Dead Man's Badge

by Robert E. Dunn

  The first sign of dawn was the pinkish glow on the underside of crawling clouds. It wasn’t long after that another car pulled into the lot and parked alongside my truck. The driver was Spencer Toomey, and the passenger was his Mrs.

  I’d expected them early, but their arrival with the sun was surprising. I stepped out of the truck and waited for them to disembark from the boat of a car Mr. Toomey drove. It wasn’t quick.

  Mr. Toomey climbed out first. He gave me a look but said nothing as he tottered around the car to open the door for his wife. It wasn’t until she was out and the car door locked by key that they both looked at me again.

  “Is there something we can do for you, Chief?” Mr. Toomey asked.

  “We’ll have coffee on in a minute,” Mrs. Toomey said. “You can tell us all about it then.”

  “She’s right,” he said. “Ain’t nothing that needs doing before coffee on a bright morning.”

  With her hand in his arm, they climbed the steps. He pulled a ring of keys tethered to his pants by a retractable chain. One by one he counted through keys until he found what he needed to open the big front door.

  By the time we got inside and had lights on, I was ready to scream at the pair. When I had a hot mug of coffee in my hand, I was grateful and calmer.

  First I told them what I wanted. They told me why it was impossible. Then I talked through a second cup and told them almost everything I knew about what was happening in their town. I told them about the morning just passing and the death of Gutiérrez.

  “I wish we could help…” Mr. Toomey said when I stopped talking.

  “We can,” his wife corrected him. To me she said, “We will.”

  “We can’t,” he reiterated stronger. “It won’t work.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It won’t be legal. It won’t stand up in court. You would be doing it for nothing.”

  “I don’t need it to be legal,” I said. “In fact, getting into court is good enough. We want it all official, with records and publicity.”

  “You want to make trouble.” Mrs. Toomey grinned.

  “I do,” I said. “The small problems of bureaucracy can build a big wall.”

  “Well, I always said it’s easier to live with one elephant than a thousand cockroaches.”

  “He’s right,” Mrs. Toomey said. “He does say that.”

  “It’ll probably take all day,” he added.

  “Tomorrow will be fine,” I said.

  * * * *

  I pulled back into the motel parking lot with morning burning away behind me. I wanted a shower and clean clothes before I took another breath.

  I scrubbed my skin pink in the hottest water I could stand. I used a fresh blade to shave clean and then a second one to do the job over until my face burned. Using my old brush, I worked my teeth over and over, stopping only when I spat blood into the sink. All of it was an exercise in removing stains that had settled into my bones and were never coming out.

  Steam came out of the bathroom ahead of me when I opened the door and stepped out, wearing only a towel on my hips. Through the fog, I picked up cigar smoke. I had forgotten to set my two-by-four brace on the door, and Simon Machado was standing in my open doorway. He was dressed again in a western suit, this time lavender with a white silk shirt and matching neckerchief. It would have been easy to make fun of him if he wasn’t holding Lenore in front of him like a talisman. In a stark contrast to his clothing, she wore only thin white panties and a red bra. Her hair was twisted in his hand, but she didn’t appear to be uncomfortable or unwilling. She smiled with secrets in her eyes and on her lips.

  Machado blew a gray cloud of smoke over her head and then removed the cigar. “You come talk,” he said.

  “What do we have to talk about?”

  “This is not an invitation.” He raised the cigar and took a long pull to savor the taste in his mouth. When he puffed the smoke out, he jerked Lenore’s hair. She fell willingly against his body. “Do not mistake it.”

  “Are you all right?” I asked Lenore.

  “Would you make me all right?” she asked as an answer. Lenore kept her gaze locked to my eyes, making sure I was seeing her as she ground her backside against Machado’s hips.

  He reached around with his cigar and put the wet end in her mouth. She drew in smoke and chuffed it out.

  “You see how things are,” he said. “Come. Talk. Someone else you know will be there. Learn what is happening. The truth.”

  He took his cigar from her mouth and put it back in his before backing away from the door. Lenore was dragged back by the hair. She wasn’t fighting.

  I left the door standing open as I dressed; then I accepted the noninvitation.

  * * * *

  I pulled up to the gate at the Gun Hills Hunting Lodge and Private Club. There was no banter or taunting. The man in the shack opened the iron gate. I proceeded through without a word.

  The main door of the club was again covered by men with guns, but they were all new to me. I had hoped to have a few words with Joaquin. Once ushered to the inner door, I was disarmed. I tried to debate the issue. This time it was different. One man put a gun to my neck; the other took my .45.

  Sitting in the center of the leather couch, taking it all but using almost no space, was Eladio Machado. To the side and around a corner, the sound of ice falling into a glass and pouring liquid alerted me that we were not alone. Expecting the brother, Simon Machado, resplendent in lavender, I turned.

  I can’t say which of us was more shocked, me or my father, when Buick Tindall walked in. For a second it looked like he might drop the highball glass in his hand. He didn’t recover all his composure, but he saved the whiskey by taking a drink. Over the glass, his eyes, metal-jacket hard, stared at me.

  His glass was half-empty when Buick took it from his lips and said, “What the hell?”

  “My thought exactly,” I said.

  Buick looked back at the skeletal Machado brother. Eladio seemed to be ignoring us. “Eladio?” Buick asked. “You mind if I have a talk with my boy in private?”

  “It is why you are here,” Eladio said, staring off at nothing. “To talk some sense to your son.”

  “Come on,” Buick ordered, pushing past me and going through the door to the big hall. I don’t think he expected the men who had escorted me in to still be there. Finding no privacy, he kept walking. The riding heels of his boots intermittently clipped the floor, making his gait a quick leather-and-wood backbeat.

  I followed without hurry. The confrontation was one I’d looked forward to. There was no reason now to make it fast for either one of us.

  He looked back when he shoved open the outer doors. “You coming or not?”

  I didn’t answer, and he didn’t wait for one.

  Out on the big porch, he clomped from side to side as if trying to decide if it was private enough for his needs. Evidently it wasn’t. Buick gave up the porch and jigged down the steps in a bandy-legged half hop. He looked back at me when he was in the middle of the drive. He said nothing, but the rage he felt from my lack of haste was projected through his eyes.

  Buick crossed the drive and tromped out into the foliage of the landscaped front, where he stopped and waited for me.

  For my part, I stopped on the bottom step and looked both ways like traffic was a big consideration. Let him stew, I figured. Then I crossed the drive.

  As soon as I was in the grass, my father looked around, once more checking for other eyes and ears, and then turned on me.

  I hit him in the mouth. The punch was not my best. It went off center because I hesitated, and Buick saw it coming. His response had no hesitation in it. He hit me high in the gut with a short jab that struck like a wrecking ball. I had no doubt that he held back. All the wind in me blew out, leaving my lungs empty and paralyzed. I stayed on my feet but bent and uselessly gasping.

  Buick grabbed me by the collar and forced my head lower. Then he did the one thing I could never have pr
edicted. He rubbed my back and leaned down, bringing his face close to mine. “Try to relax,” he said. “You can’t force it. Let it come.”

  Slowly, almost fearfully, my breath returned.

  As if he didn’t want to startle the air away, Buick kept his face close to mine and whispered, “What the hell have you done? Where is Paris?”

  I didn’t say anything. At first it was because I couldn’t. Then it was because I hated the answer. When I was able to stand upright, I wavered on unsteady legs.

  “Well?” he pressed.

  The only answer I had was to stare until he got it. Realization was painful. Buick looked like he’d taken the fist to his solar plexus.

  “No.” He shook his head as if the gesture had the power to rework the truth. Then he said, “They killed him.”

  “Yes,” I said, still out of breath and holding my gut. “Your friends killed him. They killed us both, you might say. But you don’t care about that.”

  He moved in close until our chests almost touched. He didn’t tower over me the way he always seemed to in my memory. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve been hit harder.” Even to myself I sounded like a wounded kid.

  He shook his head slowly as he stepped back and turned away. “You don’t know anything.”

  It took me a few seconds, but I got it. He wasn’t talking about the punch. The best I can say about the moment is that he was right. Still, I was gratified that he wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t want him to see my face because I had no idea what expression I was wearing.

  My father ran his hands over his body, pocket to pocket, looking for something without ever finding it. When he gave up, he turned around and looked at me without fire. “How did you get into the middle of all this?”

  I shook my head. “That’s not the conversation I want to have.”

  “Stop this.”

  “You started it, and I want to hear it.”

  “What, boy? What is it you want to hear?”

  “How did Paris get into the middle of it? Why did he die?”

  “I just found out it was him.”

  “But you’ve got all the pieces. You know. If you say you don’t, you’re lying to both of us.”

  “It’s my fault,” he said. “You feel better making me say it?”

  “No.”

  “Me either. It’s the truth, but sayin’ it is like pumping broken glass through my heart.”

  “How?”

  “The way bad things always happen. I started something without looking far enough ahead. There was what I thought would happen. And there was everything else.”

  “You tied up with the Machados?”

  “Not at first. At first I worked with Stackhouse. I helped him put together cash to finance a big op.”

  “Paris?”

  “I told him. Not everything. Just enough to get him interested, I thought. It was going to be big, plenty of room for everyone and lots of easy money. You know your brother. He said easy money was always the hardest.”

  “He didn’t take part?”

  Buick shook his head slowly. “No. He didn’t. And he didn’t let it drop either. Why?” He looked at me, and the question remained in his eyes. “I thought he would let it go. I expected he would give it a pass. It was me.”

  “Maybe that’s why,” I said. “Because it was you.”

  Buick shot his eyes my direction and then fenced them off behind narrow lids. “I didn’t ask him to do anything. Just gave him the chance. If he didn’t want to, he shoulda…”

  “That was never Paris, and you know it.”

  “Yeah, I know it.” His eyes widened and softened before he looked away to the point of his boots. “What a man expects from his son is not about knowing.”

  “Sons can say the same about their fathers.”

  I expected a reaction—a curse or a criticism. It didn’t come.

  Buick kept looking at his boots as he said, “The SOT put me with the Machados. The DEA wanted La Familia to consolidate power and cash around Lansdale. I set up all the banking with a city councilman.”

  “Woods.”

  “Yes.”

  “Paris found out?”

  He looked up and met my gaze. “I don’t know what he knew. It was the Machados who told me he had come to town asking questions. They told me to take care of him. He wouldn’t take the DEA money, but he pitched a fit at the idea of taking Machado money.”

  “How could you think Paris could be bought?”

  “It was the only way by then. The things he was doing. The things I did. Everything was digging a deeper hole.” Buick didn’t look at me. He wasn’t looking at anything outside of himself. Then he said, in a voice tinged with desperation and regret, “There was no getting out.”

  That sentence chilled me. “What did you do?”

  “I told the Machados Paris was on the payroll.”

  “What the hell?”

  “It was a way to keep him safe.”

  “That didn’t work out the way you thought, did it?”

  The flash in his eyes was weak. He didn’t have a response. Instead he said, “I should have known better. I gave him every chance to be like me, and I was proud each time he made the better choice. But you…you were already like me. I tried to give you every chance not to be. I thought if you grew up learning what a bastard was, you might have a chance.”

  “Bullshit.”

  We stood there for a long time in silence, each looking away from the other. We were like castaways on a small island of grass in a sea of asphalt.

  Buick squared his shoulders and said, “I knew that you were running cash for the Guzman Cartel. And I knew that La Familia was going to kill you when they took over.”

  He stopped talking. I waited for more, but he remained mute. That answered my question, but still I asked, “You didn’t try to warn me?”

  “They already knew about Paris. My position was on the edge. Trying to warn you would have been killing you and me and Paris.”

  “You left me hanging?”

  “And I never worried for a second. Not until…” Buick kicked a divot of lawn out into the road. “Paris was the one I worried about. You’re the hard one. I never believed that people like that could do you in. I told Paris to quit, get out, run. He was never as strong or as resourceful as you. And here we are.”

  “Here we are,” I echoed him. Hearing him say anything positive about me left me feeling more winded than his fist had. If there was one man in the world I didn’t want to forgive or cut slack for, it was Buick Tindall. “You didn’t even go to my funeral.”

  “La Familia didn’t know I was your father. It would have been a problem.”

  “Are you going to tell me you’re a good cop just trying to do your job here?”

  “Would you believe me?”

  I opened my mouth to spit out my response. Then I closed it. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we have that at least.” Buick squared his shoulders and pinched the bridge of his nose like he was damming back a weight rising behind his eyes. “Paris was the good cop.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded and looked away. In part, it was to give the old man a little privacy in the moment. In part, it was because I felt a little sorry for him. I preferred hating him. “What’re we going to do about it?”

  Buick shook his head while looking across the asphalt at the big front doors to the gun club. “I’m on this one, and I’m tied to it. You can get out.”

  “I’ve been telling myself that, but here I am too.” I’d had enough. I stepped out of the grass. The sun was so hot the road smelled of tar, and the black surface was tacky.

  “Where are you going?” My father called after me. “We need to figure this out. We need to settle things.”

  I stopped in the middle of the street and turned around to look at him. He was still a lot smaller than I had always thought he was. “What things?”

  “Us. Them. What’s going to happen. Before you got here, there w
as another man with the Machados. His name is Joaquin.”

  “I’m not surprised.” It was true. Joaquin kept popping up with the DEA and with La Familia. I was sure there was a good reason for that.

  “He said you were talking about war between the cartel and the feds. He said you should be killed.”

  I nodded my understanding. “I think I’ve done my settling.” I took a step and then stopped again. “Buick,” I said, turning back to him. “There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to say to you.”

  “Don’t bother. I said it to my father. It’s not as satisfying as you think it will be.”

  “Kiss my ass, you old son of a bitch.”

  “Feel better?”

  “No.” I turned and headed back to the clubhouse porch. At the door, I held out my hand to the man who’d taken my .45 and said, “La pistola, por favor.”

  Buick trod up the stairs. “We need to go inside. The Machados will want to know what’s going on.”

  “You handle it.”

  “What am I supposed to say about you?”

  “I have some things to do. I’ll be back tomorrow and set everything right.”

  “You better be, boy. I’m the one with my nuts in the fire.”

  “I get it.”

  “I hope you do, boy. You want us to get out of this alive—you better goddamned get it and good.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be here and sit down with you and the Machados to work things out.”

  “What’s all the talk about war with the feds?”

  “Tell them I’ll give them the undercover agent in La Familia.”

  That got a reaction out of Buick. He looked a little scared. The two gunmen at the door stared openly at me. I clipped the .45 back onto my belt and then went down the stairs.

  “That’s his gun,” Buick said to my back. “I gave that to him.”

  I never looked back.

  NINETEEN

  Driving into town, I pulled Paris’s phone from the glove box. Milo had called back. I punched the contact icon, feeling tired and wasted. It was time.