She winked at Bean. “Every meal except Sunday breakfast...because that was the Lord’s meal.”
“I’m sorry, Angela.”
“And here you sit. Not crazy at all. So I guess that madness never came for you, did it?”
It did, you just can’t see it. Open my brain and you’d know.
“I remember the fire.” Angela’s eyes took on the sheen of glass. “Remember everything about it. The color? Not just yellow. It had everything in it. Red and blue. Green. It sounded like rain. Not a soft rain, but angry rain.” She cocked her head. “Like pencils. Tapping against desks. Lots and lots of pencils.”
She sniffed the air. “But the smell is what I remember most.”
“Yeah?”
“I could smell every item as it burned. The shampoo she used on me...the lye soap...their cigarettes. He had trains. Did you know that? Model trains. In one of the bedrooms. He kept it locked but every once in a while he’d let me in. Tracks everywhere. Trains and buildings and a little town with people and cars from the ’40s or something. It always smelled electric in that room, like electric current or something. When that house caught, I smelled those trains burning.” Her face clouded. “He never let me play with them, but I used to watch.”
“Escape.”
She stared at Bean with a totally flat affect. “Yes.”
“I remember the pancakes the most. When she made them you could smell them all over the house, even outside.” Angela half-smiled. “She made really good pancakes; apple-cinnamon. Bitch beat me and starved me, but always made good pancakes and let me have two...three if I wanted. Of everything, that’s what I remember most...apple-cinnamon pancakes.”
“They’d told me you died in that fire...with your...”
“Parents?” She laughed. “Hard to say, Daddy?”
“How’d you survive?”
She didn’t answer for a second, but it wasn’t hesitation. She was taking her time with her answer. “Easy to survive a fire if you know it’s coming.”
Bean had been playing with his fork, letting it push the chorizo around the plate. Now he stopped, his balls frosted. “What?”
“It wasn’t an accidental fire.” Her eyes closed and she rocked back a little. “Daddy, I killed them.”
“What are you talking about?”
Her eyes popped open. “I wanted to kill them. I wanted to kill them all. So I did.”
“Killed all of them? All of who?”
She waved a hand. “Everyone I ever met.”
Bean watched her for a minute, thinking back over what she’d said in the bar while he’d been trying to kill Jim Dell. About guns and his and her headshots, about blood.
Mariana...I think we’ve got a problem here.
Bean let his fork hit the plate. “You weren’t killing them.”
“No.”
“You were killing me.”
“Always have been.” She stood suddenly. “I have to go.”
“You just got here.”
“And now I gotta leave.”
“But...I don’t understand. Why’d you come back if you were just going to leave again? Please, don’t leave, Angela, we can get through this.” He stood suddenly and she jumped. “I don’t care if you set that fire. They were beating you. I care if you fought back? I care if you killed them? I’ve killed people, too. It’s in our blood.”
When she laughed, something in the sound both chilled Bean and struck him as familiar. “You think I give a shit what you think? Whether or not you care if I killed somebody or burned a fucking house down...Daddy? You give me away...twice...and when I track you down, you suddenly wanna play nicey-nice Disney fucking family?”
Bean raised his hands. “Whoa, I just wanted to—”
She leaned down in his face. “Fuck you. You wanna be family? Fine...on my terms. I don’t owe you shit. I don’t want your money. I don’t want you to come to my high school graduation or my first boy/girl dance or give me concert tickets or buy me a boob job or anything. Just stay the fuck outta my way and we’ll do it like I say.”
“What are you talking—”
“I will not be part of your penance. I am not part of your atonement. Do you even know what that word means? Have you ever looked at it? At-one-ment. You have to be at one with your own sins and guilt. I am not part of that. Do you hear me?”
Bean’s arms crossed his chest. “Angela, please, I wasn’t trying to buy you, I just want to get to know you.”
“You wanna be family?” Angela yanked the .45 from her waistband and shoved it hard under Bean’s chin. “This is my family. Not you and me...me and her.” With her free hand, she pulled something from her pocket and threw it on the table.
A picture.
Of Mariana and Angela.
He wanted to pick it up but she kept him still, the metal cool on his skin. “Where’d you get that?”
“Mama gave it to me. That okay with you? Mama gave it to me and you gave me away. See the difference? She loved me and you hated me and so I killed them all.”
Slowly, quietly, she thumbed the hammer back and put a bit of pressure on the trigger. “I have so much knowledge. I could tell you everything He’s told me. I could make it all so clear.”
“Tell me.” His hands had been up near his shoulders but now he lowered them toward the table and plates. On his plate, somewhere, was the fork. “I want to hear.”
“All my knowledge is unverifiable unless you know how to work the gravity rods.”
She slammed her eyes closed and beat a fist against the side of her head. “He tells me all the time but I can’t tell anyone.”
Bean spoke slowly, his guts nothing but water and threatening to come up.
This is what your God did to me, Mariana? He gave her back to me but full of my madness? It skipped me and hit my daughter. Is that supposed to be funny? A cosmic joke? Now what, Mariana? How do I handle this? What do I do?
“Angela, put the gun down and let’s talk. You can tell me anything. As long as it takes to tell me. I’m here forever, okay? We’ll do this together.”
Howling, she pointed the gun at the wall and fired three times, then jammed it under his chin again. No longer cold, the barrel nipped at him with the heat from the three shots.
Here we go, Mariana.
“Together? We’ve never done anything together. Not a single fucking thing.”
“But this we can get through. I know some doctors who—”
“I’m not crazy.” She screamed it, her words like stiletto blades slipping into him.
“Angela, I never said you were crazy. All I said was—I miss my daughter.”
She stared at him, gun still deep in under his chin, and he thought she might cry. Instead she put the picture in a pocket and darted from his house.
Bean stood, his hands shaking, his bowels loose and hot, staring at the congealing breakfast.
38
An early afternoon sun burned the dust into him as Bean crossed the wide space in the road toward the house where Digger had Chelle.
The sun he didn’t notice. The burn under his chin from her goddamned gun he did.
Fury mixed with fear which itself blended with sadness. She had threatened to kill him. She had creeped his house. She had stolen his only picture of Mama and baby. She had lied about it.
She was struck with the madness, that was obvious. What he still didn’t know was how she’d found him way down here. Langtry West, dropped deep into the southern ridge of central Texas and riding the border like a syphilitic whore riding a cheap trick, was just a wasteland. He’d once believed he could make it a real place, with trees and yards and maybe even a few houses. But it had never taken root. It was just a two-bit stop-over, a joint with hijacked beer and booze, bad burgers, criminal intent.
It wasn’t on any maps except those handmade by criminals.
So how did she trail him here?
Did she trail you here, Jeremiah? Or to Barefield?
Mariana was right.
Angela hadn’t come here directly. She’d started in Barefield with Echo, and Bean guessed that each person gave her a little bit more until she was here, sitting in Digger’s bar, watching her father hold court.
Which didn’t answer the question of why now? Why this twenty-one-year-old woman came back into his life? Why not after the fire? Why not when she was pregnant or before she put her daughter up for adoption?
If she had a child. Lies and killing came easy to her. Maybe having a daughter was just another lie.
What did she want? Bean had thought, initially, it was to reconnect and carve out some sort of life. Yet her leaving so quickly seemed to call bullshit on that, didn’t it?
And the fact that she shot you, dumbass.
Maybe, in her madness, she didn’t know what she wanted. Maybe she was as lost as he was and searching just as hard for some unknown thing.
Bean mounted the back steps of a small, squat, adobe house. The sliding glass door was broken, top to bottom, the glass in shards on the hardwood floor inside like a glass jigsaw puzzle. The Judge stopped and drew his .380. “Digger?”
“Judge? The fuck you doing here?” Digger came from down the short hallway around the corner. When he saw Bean’s .380, he immediately yanked his. “What?” His voice was a whisper.
Bean pointed at the broken glass. “What’s this?”
“A problem. Why the gun?”
“She threatened to shoot me.”
“Who?”
“Angela.”
“Wait...I’m real confused. Shoot you, kiss you, threaten to shoot you.”
Bean took a deep breath, blew it out hot and hard. “She lied to me. Showed me a picture of her and Mariana and told me Mariana gave it to her.”
Digger frowned. “I thought Mariana died in childbirth.”
“It was my picture, Digger. From my house. The one that got stolen.”
Bean told him quickly: the gun against his chin, creeping his house, her comments about killing everyone. Digger stared at the empty cobbled dirt road as a desert-brown jackrabbit crossed it and disappeared into the scrub.
“A daughter, huh? Thought she said her daughter was dead.”
Bean shrugged. “No fucking clue.”
“Remember she kept looking at Chelle last night? Said she was as pretty as her own daughter.”
“Yeah. Damnit. She’s got it, Digger.” Bean spoke slowly, licked his lips, avoided his partner’s gaze. “She’s got it.”
“The crazy?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck.” Digger shoved his gun into his paints. “Well, I’m guessing she’s got something else, too.”
“What?”
Digger pointed to the broken glass. “Chelle.”
39
The shards shimmered, a river in a desert pisshole. They caught light from the sun and threw it back in a million different shades and shapes, in endless angles. They were jagged and hard and cut at Bean’s face and neck, at Digger’s chest and hands. They gouged the walls, sliced the carpet, and left both of the men ragged and out of breath.
“I’ve checked everywhere, Judge. She’s nowhere. No one’s seen her.”
“When did you see her last?”
“Two hours ago? Maybe three? She was still sleeping. Dead to the world, breathing slow and even.”
“And she didn’t just leave? The thing with Jim Dell scared her and she took off?”
“And broke the window on her way out just for kicks?” Digger pointed at the winking glass. “From the outside in?”
“No, of course not.” Bean leaned against the wall, his head as full of broken glass as Digger’s carpet. “Somebody came through that door.”
“That’s how I read it, Judge.”
“Angela?”
Digger hesitated. His eyes went to the broken glass, then back to Bean. “I think so.”
“No.”
“Judge, listen, I think—”
“No.”
“Damnit, old man, listen to me. I know you don’t want to hear this, but you need to.” Digger stood as tall as he could, stared straight at Bean. “If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong, but at least listen.”
Bean ground his jaw until the muscles screamed. He wanted to lash out, to smack Digger across the face, to tell him he was obviously full of shit. But Digger had been with him since the beginning, since before everything went so bad in Barefield. Digger had never led Bean astray and had kept him alive for years. Bean owed him for that if nothing else.
“Speak your piece. Why Angela?”
“How many times did she mention her daughter? And then took your picture? And what about her staring at Chelle? Comparing Chelle to her daughter, for fuck’s sake.”
“But why...I’m asking why Angela would have taken her.”
Digger shrugged, his frustration obvious. “Did you not hear what she said about her daughter? Man, she wants her back. And going on and on about how much Chelle reminded her of her daughter. Judge, she’s filling a daughter-shaped hole with Chelle. But besides that...if she’s got your madness, no telling what’s going on in her head.”
For what felt like forever, the two stared at the broken glass, or outside, or at each other. Bean was lost. He’d focused on finding out who shot Mariana, but he’d also spent the last twenty-four hours focused on Chelle. First on saving her, then on learning enough to get her home. Was it possible Angela was jealous of the time he’d spent with Chelle? Jealous of what he was trying to do for her?
Eventually, Bean nodded. Digger was right. Angela took Chelle and Bean knew now that he’d known it would happen. He’d felt it in the air last night. “We have to get her back.” Bean knew that as absolutely as he knew the sun wasn’t going to rise on him all that many more times.
“I think Angela’s dangerous.”
“Yeah.”
“So...where’d she take her?”
The nearest hotel was fifty miles away but that assumed his daughter—crap, it was difficult to think of her in a present tense—went that direction. There was one dusty road leaving out of Langtry West. It connected to a farm-to-market road which later connected to another farm-to-market. A few miles on from that there was a state road and ultimately Route 277 and I-90. There were a few back country trails she could use to slip away, but they were rough and worn and tough on both body and car.
Bean tried to conjure up everything Angela had said, both at his house and in the bar with bullets flying everywhere. He remembered her putting a finger gun against her head and babbling something about divinely-inspired bullet holes. Hadn’t she said something about everyone carrying a grudge against him?
Mostly, the things she said last night were noise in his head.
As opposed to the trip she laid on me a little while ago? That’s some fuckin’ noise.
“We got a lot to deal with, Judge, I know.” Digger wandered out of the house and into the dirt back yard. “Angela and Chelle, obviously, but you gotta keep Jim Dell there, too.”
Bean followed Digger outside. “I know.”
“If he’s alive—”
“He is.”
“Then he ain’t done.”
With each step, Digger’s worn boots sent a puff of dust into the still air. Tiny clouds followed him, junkies slobbering after their dealer. The clouds hung in the air, tinged brown but shot through with harsh sunlight, before eventually dissipating.
The junkies got their fix...then they leave. They’ll be back.
Across the dusty lot and the vague road carved out of cactus and rocks and dust, there was another house. It had been the bartender’s...dead since last night so he wouldn’t need that anymore. Sometimes the barkeep had rented out rooms to people who needed to stay overnight. But other than that, Langtry West was a pile of nothing. No plants, no elm or sycamore trees. It was dirt and cactus, sometimes a tumble weed or two. Snakes and coyotes meandered through the yard sometimes, though sometimes it was nothing but horned toads and ants. Occasionally, the air was full of windstorms
and every once in a while it was full of an unnerving silence that ended up getting filled with way too much of Bean’s own head.
Langtry West was a compound, nothing more. Seventy-seven acres flung into the middle of hell, west of the original Langtry, owned wholly and completely by the Estate of Mariana Bean. So what Bean thought of as a street was just a dusty groove worn into the face of the dried earth by a handful of cars over a handful of years.
He stared toward the remains of the bar. “Fifteen goddamned years since I saw Jim Dell. Why’d he come out of the woodwork now?”
“And where the shit he go?” Digger looked around as though he might find Jim Dell hauling himself up out of the cactus like some desert not-yet-dead serial killer coming back for a last blast. “Can’t imagine he got too far...not injured like that.”
Bean pointed toward the farm-to-market road. “Or gone completely. He run to Del Rio to save himself?”
But even as he said that, he knew it was bullshit. This is the man who disappeared into the desert with cartel soldiers, who came back not only alive but taking credit for killing a man he sold to those soldiers. He’d built his entire career on that...alleged...killing. He hadn’t run to a hospital. He’d hauled himself into the desert to lick his wounds, but he’d be back. He had to tie up the loose ends, and he believed Bean was a loose end.
“He thinks we know.”
Digger stared at Bean. “Knows what?”
“Everything. That’s why he killed Tommy-Blue and Andy. Whoever dredged all this up has a reason for doing that. Jim Dell thinks it was one of them...or me because of Mariana...so he’s tying up his loose ends.”
“What loose ends? It was fucking twenty years ago.”
“Washington.”
Digger looked blank.
“Jim Dell built his entire career on the back of killing Zapata. Went from Rangers to the Governor and the Governor’s a shoe-in for Washington. Jim Dell’s gonna make sure he’s part of that.”
“Secret Service?”
Bean shook his head. “But personal aide? Or senior advisor. Then turn that gig—one or two terms—into some high powered private security gig? Maybe get some government contracts...branch out a la Blackwater or something? Damn straight he will.”
Death is Not Forever (Barefield Book Book 3) Page 23