Dead Man's Badge

by Robert E. Dunn

  I got in Paris’s truck and ran without a plan. When it was impossible for me to drive farther, I stopped at a motel. It was the kind of place that was popular on the state highways before the interstates bypassed everything. The Texas Lodge Motel was a strip of a building divided into ten rooms. Off to the side there was a cluster of four separate cabins. The sun was well up past morning, but the red neon was still lit showing off the word “Vacancy.”

  They took cash and didn’t ask questions. I asked for the cabin farthest from everything. The only other car in the lot was a beaten-down minivan with fake wood peeling away from the side. In the window of the van was a sign that read, “The Sweet By and By Gospel Music Hour.” I wasn’t in the mood for music.

  * * * *

  After sleeping the day away, I got up. Sleep hadn’t done much to drive off the fatigue. I ate from a vending machine. Then I tried to watch TV. I fell back to sleep watching a Law and Order rerun. About four in the morning, I woke again. There was another Law and Order playing.

  Old TV wasn’t holding my attention, and I couldn’t sleep anymore. I pulled out Paris’s .45. It was clean and oiled and needed no attention. I set it aside, and then I pulled his phone from the tote bag. It had been plugged in and charging when I’d taken it from the bedroom, but I’d shut it off before tucking it away. I’d been afraid of someone tracking it as much as I had been of it ringing. What would I say to whoever called?

  I hit the power button, and the phone chimed as it booted. The screen showed a password security screen. Stymied. There was no telling what his password would be. And the phone was the kind that only gave a few chances to get it right before locking up terminally.

  It was a puzzle and a distraction. I sat on the floor with the phone and thought about Paris. He wouldn’t have made a password out of a bad association. That meant that I got to sit and think about Paris and all the things I knew were both good and important to him. Those happy thoughts were like a small gift.

  My first try unlocked his phone. NCC-1701 was the designation code for the Starship Enterprise. It turned out that Paris was not as deep or complex as I was trying to give him credit for.

  I kind of wanted to feel a little embarrassed of him, but that was overpowered by an odd sense of pride that I knew him as well as I did. I missed him.

  In the smallest hours of the morning, I explored my brother’s life through his phone. It was an intrusion, a complete violation that I did without hesitation. Information was like insulation. The plan was to keep Paris between me and the killers looking for me. Maybe I could wrap myself up in that a little tighter. I had no doubt that someone would figure out the body in the trailer wasn’t me. If Paris was alive and going about his business, it would take longer for anyone to get a hook on the ruse.

  I flipped through the text messages. What I dreaded most was finding a woman he was involved with. The last thing I needed was to be getting romantic calls. There were none. Not just no romantic texts—no texts at all. Paris had cleaned the log, and nothing had come in since then. I checked the calls. That was a different story. Maybe he wasn’t a texter. I thought about it and realized that I’d never gotten one from him. Then again, I’d never sent him one either. My own log would be just as barren. It wasn’t as weird as I had thought at first.

  The call logs went back a couple of weeks. Most of the contacts were incoming calls from M. Janssen JD. He had called nine times since I’d turned the phone off and put it in my tote. That was too many calls for casual interest. M. Janssen had a reason to expect Paris to pick up. There were calls from someone named Heck too—quite a few. That was the number Paris called most.

  I called voice mail to dig a little deeper. Nothing. I looked at the log again. Since I’d had the phone, there had been eleven calls, nine from M. Janssen and two from Heck. No messages. Whatever it was Paris felt he couldn’t tell me, I was sure these two were involved. That meant the JD after the name M. Janssen was for Justice Department.

  The phone rang, and I about browned my shorts.

  The display read M. Janssen JD. Of course it did. There was no picture to go with the name. It rang again, and I couldn’t help looking at the phone like it was about to summon a demon rather than a voice.

  It rang a third time, and I had to tell myself that this was part of my plan.

  Halfway through the fourth ring, I pressed the answer icon.

  “Where the hell have you been?” a man asked. I could only assume it was the M. Janssen listed. But I didn’t know that, did I? Then he asked, “And what the mother fuck are you doing in Oklahoma?” I was right about the phone being tracked.

  “Who’s this?” I asked.

  “Milo Janssen—who the fuck do you think it is?”

  “You woke me up,” I lied, trying to put the sound of sleep in my voice. “I couldn’t read the thing.”

  “Who says you have time for sleep? You’re supposed to be on your way to Lansdale.”

  “I am,” I said. “I just got caught up in things.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and I could hear the gears shifting. “I heard about your half-brother. That was fucked up.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “What do you think—I don’t keep track? Anything that involves you comes up on the radar. And if your brother’s trailer makes a fireball bigger than the dawn, I will definitely know.”

  “You’re keeping tabs on my family?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  I could hear the shrug without seeing him. There was something else. When I saw him, I was picturing a black man. Something about his voice. Sometimes you can’t educate the street out. Some guys never want to.

  “Longview Moody is something else though,” Milo went on. “He worked for a bunch of bad people having a big break-up. I had to keep an eye on him.”

  “And?”

  “And I looked into it. By that I mean I looked into what the locals were doing and who they were looking at.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Find anything?”

  “He ran in rough crowds. You know that.”

  “So, no connection to anything…”

  “Getting a little on edge?”

  “Maybe,” I answered, truthfully. “Maybe we should meet and talk before I roll into town.”

  “If I ever need to come meet you face to face, it means things are completely gone to hell, and you don’t want to meet me then. I’m like the comic book guy: you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

  “What makes you think I like you now?” I asked, trying hard to keep the relief out of my voice. No face to face meant he didn’t know Paris that well. It made things easier. I wasn’t going to push.

  “What makes you think I give a greasy crap? To answer your question, though, and my first question when I heard as well—no. We haven’t found any connection to your brother’s death and your work in Lansdale. In fact, I got the feeling that the local boys might be letting this one slide as just another death from drink and MHRD if I hadn’t done my look-see.”

  “MHRD?”

  “Mobile home–related death.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “It’s a redneck thing,” he said.

  “No doubt about that.”

  “You been in touch with your dad?”

  That question put my hackles up for more than one reason. I was about to spit out something angry when I remembered that this guy thought he was talking to Paris.

  “No,” I said, forcing calm. “I’ve stayed dark. Just in case.”

  “He’s doing the ID.”

  “What?”

  “Your father. He’ll do the ID of the body with the locals.”

  I thought about that. Thought hard. I had to wonder, if he knew it was Paris, would he wish it was me? Then what if he figured it out? “I thought the fire might have made that impossible.”

  “DNA. He’s not going in to look at—that. You’re right, the fire was…well, there won’t be a visual ID from what I understand. Your fat
her is giving his DNA to make a comparison.”

  That was something I’d never imagined.

  “Where have you been?” Milo asked.

  “I made myself scarce. Like I said, just in case.”

  “Okay. I can deal with that, but you need to keep in touch a little better. I can’t be losing track of you. These are bad people.”

  “Which ones?” I asked, casting a line.

  “All of them,” he answered, ignoring my fishing. “When can you hit town?”

  “A couple of days at least. I—”

  “Two days.” He jumped in and cut me off. “You got two days, and I want you to skip putting the bro in the ground.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you know why he’s dead?”

  “No.”

  “Right. But you have suspicions it wasn’t a natural thing, or you wouldn’t have hit the road, right?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t like that Milo was sharper than his name would suggest. Who’d ever heard of a black guy named Milo, anyway?

  “So,” he went on, “because of that, I don’t want you around to attract any attention. Any attention at all. No dirt by association.”

  “That’s—”

  “That’s the way it is, my man. Fucked up and spit out, but there’s nothing to it but to do it.”

  I wanted to argue, but it made things a lot easier not to. Not that there would be much of anyone at my funeral. It was possible that someone could spot the difference between me and Paris. My mother and Paris’s were both gone. Never thought that would be an asset. There was Buick, but I had a feeling the old man would be afraid someone might ask him to kick in.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Milo echoed.

  “We should go over things again,” I said, looking for more info.

  “Why?”

  I couldn’t think of a reason. I didn’t know enough to come up with anything. Milo saved me again with his assumptions and trying to be supportive.

  “I know the feeling,” he said. “I used to get the same thing before an op in Iraq. But we’ve talked it out. It’s good. All you have to do is be a cop. Don’t worry about infiltration. They will come to you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Clear as mud. Who’d I screw to get this dropped in my life?”

  He laughed. He was supposed to. It was a casual, meaningless comment. I needed to learn to keep my mouth shut.

  “That’s funny coming from you,” Milo said. His laughter didn’t sound easy then. There was a certain edge to it that made my hair stand on end. “You know exactly who you fucked and how,” he said. “And you’re lucky this office isn’t the Texas Rangers.”

  “I don’t feel lucky.”

  “That’s a true thing there. Get some sleep—it’s what? Four forty-five there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And keep in touch.” He ended the call.

  After that I was in no mood to try for sleep. But I had a plan.

  Showered, dressed, and packed, an hour later I stepped out into the fresh morning. The few belongings I had went into the truck.

  I drove away from the rising sun toward the next little bump of a town. It didn’t have much, but it had a Western Union and a Waffle House. I figured I’d take advantage of both.

  It wasn’t that I was all that hungry. It was more about killing time and the idea that I would get on the road and not stop for food for a long time. My long run into nowhere had dumped me out somewhere north of Durant, Oklahoma. I needed to be at Lansdale along the Rio Grande in two days. That was only about seven hundred, miles but I needed to do it without going through Dallas or any other large city. I wanted to skip the interstate as well. Paris knew a lot of people in law enforcement, and law enforcement knew me. That meant the smaller state highways and towns. Probably not much more in distance, but it added hours to the drive. Time to think. Too much? Too little? I guessed I’d be seeing.

  Lansdale sat right on the border at a wide part of the river, way down in the wastelands between El Paso and Laredo. It was also right on the edge of the Big Bend National Park, seven hundred thousand acres of Wild West Texas. Getting there was nothing compared to the big question. Why the hell was I putting myself through it? The world always seemed to come back to those why questions. I needed to get my head around what. What would I find when I got there? And what the hell did I think I would do about it?

  Waffle House stretched out into a couple of hours with steak and eggs and endless coffee. When the clock ticked over to eight, I paid my check and went out to the truck. Paris’s phone was much better than the burners I was always using. It had directions and Internet access. I used both while I sat at breakfast. I’d gotten the name and number of a funeral home in Houston. That was the call I was waiting to make. Most businesses opened at nine. They listed their hours beginning at eight. Nature of the beast, I thought. People who need to make arrangements feel like they need to get it done quickly. They wake up early if they’ve slept at all and make a call they’d hoped to never make.

  The phone was answered on the third ring. I told the professionally sympathetic man who I needed arrangements for. After the basics, I asked about costs. He tried to upsell me a bit, not too hard. I asked for the middle of everything but went a couple of notches better on the stone. I asked if it could be changed later if it came to it. He assumed at first that I was asking about adding a name later. A wife. When I explained that I was asking about an actual change, there was a long silence. It couldn’t have been a common question.

  “The thing is,” I told him, “I’m doing this without my family getting involved. We don’t always agree.”

  “Say no more,” he told me, and his speech sounded like a literal light coming on. “I can commission a shallow engraving on a smooth field. If things change…well, then we can have the granite blasted out to a rough panel and reengraved.”

  “It sounds like you’re the man with the plan.”

  “Solving delicate problems is my livelihood,” he said.

  I didn’t doubt it.

  After solving delicate problems, I went to the Western Union office and sent the funeral home $9,300. I had been careful to keep the cost under $10,000. Banks and money-transferring businesses had to report cash transactions that size to the feds.

  Being rich was expensive. I’d spent more money since taking that bundle of hundreds than I’d ever spent in such a short time. The bundle looked untouched. In the truck, I thumbed through it and made a rough count.

  Each currency strap of $100 bills totaled $10,000. There had originally been ten of those in each stack. $100,000. There were five stacks in a row. $500,000. And there were three rows. $1.5 million. I guess that’s why the bundle hadn’t dwindled. It was harder to spend $1.5 million on underwear and funerals than I would have thought.

  Procrastination—even necessary procrastination—can only carry you so far. Before setting out, I did some more shopping. At a gun store, I bought two boxes of cartridges, one each for the .40 and for Paris’s .45. I also picked up two spare clips for each. A cleaning kit rounded out the purchases. I thought for a moment that the guy behind the counter was going to ask some questions. It was just my nerves. Gun people in Texas knew when to keep their mouths shut.

  Next I stopped off for gas and an oil check and to top off the tire pressure. The truck had one of those spares that cranked up and down on a cable. I let it down and pretended to put air in the spare. While I was under the truck bed, I tucked the .40 and the bulk of the cash, both wrapped in trash bags, into the wheel’s interior space. I ratcheted it up tight. The .45 I kept in the cab with me. After all, I was no longer Longview Moody, convicted felon. As of that point, I was Paris Tindall, former Ranger and now chief of police for Lansdale, Texas.

  The drive started in green farmland north of Lake Texoma, a giant reservoir of water fed by the Red River. The air was clear, and the day was hot without brutality. I headed west and then south on county roads and turned
on the radio. Willie Nelson.

  I had a thought and pulled out Paris’s phone. I’m not much of a technical person, but there is one thing everyone who has a reasonable fear of being tracked knows. If your phone can tell you where you are, it can tell someone else. There was no telling how deep Milo Janssen was into the phone. I suspected that he’d supplied it to Paris. But however deep it was, I didn’t want him dogging my every step. There was something else I knew. Turning it off didn’t always do what you expected.

  It wasn’t easy to do while driving. If I’d had sense, I would have pulled over. I didn’t. Steering with my knees and elbows, I managed to get the back off the phone and remove the SIM card.

  After the phone was truly dead, I relaxed and hit the gas. The green rolled by and slowly burnished into dry brown.

  FOUR

  Driving at night would have been a good idea. I didn’t figure that out until I’d been driving in the glare and heat of the west Texas sun for too many hours. By then the daylight was fading into a smudge of color on a darkening horizon. I was hungry again and thinking about a little sleep.

  That wasn’t my usual routine. For all my adult life, I had been a drive-till-you-can’t kind of guy. Then I would get a few winks in a truck stop or rest area. Movement always felt like accomplishment.

  Not this trip.

  The farther I went, the more I felt like I was pushing against hard winds. There were no gusts out there running against the road. I knew that. They were inside me. Blowing against my mind. It was a strange sensation. Usually I went where those winds blew. Fighting them was entirely new to me.

  I rose in the morning later than I had expected and put off driving. When I did go, the sun was still in the east but high. It chased me like a cat worrying a mouse. From high in the morning sky, it arced overhead, herding me with the kind of harsh light I’d spent most of my life avoiding. Every mile of that drive felt like scrutiny, the kind that burned away all the ideas you had about yourself and left you bare to your own eyes. I’ve never met the man who could well stand what he’d see in that light.