here in a few hours to fix you up. If it was just me, you’re a loose end I’d just have to tie up. But Big ‘Un’s still a cop at heart, so you luck out. That is, if you can stay alive. You can do that, can’t you big guy?”
Her lips broke into a smile, but her eyes didn’t. They were flat, icy and soulless. There was a hard line to her jaw as she looked at him. It softened slightly as she looked up, eyes on Burch standing over the fifth body.
His shoulders shook as he looked at the face of his last ex-wife. He felt like crying, but his eyes were dry and the guilt and pain he felt rising from his gut locked up his throat so he couldn’t make a sound. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
She wasn’t the one he loved the best. She wasn’t the one who owned his soul. But she was the one most like him, the woman born with a roadmap to his mind and heart -- just as wounded, just as prideful, just as ornery and giving. And long gone.
He draped a bloody deputy’s jacket over her ruined face to keep the buzzards from picking out her eyes. He turned and saw Carla Sue looking at him. He knew she could see the look of loss and guilt on his face. He flushed with shame.
“We gotta go, Big ‘Un.”
Her voice was sharp. He nodded once and made that quick, snapping sound -- tongue on palate -- that always set her teeth on edge. He started up the dirt path toward the trailer. She followed.
The bats whirled in and out of the cave, a stream of darting bodies and dark wings, felt more than seen until they rose above the brushline and into the moonlight.
Burch didn’t look back.
Chapter 26
She was in her 90s and her brown, wrinkled skin, hanging in loose folds from her jaw and neck, made her look ancient and ageless. Her hair was
thin and pulled tight across her tall, narrow skull -- white frost on walnut. Her eyes, once dark, deep-set and burning, were now vacant and milky.
The early morning sun felt good on her arms, her face and in her bones. Birds stirred in the low branches of trees that were beyond the reach of what was left of her sight. Swallows and a mockingbird; her ears were still that sharp. So was her mind and a soul that could see the spirit world, the shape of things to come and things past, the faces and familiars that rode with every man and woman, whether they saw them or not.
She was Cuban, of mixed blood. Her father’s father had been a slave. Her mother was peasant Spanish and Indian. They were old island people, mongrels to the high Spaniards who ran the country and were afraid of being swept aside by the darker races.
The Spaniards remembered Haiti and the bloody slave revolts of the 1700s. They remembered their own island’s history of violence. They brought new settlers from old Spain, white merchants and tradesmen and workers who took the jobs and places of Creoles like her father, a tabaquero, and her mother, a seamstress.
Bad times and blood were soon to follow. It was the early years of the new century and Cuba had her independence from Spain, but not from the capitalistas Yanqui and the bootheel of King Sugar and the big fruit combines. The politics of the plantation held sway; its calling cards the stooped back of cheap labor and an insatiable hunger for every plot of land.
She was young and knew little of the changes sweeping her homeland, just her mother’s frown and her father’s heated words with the men who wanted to buy land he didn’t want to sell. She was father’s periquito and the warmth of her mother’s heart.
Her father was a santero, an initiate of santeria, that mystic amalgamation of African earth religion, with its many gods holding the power of nature, and the many saints of Catholicism, their characteristics and attributes similar to the deities of the old religion and a convenient mask for slaves who were forced to hide their old beliefs from their masters.