“Thank you.”
“Can I ask...how?”
Bean sped the car up, let the machine eat the yellow lines faster, let the amateur’s photo blur even more behind her and to his left side. “Not much further. Half hour, maybe.”
She didn’t prompt him again, didn’t prod him.
Eventually, he said, “I killed her.”
27
Finally, Langtry West.
Not a city, not even a village. A speck, buffeted by the superheated desert breeze, beaten by tumble weeds, choked by sandstorms as thick as chocolate milkshakes.
It was a compound in a remote section of the unincorporated part of the county, owned by the Mariana Bean Estate. Three houses, Digger’s bar, a few outbuildings that might have been useful if the compound had been a ranch or had drilling rigs on it. It was a lonely outpost in a lonely county and that was just fine with Bean. The fewer visitors the better, the less obvious the compound the better, the more anonymous the better.
Miles and miles away—down the busy ribbon of U.S. 90—were county offices and county cops and first responder volunteers in old ambulances, but rarely did they make an appearance in Langtry West and any day they didn’t show up was a damned good day as far as Bean was concerned.
Bean and Digger took care of their own problems, and when they couldn’t? Silver across the palms of those who wore brass and all was fine in the World.
There was a smell to Langtry West, a smell and a sound, that were both comforting and soothing and that Bean had found nowhere else since Mariana died. The air was dry and dusty, with tinges of gamey cattle or oil rig flares but always there was a hint of the perfume Mariana wore on their wedding night. The sound was a low rumble, a throaty growl that didn’t come from road traffic or air traffic or anything mechanical. The nearest farm-to-market road was nearly three miles away and the nearest state route another five or six miles beyond that. There was no traffic to speak of and no commercial airport within fifty miles. Yet Langtry always hummed, always had a white noise that sat comfortably in Bean’s ears.
The ghosts, he thought. The memories and thoughts and hearts of everyone whose feet have touched this ground; criminal or victim, husband or wife or child, loved or hated.
It was the sound of their misery, banging away in Bean’s ears until it somehow became a balm to him.
The sun had already begun slipping beneath the horizon, like a drunk slipping his way to the ground, the wall propping him up and stretching the journey out, and it cast the entire place in a saturated red. It was a color almost too red, as though painted by a young artist who hadn’t yet learned restraint. If it were lighter, somehow bright in hue, it would have reminded Bean of Angela’s first shock of hair. To the east, opposite of the towering rock that made up the distant spires of America’s Big Bend National Park and Mexico’s Parque Nacional Maderas del Carmen, Bean saw the first scattered stars of the evening. They’d be brilliantly lit when they finally set atop both countries’ national parks and danced against the dark sky and craggy rock.
For now they were dull and dingy.
Bean shut the car off. The sudden silence unnerved him.
This was the parking lot of Digger’s bar. The bar, about fifty yards away from the three houses, was an old, beat-up building. It had a forgotten, or maybe never known, history and it had been the only decent building on the property when Mariana’s estate bought it. Digger had cleaned it up, though that meant nothing more than turning from an old, beat-up building into an old, beat-up saloon. There were few permanent items in the place, few permanent drinks ’cause damned if Digger didn’t snatch his booze off’a the backs of trucks and so never really knew what liquor he might have in stock, no permanent employees except him and a sometime bartender whose right leg was shorter than his left and whose left eye was a sightless mess as a reminder that sometimes there are people who can get the better of even a six-foot-eight-inch behemoth. There weren’t any fancy, neon beer signs, but there were scores of random words and sentences scrawled all over the walls; words and phrases that occurred to Digger and that he then committed to masonry. The tables and chairs matched nothing and were whatever Digger found in dumps or at garage sales and traded a few drinks for.
There was, however, a showpiece. Amongst the rubble of stolen this and lifted that, amidst the detritus of whatever decorating scheme caught Digger’s fancy at whatever time, there was a mirror; a giant, grand thing that was completely out of place in this stretch of empty south Texas desert. It was better than twenty feet long and stood five feet tall. Built in two pieces, it towered over the bar and made the place feel enormous. Digger had found it at a hot pillow joint in New Orleans. In the Easy’s post-Katrina chaos, the madam who ran the whore house disappeared. Maybe killed, but maybe also a few steps ahead of those to whom she owed heavy. Or maybe the nightmare that was life in the days and weeks after the hurricane simply gave her a chance to get out and try something new via reinvention.
Either way, Digger bought the mirror cheap from a man who’d called himself the “agent” of the owner. Notta lotta questions so no troubles shipping it home and installing both sections himself.
“Where are we?” Faith stared at the bar.
“A bar.”
“Let’s hear it, ladies and germs, for the cleverest Judge in the land. Funny, witty, an amazing grasp of the obvious and kills people. He’ll be at HaHa’s all week...don’t forget to tip your waitress.”
Bean stared at her. “My place of business.”
“Thought you were a judge.”
“And?”
“Don’t look like any courthouse I’ve ever been in.” She shook her head. “Then again, you ain’t like no judge I’ve ever been in front of.”
“You’ve been in front of a few, have you?”
“More than you.”
Bean grunted. “Don’t bet on it.”
“So you’re a judge...who works out of a bar...who kills people—”
“When I have to.”
“And helps wayward girls get home.”
“Wayward? Hardly. You’re a victim.”
She tensed, her air suddenly electric. “No, I ain’t.”
“Of course, you are. Bassi snatched you or bought you or whatever, and—”
“I’m a victim? Fuck that bullshit. I’m a victim then that motherfucker wins.” She glared at Bean and thumped her chest. “He ain’t getting over on me. Ain’t a victim for nobody.”
Bean looked away, embarrassed by the intensity of both her gaze and words.
“You a victim?” she asked.
“Always have been.” Bean constantly saw himself as the victim. Of bad blood, of history, of tides and currents outside himself, but mostly of his own bad decisions. “No, probably not.” He rubbed his lips. “Maybe. Only of myself.”
“Yeah...well...I never seen anybody run as hard as you do.”
“Since I was fourteen.”
Out of the car, they leaned on the hood.
“Stopped for a while when Mariana was alive. But...I’m tired, Faith.” He blushed. “Sorry, that’s not your name.”
“Why is there so much violence in your life?”
Bean stared at the bar’s doorway. It was double wide, hung with swinging doors. There were regular doors, too, heavy and solid metal just in case the place needed to be locked down, but Digger preferred the old west look. Inside, Bean saw Digger, the bartender, a drinker or two, a game of poker. Everything moved slow and certain in the dim light.
Was that how the cantina had looked? Quiet and mostly empty and not at all a threat? And what about when the bullets had started flying? What had it looked like then?
And did Tommy-Blue, when he slipped out the back, look anything like Digger coming out the front now?
“Because madness runs in my family. It gets to all of us eventually. Usually the men, but sometimes the women, too. I run because Mariana is dead and…” He shrugged. “I know what’s coming. Makes me a victim, I guess. Bad
blood...bad genes.” He looked at her. “My paternal grandmother was a sheriff in New Mexico.”
“That doesn’t make her crazy.”
“Maybe.” He laughed but it was strained.
The death scene photos flooded his brain. He didn’t think of them often, but when he did, it was full color, epic, dead clear. So much blood. It had been the first time Bean realized how much blood was in a human body.
“She carried a long-barreled Colt. She loved shooting that thing. Shot it all the time. Sometimes shot with the local boys. Bragging rights...some beer after. Always won.”
“Good for her.”
“She killed a man once.”
Which is where I got my taste for blood.
“She had to. He forced her into it.”
“Suicide by cop?” she sked.
“Murder by cop.” He played idly with the .380 in his pocket. Dirt covered his boots and his hat was not only dirty, but bent through the middle. He’d never let the hat get that disheveled. “Every summer I stayed with her. Sometimes I’d go on calls, too. Car accidents with deer or raccoons. Disorderly conduct at the bowling alley...usually drunk guys getting pissed over score keeping. Sometimes a stolen lawn mower or snow blower. Never anything too serious.”
“Just what a young boy needs...massive exposure to crime.”
“Well, it taught me right from wrong and that there’s not a damn thing anywhere straight up black or white. Was gonna be a cop.”
“Why the robe then?”
He took a deep breath, watched Digger head toward them but stop, trying to decide if he could interrupt them or not. After a second, he headed back inside.
“Didn’t visit her anymore after I was fourteen.”
“Why?”
“The longest summer of my life.”
“What happened, Your Honor?”
“You know I’m not a judge anymore, right?”
“What happened when you were fourteen...Judge?”
A guy had walked into a bank. Only three banks in that tiny, lonely New Mexico town and the guy had chosen a specific one. Bean had still been in school...Barefield Junior High School, playing drums in the school band, and just beginning to realize that girls might be a great thing.
Bean licked his lips. “Guy said he had a bomb. Four sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest.”
“A bomb? To rob a bank?” She frowned. “Wouldn’t it kill him if he used it?” After a second, she said, “He wasn’t there to rob the bank.”
“Nope. His ex-wife worked there.”
Her face clouded.
Bean said, “He went straight to her window and told her he was going to kill everyone unless she remarried him. Her name was Sheila and he was—”
“An abuser.”
Bean nodded, unsurprised. “They’d been married for ten years or something. Gramma said the woman had spent most of that time trying to get away. Gramma told me she went to their house, officially, all the time. The neighbors would call or Sheila would manage to make a call before he ripped the phone out of the wall. Sometimes Gramma arrested the guy and sometimes she didn’t.”
“Should’a shot him,” she said, the hard edge he’d heard at Echo’s back in her voice.
“It was a different time. Women were still property.”
“He got worse, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, his violence escalated. But so did his sadism. He loaned her out to his friends to celebrate their birthdays. Sold her, too, but mostly he kept her—”
“Isolated. All alone. Wouldn’t let her family see her or call her or nothing.”
“Yeah.”
She said, “They all do that. Abusers, I mean.” Her right hand strayed to her left bicep and rubbed it gently, as though a muscle ache had taken hold. “No family, no friends, no one.”
“They leave you alone? Without anyone?”
She nodded. “But never alone.”
Was that how it happened with Angela? With the Donaways? When the Donaways abused his daughter, hurting her so badly she ran away at age eight and came back to her father, did they keep her alone but never leave her alone?
Bean eyed Faith. He knew nothing of her history. Had she been abused? Or had a sibling been? Had she run away from that, as Angela had, and turned to prostitution on the street for simple survival? Had she someone other than Bassi, who was just a straight up rapist, who’d left their mark on her?
“Sheila agreed to marry him. Told him she’d do it then and there, right in the bank. Asked him to let everyone but her go, to call a preacher and to let her best friend come witness the ceremony. Told him it wasn’t legal unless there was a witness.”
“She didn’t need a witness, did she?”
“No.”
“Sheila’s best friend was your Gramma?”
“Yes.”
“He let me in the bank,” Gramma had finally said late that sultry August just before Bean headed back to school in Barefield. Heat had dripped along the ridge of her nose and sharp cheeks. There had been no breeze and the air was heavy with the tinge of iron. Years later, Bean realized that smell of iron was actually blood from the perpetual slaughter at a nearby hog farm.
That summer, Bean had read all the newspaper accounts. He was so proud of what Gramma had done. Bean had thought her actions amazing and heroic. Yet she never spoke of it, no matter how badly Bean pestered her. Instead, she became quiet and short tempered. The sunshine bled from her eyes and the stride from her step. She became, by the end of that summer, a stoop-shouldered old woman, which he’d never seen, with a head of hair beginning to go gun-metal gray.
“I don’t know why he let me in the bank,” she’d finally said to her grandson. “He knew I was the law. Was the stupidest thing he did. I don’t understand it.”
Bean remembered, as clearly as he now smelled the mid-summer evening splayed out around them, being confused about her confusion.
“Of course I had a gun,” she’d said. “Not my long barrel, he would have seen that right off. I had a little Glock in my pocket. I came in and he shoved everyone else out the front door. That was the deal.”
“Why’d you go in, Gramma?” Bean had asked. “He could have shot you.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Because he would have killed Sheila,” Bean had said.
“I couldn’t let him.”
Bean had been wide-eyed, listening to Gramma, waiting for her to tell him how she’d saved the woman and killed the bad guy.
“I got there and told him the minister was on the way, but he’d been at a funeral down the road and it would be a few minutes. He nodded and started talking about the Bible. We talked back and forth and I watched him but he never looked at me. He watched her, nothing but her.”
Bean, sitting in Digger’s parking lot, knew the look. Gramma had never described it, but Bean knew it was a predator’s look. He’d seen that same look on the faces of his fellow judges when they’d decided his fate. Smug and in charge, as though they had all the answers and he was dog shit they’d paid some little Mex boy to scrape off their shoes.
And although Gramma never said it, Bean knew she had already planned to kill Sheila’s former husband. He knew she had planned to kill him even before she walked into the bank, before she’d started talking Bible talk.
He also knew Gramma had wanted to.
Bean touched his forehead, right between his eyes. “Single bullet. From right in front of him. With her little Glock.”
Gramma had described how the man had fallen straight to the floor and the blood just kept coming out of his head. Then she told a fourteen-year-old Royy—Jeremiah, at the time—how the stench of human blood struck her as so much more powerful than what was always in the air from the hog farms. And when she told him about the blood, her voice rose and her face flushed. Her breathing shallowed and became more rapid.
She was getting excited. She had killed a bad man and relieved it every moment she was awake and probably most of the moments sh
e slept.
But she had changed. Where she had once gone shooting with the local boys for bragging rights, now she went out alone and shot coyotes and deer, stray dogs, feral cats.
“She fixated on the smell of blood. Came to love it, I think.” Bean took a deep breath. “I caught her once.”
“Caught her doing what?”
Bean licked his lips. “Smelling her own blood.”
He’d thought she was gone. Grocery shopping, maybe. Or getting the transfixed on the squad car. Or maybe out shooting more dogs. He’d gone into the bathroom and found her sitting on the edge of the bathtub, naked, cutting the insides of her thighs, where no one would see the scars, and letting her blood soak her fingers.
And then she raised her fingers to her nose and breathed deeply.
Three days later, while Royy hung out at the park with a few summertime friends, a plumbing repairman came to the house. He’d known Gramma for years and so let himself in. He’d found her in that same bathtub. She’d cut her own throat and then snuggled down into the tub, letting the blood soak her. It was smeared all around her nose.
Those were the pictures Bean remembered most clearly. Yeah, he’d seen the aftermath of the bank and remembered how the man’s blood squiggled its way toward the door on the slightly tilted floor of the century-old building. He remembered how the back side of the man’s head was painted all over the teller’s booth.
But it was the pictures of Gramma that stayed in his head through all the years. Her deputies took a few pix, which Bean saw, but eventually the senior deputy called the New Mexico State Police to handle the investigation. The troopers sealed the bathroom, took roll after roll of pictures, gathered up clothes and papers, guns and bullets, anything they thought might be evidence. Bean had never seen the troopers’ pictures.
“I did it once.” Bean turned away from the bar, away from Faith, stared toward the mountains that crossed into Mexico. “After the first man I killed, I smelled his blood. Just like Gramma.”
Faith crossed herself, then whispered, “Did you ever do it again?”
Bean looked at her, then at Digger, who stood in the doorway and watched them. “Yeah...to both.”
Death is Not Forever (Barefield Book Book 3) Page 16