And how do you antagonize a woman who wears the word dyke like a badge of honor? Not to say they didn’t try. For a while every proposed undercover scenario, which included me, began with, Detective Betty’s wearing a UPS uniform . . .
Anyway. I had investigated a lot of strange crimes in New York. A dead naked guy in clown makeup, for one. But usually the trail of clues followed the physics of the known universe, and though all of the pieces may not have fit together right away, they were somehow linked. A small-time heroin user buys from a corner guy, who buys from a neighborhood guy, who buys from a borough boss, etc., etc., on up the chain until you find, if you’re lucky, the guys who are unloading it off their boat onto a Brooklyn pier. You don’t get to an urban boat dock on a drug bust and find a Civil War general. Unless you’re in Texas.
A few years ago, we get a call from the Johnson County sheriff’s office, CID unit. An abandoned car—make and model fitting the description of a vehicle belonging to Ignacio Velasquez, a midlevel heroin dealer we had been tracking—had been found outside of Cleburne, about sixty miles southwest of Dallas. Empty, except for what was in the trunk. A local highway patrolman had found the car abandoned on a dirt road, ran a check on the plates, and came up with an outstanding warrant in Dallas. He then popped the trunk and immediately called the sheriff’s office. Detective Peavey, their lead criminal investigator, ran a deconfliction report, finding my name. He calls me, tells me what’s in the trunk, and asks if I might want to make the trip to Cleburne.
My partner and I drive the sixty miles and meet up with Peavey, who’s waiting for us next to the abandoned car: a black Beamer, covered in dust. Forensics is still working the scene; a body bag’s on a stretcher. Peavey unzips the bag and inside is an older heavyset man, bound wrists and ankles, shot twice in the head. The corpse has been a corpse for a few hours and Peavey tells us he thinks the guy had been placed in the trunk soon after the shooting.
The corpse is wearing a gray uniform, with shiny brass buttons.
My partner Seth asks, “That a band uniform?”
Seth, an ex–high school football player from Lamesa, tends to frame his thinking according to West Texas practicalities: it’s light outside, the sun is up; it’s dark outside, the sun has set.
Peavey answers, “No . . . it’s a Civil War uniform.”
“Civil War,” I repeat.
“See those patches and the sash?” he says, pointing to the corpse’s shoulders and midsection.
I blink two, maybe three times. “So?”
“A Confederate reenactor,” he offers.
“Reenactor,” I echo, having no idea what he means.
“It’s a group that gets together and stages Civil War battles. Uniforms, armaments, sometimes small cavalry units. Even cannons. They do it a lot around here.”
I look at Seth and he shrugs.
“They deal drugs too?” I ask Peavey.
“Not that I know. It’s not that kind of group.”
I detect a note of defensiveness creeping into the investigator’s voice, but I ask, “Then what’s he doing in the trunk of Velasquez’s car? And where’s Velasquez?”
Peavey shakes his head. “I have no idea. But it looks like the asshole ran out of gas. Maybe he took off on foot? Got picked up?” He shrugs. Velasquez is not his problem, yet. But the body is.
He looks around as though to point out the obvious. It’s dusk, we’re ten miles away from Cleburne, and it’s going to be dark soon. One of the local cops who’s been murmuring into his car radio comes running with news that the wife of one of the reenactors has called in because she’s not heard from her husband in over twenty-four hours.
Peavey informs us that the reenactors do military exercises on several hundred acres of private undeveloped land nearby—used for deer hunting in season—land which is somewhat hilly and densely brushed; boggy after it rains, crisscrossed with small streams. Phone reception is poor.
“They leave their cell phones in their cars and are allowed only one call a day at noon,” he tells us. “The parking area is on higher ground where the reception is better. The wife says that some of the other women have called her and they’ve not heard from their husbands either.”
“How many men in the group?” I ask.
The patrolman shrugs. “About fourteen. Give or take.”
I point to the corpse. “Was he part of that group?”
He nods. “Probably so.”
“Could they be lost?” Seth asks.
Peavey shakes his head. “Not likely. They’ve all grown up hunting around here.”
The ball of light to the west is well below the horizon, flaming a wide band of clouds to a magenta red.
Peavey asks us, “Do you want to trail us to the encampment? See if they know the victim, or Velasquez?”
It’s unlikely that Velasquez has headed back again toward the Halloween camp, but it’s worth a look-see.
Peavey traces on a map the farm-to-market road that leads to a gate entrance to the deer lease, beyond which, somewhere, is the reenactors’ encampment. We drive caravan style: the Cleburne patrol car, Peavey, then us. We’re trailing behind for several miles through a curtain of dust kicked up from the dirt road. After fifteen minutes or so, I see through the headlights a high deer fence stretching into the darkness on either side of the road and a tall gate straddling it. The cop stops at the gate, opens it, and signals for Seth to close it after we’ve passed through.
Now here’s where it gets weird.
The road, just beyond the gate, forks and the two cars in front of us veer to the left, in the direction of the base camp. While Seth gets out of the car to wrestle the gate closed, I glance to the right and see in the distance a faint, solitary light bobbing its way toward us. It’s not a flashlight beam. It’s yellowish and winking, more like a candle flame. Suddenly, it starts swinging crazily as though trying to signal us.
When Seth gets back into the car, I point to the right. “Do you see that?”
Squinting through the windshield, he puts the car into gear, turns to the right, and drives slowly toward whoever is signaling us. He puts on the flashing cherries and within a few minutes a boy, about fourteen, jogs into the headlight beams carrying a lantern and panting like he’s been running for miles. And he’s dressed like an extra in a Tom Jones movie: high-water pants, linen collarless shirt, and a thumb-buster revolver shoved under a broad leather belt.
When he sees us get out of the car, he drops the lantern in the road, hands on his knees. He points back up the road and gasps (and here I’m quoting exactly), “God Almighty, but they’re trying to kill us.”
The junior reenactor named Kyle climbs into the car, but not until I make him hand over his pappy’s pistol. He calls me “ma’am” and tells us, through choking breaths, that he’s with Company E, Fourth Texas Infantry, Hood’s Confederate Brigade.
Seth looks at me and mutters, “Seriously?”
We’re not on the local Cleburne police radio band so Seth tries calling Peavey on his cell phone. No signal.
I give Kyle some water and he begins to tell us in a rush of words that at eleven o’clock that morning he’d taken a bucket down to a stream to get some water for the camp horses and saw on the far side, at the base of a tree, a bright red duffle bag. He crossed the stream, looked in the bag, and, holy crap, there was a lot of money in there.
“How much?” I ask, beginning to sense that here is the connection between Velasquez and the dead guy in the trunk.
“Looked like thousands.”
Kyle took the bag with the cash, forgetting to also take the water bucket, and, being a fourteen-year-old boy, figured finders-keepers. He hid the bag closer to the encampment and returned to his group without the water bucket, and without mentioning the cash. His “sergeant” gave him hell about leaving the bucket behind and went to retrieve it himself. Kyle never saw the sergeant again. Gunshots in the direction of the stream sent the reenactors hurrying to investigate.
; “Some Mexicans, five of them, started firing at us from the other side,” he says. “We could see a couple of cars parked up on the ridge. One had an automatic rifle, but we returned fire with our muskets.”
Muskets, I’m thinking. They returned assault-weapons fire with Civil War muskets.
“It’s all we had. We couldn’t call anyone . . .” He begins to cry. Both his dad and uncle are with the encampment.
I don’t want to upset the kid more than he already is, but I have to ask him: “Was your sergeant a heavyset man in a gray uniform? Blue sash around his middle?”
He nods and wipes his sleeve under his nose. “Is he okay?”
Kyle sees the look on my face and covers his eyes with both arms.
I’m wondering right then if, in exquisitely bad timing, the boy’s sergeant had stumbled onto the stream at about the time Velasquez was meeting up with his Mexican drug connection. Finding the cash gone, Velasquez & C o. questioned the man until his ignorance quickly ran afoul of their impatience. He was shot and thrown into Velasquez’s car. Once the shooting with the reenactors commenced, Velasquez, or someone else, drove the Beamer away from the encampment. The immediate concern at that point was how many Mexican drug dealers were left shooting at a bunch of costumed reenactors.
“We shot one of them,” he says. “But two of ours went down at the river trying to make it to the fort . . . I think they may be dead.”
“The fort?” Seth asks and looks at me incredulously. He’s still trying to reach Peavey on the cell.
“It’s what we call it,” Kyle says. “It’s just an old settlement house and barn we use for defensive maneuvers.”
“Go on,” I say.
“There were eleven of us barricaded at the house all day.” He looks at me, eyes filled with tears, snot running down his nose, and suddenly he appears much younger than fourteen. “The Mexicans kept telling us what they were going to do to us when we ran out of ammunition. Even if they did get their money. When it turned dark, the others told me to go and try and get help. I snuck out, made my way to the road.”
If there were five dealers to begin with and one got shot, and one drove the car away, that leaves maybe three armed, pissed-off Mexicans working to get their money back. I peer through the rear window at the road stretching back into the darkness, and wonder when the hell Peavey’s going to realize we’re not behind him and come investigate.
“At what point did you light the lantern . . . ?” I start to ask Kyle, and right then two things happen at once. I see headlights approaching in the distance behind us; likely it’s Peavey coming back to check on us. And the front of our car is sprayed with gunfire, shattering the windshield inward.
I throw myself down over Kyle and hear Seth from the front seat swear and call out: “I’m hit . . .”
So far, it sounds like there may be two shooters with pistols and they’re moving clockwise around the car. The front passenger-seat windows shatter and I reach over Kyle, open the door, and shove him out onto the road. Seth has opened his door and he falls out, gun drawn.
“Goddamnit, they shot me!” he yells.
I see that the headlights of Peavey’s car behind us have come to a stop, and hear him returning fire. And then the headlights begin to rapidly retreat—“advancing to the rear,” as my old captain used to say. Peavey can’t see who he’s shooting at, and takes the sensible course. I would have done the same thing.
Then the assailants are firing at us again and I feel Kyle’s hand tugging mine.
“Come on, come on . . .” he keeps saying. He’s pointing to the woods opposite the road.
“Can you move?” I call to Seth, and the three of us crash into the underbrush. It’s thick and thorny, and it’s dark, but the Mexicans have heard us and they’re shooting at us again. They’ve taken up a defensive position behind our car, and they’re relentless. They can’t see us in the thicket, but enough sprays of bullets will eventually find a mark.
Kyle is tugging at me again. He says he can find his way back to the barn—set behind the old house where the reenactors are hiding—and we can take cover there. If, that is, the Mexicans haven’t also taken up a position there.
We have a choice. We can wait for Peavey’s backup, which will take no less than twenty, thirty minutes, or we can advance to the rear. Now I’m wishing I’d let Kyle keep his thumb-buster.
“How far to the barn?” I yank on Kyle’s arm and he looks at me, his eyes huge in his head.
He says, “Fifteen minutes, if we run like hell.”
Seth nods. He’s been struck in the shoulder but he can keep up.
We move deeper into the trees, Kyle’s white shirt showing a blur of pale in front of me, and soon we’re running a narrow, cleared footpath. It’s mid-September, but warm, with a groundswell of dampness that smells like burnt oatmeal. There’s also no breeze and the mosquitoes are swarming. I feel them boring into every bit of exposed flesh and remember Seth saying that Texas mosquitoes could stand flat-footed and fuck a turkey.
We keep moving at a good pace for about ten minutes until Seth’s legs give out and he collapses, breathing hard on the ground.
I crouch down, looking back up the path, and in the distance I see a sweep of a flashlight through the trees.
“Shit.” I haul Seth onto his feet again. I don’t have to tell him that these guys don’t give a rat’s ass that we’re cops.
“We’re close,” Kyle whispers, and we keep moving.
Another few minutes and we come upon a clearing; the hulk of what must be the barn on a slight rise about thirty yards away. There is no light coming from the barn, no sound. We could stay crouched where we are, but the path leads to us and we’re too exposed.
“Well?” I ask Seth.
He takes both my arms and pulls himself up. “We can’t stay here.”
Crouching, we stagger for the barn across the exposed clearing and hear gunfire coming from behind us, the dull thunk of bullets throwing dirt clods around our feet. I see the barn door but have no idea if it’s unlocked, or what’s on the inside, and I’m thinking we’re better off running for the far side of the building.
Suddenly, from inside the barn, I hear a rifle blast. It’s coming from high up, like it’s been fired from the roof. We cringe and throw ourselves flat, but from the blackness of the open loft door a man’s wavering voice calls out to us, “Run . . . faster . . .”
Then someone in the barn begins firing off a pistol—shots that will prove to come from a LeMat black powder revolver. We scrabble up again, yank at the barn door, and throw ourselves inside. Kyle bolts the doors and we sit, blind and gasping.
For a moment it’s total silence. I can’t hear our defender up in the loft and so I call out, “Hey . . . hello? Dallas Police!”
“Move toward my voice,” the man says. “Toward the ladder. It’s safer up here.”
We feel our way to the ladder, our eyes adjusting to the dark, and I see a man in a long coat standing in the shadows above me. I tell Kyle to go first, and then crawl up behind Seth, who has to make his way one-armed.
The man helps Kyle up and says, “Hey, boy. Good to see you’re still alive.” He then hoists Seth off the ladder and reaches down a hand for me. I can see now that he’s an older man, in his eighties at least, gaunt and wearing a gray uniform with a lot of medals pinned to his chest. He’s also wearing a sword.
Kyle says, “General, these two are the police.”
The general gives me the once-over and says, “Uh-hum.”
A forceful rattling at the barn door causes the general to draw and fire his pistol through the wood. The explosion is deafening but the rattling stops. I hear the word “putos” screamed in retreat.
The general says, “We’re safe here. Unless they decide to burn us out.” He tells us that we’ve entered through the back door of the barn; the front door is situated at the other end, facing the settlement house, which is several hundred feet away.
“You been here all day?” I a
sk.
The general has taken off his sash and balls it up, pressing it to Seth’s bloody shoulder. “Yes. Until now they didn’t know I was here. I figured the best offense was a good defense.” He hands Seth a canteen. “Good thing they didn’t think to check the back door.”
“How many reenactors are in the settlement house?”
“Close to a dozen, maybe,” he says. “A few are wounded, I think. They’ve been pinned down all day. Outgunned.”
“How many attackers?” Seth asks.
“Three. It was down to one man watching the house with an automatic rifle.” He turned an eye to me and sniffed. “Until you led the other two back here again.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m old, ma’am, I’m not deaf. Those Mexicans have been making enough noise all day to wake the dead.”
“Do you know what they’re looking for?” I ask.
The general gets up and from under a pile of hay pulls out a red duffle bag. I open it and, holy crap, there must be a hundred thousand in cash, in neat, banded stacks.
“This is all my fault,” Kyle whispers.
The general and I agree with him.
“There’ll be more police here soon,” I say reassuringly. “We just have to sit tight.”
A fierce rattling commences at the front door, which is still, fortunately, bolted from the inside.
“We’re going to burn you out, putos, if you don’t come out now!” A pause and then, “You have one minute!”
I look at Seth and he shakes his head. He’s in pain and still bleeding heavily. It’s been nearly thirty minutes since we were attacked. Peavey’s Cleburne police should be at the encampment soon. The question is, will it be within the one minute we have left before the barbecue?
The general hands Kyle his small sidearm, no doubt another cap-and-ball job, and says, “I’m thinking we have one Mexican at the front, and probably one at the back. I don’t think we can make a run for it.”
Dallas Noir Page 18