Crosshairs

by Harry Hunsicker

  I stood up. “What are we doing?”

  “It’s time to eat.” Bria spoke matter-of-factly, as if everyone on the run from a crew of hired guns normally stopped at the Gristle Café for a leisurely meal.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “The child needs food. We do, too,” Bria said. “You and Petey can go. Get it for takeaway.”

  Petey appeared in the living area. “We’re a long way from where we started, and we’ve been here before. It’ll be all right.”

  I tried to ignore the rumbling in my stomach. I’d consumed nothing but a couple of ounces of Guinness in the past few hours.

  Petey opened the door and looked at me. I swore and followed him outside into the cool of the early evening, our shoes crunching on gravel as we walked toward the entrance. The front door was decorated with horseshoes and lariats glued to the rough wood.

  The inside was no better, decor like some third-rate Sizzler, overweight waitresses with peroxided hair in too-tight denim uniforms. I felt the stares as soon as we walked in but figured it for nothing but hey-look-at-the-city-slickers or maybe because of Petey’s torn clothing.

  Petey headed to the bar, where a TO GO sign hung over one corner and a small group of people sat on stools, working on beers and highballs as a television at the far end flickered soundlessly.

  The patrons at the bar were all white, various ages, and wore everything from starched khakis to faded jeans and T-shirts.

  They were talking and laughing but stopped when we got there.

  The bartender was a burly man with muttonchops and a greased-back pompadour high atop his skull. He looked at me and then at Petey and turned his back to us, spreading the sports page across the bar.

  Petey picked up a menu sitting by the waitress station and opened it.

  Nobody at the bar spoke; the clink of silverware and conversations coming from other parts of the restaurant sounded eerie in the vortex of silence that surrounded us. A handful of the people were staring into their drinks. The rest looked at us with flat expressions on their faces.

  Petey closed the menu.

  “Hey.” I snapped my fingers and spoke to the bartender. “You want to take our order or what?”

  “It’s okay.” Petey spoke quietly out of the corner of his mouth. “Give him a minute. He’ll be around.”

  A man in his late forties was the closest person to us, sitting a couple of feet away, nursing a mug of draft beer. He wore a cream-colored felt Stetson, pressed khaki pants, and a white, Western-styled oxford cloth shirt with enough starch in it to stop a bullet.

  “This’s a respectable place we got here, you unnerstand?” His accent was thick and very nearly impenetrable to a passerby from either coast. “Mind your place, boy.”

  “My place?” I tried not to sound astounded. “What are you talking about?”

  “Damn Gypsies.” The man shook his head and took a long drink of beer.

  “Don’t take the bait,” Petey whispered as he placed a hand on my shoulder. “Let it go.”

  Everybody at the bar was looking at us now. Nothing happened for about half a minute. Finally the bartender folded up the sports page, tossed it into the trash, and sauntered over to where we were standing.

  “Y’all want to get something to go?” His voice was nasally, his tone condescending.

  Petey nodded and smiled and ordered six cheeseburgers and fries and six unsweetened ice teas.

  The bartender scribbled it all down and walked off without saying a word. Conversation slowly resumed.

  Petey and I stood at the corner of the bar, a few feet away from Mr. Stetson. I felt his eyes on me but resisted looking at him. Five minutes stretched into ten.

  “You got sumpin’ you wanna say to me, boy?” He tilted his hat back a few inches and crossed his arms.

  I stared at a spot on the bar and shook my head slowly. This was his territory, not mine.

  Muttonchops arrived with the food. Petey paid the bartender with a crisp hundred-dollar bill, the light in the bar glinting on his gold Rolex as he handed the money over.

  “Keep the change.” He picked up the sack containing the food and turned to me. “Let’s go.”

  Stetson drained his mug of beer and smiled as if he’d won something of great importance.

  I tried to quell the cold anger that licked at my spine and made my arms feel tight and fingers ball into fists.

  Stetson chuckled. “Think you’re a tough guy, don’tcha?”

  “We’re leaving now, okay?” Petey pulled my arm. “No problems here.”

  “Right.” I stepped away from the bar. “No problems.”

  Petey and I turned toward the front as Stetson pushed his bar stool back and got up. I heard him clopping behind us as we walked across the restaurant. I felt his eyes staring at my back.

  We stepped through the doorway and out onto the rocky parking lot, the air smelling of gravel dust and mesquite smoke from the restaurant’s fire pit.

  Stetson followed us out.

  I stopped, turned around.

  Petey grabbed my arm. “No, this isn’t the way.”

  “You sure there ain’t sumpthin’ you don’t want to get off your chest, boy?” Stetson hooked his thumbs in his belt and stared at me. He was my height but about twenty pounds heavier, mostly in his gut. His hands were callused, fingers big as andouille sausages.

  “Ever done it with a cow?” I said.

  “Ohhh.” Petey stared at the ground.

  “What did you say?” Stetson frowned.

  “A cow. You. Carnal knowledge.” My smile was tight across my lips. “How about it?”

  “You little piece of Gypsy trash.” Stetson balled his fists. “You need to learn some respect, boy.”

  “You want, we can test the major medical portion of your HMO.”

  “Let’s go.” Petey pointed to the trailer at the far side of the parking lot. “We’ve got the food.”

  Stetson took a slow lumbering step my way, hands up like a boxer’s. I went in fast and low, putting everything I had into one shot to his ample gut.

  He sat down on the gravel, face flushed, a whooshing sound coming from his mouth and lips opened wide, searching for air.

  “I think you owe me and my friend an apology.” I backhanded him across the face, not a hard blow, meant more to humiliate than to do harm. His hat flew off and landed in the dust. “Now say you’re sorry before I do some real damage.”

  He bobbled his head like a swimmer trying to get water out of his eyes.

  “The country folk win this game.” Petey pushed me away from the man. “They always have and always will.”

  I let him drag me toward the RV as Stetson sat on the gravel and tried to figure out what had just happened. Petey knocked on the door and Bria opened it. Once inside, he turned to me. “What the hell did you have to go and do that for, huh?”

  “Do what?” Colleen said.

  Petey explained what had happened. Everyone looked at me.

  Bria said, “Are you daft, man?”

  “Now we can’t go back there.” Colleen slapped her forehead.

  “Why would you want to?” I said. “It’s the twenty-first century, for God’s sake. And they treat you like you’re a second-class citizen.”

  “You still don’t get it.” Petey shook his head and laughed without humor. “We are second-class citizens.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Colleen drove west for another few miles before stopping at a state rest area, a wide paved spot on the side of the road with a small brick building housing restrooms next to a water fountain and a soft drink machine.

  Several picnic areas lined the parking lot, concrete tables and benches sitting underneath a row of magnolia trees. Four or five eighteen-wheelers idled at the far end, amber safety lights glowing softly in the early evening air.

  We stayed in the RV and ate, mostly in silence. I asked once how the people in the bar knew that Petey was a Traveler since he looked the same as t
hey did.

  “It’s our way of life,” he said. “They don’t approve. Our means of earning a living doesn’t meet the country folks’ definition of acceptable, I guess.”

  That made no sense, but I didn’t press it. After a few more minutes, Petey spoke again.

  “They call us Gypsies, but we’re not. That’s the Roma, trash if you ask me. Pickpockets and shit.”

  A knock sounded at the door of the RV. I jumped up, moved to one side, and reached for the Benelli leaning against the wall.

  Everyone else quit eating and looked at Petey. He opened a cabinet and said to me, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing.” He answered the door and had a quick conversation with a man who was apparently a driver from one of the trucks parked down the way. He handed Petey some cash, and Petey slipped him a foil packet.

  The door shut. Petey turned to me. “A little income on the side. You know, keeping the truckers awake. The road gets long sometimes.”

  I didn’t say anything. Petey sat down and continued his dinner. A few minutes later everyone but me had finished eating. I realized that I didn’t have much of an appetite anymore. I was no closer to finding the person or persons threatening Anita Nazari. The car I’d borrowed had probably been stolen, and I had no transportation except the RV of a bunch of professional ne’er-do-wells. Plus, I still had to track down Mike Baxter’s daughter.

  Bria cleared the dinner mess and disappeared into the back with her daughter and the old woman. Colleen and Petey got into a fight, over what I couldn’t quite fathom. They swore at each other in the half-English, half-something-else hybrid. After a few minutes that passed, too, and Colleen pulled a bottle of white Zinfandel from the refrigerator in the galley area. She poured a large measure of pink wine into a baby blue frosted goblet, sat on the sofa, and drank half of it down in one gulp.

  Petey turned to me. “Hope you don’t mind sleeping on the sofa.”

  I awoke at dawn when the other passengers on the land yacht began to stir. I was tired, having slept fitfully, my slumber interrupted with dreams of angry men in Stetsons chasing me and visions of Colleen in a short nightgown, standing over me as I tossed and turned. I looked at the lipstick-stained wineglass on the table by the sofa and wondered where my reality intersected with another’s irrationality.

  After several hushed conversations on his cell phone, Petey got behind the wheel and drove toward Fort Worth. No stopping for breakfast on this trip. An hour later, he pulled to the side of the street leading into the Traveler compound in White Settlement.

  He put the RV into park and walked into the living area. He pointed to the street. “Your car’s down there.”

  “You sure?” I opened the door and stepped outside.

  He nodded. “Best be forgetting this place, too.”

  Colleen stood by her husband. She stared at me with a blank look on her face.

  “You can leave all this,” I said. “Get a real job. And a life that doesn’t involve selling speed to truckers and getting kicked out of crappy steak-houses.”

  “Go on. Get the hell out of here.” He shut the door.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Anita Nazari’s VW sat where I had left it the day before, in one piece, all wheels attached, the ragtop undamaged.

  I got in and looked at my watch: 7:35, Wednesday morning. I pulled out the slip of paper with Susan Baxter’s address on it, did some calculations, and figured I had time for breakfast.

  I drove to an IHOP near downtown where I had the Cardiologist’s Special: bacon and eggs, hash browns, sausage patties, and a short stack of blueberry pancakes. And a pot of coffee I sweetened with some of that fake sugar stuff because, hey, everybody needs to watch their weight. I washed my face in the men’s room and left.

  The last location Mike had for his daughter had been her mother’s home. The database search I’d conducted on Nolan’s computer had turned up a different address, a house a few blocks off of the Texas Christian University campus, on a street obviously taken over by students, given the number of beer cans in yards and cars with TCU stickers.

  I parked behind a Toyota Prius with a FREE TIBET sticker on the bumper, next to one for the Green Party. The car was directly in front of Susan’s address, an older wood-frame structure badly in need of a fresh coat of paint.

  The front yard was dirt and weeds and trash. A tombstone, stolen, I hoped, leaned against the corner of a sofa that was to one side of the door.

  A young man about twenty sat in the middle of the sofa. He was wearing cargo shorts, flip-flops, and a sleeveless T-shirt and reading a dog-eared copy of Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, pausing occasionally for sips of Bud Light from the bottle sitting in his lap.

  He looked up when I was about ten feet away. He didn’t say anything, just stared at me with that knowing, slightly smug look all twenty-year-olds have before they come to the realization that life is not one big Happy Meal waiting to be eaten at your leisure while the never-ending keg of good times chills nearby.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I pointed to the house. “Is this Susan Baxter’s place?”

  He frowned. I could see the thought processes working themselves out, the decision being made to act like something he wasn’t. The shoulders squared, jaw tightened, eyes narrowed. I imagined there had probably been a De Niro film festival on AMC last night, or a Dirty Harry flick, something to account for the faux toughness.

  “Who wants to know?” He wedged his beer between two cushions and stood up.

  “Me.” I spoke softly.

  “Yeah?” He crossed his arms. “And just who the hell are you?” His voice cracked a hair.

  Very slowly I walked toward him until we were face-to-face, a few inches separating our noses.

  He crossed his arms and swallowed repeatedly as if his throat were dry.

  I placed the palm of my right hand on his chest and pushed.

  He fell backward onto the sofa, dislodging the beer, causing it to spill on his copy of The Armies of the Night.

  “Shit.” He picked up the paperback and thumbed the pages, droplets of beer misting across the sofa. “You ruined my book.”

  “I’m a friend of Susan’s father’s,” I said. “Is this her house?”

  He stopped trying to dry the wet pages and looked up at me.

  “I’m not here to mess up anything you or she’s got going,” I said. “Just want to talk with her for a couple of minutes.”

  “I think she’s awake now. We had kind of a late night.” He set the book on the back of the sofa, opened to the spot he’d been reading. “How do I know you’re really a friend of her father’s? She never even talks about him.”

  “You don’t. Stay out here, okay?” I walked to the front of the house and pushed open the door.

  A two-foot square of tile formed the entryway, like an island in the sea of dirty carpeting that covered the floor of the tiny living room. The air held the faint traces of marijuana smoke and a trash can long overdue for emptying.

  On one wall was another sofa, in marginally better shape than the one outside. The coffee table was an old door on cinder blocks, littered with empty beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays, half a dozen or so books, and a bong.

  A girl carrying a bowl of cereal and wearing a pair of denim shorts and a Che Guevera T-shirt came out of the kitchen. Her hair was pinned on top of her head, one strand dangling in front of puffy eyes. The jawline and high, wide cheekbones were familiar; I knew I had found Mike Baxter’s daughter.

  “Who are you?” She shoveled a spoonful of cereal into her mouth.

  “Your father hired me to track you down.”

  Crunch, crunch.

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  “How is dear old Dad?” Her words were muffled because of the cereal.

  “He’s sick. Pretty bad, sounds like.”

  Susan Baxter put the bowl down on the coffee table next to a hardback book titled A History of American Genocide and a Danielle Steel paperback.


  “Fuck him,” she said.

  “Nice thing to say about the only dad you’ve got.”

  “You have no clue about anything.”

  I nodded slowly. “That’s true on most days, I’ll give you that.”

  “He hires some rent-a-pig out of the Yellow Pages and thinks that will fix every—”

  “We’re old friends. I remember seeing you when you were in grade school.”

  She raised one eyebrow.

  “Your dad and I served together in the first Gulf War.”

  “Oh, I see.” She nodded with great exaggeration, a smug look on her face. “Another killing machine we’ve got here.”

  “He wants to make peace with you.”

  “So did you come back all screwed up, too, because the Pentagon lied?” She stuck her chin out.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The vaccines they gave you, supposed to be harmless.” She laughed. “That’s a joke. I could show you the Web sites, the people that have died. You cannot believe how evil our government is.”

  “He loves you very much,” I said.

  “First Christmas he’s back, I’m, like, five.” She paused for a moment, emotion ragged in her voice. “He’s got these headaches and sores on his body and the VA says it’s all in his head. So he gets drunk and throws our TV through the window and then locks my mom in the closet.”

  “I didn’t know.” I tried not to look around at the dirty house. I felt guilty for my own good health.

  “T-t-try growing up with that, see if you want to have a big reunion anytime soon.”

  I watched a roach crawl across the wall.

  “All for some oil for the imperialist war machine.” She picked up the bowl of cereal but put it down a second later and shook a cigarette out of a pack of American Spirits sitting by the bong.

  “I’m gonna leave my cell number.” I grabbed a pad and pen from the mess on the coffee table. “And your dad’s room number at the VA in Dallas.”