by Jim Nesbitt
He was relentless. And cold. Colder than bare feet left too long on the stony bottom of a rushing mountain creek. Once that thrilled her; she fancied that her fire would melt his ice pack and cause him to turn from the track traced by his will to the one deftly drawn by her. He was a just a man. And every man who got in close quarters with her did what she wanted.
Eventually.
And eventually she took what she wanted and left them in the dirt — long before they were wise to her, long before they were tired of her addicting ways. In bed, in a bar, in everyday life. In all the ways she was fiery and intoxicating and kept men wanting more than she would ever give.
Except this man. Her husband. Her destroyer — a mirror icy and dark that forced her to look inward at what she feared the most. Down deep where the nasties crawl and fly about, the psychic snakes and gargoyles, the towering shadows of things a person tries to forget but cannot — Uncle Milo’s cooing voice and his fingers sliding inside the waistband of her Quick Draw McGraw pajamas; a stab of pain in the dark; the bottomless shame; the shouts, crashes and thumps of dad and mom too drunk and too locked into their nightly love-hate dance to notice what was happening to their daughter; the unquenchable urge to get even and prove her worth by besting men.
In business, in banter, in bed. Or with a shotgun in the early morning mist, at the raggedy edge where a farmer’s field and the woods meet. And they thought Uncle Milo died in a hunting accident, from a shot fired by mistake through the fog.
No mistake. A dead uncle. But it didn’t even the score or kill her need to constantly prove her worth. That she always had to do. To keep the snakes and gargoyles in their cages. To stay out of the shadows of those locked away memories. To keep herself in the sunshine, whole and untouched by the men whose lives she entered and the chaos she left in her wake.
Then she met Jason Willard Crowe. Sex, drugs, money and a high-wire lifestyle. Standing toe-to-toe with the biggest challenge she ever met in a man, one she was stubbornly confident she could overcome. She would outlast him. She would wear him down. That’s what she always thought. Until she realized she never would. Until it dawned on her that she was the one whose psychic defenses were slowly eroding, exposing those nasty psychological innards.
She knew she had to get away. And she knew she had to beat Crowe at something, best him somehow. Take his money and take him at his own game. That would leave him in the dust like the others. That would give her a hunk of his power. And cold cash was far tastier than eating the heart of the vanquished.
It was so smooth and easy. She knew he was running a big scam of some sort. She saw him spending a lot of time on his laptop. She knew that he saw her as a techno-peasant who took little interest in the whispery electronics of computers. To keep him thinking that way, she kept up her constant barrage of barbed comments about the cyber-slaves of the Information Age, about the master surfers of the Internet not knowing how to have a face-to-face conversation in a cafe, about the emasculating nature of machines and technology.
“That computer’s making you a eunuch.”
He would smile and say: “It’s making me money. And you know how hard I get at the thought of money.”
“That doesn’t do me much good.”
“It would if you’d bring your mouth and cunt over here.”
“Why? You’ve got that little gray machine. Stick it there, hon. Get a hum job.”
A head slap before sex. Rough and raw in the rack. As it always was between them. Part of the plan to keep him lulled. Along with standard firefights over money, drugs and the latest recruits for his nose candy and limited partnership service. No sweetness and light. That would make him suspicious.
The next step was also smooth and easy. A girlfriend with a brother who was a grad student at Rice, a hacking wizard with a trust fund, a grunge wardrobe full of plaid flannels, ripped jeans and Phillies Blunt T-shirts, a wedge of lank blond hair that hung over his left eye and was cut razor close on his neck, a roll-out-of-bed-and-roll-one lust for high-powered Texas tea. A cover story that was perfect because it was the truth — a need to leave Jason, a need to find his hidden assets. The hushed excitement of a conspiracy.
She slipped the brother backup diskettes from her husband’s laptop. She found the numbers to data lines Jason regularly dialed up. Both gave the brother the toehold he needed to penetrate her husband’s computerized world and find out what he was up to.
What he found was a shock to them both. She assumed it would be stock and commodity trades. It was much bigger. Millions instead of thousands. A systematic flow from American accounts to a rat’s nest of offshore depositories, screened by a series of business entities with unrelated names — Antilles Ex-Im, Ltd.; Zaxxon Exploration, Inc.; West Texas Leather & Boot; Westheimer Realty; Tres Hombres Enterprises.
And the weak point. The Dominican account. Easily accessed by the hacker.
He was easily kept on a leash.
He didn’t want money — he had scads of old oil and ranch bucks rolling in from the trust fund. He grooved on the technical challenge and the illicit nature of their little venture. And he was glassy-eyed about fucking her. He had a long, thin cock and loved for her to grease it up with Vaseline and let him slide it into her ass. He would pump hard, his breath hissing with each thrust.
Just before he came, he would cry out: “Say hello. Say hello. Say hello. Say hello.”
Like a parrot on a Key West lampost.
Then, as he pulled out and shot semen on the cheeks of her ass: “There it is. There it is. There it isssssss . . .”
She could see his cock, twitching with a life of its own, arcing out below the fish-white muscles of his belly, rising toward the falling wave of his greasy hair. She could hear him hissing above and behind her. She eased into the feeling, flowing with the erotic image and sound memory, letting it work on the blown fuses of her circuitry and crowd out the flashing hands of those TV chefs and that high fear that made her gag on the taste of pennies and socks.
A shotgun roar. The shiiing-shiiing of pumping metal. Carl’s face. Then pulp. Benito. Rushing toward her. Then sailing back, leaving his “Oh!” of surprise like a string of black holes in the hallway. Uncle Milo, rising out of the mist. Then gone. A roar. A scream. Her scream.
Horns blowing, sound rising and falling in a real-life Doppler demonstration. Her head snapped around. Her eyes darted toward the mirror. She took several deep breaths, exhaling fully.
The car drifted into the slow lane. Eyes searching for a place to pull off. The parking lot of a machine shop — broken concrete in front of a rust-pocked Quonset hut, a single lamp casting weak light on the corner nearest the door.
She wheeled the car into the lot, wincing as the tires crunched over shards of glass. A pop as loud as a pistol shot. A bottle busted by steel-belteds. Spasmed muscles and a stab of the foot on the brake pedal, juddering the car to a nose-down stop.
Head in hands, eyes closed.
“Jesus, girl — get a fucking grip on yourself.”
The door yanked open. A warm, wet blast of air overcoming the refrigerated interior, steaming the car windows. Her head jerked back by the hair.
“How `ya doin’, miss. Mind if I drive?”
A broad round face. The smell of wet leather. A flash of silver. Fists slam into the side of her face and head. Another roar. Pain, this time. Then black nothing.
TWENTY
It hurt to scratch his nose. When he tried to shift his weight from one cheek of his ass to the other, it felt like God was trying to filet his guts from his ribcage. He didn’t bother trying to smile.
The right side of his face was hot and swollen, his right eye partially shut. His right shoulder was heavily bandaged. When he moved, he felt something grinding under the gauze, felt it in his teeth and his skull. It triggered a spiraling wave of nausea.
He was awake but groggy, unaware of ever being out, slowly realizing he was feeling pain through several wavy layers of pharmaceutical protection t
hat distanced his brain from the sources of hurt, blunting their sharp rebukes when he moved the wrong way. Which every way seemed to be.
The light was institutionally harsh. It hurt his eyes in the way rays from a fluorescent tube always do.
The room was painted a custardy yellow, a color common to hospitals and college dorms. Since night school was the closest Burch ever got to college and those sessions were more than fifteen years in his past, back when he used to wear a detective’s badge in Dallas, he figured he was in a hospital. But the narcotics made that deduction a tiresome bit of mental lifting.
He had the morphine slows, which was fine by him. Moving fast only brought on pain. And pain just made it tough for him to get comfortable on this rock-hard hospital bed. He wished somebody would turn off that light above his head. He wished that somebody would be whoever was talking to him at that moment, saying something he couldn’t quite understand, in a voice coming from a place he couldn’t see without turning his body.
He listened but the words didn’t make any sense. They drifted in and out, like a bedside radio turned on low after midnight, picking up a wavering signal bouncing in from half a continent away.
Something popped in his head. The signal became clear and strong.
“. . . you’re fallin’ and there ain’t no net for you now. Whistlin’ right on through the clouds and down toward that hard, hard earth. Ain’t a friend in sight to catch you this time. No sir. No Racehorse. No colt of his. Gotta hand it to you though. Sure picked a splashy way to fuck up — shootin’ up the Astrodome in the middle of a rodeo. In front of God and everybody and an arena full of bullriders. Couldn’t have fucked yourself any worse if you’d pissed on the Alamo Mission . . .”
Burch wished he could switch stations. He couldn’t. The voice played on. Like a sermon your grandmother listened to every Sunday. Just before she sent half her money to the preacher who owned the static-laced voice.
“. . . got to give you style points for your shootin’ eye, too. Dusted those slants. With that Colt, too. Must have that thing tuned pretty tight to shoot that good with. Sure ain’t no GI Colt you’re carryin’. Army sidearms used to rattle worse than my goddam knee — that’s gospel . . .”
Burch couldn’t stand it. He clenched his jaw and rolled toward the voice. Its owner sat in the corner nearest his right shoulder, in the shadows beyond the arc of the light above Burch’s head.
“Do me a favor, Slick — shut the fuck up.”
A laugh from the voice.
“You back with the livin’, huh? Good. Good. You need to relax. Save your strength. Now where was I? Oh yeah . . .”
Burch moaned.
“Man who can shoot is still somebody in this state. That’s a savin’ grace. Particularly if he shoots somebody who isn’t too popular. Which applies big time in your case, maybe the only lucky thing you got goin’. Everybody hates those boat folks from Vietnam. Everybody — bubbas, blacks, Mexes. Helps that they shot you too. Hell, it helps that they shot their own boss. How’d ya’ arrange that? Got them to shoot their own boss. I can hear the Racehorse argue it now: `Ladies and gen’lemen of the jury, my client is the injured party here. People were tryin’ to kill him . . .’ “
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Aw, you know me. You know me real good. You wrapped me up nice and warm with my dead partner’s jacket one time. You remember. Out by that bat cave in the Hill Country. Me shot up by that big spade with the high squeaky voice who killed your ex wife. Killed my partner too. Been blamin’ you for that one. Blamin’ you for years, son. Wanted to see you get the Big Needle for that. Not right of me, maybe. But somebody ought to pay for Cortez.”
“Someone did, shithead. The spade.”
“Aw, that don’t count. Guys like that are forces of nature. Like tornadoes. Like hurricanes. Evil does what it’s gonna do, son. And you can’t pin the blame on evil any more than you can a hurricane. Naw, you got to get below the surface of things. Get to the cause of the matter — the thing that puts stuff into play. The who that puts evil into play. And in that case, it was you and that crazy Tennessee blonde. You were the cause. You two were the damn catalyst. Not the spade.”
Floating up through the haze of hospital narcotics, Burch saw an image — Carla Sue Cantrell, the crazy Tennessee blonde, a big .45 in her tiny hand, pointed at his head the first time they met. Carla Sue, with that North Dallas snooty-girl accent dropping into the flat slap and twang of a pure up-holler grit when she got pissed or enthusiastic about something. Or when she was about to kill somebody.
Which she did. Quite often during their run across Texas and into Mexico seven years ago, gunning for a half-Mex, half-oil-field-trash drug lord named Teddy Roy Bonafacio who had killed her uncle, outrunning the law and T-Roy’s hired guns. She blew T-Roy down with a clipful of slugs from his Colt to keep that sorry bastard from slicing Burch’s heart out of his chest.
Saw her one more time, down on the border, in the Big Bend country. He was in trouble again and she helped him climb out of it, killing a few hombres what needed killing. She also left him with a bittersweet memory. Hadn’t seen her since.
Carla Sue’s image floated into a slow fade, like smoke curling from a Lucky. Burch was back in the hospital room, but lost. The voice was silent. Burch looked at the wheeled tray poised above his lap and saw his Zippo and a fresh pack of Luckies. He reached for the smokes and winced, the pain holding his hand in mid-air, halfway from its destination.
“You want a cig? I’ll do that.”
An arm and a hand reaching. A Lucky on his lip. Flame and smoke. The head and body above and behind him, out of his field of vision. Burch blew out a stream of smoke and rested his head on the pillow.
“Now that I study it, you may not be in as bad a shape as I said you were. Might be that you’re double lucky. I mean, you got folks shootin’ at you, with close to twenty thousand witnesses and just about ever’ champion rodeo cowboy you can name to back up your story.”
“That’s one bit of luck.”
“There’s more. When I got to the `Dome and saw that leather jacket of yours, I ’bout creamed. Thought I could peg you to this real gristly murder I got in my case file. Killer left a streak of leather on a hallway wall. Black skid mark. Like he got bodyslammed then slid along the wall. You got a black leather jacket. And it’s skinned up pretty good.”
“So I’m the perfect match. How come I’m not in double lockdown right now.”
“You don’t wear silver.”
“What?”
“No silver. Killer wears silver. Left a piece of bracelet on the floor. What the silversmiths call Cuban links.”
“The bitch could sure shoot.”
“What? The blonde?”
Burch didn’t answer. His mind was on that bittersweet memory.
“Are you talkin’ about that blonde? Where is she now? What happened to her?”
“She liked to kill people. But only people who crossed her or got in her way. Enjoyed blowin’ those types right on down. Satisfied her. She wanted to kill you. For a reason. One you don’t want to look at.”
A long pause. A wait for Burch to continue his line of thought. Burch was drifting in and out of the drug clouds. Lucidity was waiting in the clear air. His mind was trailing through gauzy streams of cotton.
“So she was kill-crazy and you were runnin’ with her, which made you just as dirty as her. You two were sides of the same coin. Didn’t matter who pulled the trigger.”
Burch broke out of the clouds. He managed his first good look at the owner of the other voice in the room. He wasn’t surprised — vultures always circled the halt and the lame. And a badge-wearing bird always found it easier to peck at a prisoner than fly after prey that was still on the run.
“For a dude who’s managed to keep hold of his detective’s shield, you’re pretty fuckin’ single-minded. Subtleties, Slick. Pay attention to them.”
“Feelin’ good enough to get up on your hind legs and do a little
growlin’, huh? Good. Glad to see you up on the muscle. You’ll need that attitude to carry you through the meat grinder. You know, I’m gonna sit back and enjoy this. Just might go out and buy me one of them expensive cigars and blow blue smoke at the ceilin’ and watch.”
“That would make you a voyeur. Or fat-assed brass. Or maybe you’re a yard bitch. Maybe you like to watch all the studhosses carve each other up for your amusement. Thought you were a front-liner, a grunt. Thought you could swing the lead.”
“You’re gettin’ overheated. Might need to call nursey in here to give you another shot of sweetness and light. Cool you down.”
“You’re right. You need to shut me up. You need me quiet before I say somethin’ you don’t want to hear.”
“I’m all ears. You say what you got to say. I’m like a priest. I’ll listen to any man’s confession. Even a shitheel like yours.”
“No confession, lieutenant. Just another hard nugget of what you call your True Life. Involves that crazy blonde you keep tryin’ to wrap around my neck seven years after the fact. Drives a man crazy to keep obsessin’ about somethin’ bad like that. Keeps him from livin’ life. Keeps him from lookin’ at things he’d rather not look at.”
“You got a point to this?”
“You bet. You want to hang me so bad for your partner’s death you’re missin’ some true facts. You’re like a buck in rut. All in a rush to fuck somethin’. Subtlety just blows right past you. I told you that blonde liked to kill people. But only people who got in her way. Or harmed her and them close to her. You just see it as kill crazy. You want to demonize her. And me. You got to or else you got to stop and think and look at stuff you don’t want to. Well, you’re missin’ the point about her. She wanted to kill you because you brought that psycho shitheel to our doorstep and almost got us killed. She wanted to kill you because you got my ex-wife killed. And she liked my ex-wife. Liked her more than she liked me. She wanted you off the board because you were standin’ in the way of squarin’ things for her uncle.”