BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (39 page)

Then he realized they did not know who he was.

'If you're dirty, kitties, now's the time to lose
it,' he heard his son yell.

Bags of reefer and pills showered out into the
darkness, sprinkling the water far below.

Darl Vanzandt swung his leg over his Harley, started
the engine, his face shuttering with a familiar ecstasy as he twisted
the gas feed forward and the engine's power climbed through his thighs
and loins.

He cornered his bike on the far side of the fire,
his boot biting into the dirt, then righted the bike's frame and roared
down the road that Jack had just emerged from, his face turned into the
shadows to avoid recognition.

His tire tracks showed he never hesitated when he
hit the fork in the road, leaping potholes, occasionally touching the
soft earth with his boot, his path marked by the strip of starry sky
overhead, the province of gods who lived above the clouds, rather than
the narrow, eroded track sweltering with heat and filmed with gnats
between the trees.

The night had gone down bad, but he didn't doubt the
wisdom of the plan he had conceived that morning, when he drank wine
laced with speed out of a stone beer mug, nor did he doubt his partial
execution of it. It was still a good plan, one he could pull off later,
when that punk Lucas Smothers mustered enough guts to run a chicken
race along the unbarricaded road that led back to the cliff's edge.
Just let Lucas get in the lead and take the road that was open while
he, Darl, swerved around the barricade and found his way to the bottom
of the hill, safe and removed from whatever might happen when Lucas
Smothers discovered the cost of jerking on the wrong guy's stick.

Or maybe he thought none of these things. Maybe he
was simply intrigued with the frenetic bouncing of his headlight on the
pines, the latent sexual power girded between his chaps, the way reefer
wrapped a soft gauze around the uppers surging in his veins, as though
his skin was a border between his universe and the one other people
lived in.

Darl swerved around the barrier his father had
moved, opened up the Harley, the back wheel ripping a trench through
the earth, and plowed into the steel cable that was stretched neck-high
between two pine trunks.

His bike spun away into the trees, the engine
roaring impotently against the ground.

The cable was thinner in diameter than a pencil, and
Darl had tightened each end until the steel loops had bitten so deeply
into the pine bark that the cable looked like it grew horizontally out
of the trunks.

He died on his back, the headlight of his Harley
shining across his face. His mouth was open, as though he wanted to
speak, but the cable's incision had cut his windpipe as well as his
jugular. When his father found him, three misshapen, emaciated dogs
with spots like hyenas were licking Darl's chest, and Jack had to drive
them from his son's body with a stick. The medical examiner later said
the dogs were rabid. He refused to answer when a reporter asked if the
dogs had found Darl before the time of death.

But when I drove down the rutted road
to the Hart
Ranch that same night I knew of none of the events I just described.

The gate that gave onto the ranch was open, the
padlocked chain snapped by bolt cutters. I turned off my headlights and
drove the Avalon across the cattle guard, parked in a grove of
mesquite, and slipped L.Q.' s revolver from its holster. Then I pulled
six extra rounds from the leather cartridge loops on the belt and
dropped them in my pocket and stepped out into the darkness. The
revolver felt heavy and cold and strange in my hand.

The moon was above the hills, and I could see deer
grazing in the glade between the woods and the river, and in the
distance the roofless Victorian home that had been gutted by fire and
the log and slat outbuildings and rusted windmill in back, wrapped with
tumbleweed.

The edges of the house were silhouetted by a white
light that glowed in the backyard. I moved along the perimeter of the
woods, spooking coveys of quail into the darkness. The grass was almost
waist high from the rain, and a set of car tracks stretched through the
glade and ended where a 1970s gas-guzzler was parked in the shadows. A
second set of car tracks, fresher ones, the grass pressed flat and
pale-sided into the wet sod, led past the parked car to the back of the
house.

I walked between the woods and parked car and looked
through the car window. In the moonlight I could see the ignition wires
hanging below the dashboard. From behind the house I heard a metallic,
screeching sound like a board with rusted nails in it being pried loose
from a joist.

I walked to the right of the house, through a side
yard that was strewn with plaster and broken laths that looked like
they had been ripped from the interior walls and thrown outside. A
Coleman lantern as bright as a phosphorous flare hissed on the ground
in the center of the backyard. Farther on, a blue van was parked by a
barn with a tractor shed built onto one side, and through a dirty
window in the shed a second lantern burned inside and the shadows of at
least two men moved back and forth across it.

I crossed the yard, outside the perimeter of light.
My foot went out into a pool of shadow, where there should have been
level ground, but instead I stepped into a hole at least a foot deep,
my ankle twisting sideways inside my boot, a pain as bright as the
sting of a jellyfish wrapping around the tendons in my lower back.

The shadows beyond the window froze against the
light.

Then I thought I heard L.Q. Navarro's voice say,
'The
dice are out of the cup. Make 'em religious, bud.'

I limped forward and flung the door back on its
hinges and pointed L.Q.'s revolver into the room.

Felix Ringo and a second man stood just beyond a
worktable where Garland T. Moon was wrapped fast against the wood
planks with chains that were clamped and boomed down on his chest and
thighs. Moon's face was turned away from me, as though he were napping.
The clothes of Ringo and the second man were streaked with soot and
bits of hay and dried horse manure. Behind them, the flooring in the
barn had been ripped up, the plaster board gouged out of a bunk area, a
rusty hot water tank split open with an ax.

The room was hotter than it should have been, filled
with a hot smell that at first I thought came from the lantern.

'You don't look too good, man,' Ringo said.

I could feel the muscles constrict across my back,
just like someone had taken pliers to my spine. I propped one arm
against the doorjamb and held the pistol level with the other.

The second man clutched a plastic bag full of credit
cards in his hand. He had the scarred eyebrows of a prizefighter and
small ears and hair so blond it was almost white.

'Both you boys put your hands behind your head and
get down on your knees,' I said.

The second man studied my face, his tongue moving
across his bottom lip. 'Fuck you, buddy,' he said, and bolted into the
barn, crashing out the door into the yard.

But I didn't fire. Instead, I kept the .45 pointed
at Ringo's face, my other hand holding on to the doorjamb for balance.
When I took a step forward, the pain caused my jaw to drop open. I
heard the van start up outside and drive out of the yard.

'You want to go to a hospital? I can do that for
you, man,' Ringo said.

I eased my hand onto the worktable, inches from the
JOX running shoe on Moon's foot, stiffening my arm for support. An odor
like the smell of burned scrapings from a butchered hog rose into my
face.

'Last chance, Ringo. Get on the floor,' I said.

'You're all mixed up. This is DEA. You don't got no
business here.'

I pulled back the hammer on the revolver.

'Okay, man. My friend gonna come back with some
local law. They gonna jam you up, man,' Ringo said, and knelt on the
floor and laced his fingers behind his neck. He crinkled his nose, his
mustache wiggling on his lip, as though he were about to sneeze.

I worked my way around the other side of the table.
Moon's eyes were staring at nothing. The skin of his face looked
shrunken on the bone, puckered and red like a rubber Halloween mask.
The cloth of his flowered shirt was crisscrossed with scorch marks, and
inside the scorch marks were lesions that looked like they had been cut
into the skin with a laser.

The blowtorch was turned on its side by the far wall.

'I'll take a guess. Crystal coming in, counterfeit
credit cards going out,' I said.

'Hey, the
guapa
you was in the
sack with? Ask her. This is a federal operation, man. She gonna fuck
you again, except this time you ain't gonna enjoy it.'

'If y'all were looking for some of your stash, you
tortured the wrong guy. It was probably Darl Vanzandt and his friends
who ripped you off.'

'You want to take me in? That's good, man. 'Cause
I'm gonna be on a plane back to Mexico City tomorrow morning. So let's
go do that, man.'

'I don't think so.'

His eyes studied my shirt front.

'What's that you got in your pocket?' he asked.

'This? It's funny you ask. A friend of mine dropped
it down in Coahuila.'

A dark and fearful recognition grew in his face,
like smoke rising in a glass jar.

I moved toward him, my hand sliding along the table
for support. Inches away from my forearm, a viscous tear was glued in
the corner of Moon's receded blue eye.

'I bet ole Moon spit in your face,' I said.

Felix Ringo rose to his feet and began running
toward the back of the barn, his head twisted back toward me. He
grabbed onto a stall door and pulled an automatic from an ankle holster
and fired three times, the rounds slapping into the front wall, then he
began running again. He passed a tack room and flung the plywood door
open in his wake, his arms waving almost simultaneously, as though
hornets were about to torment his flesh.

I held on to a wood post by a stall and fired one
round after another, the powder flashes splintering from the cylinder
and the barrel. The explosions were deafening, the recoil knocking my
wrist high in the air. Each round blew divots out of the tack room door
that yawned open in the passageway, tore even larger holes in the
outside door, whined away into the woods with a sound like piano wire
snapping.

Dust and lint and smoke drifted in the light from
the Coleman lantern. My right ear was numb, as though frigid water had
been poured inside it. I put the hammer on half-cock and shucked out
the empty shell casings on the floor and rotated the cylinder and
inserted six fresh rounds in the loading gate, then lowered the hammer
again and locked the cylinder into place.

I limped slowly past the stalls and closed the
splintered door of the tack room. Felix Ringo lay on the floor, the
slide on his automatic jammed open by a partially ejected shell casing.
Blood welled from a wound that looked like a crushed purple rose
inserted inside the torn cloth on his hip.

'My friend L.Q. Navarro used to say ankle hideaways
are mighty cool, but the problem is they only work for midgets,' I
said, and sat down heavily on a hay bale that puffed dust and lint into
the air.

'I got to have a doctor,' Ringo said.

I felt weak all over. Gray threadworms floated in
front of my eyes. I touched my upper chest and my hand came away coated
with something that was warm and damp and sticky.

'Looks like we both got a problem here, Felix.' I
breathed slowly and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. From my shirt
pocket I pulled the playing card emblazoned with the badge of the Texas
Rangers and marked with the date of L.Q.'s death. 'You remember the
rules down in Coahuila. When you lose, you get one of these stuck in
your mouth.'

'I'm hurt bad. Look, man, I die here, I gotta have a
priest.'

'You killed Roseanne Hazlitt, didn't you?'

'Yeah, okay, we done that.' He breathed hard through
his nose.

'And set up Lucas Smothers?'

'Yeah, that, too.'

'All that grief, just to protect Jack Vanzandt.'

'There was a lot at stake, things you don't know
about, man. Ask the
guapa,
the DEA woman, it's
like a war, man, there's casualties. Hey, man, I work for your fucking
government. That's what you ain't hearing.'

He stared at me for a long time, waiting, his eyes
lustrous with hate and apprehension.

'What you gonna do, man?' he said, his voice
climbing into a higher register.

'I guess you're just up shit's creek, bud,' I
replied.

His face was gray from loss of blood, beaded with
sweat. He closed his eyes, his mouth trembling.

'No, you got it all wrong, Felix,' I said. 'L.Q.
Navarro used to own this card. I wouldn't soil it by putting it on your
body. But you parked one in my chest. So the medics won't be coming for
either one of us tonight.'

I winked at him and grinned.

Or thought I did. The passageway was slatted with
moonlight, redolent with dust and the musky smell of field mice and
moldy hay and fresh deer droppings in the barnyard and wind and flowers
in the glade and wet fern and creek water coursing over stone. I felt
myself slip in and out of time, then the darkness bled out of the sky
and a pink light glowed through the holes in the barn's walls and out
in the fields I saw a group of federal agents in blue hats and vests
walking through the mist, their weapons at port arms, like the
emissaries of Empire, a statuesque woman with brown freckles' in the
lead whose fingers would be as cool and bloodless as alabaster when
they touched my brow.

Felix Ringo was DOA at the county
hospital. I had
the feeling the DEA considered his passing his greatest public service.
To my knowledge, no investigation into his background was ever made. I
tried to tell newspapers in Dallas and Houston about Felix Ringo, then
the wire services, and finally anyone who would listen. But the time
came when I accepted the fact that societal hearing and sight are a
matter of collective consent, and I desisted from trying to undo the
cynicism and cruelty of governments and learned to walk away when
people spoke of the world as a serious place.