Dead Man's Badge

by Robert E. Dunn

  I dropped the magazine from the pistol and jacked the round from the chamber. It was a small gun. The man’s finger would barely fit through the trigger guard. He probably planned on using it as a finisher rather than the main event. Everything about his attitude said he was wanting to get his hands on me and give a little hurt. Of course, it was possible it wasn’t me or Paris he was after. Anyone who showed up to take the job of chief in Lansdale could have been the target. It was a reasonable thought. Almost comforting. I tossed it away when I looked at the hand again. There was something personal there. He had showed me the tattoo and the missing finger like I had had something to do with it.

  Lights, circling red and blue, spun across the front windows. Officer Gutiérrez came through the door. She looked ready for about anything except seeing me standing over an unconscious man with his weapon dangling from where I gripped the trigger guard.

  “What happened?” she asked, resettling her own pistol into the holster.

  “I started the job a little early,” I told her. “Take this guy in. We’ll want to talk to him once he’s able.” I hoped that sounded like something a chief of police would say.

  “Uh…take him in?”

  “You see anyone else that looks like a bad guy?”

  “Yeah, he’s a bad guy all right, but we don’t get to touch him.”

  “What are you talking about? He just tried to touch the hell out of me.”

  “He works for the bank.”

  “I don’t care if he bakes the best cookies in town. He needs to be arrested for assault and weapons charges unless he has a permit for this piece of junk.” I raised the gun to show her.

  Gutiérrez leaned in close and lowered her voice. “It’s the whole thing with the DEA. The bank being built outside of town and the people doing it are under DEA protection and jurisdiction. Don’t you know all about it? I thought you were brought in by the Justice Department.”

  “I thought that was a secret,” I said, without whispering. The truth was that I had assumed without thinking it through. I had never asked. The real truth was I didn’t know what the hell I was doing or why. I was foundering in dark waters looking for shore or a rope and wondering how I got here.

  “Please,” she said. “There are no secrets here. At least none that are kept very long. Everyone knows you’re a Texas Ranger and a DOJ insert.”

  “What else do they know?”

  “They know you were about the last choice. They know after Chief Wilcox was killed, the next guy lasted about a month. And they know your arm was twisted to get you here. What was it?” She looked at me then, from boots to hat. Her blue eyes held a knowledge that withered and diminished me.

  “What?”

  “What do they have on you?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “I bet it is.”

  I stepped back from the man on the floor, feeling suddenly exhausted and a bit scared by the size of the boots I had stepped into.

  “I’ll call the DEA guy. He’ll come take him.” Gutiérrez nodded down at the floor. “You want to give me the gun?”

  “No,” I said, but the thought behind the word was, Fuck it. “I’ll keep the gun. You take him. Cuff him and read his rights as soon as he’s awake.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “What won’t?” I asked, stepping over the body to the right side. “Arresting him?” With the toe of my boot, I kicked his right hand away from his body. It was extended and palm down just like his broken left. “Or sending a message not to screw with the new chief?” Bones snapped loudly as I stomped my heel into the back of the hand. A forward lean put the weight of my body on the ball of my food, and his fingers broke like corn popping in a hot pan.

  “Oh, my God.” Her eyes, blue and deep, went wide in astonishment. They seemed to have lost all their sense of knowledge.

  “The message is, point a gun at me once, and you never will again.”

  Gutiérrez had more questions. She had a lot more judgment too. I didn’t feel like talking either. I got out of there. The manly scent put on me by the barber had mellowed. It blended with the smell of night air, moist from the river; dry earth from the desert; mesquite; and cactus flower. I drove with my windows open, taking the wind in my face and into my lungs.

  Twenty minutes of wandering had brought me to no greater clarity. I took a dirt road to the top of a hill and stopped. Above me the stars sprayed across black nothing. I looked into the nothing. Out there was darkness beyond the absence of light. It was the kind of void that rejected vision, color, even warmth. Looking up, between the stars, was like looking at the darkness within a grave.

  It wasn’t until then that I understood I hadn’t escaped that night digging in the dirt of old Mexico. Once you set foot into your own grave, you can never leave it completely behind. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t run off yet, why I hadn’t taken the money and bought a life someplace else. Every direction I turned—any turn we all make—the darkness remained ahead.

  When I got back into the truck, I was thinking about Lenore.

  There was no plan, just hope, when I pulled into my parking spot at the Desert Drop Inn. I’d decided to splash a little water on my face and brush my teeth before going to the office to see if I could track her down. If my attention hadn’t been focused on the neon-lit office when I stepped into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs, I might have realized sooner that something was wrong. It shouldn’t have been dark.

  On each end of the motel, a staircase landed at the entrance to a little cove. The cement cave held ice, candy, and soda machines. Even if the overhead light was off, both the vending machines had lighted fronts. Like I said, it shouldn’t have been dark, but I was looking for the wrong thing.

  My foot was on the first step when something hard slammed into the back of my extended thigh. It was like being beaten with an electric eel. My leg gave way, dropping my knee onto the concrete step. I was under attack. A second blow, aimed at my kidneys, struck. Had it landed correctly, I probably would have been wadded up on the floor pissing blood on myself. Because I was already falling, the aim of the blow was off, and it struck the gun in my belt before glancing into my back. I rolled away from the attacker, putting my left side and arm between me and his club as I reached back for my weapon with my right. That was the first time I saw him. He was smaller than me but stocky, solid looking in outline, which was all I could see.

  Expecting another swinging blow, I tensed my arm and hunched my shoulder, tucking my chin. Just as I got my weapon clear of the holster, he struck. The impact didn’t come at my side or my head like I had expected. He hit me with a jab, tight as a knot and hard as regret, right into my gut. A baton punch. My attacker had a handled baton. Once you’ve been hit with one, you never forget the feeling. He had swung it against my leg and back, but he had tucked the long end and punched with butt of the short end. He was a cop.

  The air rushed out of my body, and a dam of pain kept it from returning. I was in danger of blacking out. If that happened, I was at his mercy, and that was the one thing that I had not found to be in great supply lately.

  “Who are you?” the attacker asked. “Who are you really?”

  The pistol in my hand seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, and my hand felt like it was as many miles away, working by remote control. I managed to lift the .45 but had little hope of getting the gun in front of me and aimed. No hope at all, once I saw the motion of his arm raising the baton to strike at my wrist.

  Before he could disarm me, I fired twice into the soda machine. It spit and then started pouring. My gut relaxed, and I gasped in a rasping lungful of air.

  When gasping finally turned to breathing, I was alone. I stayed that way too. It took five more minutes for me to make it up to my room, and in that time, no one showed up. No curious onlookers. Most telling, no cops.

  SIX

  “What the hell do you mean, you let him go?” I asked DEA Agent Darian Stackhouse without shouting at hi
m. I was practicing restraint, and it was mostly working.

  I had arrived at the Lansdale Police Department at the crack of eight forty, not being sure what time chiefs of police reported to work and not caring. I was limping, my knee swollen from the impact with the stairs, my back bent to favor one side, and my gut bruised by the baton blows.

  When I got in, the first thing waiting was Stackhouse, there to read me the rules of cooperation between the various agencies involved in what he called “critical relations.”

  “Why weren’t you briefed on this?” he shot back without quite yelling as well.

  “Good question,” I said. “It wouldn’t have made a difference. He pulled a weapon on a police officer.” I was exaggerating a little but not enough to bother me. “Maybe you grant immunity for that when it’s you. When it’s me, he’s lucky to be alive.”

  “Oh, knock off all the cowboy crap. You overreacted to a misunderstanding. You have no jurisdiction. The man was never in your custody, and he never will be.”

  “How’s his shooting hand?”

  “Broken to shit. How’d that happen, and why didn’t you take him to the hospital?”

  “Who knows?” I shrugged. I had dropped my voice to a normal level. Raising it hurt my stomach muscles. “And how could we have taken him to a hospital? He was never in our custody. In fact, I’ve never seen the man. Until I see him again, that is.”

  Stackhouse didn’t say anything to that. He looked at me like I was a dangerous animal that had just started talking to him through the bars of the zoo. DEA Agent Stackhouse was a black man. Former military—I could tell from how he stood and moved. He wore a loose-fitting suit jacket, the summer-weight kind in khaki, and it looked like a safari jacket. Even at that and without a tie, he still looked restricted.

  I sat down at my new desk. Stackhouse smiled and took a breath. He sat as well, spreading his hands as he did in a placating gesture. “Look,” he said. Then he thought about what he wanted to say next. “We’re all on the same team, aren’t we? I mean, we want to keep things safe and stop the bad guys.”

  “I don’t think so.” I wasn’t smiling. “Not if we’re playing by different rules. Seems to me you’re working closer to the bad guys than to the good ones.”

  “You don’t understand all that’s going on.”

  I smiled. I’d always hated to be told I didn’t understand when it was used in place of an explanation. I leaned back and put my boots up on my bare desk and put my hands forward in the same kind of placating spread he had used.

  “I don’t like the DEA,” I told him.

  His smile dropped away.

  “As a matter of fact, I’m not fond of any of the three-letter agencies. I think you all like fighting the war more than you like solving problems, and I think you all believe rules are what you enforce more than what you follow.” I smiled again, big and friendly. “Does that make things clear?”

  “As a mountain spring when the snow is melting.” Pretty words and a hateful look.

  “Tell me about the bank.”

  “As far as I know, the bank is a private venture to which the DEA has no ties and no information. I do notice that it is outside of Lansdale city limits. That makes it no more a concern of yours than it is of mine. Does that make things clear?”

  “As the Rio Grande after a hard rain,” I said.

  “I guess we understand each other.” Stackhouse ignored my sarcasm.

  “I guess we do.”

  “What do we plan to do about it?”

  “I’m not much at making plans,” I said, pointing a finger around the office. “That’s how I ended up here.”

  “You don’t seem to understand the nature—the scope—of the conflict we are engaged in.”

  “Your war on drugs.” It was an obvious statement on an obvious thing, tossed off without thought. As soon as I said it, it had a deeper meaning—a deeper connection than I had bothered to make before. I started listening harder to what he was saying.

  “War,” he said, leaning forward in his chair and giving me a “leadership” look in the eyes. Definitely military. “On drugs, with drugs, financed by drugs—an entire criminal system on our border. It has claws in the Mexican government. I’m talking about an unstable nation ruled by violent criminals—revolution. We can’t keep the lawnmower wets out. You think we can manage a million refugees and the crime families mixed in? War there—is war here. That can’t happen.”

  “You believe all that?” I asked him, holding the eye contact. “What have you done to stop it? Corruption in Mexico is an old story. How many cops and politicians do you own?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You don’t want to stop anything. You want it unstable in just the right way. Teetering on the edge.”

  “You’re not much of a cop, are you?”

  “High praise, I’m saying.”

  “What about your brother?”

  “What do you—”

  “He was part of the problem too, wasn’t he? Running cash across the border.”

  “Yeah? What would you know about it?”

  “I know he ran afoul of some people. He was working for the Guzeman DTO. They got taken over by the real bad folks—La Familia de los Muerto. Longview Moody ended up in the desert one night.”

  “Longview was found dead in his trailer after a fire.”

  “Yes, he was. That’s a strange thing. I understood he was dead and buried in the Mexican desert; then he pops up at home and dead of a house fire.”

  “Not all that strange, maybe. Information is a used car. You get what you pay for.”

  “Maybe. But I heard something else. I heard you were at his trailer that night.”

  “Sounds to me like you hear a lot of shit, Stackhouse. I hear things too.”

  “Um-hum, I bet you do.”

  “I hear there’s a house full of dead cartel boys in Juarez, and it was a DEA agent that did the deed.”

  “You stow that. You lock it tight. Lives are at stake.”

  I thought it was interesting that he said “stow that.” I’d heard army grunts say the same thing, but not often. It pegged Stackhouse in my mind as navy or marines. SEAL? He was definitely an ops kind of guy.

  “Who are you losing control of, Stackhouse? Your guys or your other guys? Anyone unaccounted for?”

  Stackhouse stared at me like I had just produced a wand and made the desk dance. It didn’t last long, though. He shut his mouth and stood. His shoulders were square and his back straight. He wanted to come across the office and kick the life out of me. I had to admire his restraint.

  “Listen here,” he said. Even his voice was tense. “I don’t know what kind of game you think you’re playing, but it’s dangerous.”

  “You put yourself on the side of a man who wanted to kill me. There’s no game.”

  He went out. I stayed behind my desk for a few moments, savoring the silence. I’d never had a desk, let alone an office. It was a weird and strangely inspiring feeling. I felt like I imagined Paris had felt all his life.

  There was a knock on the door. The savoring was over.

  It was Gutiérrez. “They were right,” she said instead of a greeting.

  “Who? And about what?”

  “Everyone on the force that you haven’t bothered to meet yet. They said you look like crap in a cheap basket.” The insult in the words wasn’t supported by her tone or her expression. Gutiérrez had a losing coach’s idea of motivation.

  “They said that? Are you quoting?”

  “Are you not even going to take the job seriously?”

  “I don’t know. Is this department in the habit of turning dangerous people loose?”

  “Yes, we are. I told you the DEA was involved, and they’ve been running things around here for the last couple of years.”

  “And now I’m here.”

  “And now you’re here, and no one has an idea what’s going on. Even you, I’m thinking.”

  I nodded just to seem like
I was listening. I probably looked more like I was agreeing. Once I realized that, I stood and picked up the one thing that had been on my desk when I came in: a gold badge that read Chief of Police—City of Lansdale. I pinned the badge on my shirt and went out to the department common room.

  “Listen up, everyone,” I said. All noise and voices stopped. That was a little intimidating. “I’m Long—” I stopped. A flush of heat rushed up my neck into my face, followed by a twinge of nausea. There were so many ways to fail that I was stunned to have made it as far as I had. “My name is Paris Tindall. Chief Tindall now. I guess everyone knows that I got this job because of unusual circumstances. I haven’t been here long, but I’m beginning to think this whole town is an example of unusual circumstances. I imagine that you’re like me and want things to get back to something like they once were. I don’t understand everything. I do understand that.”

  I looked around, and everyone was watching but giving nothing back. They didn’t know me. They sure didn’t trust me. Gutiérrez had the only friendly face in the room. When I looked at her, she nodded slightly. Encouragement but not bold.

  “What changes right now”—I went on trying to make eye contact with each person—“is this idea that some people are somehow off limits.”

  There was a harrumph from a fat man behind a desk in the far corner. It was the kind of sound intended to be derisive but deniable—a chickenshit sound.

  “What’s your name?” I asked when I turned to look at him.

  There are two ways guys like that respond when you call them out for acting like the jerks they are. Either they backtrack hard and fast, or they pretend none of it has real meaning. That guy went the no-big-deal route.

  He leaned back in his chair and pulled his seersucker jacket around his belly. It didn’t close. “Mark Walker,” he said. “Detective Walker.” He shrugged hard as though he’d made some kind of point and then stretched out his hammy arms. There were no shirt cuffs under the jacket sleeves. Short-sleeve shirt, seersucker suit: it made me wonder if his tie was a clip-on. Walker brushed his chubby fingers over the top of his head, straightening the comb-over that covered about as well as his jacket. “And I’m the entire detective staff, by the way.”