Dead Man's Badge

by Robert E. Dunn

  “So Alazraqui and Gutiérrez backed down?”

  “Who?”

  I jerked my thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the closed door. “My boy and the big blonde.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That make you feel like a big man?”

  “Screw you. I don’t have to be big. I just gotta do my job, and you gotta do yours.”

  “Well, see, we have two problems here.”

  “Whatchu mean?”

  “I mean I’m not who you think I am. And I don’t work for anyone but me.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, like he was translating Latin in his head and coming up with something that still made no sense.

  “Come outside with me,” I said, pointing again at the door.

  Padilla must have come to some conclusion that I didn’t catch. He reared back in the recliner and kicked out with his foot right at my crotch. Two things about that made me happy. He missed his target, jamming his heel into my hip. Assault against a police officer was the excuse I had been hoping for since I had laid eyes on his wife.

  The kick hurt. It turned me to the left as I buckled forward and almost went to the floor. Padilla rolled out of his chair, landing on all fours. He started off crawling and then scrambled up to his feet as he went for the hallway. I had no idea what he had back there to run for, and I didn’t want to find out. I caught my fall on the arm of the chair and made it my weapon. The vinyl ripped but held enough for me to turn the chair over on Padilla’s flailing feet.

  He struggled for a moment, like an animal that couldn’t understand the trap it was in. When he stopped flailing and turned to see what was going on, I hit him. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t gentle, but trapped animals are the most dangerous ones. Besides, if there was one lesson my father left me with, it was to never give someone an even break. They might use it to kill you.

  My downward punch to the jaw bounced him off the floor. It didn’t take him out. Another one like that would probably break my fingers. Instead of throwing another punch, I dropped a knee on him, right in the ribs, just under the shoulder blade. I knew without asking it hurt. He reached, trying to get any kind of grip he could on me. It couldn’t have been easier than that. I took him by the wrist and twisted—hard. At the same time, I stood, pulling him after me. He had the choice of coming along or letting his arm slip the socket. He stood.

  “Okay,” he said, raising his free hand.

  I twisted a little more.

  “Okay, okay, okay!” He was shouting by then.

  “How many times did your wife ask you to stop?”

  “I’m sorry.” He whined the apology.

  “I know.” I pushed his head into the cheap trailer paneling. It went through the wall and out the one behind it. He was lucky his head missed the stud.

  Through the paneling, I could hear him. I wasn’t sure if he was sobbing or puking. Either way I was glad I couldn’t see it.

  “That your truck outside?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he answered. The words were soft and thick, sounding a lot farther away than they were.

  “You’re going to get in it and go.”

  “Where?” He shouted the question, holding on to his last bit of defiance.

  “I don’t care. You’re just not welcome here anymore.”

  “I got a job.”

  “They’ll get by without you. And Mrs. Padilla will be better off.”

  “You can’t separate a man from his wife.”

  “I can. You’ve figured that much out, haven’t you? The only question is, do I separate you by miles or by six feet of dirt?”

  “Fuck you!” was his shouted answer.

  God, you gotta love a spirited debate. I responded with the toe of my boot in his ass. Then I made my point three more times until he started blubbering again. “You going quiet?” I asked.

  I took his quiet shaking as a nod and pulled his head from the wall. He dropped to the floor.

  “Keys?” I asked.

  Padilla pointed to a little plaque on the wall by the door. It read, “God protect us as we travel, by air or land or sea. Keep us safe and guide us, wherever we may be.” Below the prayer were three hooks, one holding a set of keys.

  “You believe in God?” I asked him.

  “Of course I believe in God.”

  “Then you better believe the ass kicking you got today was nothing. I catch you around here again, and you’ll be answering to him damn quick.”

  “What about you?” he asked, sounding like a child, full of spite and blame for everyone but himself.

  “Me?”

  “You’re gonna answer someday.”

  “I’m good with that. Get your keys.”

  SEVEN

  Outside his trailer, trudging through blowing dirt, Rand Padilla didn’t look at his wife as he got into his truck and started the engine. He looked at me long enough to flip the finger as he stood on the gas. Dirt and gravel showered behind him as he hit the road.

  A real cop probably would not have let a man who’d been drinking on the road. That, along with a lot of other real-cop stuff, was clear on Hector’s face as I approached the car.

  “That’s—”

  I cut him off. “I don’t care to hear it. Mrs. Padilla,” I said, nodding to her. “Your husband has decided to take a little time for himself. I understand this may put you into some difficulty. If you need anything, anything at all, just call me at the station.”

  “If he’s not here to work, I’m not sure I can keep living in the trailer.” She looked at the cheap, rolling tin house like it was a mobile palace.

  “Just call. I’ll make sure you’re not left out of doors.”

  She didn’t say anything, at least not in words, but I knew a thank-you when I got one. She went back into the trailer. Hector and I got back into the cruiser. “Go to the road. Turn right,” I told him.

  To the right was a copse of trees I had spotted from the barren land of the trailer park. There were mesquite and oak and one big cottonwood that littered the ground with peeling bark and dropped branches. We parked under the spreading limbs in a bit of pressed dirt that showed signs of a million high school hang-out parties.

  I stepped out of the car as soon as it was stopped and went around to sit on the hood. Through the green there was a view of the river bottom and the town. Wind moved the branches, and the world felt cooler. It was a live sort of cool, shade and breeze, natural compared to the sealed-in cold of air-conditioning.

  Hector shut off the engine. I felt it die under my ass. Even though the vibrations were gone, the heat remained, and the metal immediately began ticking and refitting itself as it cooled.

  “Why are we here?” Hector asked as soon as he opened the car door.

  “You tell me.” I brushed at a fly that started circling my face.

  “How should I know?”

  It was a fair question. I didn’t answer it. I swatted again at the pest; then I nodded. I wasn’t sure if I was nodding in response to Hector or the questions in my head. Either way a nod was as good as a wink to a blind man, and we were just a couple of guys feeling around the dark.

  The car door closed behind me. Hector came around the fender, giving the car—and me—a wide berth. He stopped, out of reach, with his hands on his hips. The snap closure on his patent leather holster was open.

  “I thought you might want to finish the talk we started last night.” As I spoke, I kept my gaze cast out through the green frame of trees and over the town. It was like looking at a painting.

  “Who are you?”

  I turned to Hector, and looking at him was more like looking through the wrong end of binoculars, oddly distant and distorted. “Who am I not?”

  He set a foot behind him as if my question was a physical blow that pushed him off balance. Or maybe he was just adjusting his stance to pull a weapon on me. “What’s that mean?”

  “You know what it means. Last night you asked me who I was. That means you k
new at first glance I wasn’t someone else.”

  “Paris.”

  “Yep. How’d you know? Or better yet, how’d you know him?”

  “You’re not a cop at all, are you?” He asked the question like it was a condemnation. Everything not cop was less than cop.

  I looked back at the town, and wind moved the trees again. Heat rising from the asphalt and buildings made the air ripple.

  “You’re going to tell me what’s going on and what happened to Paris.” It was a threat, spoken with a soft, even voice.

  When I turned from the view to look at him again, Hector’s hand was on the butt of his pistol. His gaze was focused on me but not on me—more like it was centered on something about two inches behind my eyes. I wondered what, or who, he was seeing.

  “You’re his contact.” I said it like a matter of fact. It seemed obvious to me.

  To Hector it seemed like something else. His face fell, literally. The tension was jerked out of the muscles, and the look of righteous anger transformed in the fall to an expression of stunned hurt.

  “Contact?” He tried to put a sneer into the word, but all the power was artificial. It was vocal paint on rotten walls. The word itself had kicked him in the gut. “Is that what he said? I’m a contact?” The questions fell without his even trying to support them.

  “No. I mean, he didn’t say anything about it…about you. It was my assumption.”

  “Assumption?” He tightened his fingers around the butt of the gun and squared his shoulders, forcing some steel back into his spine. “Assumption?” he asked again. The question was for him, not me. I was sure he was stoking his own fires. “What gives you the right to assume? You come here—wearing a badge you don’t deserve and a…a…stolen face. It’s not his. I’m not even sure if it’s yours. You have his face worn like a mask. And it doesn’t fit because you can’t be him. His bones…his center is different—better. You can’t live up.”

  Hector pulled his weapon. That was the first indication I had of danger. I had once again completely misunderstood something, and—as always, it seemed—my mistakes were aiming guns at me with homicide in their hearts.

  I stood from the hood of the car and put my hands up in front of my body. My palms were turned to Hector, their emptiness on display. Without turning my head or eyes, I searched the periphery of my vision for anything to help my situation, a distraction or a witness. As I looked, Hector eased forward, leading with the barrel of his gun.

  When it drifted upward to my chest and centered on my heart, I said, “I didn’t take anything from Paris. He was my brother.”

  Once again, my words hit Hector with a violence beyond my hands or gun.

  “Was?” he asked.

  Small words always seem to hit the hardest.

  “He’s dead,” I told him. “Killed.” I said that like it was a distinction with real meaning.

  Hector had tears in his eyes.

  “What was he to you?” I don’t learn easy.

  His weapon came back up. “What the fuck do you think he was to me? How can you tell me like that?” he asked. When he spoke again, his voice took on the trembling of his gun hand. “How much hate do you have in your heart?”

  “I don’t hate anyone here.”

  “Liar!”

  “I’m just telling you. He was my brother—what’re you blubbering about?”

  It was a stupid question. I may as well have kicked Hector in the heart because the shock that showed on his face was the kind of understanding that comes in charged bolts of electricity. I think I understood the same moment he did.

  “He never told his own brother.” That said it all—for him and for me and for Paris laid out on a slab so far away.

  “You and Paris?” My question faded, unspoken but still loud.

  “Yes.”

  “I never knew.”

  “That’s obvious.” Hector holstered his weapon and turned his gaze both downward and inward. “The world is full of obvious things, I guess.”

  “Obvious or oblivious. How could he hide being gay?”

  “Why did he feel like he had to?” Hector’s question cut right to it.

  “Who knows about you?”

  “What? That I’m gay?” He stood straight and presented himself as if on inspection. “That I’m—maricón?”

  I nodded, ashamed of the motion. Still, I asked, “Who knows?”

  “My family. My friends. The people who know me.”

  “Work?”

  “That’s different. Being a cop is—”

  “I didn’t know my brother like I should have. That’s obvious. I haven’t…ever. But I do know that being a cop was who he was, not just something he did. It’s more than different. And he didn’t have much of a family or people who knew him. Except maybe you.”

  “I thought he was ashamed of me.”

  I shook my head as I settled back onto the hood of the cruiser with my gaze turned down, looking into the dust. Hector’s boots were leaving deep sole prints as he wandered. He seemed calm now, but the prints were a map of despair.

  “I don’t think so.” I said it to him, but I was still looking at his prints in the dirt. “Between the two of us, I’d say I was the one he would be ashamed of.”

  Hector stopped his aimless walking. “He never told me he had a brother,” he said before sitting beside me on the car.

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “What now?” he asked.

  “It’s a hell of a question,” I answered. “Are you sure you want to ask it?”

  “What else have I got?”

  I shrugged. “His funeral.”

  “What?”

  “You asked me what was next. You’ll want to go to his funeral.”

  “When?”

  There was a moment of panic as I realized I didn’t know. I had made arrangements with the funeral home to pick up the body and hold a service. I’d never planned on being there. I didn’t even know if the DNA test that Milo had told me about was done. How long did those take? And what the hell would it show?”

  “I don’t know,” I told Hector.

  “You don’t know? How complicated can it be? It’s a funeral—oh.”

  “What?”

  “You mean it’s me you don’t know about. You think I’ll make some kind of scene.”

  “No. It’s about me.” I looked at Hector and made sure he was looking at me. “They think it’s me that’s dead. Paris was in my trailer. I thought someone was trying to finish a job they had started on me. When I took his place, it was just to get a little distance. But come to find out, he was involved with something that might have come looking for him too.” I spread my hands like a magician’s reveal. “So that’s it. I don’t know if I was the target or if he was. If I go to the funeral, there’s no telling who might show up and spot the switch. Buick, our father, certainly would.”

  “How did you think you were going to get away with this?”

  “I didn’t. I just thought it would get me away long enough to think.”

  “Why didn’t you go into Mexico?”

  “Some problems don’t care about borders.”

  “Can I ask you one question though?”

  “Only one? I guess you deserve that.”

  “Why is your father named after a car?”

  “Not just a car,” I told him. “‘Buick is an entire luxury line from General Motors,’ is the way he always answered.”

  We almost laughed.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” I said, and it was the truth. “He just is, and that sums up his whole life. A car, a machine, something dead and rusting in a junkyard. Never a man. Never just a human being.”

  “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “They say gay men have daddy issues.”

  I shrugged. “We are what we are.”

  “You got that right.” He stared at me. I could see thoughts traveling across his dark eyes like visible telegraphic pulses of energy. “I want to
go.”

  “I know.”

  “Well?”

  “Let’s see what we can work out. In the meantime…”

  “I’m not going back to work,” Hector said, and he meant it.

  “How about a beer?”

  “God, yes.”

  EIGHT

  I gave Hector some cash and sent him for beer. Once he was gone, I pulled my phone and called the funeral home. As I talked, I paced under the shade, kicking up rocks and crushed cans. When the call was over, I stood staring out over the town and enjoying the feel of breezes on my sweating skin.

  Hector returned. Standing by the open door of the cruiser, he called ten-seven into dispatch. Shorthand, I assumed, for off the clock and out of reach. I reminded myself to see if those cop codes were on the Internet. It seemed like a handy thing for a police chief to know. Even though I had confided in him, I didn’t want to reveal the true depths of my ignorance to Hector unless I had to.

  The dispatcher’s voice was replaced by another. “Heck? Are you…okay?” Gutiérrez sounded concerned.

  I took the mic and answered. “He can’t talk right now.” I grinned at him and let the statement sit there a moment before I keyed the mic again. “And when I arrive in the morning, I would like the vacation schedule and a copy of Officer Alazraqui’s accumulated time on my desk.” For good measure I said, “We’re out,” before shutting off the radio.

  “She’s going to think you’re firing me or killing me,” Hector said as he fired up the cruiser.

  “Sometimes it’s good for people to worry.”

  “I think she figured out that we had a run-in last night. Between my eye and how you looked—” He shrugged. “She’s a good cop.”

  “I hope so.”

  Hector took the mic back and offered beer in return. “Which would you like?” he asked, holding sixes of Lone Star and Victoria out in different hands.

  “I’m not picky.”

  “That’s not something to brag about.”

  “Don’t I know it,” I said, popping open one of the Mexican beers. Hector had Lone Star. “I called the funeral home,” I said. “His body hasn’t been released yet.”

  He opened his beer and stared at the opening a moment before drinking. After draining half the can, he looked at it a little longer before asking, “How do you feel about…”