“Did she know that?”
“I haven’t had a beer this good or this cold in a long time.” Milo lifted the mug again and took another long, slow drink.
I let the news and his refusal to tell me more sink in. Once he set the beer down, I asked, “What happens with me now? With Longview, I mean.”
“With Longview, nothing. And Paris—you did what was needed,” he said. “The job is yours as far as the DOJ is concerned. Keep it or don’t. What do you want?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“I don’t believe that.” He pushed a big bite in his mouth and chomped. He chewed quickly, keeping his eyes on me. It was a knowing gaze.
“What makes you sure?”
He set the taco down and wiped his mouth. “I talked to your old man.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he was signing on to work for you and get this department back into shape. He said you asked him.”
“There might have been a discussion about that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How long are you sticking around?”
“I’m not. No point. I’ll be gone tomorrow or the next day.” He took another big bite.
“How can that be? What was going on here was huge. You can’t figure the whole thing out in a week.”
Milo nodded, smiling around his chewing. After washing the taco down with beer, he said, “There won’t be any figuring things out. Our government won’t incriminate itself.” He wiped grease off his fingers and dropped the wadded napkin. “What began as a secret operation that no one wants to claim is quickly becoming a multiagency program. That’s how you hide things in the bureaucracy. You embrace them and give them your full retroactive support.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Oh, believe it. In a very short time, everything that happened here will have been a part of a fully authorized exercise in border, currency, and trade security. Even the Mexican government is already claiming to have been involved from the start. That might even be true.”
“What about the people? What about Stackhouse?”
“It turns out that Darian Stackhouse is no fool. The people he took his orders from were well protected, but he’d documented everything. Things that were never written down, Stackhouse had the sense to catch on camera or audio. He doesn’t come out well, but he will be coming out.”
“What about—”
“All the hard-core bad guys, except maybe Stackhouse, are dead. Mostly you did that. What more do you want?”
“I don’t know. Just—more.”
“Ain’t that always the way?” Milo took another swallow of beer and then asked, “So you think you can handle it?”
“What?”
“Staying here and doing the chief thing?”
“Are you kidding?”
“You’re a fighter,” he said. Then he waved a hand around us. “The fight’s over. Parking tickets and Saturday-night drunks will be harder in the long run.”
“We’ll see.”
That night I purchased a hog from Tubby. There were still a lot of secrets, and secrets need to be fed, or they eat you up. I went out to the small valley as a half-moon rose. The coyotes knew I was coming. They were there to greet me, snarling and circling, waiting and ready.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert E. Dunn was born an Army brat and grew up in the Missouri Ozarks. He wrote his first book at age eleven turning a series of Jack Kirby comic books into a hand written novel. Over many years in the, mostly, honest work of video and film production he produced everything from documentaries, to training films and his favorite, travelogues. He returned to writing mystery, horror, and fantasy fiction for publication after the turn of the century. It seemed like a good time for change even if the changes were not always his choice.
In addition to DEAD MAN’S BADGE, Mr. Dunn is the author of the horror novels, THE RED HIGHWAY, MOTORMAN, and THE HARROWING, as well as the Katrina Williams mystery/thriller series, A LIVING GRAVE, A PARTICULAR DARKNESS, and the upcoming A MOMENTARY LIFE.
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