The Right Wrong Number: An Ed Earl Burch Novel

by Jim Nesbitt

  Two far figures starting to turn toward him. Two near figures catching the pause and shift of their guardians. A half turn from the older men. Burch, out of the shuffle and in full stride, clubbing Thanh with the Colt, catching him just above and behind the left ear, dropping him like a month’s worth of laundry on a rainy Sunday.

  A body slam into Crowe. A grunt of pain. A chop to his gun hand. A bright piece of metal in the dirt. The Colt shoved against Crowe’s temple. A hammerlock around his throat.

  “Don’t move, asshole. Call off the dogs.”

  “Not mine to call off, asshole.”

  “Do it.”

  “Fuck off, needledick. They don’t give a shit about me. You just clocked the guy that cuts their checks.”

  The young guns split to Burch’s right and left, closing the distance, making it harder to cover them both. Burch points the Colt at Thanh’s head. A sudden stop. Freeze frame for five while the rodeo world flowed around them — the white brightness of the arena, the cascading crowd noise, a pack of cowboys and cowgirls, all hats and arena jackets, stepping from the Coke stand and flowing around the two guns.

  The freeze frame melts.

  Movement at Burch’s feet — Thanh shifting from collapsed heap to the hands and knees stance of a crawling baby. A glance from Burch. A shift and a slight involuntary easing of the hammerlock. A hard elbow into Burch’s gut. A turn and Crowe’s open hand slamming into Burch’s chin, snapping his head back, breaking his grip, shoving him back.

  The young guns, moving fast, fanning their pistols toward Burch. Thanh up and in Burch’s face, blade in hand. Crowe breaking away, bending toward his gun in the dirt. Burch fending off a knife thrust with his left arm, swinging the Colt toward Thanh’s body, stepping in and under the rush.

  White flashes and sharp cracks. Slugs slapping into Thanh’s back, lead from the young guns, slamming his body into Burch. Burch catching the body with his right shoulder, aiming for Baylor green that his eyes see only as a lighter shade of gray.

  Two booming rounds from the Colt, bass notes cutting through the river roar from the stands. Baylor down in the dirt. Another crack and flash from the young gun in black. Hot pain stabbing the right forearm. The Colt up and over the back of Thanh with his left hand. Sights center on the rush of black leather.

  Two loud bass notes, slamming a duo of Flying Ashtrays into the black center of the body. Arms, head and legs fly forward, curling around the chest and abdomen. Mouth flashes a full oval of surprise. A sliding seat in the dirt. The body topples to the right.

  Lights and the rise and fall of oohs, aaahs, whistles, hoots and yells, tracking the arena action, not the sideshow behind the chutes. Movement in the corral. Not bulls. Not broncs. No hatted stockmen. A stumbling unfamiliarity to the motion. A flash of brushy gray and a figure perched on the second set of pipes, backlit by the arena glare.

  A grimace through the pain from his right arm. Boots on pipe. Burch up and over. Pushing through rumps, horns and hooves. A rolling eye. A snort. A bellow. Dodgy steps. A whack on the rump. A smack on the snout. The smell of piss and shit. Slogging through slop.

  A shout from a stockman. Broncs in the next pen, heads bobbing, bodies cutting and weaving. Crowe in the middle, picking his way past the moving stock. Burch with boots on pipe, hauling himself up to the top.

  A pop and a flash of white from Crowe’s right hand. A sizzling sound zipping near Burch’s left ear. A clumsy fall into the next pen. Pain in arm and knee, shooting into the roof of his mouth. Hooves and hocks, up close and way too personal. Snorts, whinnies and the sweet-rot smell of horse.

  Crowe already clambering over the far rail, pulling himself onto the catwalk just behind the chutes. A cowboy’s hand on Crowe’s arm. A pistol in the cowboy’s face. The cowboy backing off, hands in the air. Burch slamming through the broncs, bouncing and stumbling, short of breath, blood pounding in his ears, muffling the sound from the stands.

  The last rail of pipes. Cowboys looking down from their perch on the catwalk. Cowboys looking at Crowe, clambering over an active chute. Suspended motion — a gloved hand left unwrapped, a cowbell left dangling and unsecured, a rider’s concentration broken. Looks of fear, confusion, anger.

  Burch. Boots on pipe.

  “You can’t come up here, mister. We got a rodeo goin’.”

  “Let’m up.”

  “Hell no.”

  “Let’m up. He’s after that other sumbitch.”

  “You law, mister?”

  A nod from Burch. Gloved hands pulling him up to the catwalk.

  “Git that sorry bastard. Sumbitch stuck a damn pistol in my face.”

  A familiar face. Archer. The roper from Wyoming. Confusion for Burch. A roper behind the rough stock chutes. An oddity. Ropers belong at the other end of the arena. Behind the second set of chutes. A flash of memory — Archer in the slack, his turn won’t come until after the bulls. Archer takes Burch’s arm, turns and yells.

  “Let’m through, boys. Let’m through.”

  “We got a rider goin’ out there, Ken. Can’t do it.”

  “Let the man through.”

  To his left, a chute bangs open. Bull and rider slam into the ring. A parting of cowboys on the catwalk. Helping hands. Burch stumbling across an active chute, stepping on pipe, then bullflesh, then pipe, bending down to steady himself.

  To his right, at the far edge of his vision, a big man in burgundy bulls his way toward the small gate cowboys use to exit the arena after their ride. Linebacker. Third baseman. Third time’s the charm. A player.

  A quick look into the glare. Bull twisting. Rider snapping forward. Crowe to the right, dodging. Burch over the gate, thudding down on the thick chopped-up clay. Eye to rump with a bull the color of a Siamese cat, the size of a runaway pickup. Rushing bulk. Clay and shit strike Burch in the face.

  Burch cuts left, looks for Crowe. Crowe heads for the clown in the barrel, the sides banded with chipped red-and-white paint. A pickup man spurs his horse toward Crowe. Crowe points the pistol. The pickup man reins in but blocks Crowe’s path.

  Five yards. No breath. Lungs searing. Gray on the edge of the vision. Ears feel packed with cotton stuffing. Burch barrels into Crowe. Pistols fly to the dirt. So does a fat rectangle of brown paper. Burch on top, clawing his way up Crowe’s body, fighting to pin an arm or make a face eat sand and clods of clay.

  Crowe twists. A knee to Burch’s groin. A forearm shot to the chest. Burch rolls, staggers to his feet. Crowe is up, grabbing for his pistol. The envelope is between them. A yell from the right. The big man in burgundy, in the arena, arm rigid and pointing at Burch, aims a chrome-plated revolver. Linebacker. Third baseman. I’m dead.

  Four quick pops. Four dark blossoms on the big man’s chest. He pitches forward, dropping his gun. Crowe and Burch frozen in place.

  Fast-rolling bulk to Burch’s right. A rush. The sound of hooves. The split-second awareness a ballplayer gets when he is about to get blindsided.

  The hit. The smacking sound of horn on bone. Burch airborne. Flying to his left. Vision jarred and blurred.

  No noise. No glare. Just black.

  EIGHTEEN

  The room had that quick and final hush, like the sudden silence after a car wreck — before the sirens and the cries of pain, just after the echoes of tires and grinding metal die somewhere above in the air.

  You could listen to it and learn. Cider Jones did, stepping through the front door of a small bungalow built in the Craftsman style — low-browed lintel, stone cairns bracing the roof of the porch, twin dormers with windows dark and dead, a driveway snaking from the street and toward a cracked concrete apron in back. The bare-dirt backyard downhill from the house to a border of scrub oak, thick brush and a molasses-colored slough.

  The house sat on a no-hope dead-ender west of the whizzing traffic clipping along Fidelity Street and south of Jacinto City, isolated from the rest of what used to be a robust enclave of steel mill workers and Ship Channel dock hands.

&nbs
p; The green sign on the corner said Kerr Street and Cider knew its history — a partner from his days as a blue grew up here and used to talk fondly of bubba daddies, grimy and sweat-stained, coming home to doughy wives and packs of children. It used to be a place where everybody knew who got too drunk on Saturday night and slapped their wives around and who slipped out to the icehouses on Holland Avenue and slept around while hubby pulled a graveyard shift.

  Kerr Street was new Asian immigrants now — Cambodians mostly, refugees from Khmer Rouge genocide. Bent and broken Anglos too poor to move away. And the odd biker or two.

  It would be a lie to call it a neighborhood.

  But it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to see it as a great place to get lost in, an urban rat’s nest where nobody cared who came and went and everybody kept to themselves. Unless you were a threat to them and theirs.

  Cider stood at the front edge of a tidy, threadbare living room, boots on scarred, clean-swept hardwood, left hand on the arm of a well-worn couch covered in a dull, scratchy fabric of black-and-red plaid. The couch served as a divide between the living room and the wall of the front bedroom, forming an alley that ran from the front door, past the open archway to the kitchen and on to the hallway that led to the back of the house.

  He looked at a man who would no longer be a threat to anybody. Or their kin.

  The body sprawled across a large rug with a machine-woven Navajo blanket pattern in the same colors as the couch. Pistol near an upturned right hand, watch on the underside of the wrist, pilot style. Head toward Cider, angled away from his right boot. Trunk and legs cutting a rough diagonal across the rug.

  Face up.

  Or what was left of a face. The lower jaw was blown away. A bloody maw under a bald pate. Close range. Shotgun blast. Buckshot or a deer slug. A one-shot kill. Splatters of blood and bone on one of the front windows and the far corner of the front wall. In that same corner, a matte-chrome Mini-14 leaned in the angle just below the splatters. Blood darkened the rug’s lighter-shaded panels.

  Which put the shooter in the narrow, hardwood alley in front of Cider and to his left. Cider listened and slowed his breathing. He panned his gaze from the body to the spot where the shooter stood.

  It happened in his mind’s eye:

  A quick spin to a sound or a sense, gun up, but not quick enough; the head shot and the metallic shiiing-shiiing of a fresh round racked into a riot pump; the turn toward the second target moving up the hallway from the back of the house.

  A spin by the shooter. A full ninety degrees to the left. Two shots down the hallway. Quick strides on the hardwood. Another fresh round in the chamber. No movement from the target. No need to break the sudden hush.

  Which would put a second body in the shadows of the hallway, heels toward him, head pointed toward the bathroom and back bedroom.

  “There’s a second stiff back in that hallway, lieutenant.”

  A blue by his elbow.

  “I know. Make sure the techs and the M.E. are on the way. And give me some room, okay? I’ll get back to you in a bit.”

  “You bet.”

  This was one of the many ways he missed Cortez. His partner had a knack for chatting up blues, getting the scene-setting information from the ones who caught the call while keeping them out of Cider’s face. Now that he worked alone, Cider couldn’t indulge his mystic side without keeping part of himself rooted in reality. And he couldn’t be so focused on his inner visions that he forgot his manners and came off like an asshole to fellow officers.

  Usually he talked to the blues before he entered a crime scene, clearing his real-world decks. But he was out of synch on this one, his internal tuning fork vibrating before he hit the door. He knew he was already in that special place that flowed from his Comanche ancestry, a private zone of the spirit where the eyes of the dead told him things and ghostly zephyrs gave him clear mental images of recent violence.

  Cider forced the blue and memories of his dead partner out of his mind, filing the details for later. He felt himself float back into the zone. He edged around the couch and into the alley, hunting for a light switch when he reached the lip of the hallway.

  Dim light — a forty-watter instead of a hundred. No smoke — Cortez was dead and so were his cigs. A body already in his mind’s eye. A black man, heavily muscled across the chest and through the arms — Aaron Neville without the gris-gris bag, the ear cuff, the mole on the forehead or the sweet, soulful voice. The body had something the New Orleans singer would never want — a pair of bloody blossoms, lung high.

  Gun still in the shoulder holster. Caught flat-footed. Time enough to get a surprised look on the face and get blown back down the hallway.

  His mind’s eye:

  Black man heading down the hallway, his back to the shooter. Single blast from a shotgun, kill shot taking down bald guy in the living room. Time enough for a turnaround. Two rounds to the chest.

  Cider went into a squat, gazing into the dead man’s empty eyes. In the zone. Diving into the sightless stare. The eyes held him. The eyes and what they told him.

  Threat. Vigil. Calm and quiet. Confidence. Everything covered. Looking outward, not inward. Electric shock. The unexpected.

  A voice: Who you serve is who kills you. Who you shield is who cuts you down.

  “Hey — Lt. Jones — the techs are here.”

  The blue. In the open doorway. Cider snapped out of the zone. He noticed the flashing lights of a marked unit, framed by the door, for the first time.

  “Thanks. Hey — I forgot my manners. What’s your name?”

  “Bondurant.”

  Real world details from the blue:

  An anonymous call. Gunfire. Address given. This blue in a solo unit. A two-man unit as backup. Tense silence. Careful approach. An open back door. Nobody home but two stiffs. Scene secured. Two backup blues canvassing the neighborhood. Nobody stepping forward.

  Real world details he didn’t need to be told:

  Two dead men expecting trouble. But not from the quarter where the killer came. Packing heat in shoulder holsters. Other weapons within easy reach. A Mini-14 with a thirty-round banana mag and flash suppressor — a handy, close-quarters weapon that was no longer street legal, thanks to Slick Willy and the Assault Weapons Ban. And on the shelves of a bookcase built into one living room wall, the glowing red lights of electronics that didn’t look like stereo equipment to him. Sensor monitors, maybe. And a night scope, definitely.

  Cider’s head was down. The blue cleared his throat. Cider didn’t look up.

  “Thanks for your help.”

  “You bet.”

  Cider didn’t see the blue shake his head in disgust. He was listening to a voice repeat a two-sentence message:

  Who you serve is who kills you. Who you shield is who cuts you down.

  NINETEEN

  Her brain felt like cabbage force-fed into the whirring blades of a food processor, the high electric noise plummeting into a choked baritone as metal cuts into the pile of pale vegetation, then rising again as the resistance is overwhelmed and the shredding is consummated, automatic and well beyond the control of anyone who should want to suddenly stop it and make things whole again.

  The roar of a shotgun in her ear. A sudden spasm of nerves and muscle. A fight to keep the car on the road.

  She saw a flashing image of the swift, sure hands of one of those PBS chefs, deftly making a Cuisinart do its humming dance. On her gray matter, her nerves and all those neurons, synapses and electrochemical neurotransmitters that drive any animal’s machine.

  Julia Child as Vishnu the Destroyer. Graham Kerr as Old Scratch. Justin Wilson as Cerberus. But this wasn’t an amusing PBS half hour with the fatass Joo-stan and his red suspenders and overcooked Cajun act or the tittering wit of the Galloping Gourmet. Not that the repackaged, health-conscious and teetotaling version of that over-the-top Aussie made her laugh anymore. He was a better act as a drunk. And what was on her tongue definitely didn’t have the taste of the be
st blackened piece of life experience she ever put in her mouth. I-gar-ron-tee you d’at, Joo-stan.

  The shotgun’s roar. A smaller flinch. No loss of motor skills or automotive control. Eddie’s voice in her ear:

  What this is, Slick, is a hard dose of what you call your True Life. You get your expectations reversed, your plans ripped and tattered. You get snapped back from your dreams and delusions and nice, neat blueprints and have to look at something mean right in its bloodshot eyes. You do sumthin’ stupid or bad then have to deal with it straight up. No chaser. Scary bidness, this True Life, Slick. There ain’t no channel selector. There ain’t no on-off switch. And there ain’t no instant replay.

  Sad Eddie the sucker. So willing to be used. So easy for her to use. A sorry loser with the saloon sport’s gift of twirling world-weary phrases around painfully obvious facts. A tiger in the sack, despite his gut and gray hairs. But life as an aging studhoss wasn’t making him any wiser or smarter. His heart still followed his cock, setting him up for the easy falls most men his age were able to avoid.

  Savannah’s rules: Good sex can be found on any bar rail or street corner. Killer sex doesn’t mean True Love. And being able to deliver and receive world-class rack time doesn’t make you a Good Person or a desirable Life Partner. Sex is a weapon or a tool. And sometimes it’s just pure, nasty fun.

  But Eddie’s phrases sure fit this deal. Wherever the hell he was right now. Hopefully lost and clueless about her present location. Maybe dead if he crossed her loving husband. Surely dead if he joined up with her again; a partner didn’t fit in her life view of wealth, sun and sand. And a fat, bald defrocked homicide detective wasn’t enough to shield her from Jason Willard Crowe now that her husband was wise to her moves so early in the game. What’s a speed bump to a Mack truck running full bore? She shivered and replayed a sad sucker’s words.

  Your True Life. No channel selector. No on-off switch. No instant replay.

  Just the sound of a shotgun in her mind — like Uncle Milo in a duck blind down home. Just copper pennies and old sweat socks on her tongue and an endless feeling that her master controls had been sliced and diced beyond recognition, hashed into coleslaw by the high fear she felt while cooped up with Carl and Benito. Fear and the sure conviction that Crowe had suddenly gained control of a game designed by her but mastered by him. The clock wouldn’t run out and the gun wouldn’t sound until he found her and killed her.