by Jim Nesbitt
“Doing what?”
“Talking to New Orleans direct.”
“I know.”
“You helped me, too.”
“How’s that?”
“Gave them a false sense of confidence. Made them think they had my action monitored. Made it easier for me to sucker them.”
“Glad to be of service.”
“And your service hasn’t ended. I’d say it’s just beginning.”
Crowe bent over and picked up the briefcase. He fished out a sheaf of bills — just under six hundred in Jeffersons and Lincolns, cash that would carry Mueller across the next two weeks of lunches, golf matches and fishing runs.
“This will come in handy.”
“Don’t tell me a man with your talent is running short of long green.”
“A short-term liquidity problem, nicely solved by your donation.”
“Can I get a receipt? My tax man insists.”
“What happened to the trust between us?”
“That disappeared when two guys from Metarie showed up at my door.”
“I see your point.”
Crowe continued his inspection of the briefcase. Mueller, growing more anxious by the second, tried to fill the silence.
“Nice haircut.”
“You don’t think it’s a little too butch?”
“Wouldn’t know about any of that fag stuff, bud.”
“But you do know first-class computer equipment. This Toshiba’s a jewel. Hayes modem. Very nice. Knew you’d have it with you. And what’s this? A wheelgun?”
Crowe held up the Smith.
“For me?”
Mueller shrugged.
“I don’t take it personally. Particularly since it isn’t pointed at me.”
Crowe shoved the Smith into his waistband then took the Toshiba to the dining room table and wired it to the modem. He brought the cellphone over to Mueller.
“You’re going to take a trip. At least, that’s what you’re going to tell your wife. And your foreman. Make it someplace you have to be for two or three days. Say El Paso. Tell me which speed-dial to hit.”
Crowe punched the buttons he was told to punch. He listened then put the phone to Mueller’s ear — the answering machine at home.
“Hi, hon — I’ve got to tool up to El Paso to meet some boys who want to toss some business my way. I’ll check in. Love ya. Bye.”
“Oh, that was very good. Very, very good, son. Put you on Broadway with an act like that. But then again, you get lots of practice lyin’ to her so you can be with ol’ Marta, doncha?”
Mueller fed the same lines to Luis. Without the “hon” and the “love ya.” Luis laughed and teased him about taking a two-day siesta with Marta. Mueller: “Ya got me, hombre. See you in two.”
Crowe had another task for him — setting up the Toshiba and modem. Mueller walked him through it. Crowe wrote the commands on a small notebook he pulled out of the breast pocket of his tan sportsman’s vest, the kind photographers like to wear.
Crowe punched the keyboard while standing at the table, pausing only to ask Mueller an operational question or two. The modem screeched. Crowe rattled the keyboard again. He broke the connection, stretched to his full height and shot Mueller a wink and a dry chuckle.
“Fan mail. Got to keep my public amused.”
Crowe stepped into the bedroom. Mueller heard two sharp metallic barks, like sheetrock being tacked up with a nail gun. Panic filled him and he tried to stand up, toppling himself and the chair to the floor. His face was flat on the clean-swept tile, his eyes facing the bedroom door. Crowe filled the doorframe.
“Marta! Marta!”
Three more metallic barks.
“She can’t hear you anymore, son. And you couldn’t answer even if she could.”
Five pieces of brass in his pocket. Wires and two boxes of plastic — one flat and rectangular, the other the shape of two columns of Saltines strapped back-to-back — stuffed into a tooled briefcase that belonged to a dead man. A quick move out the door and a vehicle that was too redneck for his tastes but a fitting mode of transport for his next destination.
He saw it in his mind — a white chapel and high desert mountains, a place of sanctity and grace, isolation and abandonment. Perfect for prayer and spiritual renewal.
Or a killing.
TWENTY-TWO
Fuck Humphrey Bogart.
Fuck the Maltese Falcon and all the movie dialogue William Faulkner, that overwrought Mississippi drunk, lifted wholesale from Hammett’s book.
And double-fuck to the line that when a man’s partner gets killed you do something, anything, whether you liked him or not. Even the score, Bogie said with a sneer, or the entire brotherhood of detectivedom will fall off the face of the earth and civilization will slip into a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted science.
“Naw, son — Bogie didn’t say all that. That last part — the part about science perverts — that was that British fucker. Churchill. The guy with the cigar and the V-for-Victory sign. Neville Churchill.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m the shitass drivin’ this car and keepin’ your fat sorry self just a foot or so outside the long reach of Brother John Law.”
“Slow down, Slick. I gotta puke.”
“Told you not to suck down that whiskey so fast. It don’t mix with hospital food and pharmaceuticals.”
Too late. Head out the window. Brownish-yellow bile spewed into the slipstream, streaking the white flank of a ’72 Cutlass convertible. A gallon from the gullet. An eternity hanging over the side. Each long retch shooting pain through his damaged shoulder, his face, his ribcage.
Head back behind the windscreen. Skull slapped firmly into the red suede headrest. Whorehouse plush. Sleeve across the lips. Eyes up, watching the fuzzy halo tracks of the streetlamps rushing through the humid air above his head.
“Arrrrrrrrrrgggggggh! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhyeeeeech! Goddam — I haven’t done that since junior high.”
“Waste of good whiskey.”
“Howzat?”
“Didn’t stay inside of you long enough to get you drunk enough to pass out. Now I got to listen to more of your craziness. And you fucked up the detailing on my car.”
Whiskey bottle in the passenger’s hand. A long pull — clear air bubbling through the brown.
“Ahhhhwhoooooooo, that hurts!”
A long racking cough.
“Leave that whiskey be, bud. Don’t want you sickin’ up all over my tuck and roll. Gotta hit the carwash as it is.”
“Bill the Racehorse, Slick. He’ll pay for it.”
“Yeah — and stick you with another jolt of his hourly rate. He already owns your soul as it is.”
“He’ll have to get in line. Three or four of his Dallas brethren hold paper on me already. And I don’t care how much of a badass he is in court, he can’t get something from me my ex-wives have already spent.”
Another pull. Shorter this time. Fewer bubbles in the brown. Less brown to bubble. The physics of bourbon.
“Life gets simple, Slick.”
“Explain that one to me.”
“Life gets simple when the pressure’s on. Our choices are easy and obvious. Find the bad girl. Find the bad guy. Take ’em down. Or take ’em out.”
“You’re forgetting a few details. We don’t know where missy is. Or hubby the finance king. No clue at all on missy — just two of Jim Tom’s friends blown away. And the only thing from hubby is some fuckin’ fax to the Racehorse’s office.”
“Nice poetry in that message. `For Burch: A brown donkey. A dead horse. A white chapel. Where the mountains clash and the miners used to be.’ Nice and neat.”
“You sound like a man who can read between the lines.”
“I sound like a man whose memory isn’t completely shot. It’s an invitation. To a place I took his wife back when I was fuckin’ her. All that’s missin’ is the time and a place to leave the RSVP.”
“
Donkeys, a dead horse and a chapel. What’s that about?”
“There’s a chapel down Mexico way, just over the river. You can see a range of mountains called the Sierra del Burro. Foothills, really. Drawfed by the Sierra del Carmens. Some other mountains called the Sierra del Caballo Muerto — Dead Horse Mountains.”
“Sounds grim.”
“It’s in the middle of some grim country. Down below the Big Bend. Grim but stunning, if you go for starkness. It’s like the skin’s been peeled back and you can see the earth’s ribcage down there.”
“You sound like you like that country.”
No words. A nod.
“So we know why we’re gettin’ the invite, don’t we?”
“Naw. Not really. I used to fuck his wife and I did try to take him down in the middle of the Astrodome but that ain’t enough to make a smart man want to kill you. Not when you’ve got bigger enemies than a broken-down pee-eye after your ass.”
“Check the glove box.”
“What?”
“The glove box.”
He popped the latch and peered inside. On top of the maps, manuals and unpaid parking tickets that live inside every car’s glove compartment sat a fat, long manila envelope, bound with clear tape. He pulled it from its resting place and slapped it on his thigh.
“Heavy. Got some throw-weight to it.”
“That it do.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“That bull did ring your bell, didn’t he? Your buddy, Mr. Crowe, dropped that in the middle of the ring. Cowboy buddy of yours handed it to me. Figured you was owed a finder’s fee.”
“How much inside of this thing?”
“Fifty large.”
“How much did you take before sealin’ it back up?”
The driver shot him a hurt look.
“Not a red cent, son. Figured I’d wait on you to be generous.”
“You might wait a long time, Slick.”
The driver snorted then looked at his passenger, a bearded, bleary-eyed man with a swollen jaw and a lump of gauze and bandage around his shoulder.
“You’re holdin’ the reason you’ve made his Most Wanted list. You took his money. He wants to take you. Easy enough to see.”
Another pull. No answer. Just thoughts. Crowe gone rogue, maddened by a scheme gone bad, wanting to take out everybody who tripped him up. As good a reason as any.
“What I can’t figure is why the Racehorse was so keen to spring you and why that hard-on cop let you walk so easy. I mean, hell — that bull banged you up pretty bad. And Detective Jones hates you a whole lot.”
“One word — motivation. The Racehorse figures I’m one motivated motherfucker since I’m in debt up to my tits and there’s a bunch of bodies on my conscious. Including a good friend. I’ll go further than any hired hand.”
He shot a look at the driver, one eye closed, the other bloodshot and evil beneath a shaggy eyebrow.
“As for our buddy, the Ciderman — well, a different kind of motivation moves him. He wants to throw me in the meat grinder, hoping I come out as a hunk of sausage on the other side.”
“Why’s he hate you?”
“He thinks I got his partner killed.”
“Partners. Jee-zus, I should have guessed. Brings us back round to that Bogart thing.”
“It does, Slick.”
Another pull.
“Arrrrrgggggh. Fuck Bogart.”
“You keep sayin’ that. Why?”
“Fuck Bogie and all that partner crap. Fuck Hammett and Faulkner. Fuck Churchill, too. And it’s Winston, goddam it, not Neville.”
“All right, Winston. Fuck him and fuck them. Answer me why?”
Another pull. The answer bubbling through the brown, unspoken but loud in Burch’s brain:
Because a friend is more than a partner. And a friend doesn’t let a friend get dead. Not without doing something. Anything. To even the score.
TWENTY-THREE
Jack is dead.
Simple and certain, the thought came to him as his eyes scanned the road ahead.
He felt nothing. He kept driving. The thought would rise up and cross his consciousness, like a highway sign caught in the headlights. Then it would disappear. Into the darkness of his mind and memory.
He kept driving. South by southwest.
Jack is dead.
Then nothing. He should feel something; they went back a long way. The Irish Channel. Angola. He didn’t. He couldn’t even recall what Jack looked like, beyond the man’s hulking bulk and dark, greasy hair. And the cool, ferocious power of big muscle in action.
But that was memory, impressions and quick-frozen images. Not emotion. He didn’t feel a thing.
Jack is dead. He never came back after leaving their Houston motel to roust some of Crowe’s dead Mexican partner’s crew and never called. He always checked in — always — but this time he didn’t.
Louis drove to the motel and cruised past the aftermath of fatal gunsmoke — flashing blue lights, a meat wagon, a body bag wheeled out on a gurney. He felt an icy dagger in his chest and just knew.
Jack is dead.
Louis shrugged off the loss and kept driving, looping them well south of San Antonio and sticking to farm-to-market and secondary blacktop before angling north toward Piedras Negras.
Somewhere deep in Dimmit County, after dark hours of solitary back road cruising broken only by the lights of the occasional town, he pulled over onto the gravel shoulder and waited for a semi to roar past so he could swing across the blacktop and creep the car behind the dark hulk of a boarded up service station.
Grit carried in the truck’s wake slapped the windows and fenders, shaking the springs and shocks once, like a shopper too broke to buy a discount mattress and glad to take that fact out on something, anything handy, particularly the very thing beyond the reach of a thin and naked wallet.
He eased onto the cracked concrete apron, his headlights playing over the rusted bolts of the pumpless island, and parked behind the building. He stepped out and stretched, flexing his arms and shoulders, pulling his sweaty shirt from his back, letting the air play over the moisture. He took a Maglite out of the pocket of his loose-fitting black trousers and walked toward the rear of the automobile, his hand tracing its flank.
The car was old Detroit iron, a ’76 Malibu Classic, a two-door that was once a glossy burgundy rolling off the showroom floor, but was now a faded shade that could be called deep russet, on the uptown side of primer red. The engine was a remanufactured 350 V-8, GM’s best of the era. The body was bondo-ed but sturdy. The tires used and recapped but still deep in the tread and even in the wear. Not a bad pickup for a grand and change on the southside of San Antonio. In and out of a body shop. Cash and carry. Thirty minutes. Maybe less.
That was the easy part. Transferring his cargo was far trickier. Rental car parked in the cool bowels of a parking deck next to the Riverwalk, near a wall and a heavy concrete cylinder, away from the security cameras. A long wait until the six o’clock rush of office workers and evening shoppers and strollers was over and the cool of the night hush gave him time and cover to make his move.
One trunk open. A fast move with a vial, a syringe and a slender needle. Not his old kit. Modern-day throwaways. Two trunks open. A dead lift with lots of leg, just like the old days under the big iron of the prison gym. A shoulder carry. Big load. Lots of sweat. Lots of time to cool down — later, on the highway, with the windows wide open to the thick night air.
No sweat now, standing on the side of the road on the drag-ass end of a long night’s drive, with cool pitch darkness receiving the first faint brushes of daylight, a change felt more than seen, picked up on the edge of vision rather than the center of eyesight.
He pulled out his silver cigarette case and put a Camel Wide on his lip. He lit it with the Varaflame and blew smoke, then walked to the rear of the car.
Trunk open. Flashlight on a supine form. A shake. Two shakes. A moan, muffled by tape. The smell o
f urine. Not unexpected. Another shake. Muttered profanity. The thud of a foot kicked against carpeted metal. More profanity. Signs of life. A reach and a sharp pull, greeted by a yelp of pain.
“You motherfucker! You fuckin’ enjoyed that, didn’t you, you piece of shit! Bet you get off on smackin’ women around and tyin’ ’em up. Makes you feel like a big man, in control. Makes up for that little dick the world laughs at you for . . .”
The words skidded to a sudden stop at the distinctive sound of a switchblade snicking open. Gleaming metal arcing downward.
“You smell like horse piss. Climb out of there when you can and clean up.”
“I can’t move. I can’t feel my legs.”
“That will change. Sit up.”
“I can’t.”
“I said, sit up!”
He grabbed her by the collar and pulled her into a sitting position. She yelped like a dog. He slapped her twice, then bent down to put his face within inches of hers.
“You smell like piss. Here. Clean yourself up. Get dressed.”
A milk jug half filled with water. Thunked into the well of the trunk. A towel, faded jeans, a black buckaroo shirt with white piping and pearl speed snaps. Thrown into her lap in a tight ball. From the bag she had in the car when he grabbed her. Clothes and an IBM ThinkPad with modem and a Nokia cellphone. Standard issue for the rising yuppie. And a Beretta 9 mm, the full-sized version adopted by the American military. Optional equipment, opted for only by yuppies taking a wild walk where they didn’t belong.
“Turn around.”
“Fuck off and get dressed.”
He took a deep drag on the Camel Wide, eyes on her, watching her clamber out of the trunk, laughing softly when she banged her ankle bone on the bumper.
“Quit laughin’ you shit, and help me stand up.”
“You look like you gettin’ along awright.”
“No thanks to you.”
“You right about that. No thanks to me.”
She stood awkwardly, shimmying out of soiled jeans and a blue cotton blouse, shucking panties, but locking an angry stare on him the whole time. She was barefoot, flesh on gravel, and it was clear that the stone was cutting the bottoms of her feet. But she didn’t try to shift or hip hop; she stood her ground, shaking her wild bronze locks, splashing water on her thighs, bush and ass, stepping into the fresh clothes, taking her eyes off him only when she bent forward to rub water on her calves.