It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Which of course translated to doing a good job. If he didn’t, then his bosses would make sure he never got back anywhere.

  So he left night after night, carrying packages he never opened, and once Refugio had him in his rifle sights, even, but let him go. Because that’s not the way an honest man catches somebody.

  The whole time he was telling me this, I wasn’t saying anything. It was like he’d peeled up a corner of the wallpaper in my bedroom, to show me a whole different house behind it. One that shared some of our walls. He told me he didn’t want to tell me the next part, either, but then rubbed his mouth hard with the palm of his hand and did anyway.

  When he finally caught my dad, he wasn’t even looking for him. What he was doing was helping some other law enforcement guys break up this drug meeting out in the desert.

  It was supposed to be just routine — the law announcing themselves over the bullhorn, then turning the lights on all around. Except this was a meeting some of the bosses were actually at. And my dad, my real dad, he was just suddenly there, handing a backpack through the dust of six trucks’ headlights, and the bosses, before they started strafing the bullhorns with their automatic weapons, they first shot a burst into my dad. Four of them at once, before my dad could even do anything. Before either of my dads could do anything.

  By the time it was over and my father — Refugio — could wade through to Dodd, it was too late. It was their first time to meet. It was like they’d known each other forever, too.

  “I was the only one he could trust with you,” my father told me. “His most important thing in the word.”

  And that’s the fairy tale. In the wake of it, my face was cold.

  The week after that’s when, for the first time, I called him ‘Dad,’ Refugio. In thanks for trying to save my real dad, I think. But it’s not something you can say once, then not keep saying. After a while, it doesn’t even feel wrong anymore, and you don’t even remember that it’s supposed to. That it doesn’t matter if your real dad’s dead or not. That he loves you enough to still be out there, trying to save you.

  God.

  I think Refugio knew this, too, or suspected it.

  It’s probably why he made up that story about the turquoise knife my dad had left for him one morning, in a fencepost. The knife Refugio trained me over the years to look for, out in the pastures north of Del Rio.

  All it was going to be, he told me, was a dull silvery glint, like an old coffee thermos or something, except smaller. Because it was a family thing, too, he was going to let me keep it when we found it. It would be the only thing I still had of my real dad’s.

  I was there every weekend.

  After talking to Sanchez, I sat in my truck in the parking lot of the Jomar for ten minutes, I think. In the two o’clock heat. The desk clerk was watching me through his small window.

  A device. The FBI. My father.

  I started my truck, turned on the air conditioner.

  One option no one was considering was that the Ranger’s story and the FBI’s were both right: my father had caught some illegal he already had a history with, yeah. Only, this time, that illegal was being paid to carry plutonium or uranium or whatever. And he somehow used it to get the upper hand, then panicked, locked both of them into the Jomar for a week.

  This was the only explanation that allowed my father not to be a terrorist. And — if that’s what they thought he was. Of course they wanted me off the case. Not because my priorities were wrong — I wanted the killer, not the materials for the device — but because maybe I was involved.

  I pulled out of the parking lot when the desk clerk picked up a phone, angled his head over for my plates. If that’s even what he was, a desk clerk.

  The other choice was FBI.

  When I eased into the street, it was right into the path of a hot oil truck. He locked up his eight rear tires, his bug-splattered bumper dipping down maybe twenty-four inches from my face, then sighing back up to level. I pulled out the rest of the way, going extra-slow now, like I could make up for being stupid.

  As for the truck driver, I didn’t look up, and he didn’t lay into his air horn, and Del Rio just kept happening all around us. I drifted through two lights, a drive-through for a coke with the rabbit turd ice I liked, and realized about forty-five minutes into it all that I was saying goodbye.

  Soon enough I was parked in the visitors’ section of the main office. It was where the Rangers were working out of, where Sanchez might be reporting back, where the advance FBI agents might be sweeping for bugs. I was hoping to avoid all of them, though.

  I pushed through the public doors, smiled to Rosario behind the bulletproof glass so she’d buzz me through, then bee-lined the switchboard, making zero eye contact with anybody in uniform or out. At the door to Dispatch, though, I lost all momentum.

  You had to have a five-digit code to get in. And there was no doorbell, and everybody in there had a headset on, so wouldn’t hear a knock, and couldn’t leave their stations even if they did hear.

  All I wanted was that post-it note. Or, if it was already tagged as evidence, in some folder, then somebody who remembered the post-it.

  I don’t know.

  Because I needed an excuse to be there, I rounded the corner, stiff-legged it through the breakroom and reached into my mailslot. If Sanchez asked, I was just cleaning it out before I started staying out of town. It made sense. But then, because the boxes were alphabetical, right under mine was my father’s. And it was full, and nobody was looking.

  I palmed his stack of mail under mine, ducked back out to the visitor’s parking lot and read it over my steering wheel. Most of it was the usual nothing — newsletters and updates and memos and jokes — but about halfway down, rolled so it would fit in with the rest, was a fast photocopy of the post-it.

  More than that, it was even tagged already, meaning this photocopy was an afterthought, like regulation usually was. What the books probably said was that the Rangers could confiscate the original only so long as they supplied you with a copy for your own records. Never mind that my father was dead, and that they were investigating it.

  Whoever’d done this was just following policy. If he hadn’t been, I probably wouldn’t be here right now. On that post-it, in hurried handwriting, up top, in the corner like I used to do it, was my father’s name, then, below, the number the caller must have said was supposed to be good for my father. In the middle, a big question mark.

  Not for me, though. I’d called this number a thousand times, growing up. It was Refugio’s old office extension. I pulled away, my world crumbling around me. This was someone from my father’s past. That he had some radioactive package was just bad luck. For both of them. I looked to the north again.

  What the FBI was probably spending all their computer time trying to figure out was the final destination of that plutonium or uranium or whatever. What they maybe weren’t taking into account, was how many times a package tended to change hands after it came across the river.

  My father had tried to break that chain of people — for love or profit, it didn’t matter — and been killed for it. But it had taken a while. And now the courier had to hand the package off to the next person, at some anonymous drop on an empty stretch of highway, probably.

  Except he’d spent a week in that room at the Jomar as well. Meaning he was burned, sick with it. Not as bad as my father, but enough to keep him out of convenience stores. And nobody picks you up off the side of the road when you’re bleeding from the eyes.

  All this left was north, by foot. Maybe that dog did mean something, then. If it had been the killer’s dog, or just one that had fallen into step behind him, then it was a breadcrumb.

  And I had at least ten more days left of my bereavement leave, and they’d already told me they didn’t want me in Del Rio anymore. For the rest of the afternoon I told myself I wasn’t going to do what I knew I was going to do, and when I finally gassed up and started feeling through the pastures no
rth of town, cutting for sign, watching for buzzards, glassing the ridges, the way I pretended I wasn’t doing what I was doing was that I only brought one thermos of water and one change of clothes.

  When dark came and I was still out there, though, there was no denying what was happening. I was going after the man who’d killed my father. It sounds like a movie poster, I know. Starring Laurie Dodd, the Austin Marksman.

  God.

  It didn’t take me long to pick up the trail. It wasn’t from any of the seminars I’d attended on spotting illegals, either. It was on the radio. Crazy Dave was broadcasting from his mother’s garage in Ozona.

  For the two hours leading up to the new concrete stock tank a little way into the big Mosely pasture, he’d been my only company. It was completely possible I was his only listener, too. The Misanthrope Morning Show probably wasn’t real big with the crowd who woke before the sun to drink their coffee and glare at the world.

  But then, too, they had their coffee to keep them awake.

  All I had was Crazy Dave’s lispy, enthusiastic delivery, his complicated theories on everything from the real reason for the spacing between the yellow stripes on state-funded roads to why his mother preferred afghan lap blankets to fleece throws. It’s hard to nod off while you’re smiling, I mean.

  And, though I never called in to any of Crazy Dave’s nightly charity drives (he was his own favorite charity), still, for as long as it took me to dip my thermos into the cool water of the stock tank, I did expand his audience out to a record seventy-something, it looked like.

  About twenty yards out, to the south and a little bit east, were a wall of dully reflective eyes. Cattle. They’d followed my truck in. But only so far.

  It wasn’t me keeping them away, either, I knew — I’ve yet to see a cow that won’t nudge me out of the way, if it wants what I’m blocking — and it wasn’t that they weren’t thirsty. The few I’d seen trotting beside me had been starved down, the skin on their sides drawn in to their ribs.

  I looked at the water I had my hand in, smelled it. Nothing. And then I saw past my hand, to the tracks right beside where I was standing. Someone hadn’t just drunk from this tank not long ago, had gotten in and waded in it. Maybe swam. Someone wearing new boots with an aggressive tread. Not the kind that go in a stirrup.

  I nodded thanks to the cattle and wished them long, boring lives, then left my thermos right where I’d been dipping it full. It floated out to the center of the tank, the moss reaching for it, slowing it down. Thirty seconds later it was under, part of the ranch now. Part of the land.

  So be it.

  I was waiting for its last gulp of air to roll to the surface and pop — it had become a sudden little game, part of a deal I was trying to make — when a bullbat flitted down to pick some bug from my headlights. For an instant its shadow melted across the side of the tank and I shivered on the inside.

  But Crazy Dave was still with me, talking steady from the cab. I came back to myself, remembered how to breathe. Tried to smile about how stupid I was being. For the cattle, yeah.

  What Dave was talking about were the old-time CSI guys — old time like horse and buggy — how they used to think they could shine a light through the back of a murder victim’s eyeball, and then see, projected on the wall by that light, the last thing that eyeball had ever seen: the killer.

  He’d got there off a monologue that had started with a comic book, I was pretty sure, but then had leafed down through the contents of his desk, to the freshest tabloids. Now he was doing a running commentary on the news items there. It was supposed to feel unscripted, I know, but still, standing at the edge of my headlights, a hundred-and-forty green eyes watching me, I was pretty sure Dave was taking me somewhere good.

  As it turned out, it was back to the Jomar. Dave pronounced it like it was a Spanish word, but still, I knew what he was talking about: my father.

  According to Crazy Dave’s unimpeachable sources — he always knew more about the tabloid stories than were actually in the tabloid — the case was solved, the killer practically caught, thanks to the lessons learned from those Victorian CSI guys.

  Inset lower right was a sketchy rendering of the killer from the shoulders up. It was just the vaguest outline, according to Dave, but still, there was no denying that, standing up from the head like the twin shadows of feathers, there were two tall ears.

  The caption was Jack the Rabbit, only to get to ‘Rabbit,’ they had to cross out Ripper. I pushed off from the stocktank, my lips pressed together. I was trying to reach the volume before Dave could make one of his jokes about this, because I didn’t want to have to hate him and not listen to him anymore. I almost made it, too. My finger was even on the dial.

  I didn’t roll it back toward me, though.

  Now Dave was explaining how the tabloid had obtained this artist’s rendering. It was from a television set the Jomar had thrown away. Apparently the image had been burned into the screen. Like a giant rabbit had sat on the edge of the bed for days, watching my father die. It made my eyes unfocus, lose themselves in the rough weave of my saddleblanket seatcover.

  A rabbit?

  I got in, pulled the door shut and backed the truck out, stepping down into the pair of ruts that had brought me here.

  A rabbit?

  It was a question I hadn’t even thought to ask Sanchez: ‘Speaking of that, you wouldn’t know if a bunny maybe’s the one who killed my father, would you?’

  It was a tabloid, though. I had to remind myself. And Crazy Dave, too, “The Original Dryland Pirate,” known far and wide for his scurvy tongue and swashbuckling good looks.

  Still, I was going to have to buy this issue, if it wasn’t already sold out on the shelf. Just to see if the television set the tabloid had all lost and lonely beside a dumpster wasn’t the same fake-wood, green-screened model I remembered. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted it to be or not.

  Instead of dwelling on it, I tried to remember where the grocery store was in Uvalde. What I would buy the tabloid with would be blue Gatorade, I told myself. Because then it could just be something funny that had caught my eye, not specifically what I’d gone in for.

  It was Uvalde, though. Nobody knew me in Uvalde. Yet. But then I could have said that about all of Texas back then, too. All of America. I may have even made the Misanthrope Morning show last week, for all I know. Become tabloid fodder myself. That’d be about right.

  Maybe, even, that’s the only kind of immortality that’s real: for Crazy Dave to lean down to his mike, close his eyes, and intone your name once, so that it’s swirling up in the ionosphere forever.

  It would let me be with my family, anyway. There are worse things. For all I know, though, the Misanthrope Morning show doesn’t even have a news segment anymore. Because of me, yeah.

  But back to Crazy Dave that night, peeling open another tabloid, the false-seriousness in his voice as much as saying that this was an article he’d had a hand in, and was now showcasing for the true believers.

  What he was talking about now was the Del Rio chupacabra. Apparently another had turned up. Not the one pictured here, that some intrepid photographer with a rapier wit had probably photographed, but a newer, fresher one.

  It was only then that it hit me, that Crazy Dave drove a light-brown Chevette, not a skull and crossbones ship. I felt guilty almost, knowing that. Remembering how he’d scampered back to his front seat.

  According to him, this new chupacabra wasn’t just some chemotherapied Collie dog, either, like the law enforcement officials were saying. It was the real thing. ‘Chemotherapy’ being the key word there, of course.

  After getting the tabloid Dave had been talking about — it was the same television, no matter how I looked at it — I slept for four hours in a motel. And, yes, I flashed my badge at the desk to get the bed free.

  I can pay it back, if that’s any kind of issue. But then I haven’t seen it listed on the charges against me, either. I suppose, in comparison to what I’m su
pposed to have done — it would be like citing a serial killer for jaywalking, just in case all that murder stuff doesn’t stick.

  Not that I killed anybody.

  But you know that. If this has gotten this far, that I’m reading it to you, then you know what I was doing up there. Never mind that you’re not even real yet, and that this isn’t either. If this goes some other way and this legal pad gets filed anywhere, it’ll be in my attorney’s file cabinet, under P, for privileged, or E, for eyes-only. Or, just burned. Better yet, left scattered on the surface of Town Lake.

  I’m smiling now. I don’t know any other way to say that than just to say it.

  If I wind up reading this out loud, though, I’ll have to try not to. But I’m sure my good attorney will have sliced out anything like that. The real irony, of course, would be to lock me way up in some tower. That doesn’t make me smile so much.

  If my lawyer’s good and not stupid, then juries are predisposed to decisions which round a story out well, so the beginning and the end kind of match, balance each other out. The scales of justice, all that. Punishment fitting the crime, the more poetic the better.

  Except I don’t want to be locked up.

  Understand this, instead: the real closure for this story would be for me to walk out of here on some idiot technicality, like that officers on extended bereavement leave are immune to prosecution, or that, because ‘Romo’ isn’t my legal name, then that person being charged isn’t me, and whoever I am, I can just drift out the double doors in front, melt back into Austin.

  That way I’d be free to say the goodbye to my real dad that I never got to say before. Or hello, yes. And everything else.

  In Uvalde that day, I woke with the tabloid beside me on the bed. It made me want two showers, but then the water pressure made me want just one, please.

  I slid my big key though the night drop slot, paid for a drive-through burrito — badges never work so well there — and without even thinking about it, filled up the front and back tanks at one of the places that took the state card. What I told myself to make it okay was that if I saw even one illegal, and mentally noted where he was standing, what he was wearing, then the gas wouldn’t be stolen.