Bean flushed. “I apologize. Is there anything I can do?”
“Get the crap outta here.”
“It’s been a long time.”
“Not long enough.”
Bean counted ten, swallowed his anger back. “What gives you cause to speak to me that way? What have I ever done to you?”
A crooked, smug smile crawled across Tommy-Blue’s face. “Why, nothing, Your Honor, you’re as perfect as can be. Always have been.”
“Explain that.”
“Kiss my butt.”
Bean ground his teeth together.
“And after you kiss it, get out.” Tommy-Blue headed for the back office.
“Did you lie?”
Tommy-Blue stopped. “About?”
“You lie so much I have to be more specific?”
Tommy-Blue stormed to within inches of Bean. Bean’s gut clenched but he refused to flinch, refused to move, to give Tommy-Blue the satisfaction.
“I’ll kick your behind and no one will care,” Tommy-Blue said, his voice a low rumble.
“Could be, but that doesn’t answer my question, does it?”
“Did I lie? I was a cop, Judge, I lied all the time.” Stepping backward, Tommy-Blue ran his hand over his face. “I lied to suspects, to fellow officers. I lied to superiors and attorneys and judges and reporters and civilians. I was a cop, you dope, I lied all the time.”
Bean fingered the package in his pocket. “All cops lie?”
Tommy-Blue snorted. “Yes, because the world is exactly that simple.”
Bean shook his head. “No, it’s not.”
“All right, then. If we’re going talk, then let’s talk like adults.”
Bean wrapped his hand around the package in his pocket. “Fair enough. Did The Quartet lie about that night?”
Tommy-Blue grinned. “The Quartet? Is that how you see us? A proper noun? Given gravitas by grammar?”
“Did the four of you lie about that night?”
Tommy-Blue rolled his shoulders and slithered away from Bean. He roamed the empty room, his hands touching table to table, his feet shuffling along the wooden floor. “‘That night?’ And how am I supposed to know which night you’re talking about, Judge.”
“I’m not a Judge anymore, Tommy-Blue.”
“That’s right. I plumb forgot.” He’d forgotten nothing and it was obvious. He tapped a vein like a junkie looking to jab a tin. “Got a little problem, do you? Off scoring the night of your daughter’s birth, weren’t you? Scoring some junk instead of being there with your wife?”
Bean drew himself up, clenched his free hand to a tight fist. Tommy-Blue laughed.
“Going to beat me up? To pound me into the dirt? A big, tough dude like you beating down a cancer victim? Think you’ll even break a sweat breaking me?”
“No, I—”
“I don’t care.” Tommy-Blue blew out a quiet breath.
“Check your facts.” Bean swallowed. “I scored later because she was dead.”
Tommy-Blue looked at him. “When you were raising your daughter alone.”
“Yeah.”
“You gave her away,” Tommy-Blue said.
“Yeah.”
He kept the rest to himself. Tommy-Blue didn’t need to know Bean refused to put Angela through what he’d been through with both his grandmother and his father. The man didn’t need to know Bean was, at heart, a coward.
Tommy-Blue’s face was dark, almost gaunt with shadows climbing out of what Bean realized now were sunken cheeks. “Karen raised our son alone.”
“Did she?”
“The biggest regret I have.”
“I have a few of those biggest regrets, too.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“What happened that night, Tommy-Blue?”
“The night of the promotions?”
“Yes.”
This time, the man’s laugh was ragged, with chewed edges and a hollowness shot through its heart. “That was the best night ever, wasn’t it? Save the world, get promoted, move up that ladder.”
Bean frowned. “Mariana wasn’t too interested in the ladder.”
“That’s true. I thought she was crazy. A Hispanic woman? A Texas Ranger? And not from the multi-cultural quota system, but because she worked her buns off, scored off the freaking charts every step of the way and on every damned test. She was the real deal. Could have climbed that ladder and hauled it up after her.” He laughed. “Go out and save the world, then chug down a Corona or three and chase it with a single shot of Blue.”
Mariana had always kept a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue in the house. She celebrated good arrests or righteous convictions or birthdays or whatever with a single shot. But she always made sure he knew it wasn’t for every day.
“Shit’s too expensive for every day, Jeremiah,” she would always say. “Shit’s too expensive.”
“Tommy-Blue, what happened that night?”
“Why don’t you think it happened like we all said?”
Bean bit down his anger. “Cut the shit, Tommy-Blue, what happened?”
“Nothing at all. Just four Rangers trying to make an arrest.”
“Yeah? I got a package that says otherwise.”
“You got dick, then.”
They’d met at Mariana’s house that night, all four of them keyed up and swallowing back the metallic-tasting adrenaline that flooded their blood. They’d been following a particular man for months. He’d been a coyote, sometimes a mule, and at all times a murderer, pimp, and sodomite, and on this night, a confidential informant had maneuvered the man to a particular place and time.
The Quartet was there when he arrived.
Tommy-Blue stared through the Sip’N’Tan’s front door, but Bean doubted he was seeing anything. He was looking inside himself, deciding how much he wanted to say. Eventually, he took a deep breath, looked hard at Bean, and said, “We murdered him.”
Bean was stunned. Murder? How could that possibly be? “You were fired upon, you defended yourselves.”
Tommy-Blue spoke slowly, as though his mouth was broken and he couldn’t speak clearly. “Yeah, yeah, that...happened. But, Judge, we murdered that night.”
Bean pulled the package from his pocket, carefully open the small box. “And did you take souvenirs?”
Tommy-Blue stared at the finger. “What the hell is that? Where’d you get it?”
“Mailman brought it. Did it come from Zapata?”
Tommy-Blue laughed. “Hell, no, it didn’t.”
Bean showed him the note. Tommy-Blue’s color faltered some, but he stood taller than he had since Bean walked in. “What of it?”
“What was the lie?”
“Judge, you don’t understand at all. Everything was a lie...all of it. Yes, we got fired on. Yes, we defended ourselves. But everything was a lie and you ain’t getting the truth from anybody.”
14
There had been rain that night, rain that smelled of dirt and sand, of cattle and cattle feces. Rain in west Texas was like that, a crap shoot. It might smell of desert flowers or it might smell of oil rigs and the burn-off from area refineries. It could take someone back to a pleasant childhood or shove their nose into their non-descript right now or their bitter and angry tomorrow. Regardless, the rain never lasted overlong, as though the desert didn’t want to confuse anyone about where they were. This was a harsh and dry landscape and rains that did anything more than leave spots on cars or tease lawns with moisture inevitably caused flashfloods that could leave anyone caught in them washed away and found five or ten miles away, if at all.
That night there had been a hot rain.
Everyone called him Zapata and who the hell knew his real name anymore. Even he professed not to remember it, or his birth date, or even where he was born. With Zapata, everything was mystery within obscurity within anonymity. Rumor was, and The Quartet believed, he’d crawled up the Zetas ladder; a young boy on the streets of Monterrey watching for the policia, then a teenager running
from the policia, then a man buying the policia before killing those he couldn’t buy.
He dabbled in everything but his original love was providing for those with addictions. Cocaine, weed, heroin, toward the end of his career a bit of crystal meth. There wasn’t a need an addict had that Zapata couldn’t fill, and eventually he’d turned his eye toward those poverty-plagued laborers who were addicted to opportunity in the shiny north.
When those laborers rebelled, when they wanted their money back, or demanded to be led to civilization rather than some waterless shack in the middle of the Arizona desert, Zapata fought back hard. Once, fifty-one wets had gone with him to America, forty-nine had been left headless and handless to thwart identification in Piedras Negras. An old woman and a young boy were told to tell Zapata’s story.
A confidential informant, one of JD’s snitches, had somehow cobbled together a meeting between Zapata and a man who had questioned Zapata’s testosterone publicly while drinking agave juice in Zapata’s favorite cantinas. The man had been a relative of one of the forty-nine. “How hard it is to kill a pregnant senora? How much of a man does that make someone?” the relative had said loudly in the cantina.
Two weeks later, JD’s source put the two men together to work out their differences.
And had mentioned the meet to JD.
Tommy-Blue’s eyes glowed, lost in the memory. It had been a glorious night, one that the media from one end of the state to the other had breathlessly covered for weeks. It had been a time when Texans and Americans thought cartels emanated from Columbia. The Mexican cartels were thought of as bastard step-children if they were thought of at all.
“But we knew,” Tommy-Blue said. “The Columbians were already losing their grip. They were too far away. The Mexicans were right on the border. They controlled the ground. The Zetas and Sinaloas. The Gulf. They were all already there. Nobody had ever heard of them, but we knew.”
“What happened, Tommy-Blue?”
Tommy-Blue stared at the Judge, his face full of memory. Jagged lines ringed his mouth and radiated from his eyes. Knowledge, memory, regret. All of them filled those broken lines.
“We killed him. We pulled up to the cantina, a little place outside of Piedras Negras. Came up out of the desert, driving slow, lights off. Mariana was fine, hard as steel. JD was JD, crazy from the heat and itchy.” Tommy-Blue shook his head. “You know JD was the only partner I ever had that scared me. Me, obviously, and Andy. I was scared, I won’t lie about that. Driving with the lights off? I kept thinking we’d drive into a wash or run over a goat or something.”
Tommy-Blue licked his lips, reached behind the counter for a bottle of water.
“We came in the back door. There were no guards out back. I thought Zapata really wanted to show what a man he was. Wasn’t going to let this other guy get the better of him.”
“Yesterday’s headlines, Tommy-Blue. What happened? What did you guys lie about?”
Tommy-Blue shook his head. “It started like the papers said.”
“Bullshit.” Bean stalked the room. “If it had happened that way, I wouldn’t have a package with a finger. Sure as hell wouldn’t have a note telling me you lied.”
“I said it started the way the newspapers said...he fired first. But let’s talk about that finger. Where’d it come from? You wonder about that? It’s probably some mope yanking your chain, keeping you up at night.” He tapped his skull. “Getting in your head, man.”
Bean shook his head. “No, this is real...whatever it is. You told me murder. Murder isn’t getting fired on and returning fire and killing a bad guy. How’d Mariana get shot?”
That’s what you lied about, isn’t it, Mariana? How that bullet ripped open your leg.
“How’d...what? How’d she get shot? I’ll tell you this: that flesh wound sure as hell didn’t come from a narco-gangster.”
Bean ground his jaw, stared outside to the SUV. Faith stared back at him, her face full of questions. “One of his soldiers?”
“Do you ever listen to anything besides your own voice? First of all, I said he came alone...secondly, I said that shot didn’t come from a gangster.”
“Someone in the bar? Some random person...”
Mariana, you told me Zapata shot you. Who shot you? What happened?
Silence.
Into that silence, Tommy-Blue opened his mouth. He stared at Bean until Bean became uncomfortable, feeling naked beneath the man’s gaze.
Then Tommy-Blue shook his head. “No. You come back into my life after...fifteen...sixteen years? And question my integrity?”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing. What happened is what happened. We told everyone already. We told the media and the District Attorneys and the civil judges and anyone who asked. What happened is what happened, and some crank sending you some dismembered body part doesn’t change that fact.” Tommy-Blue shook his head. “Get out, Judge, we’re done. You come back and I’ll call the Rangers myself. I’m sure they’d love to know where you are.”
Bean slammed his hands flat against the counter. The boom rattled the windows. “Goddamnit, who shot my wife?”
Tommy-Blue grinned. “You know, Judge, you’d be a lot scarier if there was an actual gun in that holster.” His entire body shook with his laugh. “You stupid or something? An empty holster?”
When Bean jammed the .380 up under Tommy-Blue’s throat, his laugh snapped off.
“What the hell? Are you crazy?” Tommy-Blue’s hands froze, but his eyes remained cool as a frosty glass of iced tea. “Ease up, mister.”
The Judge yanked his wallet and flipped it back. A silver badge winked in the dregs of sunlight that leaked through the windows. “A gun and a badge, you son of a bitch. That make me any scarier?”
“Scarier?” Tommy-Blue said. “No. More pathetic, carrying around a reproduction of your wife’s badge...one I heard you lost in a poker game? Yeah.”
Bean slammed the badge into Tommy-Blue’s forehead, jammed and twisted it until a there was a trickle of blood down Tommy-Blue’s forehead. “You fucking well were a Ranger. You swore an oath. Justice. A moral center.”
“Hell of a thing coming from you, Judge. Shooting heroin until you were pissing yourself, taking campaign cash from anyone and everyone. Yeah, you’re one to gas about a moral center.”
“Goddamnit,” Bean said. “I’ll kill you here and now. What happened at the cantina? Who shot my wife?”
“I don’t know.”
Jeremiah...stop. You don’t need to do this to him.
“Bullshit. You were there. One of the heroes.”
“One of the heroes? There were no heroes in that place.”
In a blur, Tommy-Blue slipped his hands between the two men, grabbed Bean’s wrist. A quick yank and spin and Bean was pinned to the counter, bent over with Tommy-Blue’s body pressing hard against him. The gun dug into the back of Bean’s skull while the badge hit the floor.
Tommy-Blue said, “Better make sure, if you’re going to put a gun to my head, you follow through with that threat. Because I will.”
Tommy-Blue put some upward pressure on Bean’s arm and tiny fingers of pain grabbed hold, just enough to get Bean’s attention. “Piss on your guilt. Moral center? Load of cowflop. Guilt has no weight with me. I don’t care about anything anymore. Guilt ate me clean through. My wife...my kid. My parents and friends. Damn near everything I’ve ever done.” Tommy-Blue gave Bean another jolt of pain. Bean grunted but did not fight back. “You understand that?”
“Twenty-one years down the line and now you’re as bad as the men you arrested?” Bean asked.
Tommy-Blue laughed. “I have been. Just like you’re as bad as the men you judged. We’re both failures. The difference is...I don’t care anymore.”
Neither do I, Bean wanted to say. I’m tired of everything. I just want to see my wife.
And I don’t care if she lied.
That was the lie to himself. He wanted to know if she’d hidden the t
ruth from him. He wanted to know who belonged to the finger. He wanted to know, maybe more than anything else, if he could have changed one thing those years ago and thus changed the here and now.
Could I have saved my wife...and my daughter? Could have done something to ensure they were with me right now?
“Justice?” Tommy-Blue spat on the floor. “Justice is an illusion. A little kid’s picture book.”
Bean raised his free hand peacefully. Tommy-Blue released him but kept the gun against his skull even as Bean turned to face him. “What are you doing out here, Tommy-Blue? A coffee shop? A tanning parlor? In Texas? Three hundred and sixty-five sunny damn days a year. Who needs to pay to tan?” Bean shook his head. “There are no customers and we both know it. How do you survive?”
Tommy-Blue said nothing, his face as blank as the desert.
“You’re fronting? Coyotes? Mules? Only two hundred miles from Mexico.”
Tommy-Blue shook his head. “Mariana always said you thought you knew everything. She thought it was cute. You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything about me. What am I doing out here? I’m dying, ass.”
“We’re all dying.” Bean tapped his temple. “One way or another.”
Tommy-Blue snorted. “Whatever you say.”
“They come through here, don’t they? Take a break, get some water or food, then back on the trail. A few bucks from the coyotes and all is right with the world.”
Tommy-Blue popped the magazine from the .380, dropped shells all over the floor, then emptied the chamber. He held the gun out for Bean. “I do what I do, Judge, we all do. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s awful and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. I got no guilt left for you to hit me with. There’s nothing to say about that night. It was exactly how the newspapers said.” His sigh, exhausted, weary, came from somewhere far away, deeper inside him than Bean would have thought possible. “I have no deathbed confession for you, Judge. Try somebody else.”
Silence yawed between them, a chasm miles wide and as deep as the surrounding desert. In that space, the breeze carried a hint of perfume. Sweet but tinged with stale sweat and fear. Both men looked at the doorway. Faith stood there, still in the white dress.
Death is Not Forever (Barefield Book Book 3) Page 8