Dead Man's Badge Read online

  DEAD MAN'S BADGE

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  © 2018 Robert E. Dunn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 0997832363

  ISBN 13: 9780997832365

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  Nothing is easy—not even dying. At least for me it wasn’t. The half hour spent digging my own grave in the glare of headlights and the cold of a desert night was literally the hardest work of my life.

  A man digging his own grave in the movies makes a perfect, squared-off hole. He digs it deep too. The reality is that you gouge out a ragged hole in the ground that measures in inches, not feet. Self-dug graves are always shallow. Also in the movies, the men digging are resolute. They either accept their fate or work confidently on escape. Real men will scream or plead, cry or beg. Always there is bargaining.

  Hope. It’s a bitch. It’ll keep you shoveling, and it’s the only thing that will.

  The three of us digging were past making bargains. Four of us began the exercise of moving our own dirt. One man couldn’t take it. The two men holding guns on us, the quiet one and the one who laughed at everything, called the fourth man “maricón.”

  In east Texas, where I grew up, we would have said “faggot.” I’ve used the slur many times. Hearing those two hateful killers denigrate another man with superiority in their voices made me ashamed of my own failing to be a better person.

  When they shot him, he was on the bare dirt crying like a child. He begged, not for his life but to be again in the arms of his mother. Being the man he was, being a maricóne, had nothing to do with his tears. Those were falling because he had been beaten for sport and mocked in his despair.

  Sometimes, when that bitch hope leaves us, the only thing that can fill the hole is tears. I couldn’t find it in my heart to think less of him for crying. At that point I was certain I would be doing the same soon.

  “Trabajar más rápido; no quiero perder toda la noche matando estos hijos de puta,” said the one closest to me. “Work faster; I don’t want to spend all night killing motherfuckers,” or something like that. He was the one who didn’t seem to be enjoying the job. His partner seemed to be in no hurry.

  Neither was I.

  “¿Quién va a enterrarel el maricóne?” the second guy asked. He wanted to know who would bury the man they had already killed.

  “Haga que el Yankee haga un agujero más profundo. Pueden compartir,” the one with his gun on me answered. I was the Yankee. I didn’t have a perfect translation for that, but I knew it came down to me digging a bigger hole to share.

  The shovel I used was old, and the handle had broken off. It terminated into a ragged point that ate my skin. Every scoop of dirt jammed my fingers into crevasses that pinched or splinters that pierced my palms. The dry wood was tracked red with my blood.

  For some reason, I’d been cursing the instrument rather than the men who held guns on me. I heard a preacher say once that we’re all born in the middle of a ladder. From the first breath, we start climbing. Every choice is a rung up or a rung down. That put me one step above a broken shovel and two from a dirt hole and at the bottom of my personal ladder. I wasn’t arguing the point. Good people rarely end up where I had. Life is a series of choices that always brings us to the same place. The only difference in lives is how you feel about it at the end. I was feeling pretty fucking bad.

  I put my palm on the end of the shovel and jammed the rusty, blunted blade into the soil. When it struck, a bit of the fractured end broke away. A long splinter sliced into my hand.

  “Damn it.” I pressed the cut to my mouth. The second bastard laughed. I sucked away the salty taste of sweat and blood along with a three-inch sliver of hickory that was dead and mounted to a shovel before I was born.

  “Sigue cavando,” said the one close to me. He wasn’t laughing.

  The other two digging men bent their backs to the task slowly. Not hurrying was resistance. It was a way of stealing a moment to rest and maybe looking around for some chance to run.

  They didn’t get the chance.

  Again, I stuck the point of my shovel in the bottom of my grave. It penetrated no more than a couple of inches into the hard ground. I released the handle to pull another splinter. The old shovel fell over. I picked it up and angrily thrust the point down once more. The result was the same. Taking my despair, anger, and pain out on the old tool, I jammed it down again and again, shouting, “Kiss my ass, you dull-pointed son of a bitch.” After that I kicked it, sending up a shower of dirt. The shovel accepted things much better than I did. It flopped up and settled again, pointing with my blood at a point someplace between Venus and the horizon.

  Everyone was looking at me, even the other diggers.

  “You too!” I screamed at them collectively, diggers and killers alike. I stepped out of my shallow hole.

  The laughing one kept his weapon pointed at the other two men, who had stopped their digging. It was the one close to me, the serious one, who sighted my chest. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. We both understood.

  I understood one more thing, though. If he was willing to dig the hole, I would already be dead.

  One backward step, and I turned away from him. One more step, and I was on the edge of the old Chevy’s low beams.

  The bore of the .40 was still warm from killing the crying man when it pressed up against the base of my skull.

  “Your shovel is waiting, my friend,” the serious man said. His voice was honey and gravel. “Come on. Let’s make a rough job quick. Then you can rest.”

  Moving slowly, I opened my fly. There was a long moment where I had the worst case of bashful bladder in history before the water flowed.

  Everything seems louder in proximity to death. My piss running into the dust of Mexico sounded like a horse filling a dry bucket. Behind me the killers laughed. Their surprised mirth made a noise like the scattering of birds off a fresh carcass. I must have looked pathetic or foolish or both being willing to get my brains blown out just to avoid messing my grave.

  As soon as the muzzle of the .40 lifted from my head, I turned.

  The moment he understood I was still pissing, my killer backed away in an awkward dance. He pointed his weapon to the ground. His eyes followed my water as he tried to avoid getting pissed on. He failed. When the stream of my urine crawled up his legs, he jumped higher. His laughi
ng buddy cackled like an old crone. I let go of my meager weapon, put up both hands and pushed.

  I hadn’t planned anything beyond the last act of defiance. When I pushed, it wasn’t very hard. I simply wanted him on the ground and feeling what he dished out before I died. It felt good. It felt even better when he kept stumbling back, his gun arching up and firing into the sky. As soon as the weapon flashed, the other guy swallowed his laughter in a panic and shot the men in front of him. The other two gravediggers fell like their strings had been cut by God as the ragged end of my shovel handle burst through the chest of the man I’d pissed on.

  People who never experience real violence often wonder what goes through your head when things get hot and the cold night is streaked with the flame of tiny, metal-jacketed comets. If you’re lucky and prepared by experience, nothing goes through your mind. You just react. You move.

  That’s what I did.

  The serious one was dead. The other two diggers were dead. Laughing boy was pointing his weapon at me, and I ducked to the side, closing on him. He missed, and then his revolver clicked on a spent cartridge. He had used five on the guys in the grave and his last one missing me.

  I passed again through my own grave and out the other side to pick up another shovel. This one had been dropped by one of the men just killed. I swear, when I picked it up, the heat of his fingers was still on the handle.

  Laughing boy threw up his arms to defend his face as I raised my shovel. He needn’t have bothered. I swung low, aiming the edge of the shovel blade at his kneecap. His screams were as loud as the gunshots had been. A second later everything went quiet. At least he had stopped laughing.

  As I stood there leaning on the shovel, he started talking. First, he said, “Please.” Then he said the worse thing he could have: “Longview.” My name. Longview Moody—it’s a stupid name given by a foolish man. Hearing it come from the mouth of the laughing guy only made me despise it more.

  “Longview,” he said again, his hands up in supplication.

  “What?” I asked, not sure if I was asking what he wanted or just asking for clarification. I had been turned over to these guys with barely a word. It was possible that they had been told who I was, but why? I was meat to them—just meat to be disposed of.

  He pointed vaguely at his crotch and said, “Badge.” With two fingers, he reached into his pocket.

  I nodded, smiling down. What did I care? Mexican cops are literally a dime a dozen on the border. The seriously bent ones go for the bushel price. I let him reach for the badge, thinking about the letdown he would feel when I showed just how little it mattered to me. Probably as little as it had mattered to him until he needed to hide behind it. People like me—bad guys, that is—are like the straights in this world. We like our cops to be on the up. Hell, no one likes a hypocrite, and there’s no greater hypocrisy than a crooked cop.

  Laughing guy got the badge out of his pocket and held it up. It was a gold shield with a blue “US” standing out in the middle like a flat punchline. Around the center it read, Drug Enforcement Agency—Special Agent. DEA—he was holding up a DEA badge.

  I turned my head and spit into the dirt waiting for the cosmic other shoe to drop. My breath felt bad in my chest, and my gut was roiling. What should I do? What did I want to do? This was a man who would have killed me and never stopped laughing. I could have left him to die in the desert, but I’m not that cruel.

  I’m much worse.

  I lifted the shovel again and broke his other leg. When he reached for the dropped revolver, even though it was empty, I crushed his fingers under my boot heel and kicked the weapon away. He wallowed in the dirt like a fish hoping the next flop would take him to the water. His efforts dropped him into the middle grave along with one of the men he’d killed.

  There wouldn’t be any more laughter out of him. Somehow his screams were more fitting to the night. They fit my mood a lot better, I can tell you that. He rolled over onto his belly and tried to claw his way back up from the shallow grave. The dirt he pulled down got into his mouth, but he kept screaming. It fell into his face and hair, coating him with the dust I figured he would soon return to.

  I stepped into the grave and stuck a hand into his back pocket. There was a lump there I thought might be the car keys. It was a handful of loose bullets. I threw them all away into the darkness, except one. I retrieved the revolver and his badge. The badge went into my pocket, and after I dumped the spent casings, the one remaining bullet went into the cylinder.

  That was when I noticed that the laughing guy had stopped screaming and was watching me from his grave.

  “You can’t do this,” he said. His voice was as weak as his supposition. He knew full well I could do it.

  “I’ve done all I’m going to do.” I held up the revolver and showed it to him. “The rest is up to you.” With that, I dropped the gun.

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure, you can,” I told him. “If you want it bad enough.”

  “Have pity.”

  I gave him a good hard look and even thought about it for a moment, a moment longer than it deserved. I said, “Nope.”

  He kept begging. I ignored him while I kicked around the dirt looking for the .40 that had been pressed up against my head. It was in the hole that was supposed to have been my grave. I rifled the pockets of the man with my shovel handle through his chest. He had a spare magazine but no keys. I wasted a couple of minutes looking for them before it dawned on me to check the Chevy. There they were, dangling from the ignition with a few other unknowns and a little plastic Jesus. The car started right up. Thank you, Jesus.

  When I backed away and headed down the trail that led who-knew-where, I saw the laughing guy crawling out of the grave. He was reaching hard for the gun I’d left in the dirt. I wondered if he heard the same yowling coyote I did.

  The body dump was deep in the desert. After twenty minutes on the same rutted dirt track, I was wondering if I had enough gas to get back to the States. That led me to a question. Was that where I wanted to go? I’d been making a cash drop in Juarez when I had been grabbed. A lot of people don’t know that cash can be harder to move than drugs. It was my specialty. I started off stealing it and ended up moving it. Turned out there was a lot better money to be made in protecting cash than taking it. I say better, not more. Truth is that most guys who rob spend a percentage of their lives in jails and prison. A hundred grand would be a huge score for the average career criminal. And it sounds like a lot of money until you consider the costs. If he’s under the thumb of a family business, he’ll piece off a big chunk. There are taxes even on crime. Lawyers take a bite too. Then there’s the real price—prison. Say you don’t use a gun and get only fifteen; you do ten for your hundred grand. Working as a straight in any cubical hell gives a better return. Of course, if criminals were smart enough to run their own lives, lawyers would starve.

  As I drove faster than a sane man would on what was more of a trail than a road, I tried to work out why I had ended up where I had. I’d showed up at the right time and place. My count had been perfect. My trail had been clean. Everything should have been fine. Still, someone had been pissed off.

  I never saw who had hit me. It had been a hard lick upside the back of my head with the butt of a pistol that had brought me down. My head had been filled with stars, and sound seemed like it was coming through a thick wall for a long time. I don’t think I ever went out. Not that it matters. One instant after the fireworks went off in my skull, I had hit the floor. Before I had settled fully, my hands were being tied behind me. After that, I had squirmed for a while on a carpet that smelled of old dog before my head had been bagged. Hands had gripped my ankles. I had been dragged across carpet before being hefted up by two men. They had taken me out and tossed me into the back floorboard of the car. I think the other guys were already in the trunk, so I can’t complain about the transportation accommodations.

  Replaying it in my mind did nothing to help me understand w
hy. It did no better with the where. In the car, little had been said, and my head had been bagged. That had made time hard to figure. I could have been about any place within a couple of hundred miles of Juarez where I had made my drop.

  Something moved in the bouncing headlights ahead of the Chevy. Black over black, they scattered like dark angels escaping a wound in the earth. Birds. They were dining on the carcass of an armadillo. I steered carefully, straddling the dead animal. In the mirror, I watched fluttering black shapes settle behind the car.

  I wondered about Matias. He was my contact. For almost three years I had carried cash from various places in the States to Matias in one of three Mexican cities, either Juarez, Nogales, or Mexicali. I would make the drop and then got my pay for the run and a new burner phone. Matias would call the burner when he had a pickup. Until that call, I wouldn’t know where I was picking up or which of my three drops I was heading to. It was a good system. It had been until I was coldcocked and driven out to the desert to die.

  That night things had been wrong from the moment I had arrived at the drop house. Always before, Matias had been there with a grin and a beer. He was a rough son of a bitch who would gut a cheat without a thought. Other than that, he was a great guy. I never cheated or stole from my count. He treated me like a pal.

  But a thin man in a suit and a room full of darkness and thugs had replaced Matias, his grin, and his beer. Matias had never needed much extra muscle. He was a hands-on manager. He didn’t go much for the lights-off theatrics either. This other guy was obviously more of a background kind of man. He was tall and lean with a sharp-edged aspect of face and demeanor that chilled the room. Not that I had been able to see him clearly. When he had come between me and a backlighted window, I could see a long nose and hard lines.

  The thin man had reached through the stripe of light coming through the window to take the cash from me. His hands were as much claws as hands. His nails were long and yellowed on thin fingers. On the skin that covered the talons were tattoos—skulls. Six fingers, four on one hand, two on the other, had the ink. They were startling because they weren’t simple death heads but intricate, Día de los Muertos–style skulls. Each one was different. All were colorful, whimsical, and a bit terrifying. It was impossible to see them as anything but beautiful notches in a gun butt.