Dead Man's Badge Read online

  He had taken the cash, hefting it in his hand as though he could tell just by weight the value of what he held. After a moment of consideration, he had tossed the package onto a coffee table in front of an old couch. There is something about money. Even the most jaded treat it either with awe or calculated dismissal. Rarely is a bundle amounting to at least a million dollars treated casually—unless a paltry million is meaningless in your view. He dropped it as if it was nothing onto a table already stacked with plastic-wrapped bricks of cocaine and grass.

  That was when I had known Matias was dead.

  Knowledge can be a terrible thing. Until that moment, I could believe. It didn’t matter what—I could believe anything I wanted. Once I knew, belief was gone. All the doors that lead to all the different hallways through which belief could go slammed shut. Only one door remained.

  The man had said, “Hacerle desaparecer.” Make him disappear.

  That door had opened with the burst of fireworks in my head.

  The track I drove finally opened and smoothed. It brought me up the back side of a trash dump stacked with tires, old refrigerators, and piles of garbage that were being picked over by coyotes and rats big enough not to be frightened by them. Eyes glowed back, red and green, as my headlights passed over them. On the other side of the pit, I came to an intersection. It was another unmarked oil-pan hazard. I stopped and idled as I tried to choose a direction.

  Choosing was the excuse. I was coming down off the adrenaline high and crashing hard. Suddenly I was cold and sweating. My hands were shaking, and my stomach felt like it was full of snakes. At times like that, it’s natural to ask yourself, How has my life ended up here? Natural but foolish, at least for me. I knew. I think most of us do, but I had no doubts.

  A pair of green eyes watched the car. They remained at the edge of the road, on the far end of the headlights’ reach. I turned up the heater. As I did, I noticed the pile of belongings in the passenger-side floorboard. There were four wallets, some loose cash, bits of paper, and a pocketknife. I grabbed my wallet and checked the others for money. A few bucks—not what I’d signed on for.

  The .40 was still sitting on the seat where I’d thrown it with the spare clip. I decided to check it out. The loaded clip dropped out smoothly, and the slide racked back to eject the chambered round easily. It was a cared-for weapon, clean and oiled. I would have thought about keeping it long term if it wasn’t a pimp’s gun. Mexicans liked that kind of crap—nickel plating, fake-pearl grips. This one had all that and a few extras: seven notches filed into the metal of the handle running up the back edge. There was no chance they were scratches either. They were filed and finished smooth, spaced evenly. The notches had been put there intentionally by the same man who had kept the weapon clean. It gave me a little satisfaction knowing that man had died from a rusted and poorly maintained gardening tool. I counted both clips and reseated the round that had been chambered. Three cartridges were missing: one had killed the crying man, and two had been spent into the sky.

  When I had everything back together, I looked up for the first time in a while. There were more eyes watching. The animals were closer as well. I could see them, dark-gray ghosts against a background of velvet black. They were circling in, getting braver as I sat motionless. If it weren’t for them, I might have shut off the engine and waited for daylight. Instead, I pressed the gas and twisted the wheel right. In another few minutes I was rewarded with a streak of light crossing in the distance. Headlights on a real road. I hit the asphalt and took another right.

  It wasn’t long before I came out on Highway 2 near a town called Barreales. From there it was about twenty-five miles to Juarez, the nearest border crossing. I wanted nothing more than to be back on the US side of the border, but…

  As I drove, and as my mind pushed aside the effects of the terror and anger, I began to think of other reasons to stop in Juarez.

  The sky was still nighttime dark and frosted with stars as I approached the city limits. When I parked, the sun was just pinking the eastern horizon. I needed to be fast.

  The drop house was six doors down from my parking spot. I hugged the darkest parts of the street in a stiff-legged lope to cover the remaining distance. I was counting on arrogance—theirs, not mine. A house like that one, filled with cash and drugs, would be surrounded by security cameras or armed guards in the States. In a poor Mexican neighborhood, cartel houses count on word-of-mouth security. Everyone for blocks knows what goes on behind the peeling blue paint and barred windows. The police know. Even the reporters know. Everyone knows. They know just as well what happens to anyone who talks about it. You don’t even have to talk. Just look at the house the wrong way, and a poster goes up with your name on it and the word “Missing.” You disappear. And if you’re ever found, it’s because your body is a message. Sometimes your body is one message, your head another, so on and so on.

  The point is, no one messes with a cartel house because you’d have to be crazy to do it—more than crazy. Even the maddest of us have some sense of self-preservation. I wasn’t crazy. But I was dead once that bag had gone over my head. Let me tell you, an escape from the grave is an experience that colors your outlook. After that, most people run off to blue skies, rainbows, and boat drinks. I wasn’t most people, though, and I was pissed. An angry dead man is not an enemy to have.

  I reached the door without raising an alarm. That was, I expected, where sanity would end. Everything else—well, that was up in the air until I went through the door. I acted without hesitation.

  There was no kicking in of the door, no bursting in guns a-blazin’. I tried the knob. The door opened easily if not quietly. It squeaked. After it came to a halt, half-open, I waited. No one shouted or came to check on the sound. I crept in. An almost-shadow moved on the door as I passed. I looked back to the eastern sky. It was beginning to brighten from soft pink to a burning red.

  The dark room was littered with bottles and men. I didn’t see the thin man with the skulls on his fingers. I imagined him someplace close because the bundle of cash I had delivered the night—a lifetime—before was sitting beside the couch. Also on the couch, framed in the faint glow from the open door, was a man I’d never seen before sleeping with a shotgun cradled in his arms. He was a Mexican cliché, wearing stiff jeans and boots with long pointed toes. Around his waist was a tooled belt with a huge rodeo-style belt buckle in silver and gold. Over the top part of his face was a straw cowboy hat. In his open mouth was a gold tooth. I wanted to shoot him just because he made the other Mexicans look bad.

  I restrained myself and went for the bundle of money. If life was like the movies, he would have woken and the sliding click-clack of the shotgun chambering a round would have warned me. Life isn’t a movie. I’m always reminded of that by my own failures to be the hero or get the girl. Guys like him, cartel soldiers guarding a twelve-pound block of hundred-dollar bills, don’t sleep with uncharged weapons. It was the sudden silence when he stopped mouth breathing that was my warning. I no longer had to restrain myself. He raised the shotgun. Or he tried without getting it very far. I had been keeping the .40 on him as I approached the money. My shot went right through the hat still covering his face.

  Drunken, surprised men scrambled, as well as they could, to their feet, reaching for weapons. Again, I didn’t hesitate. From the dead man on the couch, I turned and fired at the other men. My only chance was to kill faster than they could come to their senses. First, I shot the man on the chair, one to his heart before he even got to his feet, and then I started in on the men wallowing on the dog-stink carpet. Three of them. Three shots. The muzzle flash and reports of the .40 in the dark room were a raging thunderstorm of high-velocity metal.

  I was wrong. There were four men on the floor. I had missed one passed out behind the chair. He got a shot off that touched the hairs on my ear as it passed. I turned, dropping and firing, using three bullets to bring him down. When I hit the floor, I stayed there. Men were shouting as they pou
red out of the bedrooms, angry ants after the nest is kicked. They ran shooting wildly. It was all cover fire; they weren’t aiming, only hoping to keep heads down until they could find a target. My head was already down.

  I dropped the .40 and grabbed the shotgun, pointing it down the hall and keeping it low. Two rounds of double-aught buckshot ripped the left foot off the first man and then raked away his face when he fell. The men who came after were taken out at the shins and knees. I finished them as they clutched at missing limbs.

  When I rose again, I had the .40 back in my hand and ready. The last man was waiting. As soon as I showed against the brightening sky at the doorway, he started emptying his weapon. It was one of those giant .50 hand cannons with seven in the mag and one in the chamber. Those rounds would go through an engine block, or in this case a cinder block wall, and keep killing for a week. But unless your name was Schwarzenegger, they never hit the person you were aiming at. It was too heavy and too slow and kicked like Newton’s third law on steroids. I let him shoot his wad and put one of mine through his eyebrow.

  Subtlety is not in the cartel playbook. When the house was silent, I was certain it was empty of life other than mine. Still I checked. One by one, I quickly cleared the rooms. The next thing I did was check each body to make sure that they were dead. Then I had some fun. Grabbing up a discarded shirt, I used it to keep my prints off the guns as I fired every one I could find into the walls, ceiling, floor, and bodies. When I was satisfied with that bit of red herring, I pulled the DEA badge from my pocket and dropped it. I took the cash and a bundle of grass.

  The rising sun was giving as much light as color by the time I exited the house. It was a sliver of red on a leaden horizon projecting orange on the underside of scattered clouds. My shadow was coming into the world, darkening with new reality as I walked.

  I didn’t see anyone watching me, no faces at windows or curiosity seekers on the porches. That didn’t mean no one was there. Life was lived carefully in Juarez, or it wasn’t lived very long.

  TWO

  Getting out of the house wasn’t enough. I had to get out of the country and fast. The car I’d driven into Mexico was gone. I still had the Chevy. The problem was that it wasn’t fitted with the compartments my car had been. Those weren’t perfect for heading into the States, but they would have been better than nothing. My usual trips were south carrying cash. I didn’t move drugs and rarely went armed. I got almost no attention going either way. Driving the Chevy, a vehicle with Mexican tags and a ragged-looking Anglo at the wheel, I would get a look. If I had the cash in the car, I’d get a long, hard look in a small room with too much light and too little air. That was why I had grabbed the grass.

  At an all-night stop, I bought a gas station sandwich, some water, and a jar of pickles. Walking back to the car, I lifted the spray bottle of window cleaner that hung by the pumps. It took less than a minute to eat the sandwich. Then I got to work.

  First, I emptied the window cleaner from the spray bottle and refilled it halfway with water. After that, I opened the package of dried and compacted weed. Tearing off two big clumps, I crushed them on the concrete to release the oils. That was something I had learned from cooking shows. The ground-down pile I scooped into the spray bottle. My weed-water mix got a good shake, and then I washed my hands in the pickle juice. I was still hungry enough to eat one of the dills before I got back into the Chevy.

  The sun was up. Another day had begun for me and a couple thousand day laborers and domestics getting into line to cross the border into Texas. I didn’t go straight in. I drove around slowly, and every car I passed that was going toward the border, I sprayed with the marijuana-infused water. When the traffic got to its thickest, I finally eased in with the flow. After a half hour or so, the Chevy was about a dozen cars from the checkpoint, and traffic was dead. Dogs were alerting on cars I’d sprayed. Those were pulled to the side and getting a good going-over.

  A lot of people were out of their vehicles and milling around with street vendors and panhandlers. No one paid attention as I strolled out into the stalled traffic, giving everything around me a good but surreptitious spray. Lines started moving again. I screwed the nozzle off and dumped the bottle in the back of a truck.

  Dogs were going crazy signaling at sprayed cars. Border Patrol agents had almost twenty cars pulled aside getting hard searches. It had to be frustrating. At least I hoped so.

  The truck I’d tossed the bottle into provoked a huge response. It was big enough to hide a huge cache of drugs. It helped that the angry landscape workers were putting up just enough of a fight to make the edgy agents downright certain of their guilt.

  When things are like that, the gringo heading home gets the once-over. Thankfully they didn’t even bother to look under the seats once the dog sniffed the car and my pickle-scented hands and then lost interest.

  * * * *

  “What’s the problem now?” It was my half-brother asking. He was older than me by a year, and we had different mothers. The man who named me Longview had named his first son Paris. Our father’s name was Buick. Names were apparently a familial curse.

  Both Paris and I took after Buick and had an uncanny resemblance for half-brothers. Paris was a bit trimmer and well kempt. His hair was darker and shorter. Mine was sun bleached and hanging past my collar.

  Paris had the home, the mostly full-time dad, and the Tindall name. The only thing I got from Buick was a face I had to share.

  The old man was a bastard in so many ways. That’s ignoring the fact that I was the literal bastard of the family. My mother moved us to the east side of Trinity Bay outside of Houston to be closer to Buick. He showed his appreciation by keeping us housed and a little food on the table. Dependency was a trap that my mother either didn’t understand or didn’t choose to challenge. Poverty can be like a toilet: smooth walls and a strong current pulling you down. That’s where we were, in the middle of the swirl, while Buick watched us go around. We were not the dirty secret you would think. That’s to say we weren’t secret at all.

  Buick Tindall was a Texas Ranger. Paris Tindall was a Texas Ranger. Longview Moody was a career criminal with a history of violence. Sometimes I can almost see a pattern in my life. There is one definite pattern. When I get in trouble, I call the one cop I know I can trust.

  “I was set up,” I told him, passing the phone to the other ear. My right one still had the creepy feeling of that bullet whizzing by and tickling the short hairs.

  “Where are you?” he asked. Paris didn’t sound happy to hear from me. I couldn’t blame him.

  “I’m at a motel in El Paso. I need to sleep before heading home.”

  “I don’t know how much help I can be this time. There are some things going on. I’ve got a new job.”

  “A new job? What?” That was hard to believe. Paris loved being a Ranger, and as much as I hated to admit it, he was one of the good ones. In our family, the apples fell far from the tree and then rolled down hill.

  “I’m going to be the new chief of police in Lansdale.”

  “The hell you say.”

  Lansdale, Texas, was a dead end on a road no one traveled, tucked into a bend in the border. Remember that movie Lonesome Dove? The town of Lonesome Dove was what Lansdale aspired to become when it had been founded by the grace of a horse dying and stranding its rider in 1897. It had grown but not well; a bigger hell is not necessarily a better hell. “Why?”

  “Things,” he answered. Paris was always good with words. “What about you? Need money?” There was the reason I could always forgive him. My brother never liked the way I lived. In fact, he could be outright judgmental and harsh about it. But that never stopped him from offering help.

  “No. I need to tell you—”

  “I have to go,” he said. “Meet me at your place.”

  He hung up.

  “Damn it,” I said into the dead phone. Then: “Screw it.” I went to sleep.

  My dreams were of the underground. Darkness b
oth surrounded and filled me. The organic taste of rot filled my mouth. It wasn’t like the desert soil, dry dust. What fell into my mouth as I tried to scream was moist and rich. It was the soil of a forest floor, old leaves, and chewing worms. Then came the lightning. It came not in bolts but in sprays of light. Gunshot bursts of electricity expelled in barking thunderclaps. Some were small. Or they were distant; I wasn’t sure. The sound came instantly in either case. Some of the flashing bursts were larger, concussive blasts of light and pressure like a shotgun in a coffin.

  I wished I had a coffin.

  When I woke, the sun was almost gone from the sky, replaced by thunderheads and a sweeping storm. Lightning fingers pointed south, accusing and betraying me at the same time. I tried calling Paris again. It went to voice mail. There was no point in leaving a message.

  Before getting back onto the road, I showered again. It was the second time I had washed off the feeling of the grave since coming to this little motel. I left the key on the sweat-soaked bed and then walked out into the rain. A third wash.

  * * * *

  “What are you escaping from, prison?” the cashier asked.

  I looked around to see if she was talking to someone else. She wasn’t. “What do you mean?” I tried not to sound too concerned.

  I had gone straight to a truck stop from the motel. It was a big one with showers and stacks of trucker caps. This one sold boots and had a rack of jeans. I picked up clean pants; a fresh shirt, the kind with pearl-snap buttons; and a burner phone.

  The woman whose name tag read Rochelle pointed at what I’d laid on the counter. Looking at my little pile of purchases, I supposed it couldn’t have looked more suspicious if I’d added a bottle of whiskey and a new pistol.