The Next Time You Die

by Harry Hunsicker

Billy Barringer.

  My best friend.

  After the ten o’clock news, I went to bed. I slept fitfully, Billy making an uninvited guest appearance in my dreams.

  We were on a beach. I recognized the place as South Padre, the Texas Riviera, a barrier island only a few miles from Brownsville and the border. I smelled the sea and suntan lotion. A freighter was barely visible in the distance, a dark wedge of iron slicing through the glassy ocean.

  All around me were the gringo snowbirds from the north, with varicose veins and pinched Midwest accents, and affluent Mexicans holidaying in their high-rise condos lining the beach.

  Billy walked around a pair of Mexican girls, tanned and oiled, sitting in beach chairs and chattering on cell phones. He tried to tell me something but I couldn’t understand the words. Finally he pulled a knife from his pocket and made a deep cut in the palm of his hand. The blood turned black as it hit the sand. Thunderclouds rolled in, and the air grew cold. The two girls were no longer talking on their phones. Their throats had been slit. The blood from their wounds was black, too.

  Then I woke up. Heart pounding, coated in sweat. Sleep would not come again. At seven I showered, fixed breakfast, and left the house.

  Carlos lived in a boardinghouse on Tyler Street in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, south across the Trinity River from downtown and the polished concrete facade of the northern half of the city.

  Originally a separate town before the turn of the last century, the area possessed some of the only natural beauty in this part of Texas—hills and valleys, creeks and massive old live oak trees. It was where the business and civic elite of the era made their homes in block after block of stately mansions and quaint stucco cottages.

  But then things changed.

  The wealth and development grew north across the river, leaving Oak Cliff a shell of its former self. Potholes. Crime. Immigrants with mahogany-colored skin and little command of the English language. Benign neglect from City Hall.

  In other words, the perfect place for a guy named Carlos who worked in a soup kitchen to live.

  I crossed the Trinity River on the Continental Street Viaduct, passing the site where I had almost died during a firefight with a drug crew a couple of years back. On the other side, I bottomed out in a pothole big enough to serve as a wading pool.

  The houses and buildings were small and faded: peeling paint, overgrown yards, cracked windows. At Sylvan Avenue I turned south and drove through the sporadic traffic heading to downtown. After a few minutes, the road jogged left and became Tyler Street.

  A dozen blocks later I found the correct address. The place had obviously been a single-family home years ago, before being converted to its current use as a boardinghouse. It looked like it had been painted as recently as the Carter administration. The yard was dirt and weeds and empty beer cans.

  I pulled to the curb behind a midseventies Monte Carlo. I guessed it was originally green but it was hard to tell with all the rust. A black woman wearing a pink miniskirt, six-inch heels, and a blond wig was leaning against the back of the car, smoking a cigarette.

  It was eight o’clock on a Friday morning.

  I got out, chirped the alarm, and stepped onto what passed for a sidewalk, a mishmash of broken concrete and packed earth.

  The woman blew a cloud of smoke into the humid morning air. “Looking for a date?”

  “Nope.”

  “You a cop?”

  “Uh-uh.” I pointed to the ramshackle structure where Lucas Linville’s assistant supposedly stayed. “You live there?”

  “What do you care, if you ain’t looking for a date?” She flipped the cigarette butt into the street and adjusted her left breast within the red bra she wore as her only top.

  “Know a guy named Carlos?” I removed a twenty from my wallet.

  “Maybe.” She put one foot on the bumper of the elderly Chevy and scratched the inside of her thigh.

  I pulled another twenty out. Waved them at her.

  “Second floor. Room Two-C.” She grabbed the money and stuck it in her bra.

  “Thanks.” I walked toward the entrance of the boardinghouse.

  “Another ten and I’ll suck you off,” she said. “Nobody in Dallas gives better head.”

  I ignored her, though I did admire the direct marketing aspect of her sales pitch.

  “Screw you, whitey.” She was shouting now. “Bet you’re a faggot, anyways.”

  I pushed open the front door. What was once the foyer and living room now served as a communal area, with several worn sofas and what looked like outdoor carpeting, dark green and filthy. The room smelled like sweat and urine. A small person of indeterminate gender and race was huddled in a ball on one of the sofas, snoring loudly.

  The stairs were to the right. I took them two at a time. Halfway up I brushed past a man in a seersucker suit and a white button-down shirt. He was completely bald, his skin the color of vanilla ice cream. The odor of Old Spice aftershave trailed after him.

  “Good morning to you, suh,” he said as we passed. His accent was thick, elongated vowels that made me think of grubby little bars with names like the Dew Drop Inn along the farm-to-market roads of East Texas.

  I nodded hello as my pulse quickened. I felt for the Browning on my hip, hidden beneath an untucked denim shirt. At the top of the stairs, I leaned against a wall and waited, straining to hear any sounds from downstairs. I had no idea what the man in the seersucker suit was about, but I wanted no part of it.

  After a long twenty count, I could discern no activity from below. The only thing audible was a radio or TV tuned to a Spanish-language station, coming from somewhere on this floor.

  The second story was one narrow hallway with rooms on either side. Two-C was to the right, at the end. The Spanish broadcast grew louder the closer I got to Carlos’s unit.

  The door was ajar about an inch. The heightened awareness brought on by the man in the suit returned. Senses focused, mouth dry.

  I grabbed the Browning. Chambered a round. Pressed myself against the wall to the right of the entrance. Pushed open the door with my foot.

  The air smelled metallic. Copper. Salty. I led with the muzzle of the pistol, followed by my head. Peered into the room.

  A twenty-inch black-and-white television was tuned to a Mexican soap opera, volume turned all the way up.

  A shirtless and overweight Hispanic man lay on a twin bed, an earto-ear scarlet smile where his throat should have been. The blood was still seeping from the wound. He’d been dead only a few minutes. I could see a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his shoulder. The fingers on his right hand were twisted at odd angles, obviously broken.

  I stepped inside, shut the door, and turned off the TV. The room was small and contained very little besides the corpse, a dresser, and a couple of lawn chairs. What possessions the young man owned appeared to have been thoroughly searched. At the end of the bed was a small pile of broken glass and picture frames. I picked up several of the photographs that were scattered among the debris. All of them were snapshots of the dead man and a matronly looking woman. In all the shots, the older figure had her arm around the man, a loving gaze on her face.

  On the dresser were several envelopes addressed to Carlos Jimenez. I rifled through them and saw most were bills. The last one had a return address a few miles north of here, from Maria, same last name. I opened it and saw another picture of the same woman and Carlos. I stuffed the envelope in my pocket.

  Between the bed and the wall I found a large manila file folder on the floor. I picked it up. There was no label. The only markings were on the bottom corner where someone had pressed a rubber address stamp. The words were faded but legible: “Pastor Lucas Linville, Church of the Harvest, Pleasant Grove.”

  The folder was empty. I creased it in two and stuck it in my pocket next to the envelope and searched the rest of place. In the bathroom a ripped pile of magazines lay on the dirty floor. I grabbed a handful of glossy paper. All of Carlos’s reading mater
ial seemed to have a similar theme: sports and betting. I wondered if the young man had traded drinking for gambling.

  I went back into the bedroom, heard voices in the hallway, and decided to wait a moment before leaving.

  The solitary window in the room faced the street. I pulled the dirty shade to one side about a half inch and peered out.

  Seersucker Suit and the woman in the miniskirt stood next to the elderly Monte Carlo, talking. A chartreuse Mercedes-Benz with gold wheels was double-parked by the Chevy. I could just make out a figure in the driver’s seat.

  The streetwalker waved her arms a lot when she spoke, hands moving one way and then the other. She paused to light a cigarette. Seersucker Suit pulled what looked like a wad of currency from a pocket. He gave it to her. She pointed to my Tahoe, then the second floor of the boardinghouse.

  Seersucker Suit looked at the window from where I was watching his little gray-market economic exchange. He waved like an old friend, turned, and walked down the sidewalk, hands behind his back.

  I let the shade drop and moved to the door leading to the hallway.

  I strained to hear anything. Witnesses would be bad at this point.

  Only silence in front of me, Carlos’s silent body to my rear.

  I eased open the door and stepped out of the room. The aroma of morning wafted through the corridor: bacon, coffee, cigarettes. A toilet flushed nearby.

  I walked as quickly and quietly as possible along the hallway and down the stairs. When I got to the bottom, the figure asleep on the sofa had awoken.

  It was a woman, I think. She was leaning against the wall by the stairs. Bloodshot eyes. Body shaking. She squinted at me and started to say something, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead she closed her eyes and slid down to the floor, a tiny string of spittle drooling out of the corner of her mouth.

  I crossed the foyer and threw open the front door. Dashed down the torn-up sidewalk. Made it about twenty feet before I was stopped by a figure so large his bulk blotted out the sun.

  He wore a purple suit, double-breasted with eight buttons on either side, over a shiny gold shirt and black tie. His shoes were as big as some foreign cars and made of a synthetic material that resembled orange leopard skin.

  He held a baseball bat in one hand. “Whatchoo doing messin’ wit’ my hoes?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The pimp was about ten feet away. The bat looked like a billy club in his oversized grasp. His suit had a reflective material woven into it, and the sun made it shimmer and shine like a humongous violet diamond. He looked like Huggy Bear updated for the new millennium.

  I could run but he would catch me in two strides.

  I could shoot him but that would entail too much paperwork.

  “What?” I said.

  “My bitch.” He swung the bat at nothing, as if it were a flyswatter. “Said you was asking after Carlos.”

  A marked police unit passed. The driver and passenger paid no mind to the baseball bat-brandishing pimp.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” I reached for the sap in my hip pocket, the one I decided to carry today on a hunch.

  “Don’t be fuckin’ wit’ me, cracker.” He took a very slow and ponderous step in my direction. He looked as spry and agile as a statue. He swung the bat once more, again very slowly, aiming at air and connecting.

  When the bat had cleared my head, I went in low, left elbow to his gut, the leather sap in my right hand going for a joint shot.

  My elbow sank into a couple of feet of purple dough. The sap connected with a thwack on the side of his knee.

  Huggy Bear grunted and fell over on one side. The ground shook. I dropped on top of him and bonked both his legs with the sap, a double tap to each kneecap. He squealed and curled into a very large, purple ball.

  I stuck the sap in my pocket and pulled out the Benchmade automatic knife I kept tucked in my waistband. I held the knife in front of the pimp’s face and pressed the recessed button in the handle.

  The three-inch blade sprang into action like a Viagra-snorting used-car salesman at the Playboy Mansion.

  I stuck the tip in Huggy’s nose. “Carlos is dead. Suppose you tell me about it.”

  Huggy growled. Spit flecked his lips.

  “Gonna have to do better than that.” I exerted another quarter ounce of pressure on the blade, pressing against the outside of his nostril.

  “Screw you, whitey.” He spoke through clenched teeth. “You are a dead muthafucka.”

  I didn’t say anything. Just slid the blade up his nose a few more millimeters.

  He yowled.

  I eased back a micron.

  “All right all right all right.” He seemed scared now. I figured he had been busting up six-plus-feet deadbeats for a long time. Probably the first time one had fought back.

  “Tell me about Carlos,” I said. “Who killed him?”

  “I-I-I didn’t know he was dead.” His breath was ragged. “No shit, okay?”

  “Who would want to kill him?”

  No response. The man chewed on his bottom lip, sweating. I rotated the blade inside his nostril an eighth of a revolution.

  “Noooo.” He tried to move but his knees probably wouldn’t work right yet and I was sitting on his arms. “T-t-they gonna get me, if I tell you.”

  “Consider yourself already got.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  I was sweating now, too, not just from the heat and exertion required to keep a 350-pound pimp under control, but also from the fact that we were on a city street in broad daylight. The cops might drive by again and decide to stop this time. There was also the other one, the man with the shaved head who’d passed me on the stairs.

  “Tell me about the white guy in the seersucker suit.”

  Huggy’s eyes got wide as his pupils narrowed. “That’s what I’m trying to get across to your dumb white ass. You are dead, see what I’m saying?”

  I heard a car door slam, looked up, and saw a late-model Cadillac across the street. Three more very large men in neon-colored suits stood beside it, watching the traffic go by, apparently waiting for a break to cross.

  “Who is he?” I pressed the tip of the knife against the flesh on the inside of his nose.

  “Listen up, cat.” The man’s voice trembled. His coffee-colored skin seemed to pale. “If you have to ask then you ain’t in the game. And you are seriously fucked.”

  I rolled off the man. Picked up his baseball bat and threw it as far away as possible.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Go on. Get out of here. If that crazy muthafucka don’t get you, I will.” Huggy Bear wobbled himself upright, legs shaky. He mopped at a tiny trickle of blood coming from his nose.

  One of the men from across the street stepped into traffic. Brakes screeched. Horns honked. I hightailed it to my truck, using the confusion as an opportunity to get the hell away from the dead man’s boardinghouse and the pissed-off pimp in the purple suit.

  I set the air conditioner in the Tahoe to ex-wife cold. My breath fogged. Ice formed on the inside of the windshield. By the time I got downtown, my core temperature felt as if it had dropped below one hundred, just in time for the stop-and-go traffic that inexplicably materialized right after morning rush hour.

  It was ten o’clock when I found myself in front of Old Red, the historic, nineteenth-century courthouse on the east side of downtown, overlooking the Kennedy Memorial, the Texas School Book Depository, and the infamous grassy knoll.

  The terra-cotta building was five stories of ornate brick, Victorian style, almost as red as a good Cabernet. The turrets on each corner seemed to reach for the sun, a slap in the face to the dullness of modern municipal buildings elsewhere in the city.

  Twenty minutes yielded a half block of forward travel, an inch-by-inch visit with Old Red. Ninety seconds after that, the unseen clog dissolved and I continued on toward the converted prairie-style house in East Dallas where I officed with three other peo
ple: a lawyer suffering from Napoleon syndrome, a real estate appraiser with a gambling problem, and my partner, a former profiler with the San Antonio Police Department, who made so many bad choices when it came to relationships, she could have her own season on the Dr. Phil show.

  The office was on Rieger Street, not far from my home, in a residential area slowly going commercial. Eclectic was one way to describe the neighborhood. Dangerous-after-dark was another. The rent was cheap, the location good. Who was I to complain?

  I parked in the rear on the gravel driveway, underneath a dying hackberry tree. I went in the back door. My office was one of the two rear bedrooms. My partner, Nolan O’Connor, occupied the second.

  I managed to get to my desk without anybody noticing. I turned the window AC to high and grabbed a half-liter bottle of water from the dorm-sized refrigerator in the corner. I fired up the computer and did a phone number search for Reese Cunningham.

  There were a half dozen R. Cunninghams in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. I printed out the info. Next I did a property search on various county databases looking for evidence of home ownership, either for Reese or his parents. Again, a number of possibilities materialized on the screen, but none was in the locales where a family of means might reside. I printed that information also.

  I leafed through the hard-copy results of my searches and drank the rest of the water. After a few minutes a plan formulated in my overheated brain: Go see Lucas Linville and ask him what the hell was going on.

  Before I could leave, Nolan O’Connor appeared at my door. She wore a pair of skintight faded Levi’s that accentuated her long legs and the curve of her hips, a plain white T-shirt, and a pair of low-heeled cowboy boots. And very little makeup, which she didn’t need anyway, since her high cheekbones and thin nose belonged more on a model than a PI partnered with a low-end wiseass like myself.

  Her dark hair was shoulder length and loose, thick bangs dangling in front of a pair of blue eyes that never missed a thing. Unless it was about her own personal life.

  “Hey, Hank.”

  “Morning.”

  Silence. She twisted a lock of hair around her index finger, a blank look on her face.