“Well...I tried, but I couldn’t put a bullet through that little fucker.”
“So you ran him over?”
He chuckled. “Well, no, ’cause that’d just be stupid. I tried to distract him so you could shoot him. That didn’t work, either.”
“Then you tried to run him over.”
Digger shrugged. “Well...yeah...bar was already shot to shit. Gonna have to rebuild anyway. Didn’t seem like we lost much going this route.”
Bean felt the laugh start deep in his gut. Hysterical, almost painful, laughter that made him cry, made his head hurt and his hands shake. “Well, when we find him, you get dibs on both of his 1911s. How’s that sound?”
Now Digger laughed and Bean heard the same hysterical sound in his friend’s throat. While Digger laughed, Bean tramped through the rubble, stared out the gigantic hole in the front wall. Two or three of Digger’s regular customers, cowboys and ranchers from deep in the county scrub, stood outside, their mouths gaping, staring into the bar.
“Judge,” one of them called. “You okay?”
Bean waved, tried to smile. He wrenched the dented car door open and helped Digger out. Yeah, the man had pissed himself. They stood in the pile of what had been the bar. Somewhere under it all was Jim Dell.
“What about Reuter?” Bean asked.
Digger shook his head. “Didn’t see her. Or her husband.”
Didn’t surprise Bean at all. Jim Dell had been firing like a madman. Bean was surprised anyone had survived.
“We’re going to need a fuck of a big broom to clean this mess up,” Bean said.
32
But Bean didn’t clean up the bar. He went to bed.
And slept without dreaming.
Most nights passed with the Sandman wielding a sledgehammer, beating Bean’s dreams into a twisted relic of what they’d once been. This night, even as he slept, he knew he wasn’t dreaming and some part of him was glad of it. Some part of him was glad that he didn’t have to deal with the voices and images that drove him crazy every night.
Hah hah...drove him crazy. Funny stuff.
If this whole black market judicial bullshit doesn’t work, you ought to hit the comedy circuit.
Funny...except it was so true and scary.
Since junior high school, when he’d discovered what secrets the yellowed pages of old newspapers and family Bibles and black and white photos had kept hidden from him, he’d known it was coming.
The Madness.
A proper noun, something made inevitable by becoming that proper noun, something he could never fight. Now it was right around the bend and he well knew it. On the horizon, staining whatever life he had left with streaks of orange and yellow, a wildfire that refused to play nice with firefighters and just kept coming and coming, burning everything in its path.
But this night, built upon a day of death and destruction, of a young girl stolen from her family and raped countless times, he didn’t dream of The Madness. Tonight, with cordite stuck in the hairs of his nose, with the sting of cut skin his companion, The Madness was only a fleeting thought here and there, like wisps of someone else’s life glimpsed through curtains opened by a summer breeze.
Yet at the same time, as he slept and the clock’s red eyes slipped past 12:34 and 1:52 and 2:17 and further still past 3:01 and crept up to 4:00, part of him wanted the dreams. Part of him wanted the perverse comfort of seeing The Madness. Yeah, he hated it and it was going drive him to suicide one day very soon and holy shit he wanted nothing more than to rewrite his entire DNA sequence to rid himself of the insanity, but somehow, in spite of all that, it was comforting.
Even as he sometimes cried himself to sleep or drank to filthy and embarrassing excess, he knew he looked forward to the dreams and voices every night. Not because he enjoyed those visions, not because they brought him some revelatory understanding of life. But because it had become ritual. They were what his nights were about. And when, on the few occasions when a night—and his head—was filled with silence, it almost drove him back into his bottle.
The Madness had become perversely companionable by its very presence. And when that presence was gone, the world was a bit out of joint.
What he wanted tonight, as fear ached his muscles and pounded his head and dried his throat, was Mariana. He wanted to see her, to talk to her, to know when he would see her again. He wanted to dance with her as they so frequently danced while she lived. He wanted to hear her music and smell her perfume.
And he wanted what belonged to her, what meant more to her than anything else in her life except her family.
What he—her husband and lover and confidant—had managed to lose.
Might have been easier, his sleeping-head sold him, if he had sold it. Because there could have been only one reason to sell it...more Horse. So if he had sold it, to get the drugs his system desperately craved, then chances were pretty straight up he wouldn’t even remember selling it.
Instead he lost it.
In a poker game.
And he remembered every moment of it. A game of seven card, with the Joker traded up as high card. Dealer’s rules and that dealer loved putting together goofy shit to trip players. Sometimes the ace was high card, sometimes the deuce. For that game it was Joker high card. And Bean had been so close. Just a card, maybe two, from taking the entire hand and maybe the game.
But Mariana’s property had been the last thing he had left and what tortured him was that he hadn’t given it a second thought. When he realized that was all there was, he’d thrown it on the table; nary a hesitation.
That fucking last card never showed. Some punk from Zachary City had snatched up the pot.
Which included Mariana’s Texas Ranger badge.
Bean had tried to get it back. “Come on now,” he’d said. “I didn’t realize that thing was in the pot.”
The winner had frowned. “What? What are you talking about?” He’d looked at the game’s host. “The fuck is he talking about? What kind’a game you running?”
“Judge,” the host had said. “I’m not really sure what—”
Bean had shaken his head. “Look, I been hitting the juice pretty hard. Not really fair to get me drunk and then take me for everything.”
“Get you drunk?” Confusion had rocked across the winner’s face. “You think I’m trying to get in your pants or something? What the shit is going on?”
“Bean, ain’t nobody made you drink.” Another player, a sheriff’s deputy he played with a few times a month. “You got a taste and you indulged too much. Your own fault. Wha’choo always say on the stand? Personal responsibility? You need to tee up some’a that for your ownself.”
“You guys don’t understand.” Even these years later, Bean could taste the panic on his tongue. He had stalled. “Look, I don’t want—” His mouth had dried. “It’s just that—Fuck.”
“I’m outta here,” the winner had said, heading for the door. “Thanks for all the swell money, gents, I’ll spend it in good health.” He had fingered the Texas Ranger badge. “Not sure what the crap I’m’a do with this. Ebay, maybe.”
“Can’t sell badges,” Bean had said. “Illegal.”
“Yeah, probably can’t gamble with them, either,” the host had said. “But I’m sure we’re gonna overlook that, aren’t we?”
“Wait. Look. Okay, here’s the deal. Damnit. Didn’t want to have to do this...but...I’m not letting that son of a bitch walk outta here; not with Mariana’s badge.”
The winner had squared up, chest all puffed and ready to war. “Yeah? And how the fucking fuck are you fuckin’ gonna stop me?”
The Judge had laid his hand on his empty holster. “All of us are going to stop you.”
The man’s eyes had flitted around the room and Bean easily saw the panic. The guy had suddenly wondered if he’d been set up.
“You cheat,” Bean had said. “We all saw it. Cheated every hand. Problem is you’re so bad that even cheating you lost some hands.”
>
Every once in a while, these years later, Bean saw in the sunset the same shade of explosive red as in the winner’s face when he’d called him a cheater. The man had launched himself across the room, slammed hard into Bean’s gut. They’d tumbled to the floor and the next thing Bean remembered was waking up with a hole where a front tooth had been, his head on fire, and blood all over his face.
In an alley and still without her badge.
Four years and he hadn’t seen it since.
The only time he wasn’t thinking about losing her badge was when he was thinking of The Madness and remembering exactly what happened to his father and his grandmother.
A single razor with two sharpened sides, both capable of leaving him dead.
“So why not just fucking do it myself...now...and be done with it?” his dream-self asked Mariana.
Because you’re not done, Jeremiah.
“Fuck this shit. I’m done. And I’m tired. I’m not interested anymore.”
Jeremiah, you—
“I’ll get Chelle home. Then I’m coming home to you, Mariana. That’s just how it’s fucking going to be.”
33
Bean opened his eyes. Not slow. Not moving from a deep sleep netherworld to a sort of sleep-purgatory and then moving into wakefulness, but quick.
Snapped open.
Because someone was here.
In the room? Next to his bed?
He listened intently to the dark. Heard stifling, west Texas heat, an undercurrent of chilled air, the dim hum of the air conditioner unit just outside his bedroom window.
Nothing else.
Without moving his head, he tried to see his entire bedroom. Moonlight stumbled through the window like an aimless drunk staggering on the sidewalk. Dresser. Closet door...closed. Bedroom door...open. Chair with clothes piled on it.
No odd shadows, no unexpected movement, nothing darker than usual.
Bean moved, just another toss and turn in a fitful sleep, and looked at more of his bedroom. At his clothes and wallet, the loose change jar, his boots, his grandmother’s empty holster hanging on his bedpost. Those things, those bits and pieces of a life that accumulated almost without awareness, had been touched. They’d been slightly moved, slightly altered. It was an almost indefinable sense of violation, of his world being just a few degrees out of plumb.
The air around those things was also different. In Bean’s house and in his lungs. This new air, violated air, didn’t have the same taste as the air in his house. And the night sounds hit his ears differently. A different timbre. The quality of light coming through his bedroom window was different, too.
He found the .380 beneath his pillow. Already had a pop in the pipe and a full magazine. He could war if he needed to.
Who exactly you warring with, Bean?
Hell, just from today it could have been Bassi, Echo, Jim Dell, Tommy-Blue, Andy, Reuter. His heart tripped when he realized all of them was dead except Reuter. Go further back in Bean’s history and there were scores of mopes and low-lifes and gun thugs who wanted him dead.
And whoever this was, they had chosen to come at Bean clothed in the dark, close and personal...in his house.
He’d been here before, too. Years ago, still a Barefield resident, still a respected presiding justice of the peace. After he’d given his daughter to Catholic Charities. After he’d signed the paperwork that had given his flesh and blood to another family so that she wouldn’t have to live with the madness of her father.
Angela had gone to her new family. Never said a word, never cried a tear. Her silence had torn Bean’s heart right out of his chest. But three weeks later, she’d slipped quietly in through an open window during the night. Hours later Bean woke and went through his morning ritual, getting more anxious as the minutes ticked past but without understanding why.
Then, as now, the air had been different. What had become solo air—Bean had been the only person living in the house—was suddenly the air of a duet. It moved differently through his nose and lungs, sat more heavily in the back of his throat.
When he had gotten out of the shower, his towel had been moved. From one side of the vanity to the other. He’d stared at it for a few minutes, wondering if The Madness was on him, then had come out of the bathroom with a .25 in hand just in case it hadn’t.
Standing there, wet, his phallus on display, he’d found Angela.
The tears on her face hadn’t hidden the redness around her eye. Her hands had been grimy and the knees of her little-girl jeans ripped out.
“Please, Daddy. Don’t send me away again. I’ll be good, I promise. Please keep me.”
He shoved the memory away, tried to burn it down in the fiery anger of knowing someone else was in his house now. Miles away and years later and it was happening again.
But this time, he could see a faint glow.
The fuck is this?
The place should be dark, quiet. It should be exactly as he left it. Instead, his desk lamp burned steadily. A tall lamp, tower-shaped, but with a shade of fuzzy pink. Bean had gotten it from a client as a thank you. A big gal, last name of Heing, went three hundred if she went a pound. Fiery red hair, flashing green eyes. On the run from snatching money from a shitty, hands-on boss in Los Colinas and then another in Houston. She’d requested Bean’s help divvying the take between her and a raggedy, junked-up partner.
Lightly, quietly—both damned tough for a man better than six-five—he slipped out of bed. Again naked, again armed, standing on the threshold between bedroom and hallway. His room was at the end of the hallway, a bathroom and second bedroom between him and the open area that was his living room, kitchen, and dining room. It wasn’t a huge house, certainly less than he could afford, but more than enough for a man with no family.
Dead still, he listened, heard nothing except his own breathing. He tamped it down, breathed more slowly and deeply, the way Mariana had taught him. Tactical breathing, she called it. Didn’t want the bad guy to hear you breathing and know where you were.
But the converse of that was, obviously, that if Bean could hear the bad guy breathing, he’d know exactly where the son of a bitch was.
Let me find you, asshole, and I’ll solve the problem here and now.
Why come in the house but not wake him or kill him? Why creep the place like a common street burglar?
Holding the .380 out like a lead-loaded talisman, Bean stepped quietly to the bathroom. The door was open. He hesitated, listening, then turned the light on and plunged in, finger already squeezing the trigger. Harsh white incandescent banged against the white ceramic fixtures.
“Come into my house? You son of a—”
The tiny room was empty.
He eased off the trigger. Took a deep breath, realized his hands shook like an old man’s.
You are an old man, Jeremiah.
Not now, love, I’m a little busy.
Turning back toward the hallway, he swallowed into a dry throat.
Let’s go, pussy, find him. Kill him. Dump him in the Rio Grande.
Knowing the bathroom light would cast a halo around his body, and that was assuming the man had been deaf enough not to hear Bean yelling in his own bathroom, Bean moved quickly into the second bedroom. He went for the light switch, hoping to blind the guy, but found nothing.
“Damnit.”
It was like the switch was dancing, sliding around the wall avoiding Bean’s touch. If he reached high, the switch went low. If he reached low, the switch rushed backward or forward. And the whole time, that fucking light from the bathroom highlighted him. It burned around Bean’s edges, giving the guy a perfect target. Bean ducked, dodged, weaved and bobbed, tried to keep himself blurry so the killer couldn’t get a bead on him.
Damnit, where was the switch? It obviously wasn’t moving. Yet it wasn’t there. It had been there for years. Where the fuck—
He heard it then. The smooth click of metal against metal, of a hammer being eased back, of a finger putting pressure on
a trigger.
Of the man’s slow, easy...relaxed...breath.
Bean fired. The room still dark, he fired three times, each shot defined by a streak of orange flame reaching across the room. In their glow, he saw nothing and once the gun roared he couldn’t hear anything, either, but knew the guy was dead, laying in a pool of blood and pulverized bone.
“You fucking come after me?” He found the light. “You think you can—”
No one. Just like in the bathroom. Three holes stared at Bean from the walls. He whirled, sure the guy was behind him and the entire thing had been a set up, but the hallway was empty.
“Damnit.”
Bean’s voice bellowed the way it had in court, the way it had in Johnny’s yesterday when Bassi tried to screw him.
Sweat rolled down his dented forehead, sheened every inch of his skin. His fingers were thick and stupid and his legs trembled. For all that, he stormed down the hallway, raging and howling.
“Don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but we’re done. Right now.”
Anger burned Bean like a blow torch cracking open his skull, searching for the soft gray sweetmeat inside.
“You looking for loot?” Bean laughed. “I got nothing here. You think I’m that stupid? Keep this place loaded with the millions I’ve got? Idiot.”
Gun up, finger on the trigger, already applying pressure. Because the shooter was sitting on the couch, Bean knew it. Sitting there next to the pink lamp he’d left on. Bean had no problem killing him while he sat there.
Into the living room, the trigger just about at the end of its pull.
“Fuck!”
The room was empty. Bean’s eyes darted everywhere, seeking every hiding, probing every single place the guy could hide.
“The fuck are you? You invade my house but can’t face me?”
Bean tore through the room, knocked the pink lamp hard against the wall. The glow died as he went through the kitchen. Then back again through both bedrooms, the bathroom. Into the garage, breath hot and heavy in his chest, sweat dripping down his back. Around the perimeter of the house. He kicked aside paving stones as though somehow the guy had found a way to hide beneath them.
Death is Not Forever (Barefield Book Book 3) Page 20