Blood Country: The Second Byron Tibor Novel

by Sean Black

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Mills. ‘You must have done something dumb.’ He shook his head in disbelief, but he was buying it. Mills got closer. ‘We don’t have any spares. You’re just going to have to use what you got.’

  Byron bent down and picked up both pieces. He held the top of the wooden shaft in his right hand. It was about eighteen inches long and splintered where it had been broken. ‘I can’t work with this,’ he protested.

  ‘Then you should have been more careful, Davis.’

  Mills was within a few feet now. He was so busy lording it over Byron that his cigarette was still dangling from his right hand.

  Byron gave an apologetic shrug. ‘Do we have any tape? Maybe I could tape it back together or something.’

  Mills laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion. He raised his cigarette to his lips, and began to take a long drag.

  Byron pushed off with his left foot, shifting his weight forward, pivoting with his hips and plunging the jagged edge of the wooden shaft towards Mills’s neck.

  Mills tried to sidestep it but it tore into the side of his neck, leaving a long gash.

  Byron followed up with a left elbow strike to the man’s face, and a knee to his groin. Air rushed from Mills’s lungs in a single burst. He started to fall. Byron grabbed his shirt with his left hand, keeping Mills on his feet long enough to unclip his belt and holster. He threw them behind him, with Mills’s sidearm, then sent Mills reeling back with another fierce left elbow, this one catching him in the side of the head.

  Byron bent down and picked up the belt and holster. He drew the pistol, a Glock 21 Gen 4. He snapped the belt, with Mills’s pepper spray and baton, around his waist and made sure there was a .45 round in the chamber of the Glock, ready to go if he needed it.

  He needed it sooner than he’d thought. Looking up he saw the other guard, a skinny white dude, booking it towards them, his firearm drawn but low by his side. Byron raised the Glock and aimed it. ‘Drop your weapon,’ he shouted at the guard, who had closed within twenty feet.

  Stupidly the man didn’t. Instead, he stopped and began to bring his pistol up. Byron sighted his chest and fired a single shot. The guard went down, thrown back hard by the impact of the Glock’s .45-caliber round, and landed on his side.

  Byron jogged over to him. He picked up his gun, and bent down to take a look at the damage. The round had smacked into his body armor, splitting it open and passing through into his left side just below his ribcage. He was screaming and crying with pain. Byron didn’t blame him.

  Chances were, with medical treatment, he would live. The body armor had absorbed some of the impact, and taken the sting out of the shot. It had missed his heart and lungs. Byron reached down to the guard’s neck and found a pulse that was regular and strong.

  Red and the other prisoners were gathered around, rakes still in hand, staring, open-mouthed, at Byron and the chaos that had erupted from nowhere.

  ‘Red,’ Byron said, waving him over.

  Cautiously, Red began walking towards him. ‘We’re good, ain’t we?’ Red said. ‘I mean that shit I was saying about those women. That was a joke. I wouldn’t have—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Byron said.

  The other white inmates had taken to their heels, running into the trees. Red glanced back to them, wondering if he’d made a bad call.

  ‘We’re fine,’ Byron said. ‘Stay with this guard. Make sure he doesn’t close his eyes. Try to get some pressure on the wound, if you can. That should slow the bleeding. When the other guards get here, tell them they need to get him to the emergency room as soon as possible.’

  Red knelt down by the guard. ‘You’d better get out of here,’ he said to Byron.

  ‘No shit.’

  Byron jogged back to Mills, who was crawling on his elbows and knees towards a stand of pine trees. When he heard Byron coming back, he picked up the pace as best he could. Byron reached him in six strides, grabbed the back of his shirt and hauled him up. ‘You’re coming with me,’ he told him, pushing him forward through the trees and back towards the parking lot where they had left the pickup.

  Behind him, Byron heard a radio crackle. He looked back to see the injured guard with his thumb on the call button of his radio. ‘This is Officer—’

  Red grabbed the radio before he could finish his transmission. He glanced at Byron and threw it away.

  Byron half pushed and half carried Mills forward. Behind them, he could hear panicked shouts from the other guards as they tried to get a handle on why they’d just heard a gunshot and screams and why an officer had begun a panicked message that had been abruptly cut off.

  When they reached the pickup, Byron scoped out the one they’d arrived in. ‘Keys,’ he said to Mills.

  Mills laughed. ‘Asshole. They’re with the other guard.’

  Byron shoved a hand into Mills’s pants pocket and came up with the keys. ‘Nice try.’

  He clicked the button to unlock the doors, then opened the cab’s passenger door and shoved Mills inside. He walked round the front, the keys in his hand, and got into the driver’s side. He started the engine, put the truck into drive and hit the gas. He steered with one hand, using the other to cover Mills with the Glock.

  In the side mirror as they powered down the track towards the rear entrance to the Country Club, Byron could see a couple of guards racing into the parking lot they’d just left. Mills’s head was resting against the window. His shirt was soaked in blood but the bleeding from his neck had slowed.

  ‘You’re crazy, Davis. You know that? Who the hell pulls something like this to get out of the county jail?’ said Mills.

  Byron ignored him, focusing on the road ahead as they pulled out of the back of the country club and onto a street.

  ‘You know Texas has the death penalty. Trying to kill two prison guards, they’ll fry your ass for this,’ said Mills.

  Big deal, thought Byron, spinning the wheel hard to avoid rear-ending a soccer mom, who had slammed on the brakes of her Porsche Cayenne as soon as she caught sight of the pickup truck with the blood-soaked prison guard in her mirror.

  ‘Believe me,’ Byron told Mills, ‘if I wanted to kill you, you wouldn’t be here right now.’

  61

  As Byron passed the Porsche he glimpsed the blonde driver on her cell phone. No prizes for guessing who she was talking to. He flashed back on the Sheriff’s Department motor pool, which held enough vehicles for a town ten times the size of Kelsen. All brand-new vehicles, all well maintained, all of them fast enough not to be outrun by the truck he was driving.

  The man nursing his wounds in the passenger seat had obviously just had the same thought. ‘You’re screwed, Davis. There’s no way you’re getting out of here alive,’ he said. ‘This town might look nice, but it’s a goddamn fortress. And outside, what you got? A whole bunch of nothing, and nowhere to hide.’

  Mills kept ranting. Byron tuned him out as the soccer mom took evasive measures, rounding the next corner so that she almost flipped her SUV over in her eagerness to get away from the pickup. If Mills wasn’t venting, if he actually intended to throw Byron off course, it wasn’t working. If you were a dead man walking for long enough, you tended not to worry too much about threats. And there was something Mills didn’t understand. Fear was an idea to Byron, not an emotion.

  The parking entrance to the town’s main shopping mall, Kelsen Fashion Square, was up ahead. Byron turned into it, driving down the entrance ramp, plucking a ticket from the machine, and waiting for the barrier to rise.

  The pickup nudged past the barrier and into the gloom of the underground parking garage. Mills started to tell Byron just what a dumb move this was, and Byron’s finger fell from the side of the trigger guard to the trigger. ‘Be quiet,’ he told Mills.

  Mills fell silent. The calming power of a loaded gun pointed at you was never to be underestimated. It tended to focus the mind in a way that few other objects did.

  Byron drove down two levels to the lowest level. It
was where he guessed there would be most empty spaces (the sign outside had informed visitors that there were three hundred vacant spots). Consumers who arrived at a mall in their car tended to minimize the distance between where they parked and where they were heading. God forbid that someone had to walk an extra twenty yards when they could wait five minutes for someone to exit some prime real estate next to the elevators.

  Byron pulled into a spot next to another pickup. Mills shot him a ‘Now what?’ look. The bleeding from his neck had all but stopped.

  ‘Take off your clothes,’ Byron told him.

  The instruction was enough to override Mills’s fear of being shot in the gut. For Mills, a man whom Byron had seen humiliating others, the prospect of his own humiliation was clearly a matter of some sensitivity.

  ‘Now hang on a goddamn minute,’ Mills protested. ‘I know some guys turn faggot in the pen, but I ain’t no homo.’

  ‘Relax,’ said Byron. ‘If I were gay, I’d have better taste.’

  From Mills’s reaction, Byron wasn’t sure if the guard was relieved or his ego bruised. He didn’t have time to seek clarification. He jabbed the Glock into Mills’s face. ‘Do it.’

  Mills shuffled along the seat a little and began taking off his clothes. He stopped when he got down to his jockey shorts. Byron couldn’t help but notice the piss stain that had blossomed through the front of the white fabric. It was no great disgrace, but Mills flushed. From the yellow hue, he needed to drink more water.

  ‘Everything off,’ said Byron.

  ‘Fuck you, faggot,’ Mills said, his voice high and hoarse.

  ‘I think we’ve already established that the sweet act of love is off the table,’ said Byron.

  Mills slipped off his shorts and threw them into the foot well.

  Byron grabbed the door handle. ‘Don’t move. I’ll be right back.’

  He got out of the cab, and walked to the back of the truck. He climbed up onto the flat-bed and rummaged through the detritus of work gear that had been left behind. He found what he needed, picked it up and jumped back down.

  He went to the driver’s door, opened it, got in, and tossed what he had collected down onto the seat next to Mills. Mills’s eyes grew as wide as saucers.

  ‘There’s good news and bad news,’ he said to Mills. ‘What do you want first?’

  Mills was on the edge of screaming. If it hadn’t been for the gun, Byron was fairly sure he would have started by now.

  ‘The bad,’ said Mills.

  ‘The next few hours are going to be very unpleasant for you.’

  ‘And the good?’

  ‘Unless your colleagues in the Sheriff’s Department get overexcited, you’re going to live.’

  Looking down at the gasoline can, duct tape and box cutters sitting next to him, Mills didn’t look too convinced. Byron didn’t blame him. Faced with the same set of objects, there was every chance he would have asked for the bullet, and hoped for a clean headshot.

  62

  ‘You have got to be shitting me!’

  Legs planted wide, Sheriff John Martin stood on the third level of the now evacuated Kelsen Fashion Square mall, and stared at the pickup truck sitting, engine idling, with a naked correctional officer cuffed and duct-taped to the steering-wheel. Sheriff Martin couldn’t help what happened next. He’d never be able to explain it. Later, he would try to, without ever getting close to the truth.

  He looked at the truck and Mills inside and burst out laughing. The looks he drew only made him laugh all the harder.

  ‘Oh, my Lord,’ he said, when he had regained enough breath to speak. ‘Some dipshit drifter did this? Man, that is too much. Guess we finally caught ourselves a real criminal and never even knew it.’

  Two years ago Bobby Slaw, a former Marine, had persuaded the department to allow him to establish a bomb squad. Now he stood behind the sheriff. All those days of training in the yard, the rest of the officers sniggering at him from behind reflective glass, and now he was going to have his moment in the sun. He’d be able to justify all the cash they’d thrown at that garbage can on wheels he’d insisted the department purchase to ‘facilitate remote control explosions’.

  That poor bastard Mills, thought Sheriff Martin. The guy was a grade-A asshole, and not the brightest, which was saying something: the correctional officers were guys who couldn’t pass a Sheriff’s Department entry exam that consisted primarily of being able to hit the door. But Mills didn’t deserve this. If Slaw’s assessment was correct, Mills would go up like a Roman candle if they put a foot wrong.

  63

  Byron waited in an abandoned lot across the street from a gas station in the south-east corner of Kelsen. It had a sign promising future development by the Kelsen County Corporation. It was secured by chain-link fence, but someone had already cut a hole in it on one side. Not that there was much of anything to secure.

  Behind a large dumpster near the back of the lot he’d spotted a couple of well-fed rats and some discarded hypodermic needles. Like any town, if you scratched under the surface of Kelsen you could find a place that was way less Stepford than a visitor might have assumed. He had spent months traveling the country so the needles hadn’t surprised him. Like all things eighties, heroin was making a comeback, fueled by the country’s recent flirtation with prescription opiates, like OxyContin.

  Byron had been in the lot for twenty minutes and the wait was already making him nervous. He was starting to wonder if the person he was expecting would show. He planned on giving it another ten minutes before leaving. It seemed like every few minutes a Sheriff’s Department vehicle rolled past. They seemed to be heading in either direction, criss-crossing the avenues, two or three cars passing five minutes apart. It was evidence that they didn’t yet have a solid lead.

  The time to worry would be if and when it went quiet. When cops had solid intel of a suspect’s location they tended to withdraw from the immediate area and establish a perimeter. Only when that was done would they appear, and even then, if they did it right, it would be sudden and with overwhelming force. So, for now, a few patrol cars with spotlights didn’t concern him. Waiting on someone he didn’t truly know, and certainly didn’t know if he could trust, was another matter entirely.

  Another patrol slid by. It stopped, put on its turn signal, and drew into the gas station. Not good. Not good at all. That was Byron’s meeting point. He watched as the two sheriff’s deputies got out and walked inside. For a second he thought about the possibility of jacking the patrol car but swiftly dismissed the idea. Too risky. It was parked within sight of the front of the gas station.

  He watched the two deputies head for the coffee stand. They each poured themselves a cup, topped up with cream and sugar. Byron didn’t blame them. He could have used some caffeine himself right now.

  The deputies crossed to the cashier. He didn’t appear to ring up the sale. That was standard protocol. Gas stations got robbed. Gas stations popular with cops, not so much. Free coffee provided an excellent return on investment if you were a gas-station owner trying to keep your insurance premium down.

  A dark sedan rolled down the street. Tinted windows made it hard to see the driver. The vehicle slowed near the gas station, looking like it might turn in, then kept going, maybe spooked by the cops but it was impossible to know.

  The cops idled at the counter, shooting the breeze with the elderly lady behind the cash register. For a second Byron flashed onto another gas station. Another woman who’d just been doing her job when their paths had crossed. He pushed out of his mind the memory of what had happened, of the terrible thing he’d done. It wasn’t as if he could change the past. If he could, he would. All he could do was try to ensure that he didn’t repeat it.

  In some ways, Mills had been a start. Byron could have killed him. Not only did he have opportunity, he had motive. It would have made escape easier. Rigging the truck, or rather faking the rigging, had taken time. It had exposed him to capture far more than just dropping a ro
und into the back of Mills’s head. If a patrol car had cruised through the mall parking lot while he was in the middle of it, things would have been bad.

  As personal improvement went, claiming to have terrified someone he could have murdered in cold blood wouldn’t earn Byron any points. But knowing what he did about his capacity for violence, it felt like a start.

  Still, he could feel the rage within him, which worried him. Not only because he might hurt another innocent person, but also because he feared that once the genie was out of the bottle, he might not be able to push it back in. That was what he feared more than anything. Certainly more than capture. More even than death, though the will to live had proven far more potent than he could have imagined.

  The cops picked up their coffee and moved back towards the door. The same dark sedan turned onto the street again, on its second go round.

  The cops climbed slowly into their patrol car. The sedan slowed near the gas station. The cops were taking their time leaving.

  The sedan’s brake lights flared red. The cops looked at it. The driver seemed to hesitate for a moment. Finally, the car pulled into the gas station. The cops were still watching it.

  The sedan pulled up next to a gas pump. Its lights died along with the engine. The cops seemed unsure as to whether they were leaving or not.

  The driver’s door of the sedan opened. Byron couldn’t see the driver, his view blocked by the street-side gas pumps. He narrowed his eyes, trying to focus through the gloom. To see if it was who he thought it was.

  The cops were equally curious. Curious enough to kill their engine and get back out. They walked the short distance to the sedan.

  Byron studied their body language for clues. Everything about their manner suggested they recognized the person. Their hands stayed by their sides rather than falling to their service weapons. They appeared to be smiling.