Dead Man's Badge

by Robert E. Dunn

“What are you doing here?”

  “Homework.”

  Gutiérrez looked like she was considering that. She took a sip of beer from a bottle and asked, “So, school’s in session. What have you learned?”

  “Walker is here when he’s supposed to be on the clock.”

  “Obvious. What else?”

  “Those two guys playing pool.” I tilted my chin at the pair of big men with tattoos and long hair. They were not looking our way and being careful about it.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re DEA. Part of Stackhouse’s crew.”

  “You’ve seen them before?”

  “They may have been on the road today.” The bartender put an open bottle in front of me and then moved on. “But that’s not why I make them.”

  “Okay…”

  “They look like cops.”

  “What do cops look like?”

  “Mostly like smug thugs. Like they have a right.”

  “What right?”

  “All of them. Cops like rules that everyone else has to follow. Order. Those guys have tattoos that only show if their sleeves are rolled. They have ankle holsters, and they haven’t looked over here once.”

  She shoved my beer over closer to me and took another drink from hers. “Why should they look over here? Are you that interesting?”

  “Nope. But you are.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not as good at complimenting women as I thought I was.”

  “A man should know his limitations. What else?”

  “I’d bet a nickel that most of the other men in here work for the Machados.”

  “Most of the men in town work for him one way or another.”

  “Yeah, I get that. These guys are a little more directly involved.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You, me, Walker—all local cops. The pair of feds. If I can make them, anyone else can. That’s five cops in here.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Five cops. No one cares. They’re all protected.”

  She took another drink with her eyes open and gaze fixed on me. When the bottle was empty, she said, “Maybe you’re just a little sharper than I was giving you credit for.”

  “Even a broken clock…” I said, toying with my sweating beer bottle. “How many sides are at play here?”

  She was no longer looking at me. She had turned to look at the mirror in the bar back. I couldn’t tell if she was inspecting her reflection or the condition of the glassware. I did notice that there was good reason to take your beer from the bottle at the Border Crossing.

  “Just when I think you might have a little edge, you turn into a big blunt hammer again.”

  I slid my untouched bottle over to her hands. “What I lack in subtlety I make up for in other things.”

  She took the beer. “What things?”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.”

  She took a drink.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I said as she sucked down a long drink of pale lager.

  “Getting sharp again,” she said, setting the bottle down and keeping her eyes forward.

  “Sides,” I said. “And who plays for which team?”

  Gutiérrez raised the beer again stopping before it got to her lips. “That could be a fluid situation,” she said. Then she pursed her lips and pressed the bottle to them.

  Off to the side and beyond the bar, I caught some movement. Detective Walker was standing at a table talking with a group of Hispanic men. I’d seen one of them at the gun club. Joaquin. The doorman who’d let me in. They looked a lot closer than one would expect.

  I left Gutiérrez with her beer and her reflection.

  “Detective Walker.” I didn’t quite shout it across the room.

  He lost his smile quick. “Chief?” Walker asked.

  Joaquin didn’t even turn to look at me.

  “Walker.” I made sure to sound happy to see him. “Great work you’ve been doing.”

  “What?”

  “All the information you’ve been gathering.”

  “Chief…” Walker had a little warning in his voice. “I’m just—”

  “Don’t explain. I don’t need to know why you’re here. Are these the men you told me about?”

  Joaquin looked at me. Then he looked away. The three other men at the table never even glanced up. They tried hard to act like I was invisible. The guy on the end was the most nervous. He looked familiar too. At first I couldn’t place him, but it occurred to me that I’d only ever seen him from behind. There was no way to be sure, but I thought he might be the guy who had kicked in the motel door two nights ago.

  Walker was outright scared. “No,” he said. “I mean there aren’t—what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s just between us chickens.” I laughed, but no one joined in. Then I pointed to Joaquin. “Is he your informant?” I shifted my finger to the man on the end. “Is that the guy from the motel?”

  Walker went a little pale. All the men at the table leaned away from each other, adding a tiny bit of distance between everyone. The doorman scooted back in his chair as if to rise.

  “Stay where you are, Joaquin,” I said. I wasn’t laughing anymore. Then I turned to Walker and tossed my arm around his shoulders. “Come here with me. I want to introduce you to a couple of our friends in the DEA.” I dragged him to the pool tables.

  The bar was very quiet as we walked the few steps over. The two feds were leaning on their cues staring bullets at us—at me.

  “What kind of crap are you trying to pull?” the bigger one asked.

  “Tell me something,” I said. “You ever been fishing for sharks?”

  “You’ve gone fucking crazy,” the smaller one said.

  “No. I’m just fishing. And if you want to catch sharks, you gotta get some blood in the water.”

  I turned toward the bar and looked straight at Gutiérrez. Her beer bottle was empty again. “Ain’t that right?” I hollered.

  She didn’t reply. She didn’t even look.

  The big fed pointed at me with his cue and said, “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing here—”

  “Game?” I cut him off loud and clear. “Yeah. Speaking of games—which one of you was in on that game down in Juarez?”

  The change in their faces was instant.

  “That was some bad action down there.” I checked to make sure the table of Machado’s guys was listening. They were. “But I hear someone got away with a load of cash.”

  The feds were split. They wanted to go at me with their pool cues, but they were afraid to take their attention away from the four men at the table.

  I turned to Walker and told him, “Get out of here. It probably wouldn’t be wise to come back to this place. In fact, if I don’t see you again, you can consider your resignation accepted.”

  He left without looking back.

  I walked across the room. Even the gloom seemed to be holding its breath. When I got to the bar, I picked up my hat and set it in place. Then, to Gutiérrez, I said, “Now, that’s what a hammer does.”

  TWELVE

  I didn’t go back to the station. I didn’t go home either.

  Without a plan or destination in mind, I twisted the wheel and hit the truck’s gas pedal. It responded with a surge of speed that shot me out of the gravel lot and onto asphalt headed out of town. I passed the entrance to the gun club and kept going until I was well into Big Bend National Park.

  Main roads were not what I needed. The first unpaved cross road I came to, I took. It reminded me of the dirt track I had traveled that night I escaped my grave. That was a thought I tried hard not to linger on.

  The trail took me into a spit of desert that drooped as if melted into a ravine that spread into a tiny valley. In the sheltered walls, water collected when it did rain. Mesquite and junipers grew in clumps. Along the path of drainage was a line of pecan tr
ees.

  When the road petered out over the slope, I stopped and let the truck rest. Metal ticked under the settling dust. An idea was already forming in my head that could tie some questions together. But thoughts as hard and black as mine were didn’t give much peace. I was feeling worse, not better. Everything was a nagging grievance: my outlook and attitude, the pain in my spine, and the taste in my mouth. The day was ugly and bad. It needed an ending that didn’t suck quite so hard.

  With a last glance, I left the little valley behind me. At a roadside joint that was both restaurant and gas station, I picked up a heaping box of fried chicken. To that I added a tub of black-eyed peas, mashed potatoes with a steaming quart of gravy, cornbread, and a six of Victoria. It wasn’t until I was about to leave that I noticed a galvanized trough full of ice and Big Stripe watermelons. How could I resist? Good food, home food, was one of those things that could raise any spirit.

  On the way back to the Desert Drop Inn, I called Officer Sunny. I asked her to make a general radio call putting everyone on notice that the Border Crossing bar was off limits to all officers.

  She told me, with remarkable patience, that we didn’t use the radio for such things. Then she said, “I guess you’re learning a thing or two.”

  “Yeah, a thing or two,” I answered. “Put it out anyway. And type it up to hang on the bulletin board too.”

  “A staff meeting might be a good idea,” she said. I appreciated that she didn’t make me feel like an idiot about it.

  “What do you think, once a week?” I asked.

  “Monthly has always been enough.”

  “I buy that. Thank you, Officer Johnson.”

  “Thank you, Chief.”

  I hung up feeling a tiny bit better about my job.

  The day was slipping into amber when I got to the motel. Another magic hour in south Texas. Who would have ever thought barren could look as beautiful as it did? I laid out my feast on a couple of the pool’s umbrella tables.

  While I worked, a car pulled off the road and into the lot to park beside my truck. Hector got out.

  Hector stood on the other side. “I got your message about vacation. What’s that about?”

  “I’d like you to do something for me.”

  Hector leaned over to get a look. “Having a party?”

  “You want some chicken?” I asked him.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Paris’s body is at the funeral home.”

  Hector stiffened his back and set his gaze on my eyes through the galvanized wire diamonds of the fence.

  “I want you to go.”

  He dropped his eyes to the ground and started to say something.

  Before he could speak, I added, “I want—need you to take care of it for me. I can’t go. The funeral director is expecting you. Paris needs a suit. He needs you to be there.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, still evading my gaze.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know how he felt.”

  “You mean—”

  “About me. We didn’t talk about feelings. Maybe…maybe I was projecting my hopes more than reading his.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you about that. I can say don’t worry about doing it for him. Or me. Do it for you—for how you feel.”

  “Maybe.” He looked up to meet my eyes.

  “Tell me something.”

  Hector nodded over at the table. “Give me a beer.”

  I fetched two bottles and opened them both, tossing the caps away.

  “How you met Paris.”

  “About two years ago. He said he was in Lansdale on Ranger business checking on something.”

  “Did he say what?”

  “No. But it had something to do with the other one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was another Ranger. Old school—you know the kind. He was here a lot around then. Kept meeting with Chief Wilcox.”

  “Why do you say Paris was here about him?”

  “Timing mostly. The old Ranger would show up. Paris would be here soon after. That and the fact that Paris wouldn’t talk about it. Not at all. But you could tell how bothered he was about it.”

  “Wilcox was the old chief, right? Everything started with him.”

  Hector shrugged and took a drink of his beer. “We found him shot in the head with his car still idling down by the river. Whatever he started, it finished the heck out of him.”

  “Tell me about the replacement chief.”

  “What’s to tell? He was here a month, and he turned up dead.”

  “By the river again?”

  Hector shook his head and used his bottle to point off into the coloring west. “Out in Big Bend. But otherwise the same. Bullet. Head. Parked vehicle.”

  “You know about the money?”

  “What money?”

  “Grants. Homeland security, border protection, economic development—anything like that.”

  Hector upended his beer and swallowed the last of it. Then he tossed the empty at a trashcan like shooting a free throw. He made the point. “Over my pay grade,” he said. “I’m going. I need to see him.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” I dug into my pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. “Here. This is for a suit. Anything else that comes up.”

  “Are you sure—”

  “I am.”

  He shoved the money in his pocket without looking.

  I thought he was going to say something else. He didn’t. Hector went to his car and left. I remained alone by the pool for a while with too much food and too little beer.

  After a bit, a family, a man, his wife, and their little boy came from one of the rooms to the pool. Nothing like a four-year-old determined to have fun to pull the chill out of one’s thoughts. I sliced up the watermelon, and they helped me polish it off. By then the evening had become night.

  The family left me. I stayed by the pool watching stars and then turned out, drifting off to sleep.

  I woke in the metal chair with a crick in my neck. On the table beside me was a burning candle within a glass cylinder. On it was painted the image of La Virgincita. Sitting beside it was the last beer.

  After I’d twisted off the bottle top, I took a quick swallow and continued what seemed to be the natural next step: stripping. There was no thought behind it, like the moment was a continuation of a lost dream, a dream in which being naked in a lonely, dark world was the most normal thing possible. Once bare I dropped into the water.

  Just like the beer, still in my hand, the water was blood warm. Sitting in the chlorinated bath reminded me of being back in my grave. I would have climbed right back out, but Lenore stood at the gate watching me. She held a sixer of cans cold enough to be misting.

  “This is my favorite time of the day,” she said, kicking off her sandals.

  “Night?”

  “Hot night.” She pulled a can from the rings and opened it. Lenore tossed her hair and put the cold can against her skin, just below her throat. She kept it there, riding her breaths, as she unbuttoned the shirt with her free hand.

  “The heat of the day is not yet spent on the stars,” she said. “Night, desert night, is hot early, cold later. Life and death. There is no fighting it. But we can love the heat while it lasts.”

  When she shrugged the garment off, her skin came alive. It was as if she had been painted with magic pigments that showed only under starlight and ice. With the can still pressed to the hard bone of her chest, she made sure my eyes were watching. Then she trailed the dripping can lower, between her breasts, and began rolling it side to side. To her left, it watered the flower tattooed on her skin. To the right, it rode over and then rested on her nipple.

  “You want a taste.” It wasn’t a question. Nor was it a statement. It was almost a command. With her left hand, she cupped her right breast. With her right hand, she tilted the can’s mouth over her thick, puckered nipple. She bathed it in frigid beer.

  I was ready to
climb from the pool to taste it all, the froth of beer, her skin, her mouth. Lenore beat me to the moment.

  She came to the edge of the pool and knelt. She dropped the can as she reclined on the rough concrete, extending one arm over her head and offering her breast with the other. When my mouth found her skin, I think we were both somehow swallowed.

  I tossed an arm over her bare waist and pressed my face to her. I suckled like I was starving and she was Rose of Sharon. My teeth raked, and my tongue caressed, urging the warmth of her body to melt into me.

  Lenore put her arms around my head and pulled. She was forcing herself into my mouth like she could disappear if only I found the right way to swallow her. We were so tightly bonded that for a moment we were one creature, the snake eating its own tail.

  Her chest shook, and sounds, indistinct but meaningful, were communicated through our bones.

  Sucking her nipple, I worked it into my teeth and bit.

  Lenore pulled her embrace tighter and that time moaned at the contact. Then, like a distant echo of the sound, she whispered, “Yes.”

  She rolled to me, and I pulled. Wrapped up with me, she tumbled over and carried us both into the depths of the shining water.

  We broke apart. The distance was an instant of clarity. And for some reason I could see her better underwater and lit by pool lights than I could when she stood before me under stars and neon. In the water the bats inked onto her right arm appeared to flitter and fly. Her black hair was like a living thing that both reached and ran from me. The jeans she still wore were a blue skin that covered her kicking legs. When she twisted away, I saw the colors and art of her back. Between her shoulder blades was a crucifix bearing a bleeding Christ. It was all in shades of gray but the blood. Where it poured grew flowers and skeletons. Low on her hips was the band of grinning skulls I had seen before. On her ribs, curling from front to back under her left breast, was a series of lines, words, like a verse tattooed so it would always be singing to her.

  I was torn between reaching for her again and reaching for breath. She wasn’t. Lenore snuggled her back against my chest and wrapped my arms up, holding my hands to her breasts. I could have drowned happy. I almost did.

  Thrusting my hips to her backside, I let her feel my arousal. The denim I pressed against flexed. She ground back at my erection.