The Next Time You Die Page 6

  The other two walls were dominated by bookcases, and various plaques and trophies. The largest was from the Environmental League of Texas, awarding Senator Black their Outstanding Environmentalist Award for 2001. Next to that was a picture of Black and former Eagles drummer, Don Henley, at Caddo Lake, the only non-man-made body of water in the state. Vernon Black, scion of a wealthy East Texas oil and timber family, had turned into a rabid tree hugger upon election to political office.

  Black sat behind his desk, facing the window. He had a phone pressed to his ear and a pen in one hand. He clicked the pen repeatedly as he talked.

  After a few moments, he turned and noticed us. He waved and pointed to the leather chairs arranged in front of his desk.

  We sat. He talked. About a Senate bill that some dipshit from Amarillo was gonna screw up. One minute stretched to two and then three. Nolan shifted in her seat and shot me a look. I turned and stared at Olson. He shrugged.

  A moment later the senator ended his call, turned to us, and stood up. He was as I remembered. Early fifties, slim build. A full head of slowly-going-gray hair bracketed a thin face and pointed jaw. Craggy but handsome. An urbane Marlboro Man.

  “Hank, how the hell are you, buddy?” He flashed a thousand-watt smile as his hand reached for mine.

  We shook. I told him I was great, super, fantastic. He was the kind of guy who brought that out in you. He exchanged greetings with Olson and then with Nolan.

  The senator sat down, steepled his fingers, and stared at Nolan’s chest. “Hank, you got any family?”

  “Yeah.” The Oswalds weren’t exactly a close-knit bunch, but I did have relatives here and there.

  “Bet you wouldn’t like it if somebody was messing with ’em, would you?”

  I shook my head but didn’t say anything.

  “Me? I’m just a good old boy from East Texas. All I got is family and friends.”

  And an MBA from Wharton and a Texas-sized trust fund. I kept that thought to myself.

  “Gets my dander up when somebody messes with my people, you follow?” His accent seemed forced, as if he were speaking to the Lufkin, Texas, Rotary Club.

  I nodded.

  “One of my oldest friends and first business partners was a guy named Jimmy McPherson.”

  He paused. Olson shifted in his chair, causing a squeaking noise in the otherwise quiet office.

  “His daughter’s in Dallas now. Works here part time.” His voice sounded hoarse all of a sudden. It took me a moment to realize he was trying not to let his emotions get the better of him. “I remember bouncing her on my knee as a child. . . .”

  Nobody spoke for a few moments.

  “This is real important.” Black cleared his throat, coughed a couple of times. “I want somebody to look after her.”

  “Like a bodyguard?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “What’s the threat?” Nolan said.

  The senator ignored her and spoke to me. “Things are never quite what they seem, you know what I mean?”

  I shrugged.

  “She needs to stay out of East Texas especially.”

  “Why?” I said.

  The senator pursed his lips and positioned his shoulders and head as if the cameras were rolling. “There are forces that are aligned against us.”

  “Huh?”

  “Good people make bad choices sometimes, you know?” He shook his head slowly.

  “Now’s not a good time.” I shot a glance at Nolan. “Got a full plate right—”

  “We’ll take the case.”

  Senator Black looked at me and then at Nolan.

  Olson said, “You two want to get on the same page?”

  “We’re busy at the moment.” I shook my head, thinking of Lucas Linville and a dead man named Billy Barringer.

  “The rent’s due in a week,” Nolan said. “And we need to make another payment on that bionic ear thing you just had to have.”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes.

  Nolan smiled. “Beats the hell out of chasing ghosts.”

  “That’s great.” Black grabbed a tablet and a pen.

  “Ghosts?” Olson said.

  “Yeah.” Nolan chuckled, a mischievous look on her face. “Didn’t Hank tell you? Billy Barringer is back.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The room was silent. After a few moments Senator Black laughed.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “You had me going there for a minute.”

  “Billy Barringer is dead.” Olson spoke to Nolan but looked at me. “Dental records proved it.”

  “He burned up, didn’t he?” Black put on a pair of reading glasses and scribbled something on a tablet.

  “It’s hard to kill a legend,” I said.

  “Here’s Tess McPherson’s address.” He handed me a piece of paper. “She’s in Lubbock right now, plane lands about six. Why don’t you meet her at her apartment a little later.”

  “Will do.” Nolan plucked the paper from my hand.

  “Billy. Barringer.” Olson spoke the two words slowly, distinctly.

  “His name came up in a case I’m working on.” I stood.

  “Even though I’m against capital punishment, I’m damn glad that guy is dead,” Black said. “The last thing this state needs is any more of that redneck mafia. Makes us look bad to the rest of the world. Bonnie and Clyde and John Gotti rolled into one, living in a dinky trailer park in the woods. No more bodies need turn up . . . that way.”

  Ruthless enforcement had been a Barringers trademark. The typical hit attributed to Billy was a .22-caliber bullet in the belly button, the victim left in a remote location for a long, painful death.

  “But the family’s still around.” Olson looked at me.

  “Billy was the brains,” I said. “The rest of them came from the muddy end of the gene pool. The only thing they could organize to take out would be Chinese food.”

  The phone on the desk buzzed and a woman’s voice filled the air. “Senator Black, your three o’clock is early.”

  Olson leaned over the desk. “If it’s Roger Staubach, tell him he better have his checkbook.”

  The young man in khakis entered a few seconds later and hustled us out the door. In the hallway we passed a couple of lawyer-looking types. We rode down alone in the elegant wood-paneled elevator. Halfway to the bottom Olson said, “You didn’t tell me somebody mentioned Billy to you.”

  “Doesn’t matter one way or the other,” I said.

  Nolan gave him the nickel version of events, including the dead body at the boardinghouse this morning, Lucas Linville and the redneck thugs the evening before, and the missing case file for a trust-fund lapdog named Reese Cunningham.

  “Retards or not, don’t you think the family might be looking for a little payback?” Olson said.

  I didn’t reply.

  Nolan said, “Makes sense to me.”

  “I would have mentioned it but we were a little busy with those clowns trying to shake you down.”

  The doors dinged open. We exited the building into the heat of the afternoon. The air felt grimy and oppressive, like wearing a dirty wool coat in the jungle.

  I cranked up the truck’s AC to high. After several blocks, the air cooled enough that I stopped sweating. We were back on the LBJ Freeway, heading east along with a hundred thousand other cars, traveling at a velocity between five and ten miles per hour. The air shimmered in front of us.

  “There was a guy this morning at the boardinghouse,” I said, “coming down the stairs as I was going up. Made me want to shoot him in the back of the head just so I’d feel safe.”

  “What did he look like?” Olson said.

  I described the man with the shaved head. “He sure as hell didn’t live there. And then I find the preacher’s assistant, a slit throat and dead only a couple of minutes.”

  Olson nodded thoughtfully. “Let me do a little research.”

  I dropped Olson off at the gun store. It was five o’clock. Nolan and I were near
the center of town, the tiny office we shared, and our respective homes. I headed east with no particular destination in mind. The traffic was heavy as the workers from downtown headed to the snug bungalows and remodeled cottages of the Lakewood area, so named because it wrapped around White Rock Lake, one of the city’s prettiest locales.

  “Let’s eat.” I parked in front of a bar called the Lakewood Landing, a misnomer since the only body of water visible was a pool of oily liquid in the parking lot. The building itself was low-slung wood, painted white but gone frayed at the edges. They served pretty good food but the primary emphasis was on cocktails.

  Nolan shrugged but didn’t say anything.

  We walked through to the back and sat at a booth by the jukebox. The place was dim and smoky and loud, people standing three deep at the bar, the happy hour crowd mixing with the spillover day drinkers.

  A waitress drifted by. We ordered cheeseburgers and a pitcher of Miller Lite. Halfway through the first mug of beer I said, “We’ve got about an hour before we’re supposed to babysit the girl. You want me to take the first shift and you can pick it up tomorrow?”

  “I’ll go with you. I don’t have any plans.” She wiped a foam mustache off her lip. “People who have significant others have plans.”

  I ignored her pity party invitation. “Why did you mention Billy back there?”

  “You put the redneck Don Corleone in prison. Then he dies trying to get out,” she said. “Didn’t it cross your mind that his people might be looking for a little payback?”

  The waitress brought our food. We ate, finished the pitcher, and paid the tab. By the time we got in the truck, it was six o’clock and the heat had eased a little, maybe now in the midnineties.

  Nolan squinted at the paper we’d gotten from Black. “Looks like she lives in an apartment near the American Airlines Center. Makes sense. She’s young and probably single. Lots of nightlife, people to go out with . . .”

  I recognized this as my cue. “Don’t worry, you’ll meet somebody else. Maybe this time you can look somewhere other than a VFW hall or a tractor pull.”

  “Shut up, Hank.” She crossed her arms and sulked.

  “Just a thought.”

  “I wonder if Olson has any new machine guns in stock?”

  Tess McPherson lived in some bourbon-swilling-developer’s idea of what an urban environment would look like stuffed on the Texas plains.

  Her home was part of a brand-new half-dozen-block conglomeration of four-story buildings designed to look like turn-of-the-century brownstones in a hip section of some unnamed East Coast city. All of the structures orbited around the most important feature of the project, a six-story parking garage. The buildings all housed chain retail stores and expensive, trendy restaurants on the ground floor, with apartments on the upper stories. Dallas does Manhattan.

  The place was called the Chelsea Tribeca Meadow.

  We got lucky and found a parking space in front of a Gap and a T-Mobile store, avoiding the long valet lines at the watering holes a hundred yards away. I checked the address again. Tess lived on the fourth floor of the building where the cars were congregating.

  Nolan and I made our way through the throngs of twenty-somethings milling about on the streets, hopping from one bar to the next. Everybody looked the same. The men all had gelled hair and shirts like something David Cassidy would have worn during his Partridge Family days. The girls wore midriff-baring tight T-shirts and had hair done like Paris Hilton’s or Lindsey’s or whoever the It Girl of the moment was.

  I smiled and nodded at a group of three particularly toothsome women, the leader a statuesque blonde whose black T-shirt stopped about four inches above her navel.

  She smiled back. “Hey.”

  Nolan elbowed me in the ribs. “We’re working. Remember?”

  I turned away from the blonde and kept going.

  The entrance to Tess’s building was to the left of a restaurant. It didn’t have a doorman, only a glass-and-wrought-iron door with a keypad access. As we approached, two women were leaving. We stepped inside before the entrance shut. So much for security.

  I was aware of it as we waited for the elevator. The barest trace of cologne. I tried to remember where I had smelled it last, but the odor was too faint. It was stronger when we got inside the lift. When the doors pinged for the fourth floor, I remembered the man from the stairs at the boardinghouse that morning.

  I put a hand on Nolan’s arm. “I think he’s here.”

  The doors started to open.

  “Who?”

  The bullet-headed man stepped into the narrow chamber and pushed the down button. “Why you following me, huh?” As he spoke he threw a right into my stomach. His fist punched a hole in my gut all the way through to my spine. On the way to the floor I saw him backhand Nolan. Her skull bounced off the side of the elevator.

  The aroma of Old Spice aftershave filled my head.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I opened my eyes because I couldn’t breathe.

  Drowning in a room full of air. Diaphragm mangled around my spleen. Lungs struggling. Mouth wheezing. I looked up and saw Bullet Head in the corner of the elevator. He had Nolan’s throat squeezed in the crook of his elbow. She was bleeding from her head and a cut lip. Her face was purple. I looked at the control panel. The STOP button had been pushed.

  “Oh, yeah, that feels good.” With his free hand, Bullet Head massaged Nolan’s left breast. He looked at me. “How you doing, buddy boy?”

  “Uuggh.” I shook my head and tried to relax my chest to get some air.

  He stuck his tongue in Nolan’s ear and moved his hand to her other breast. She fought until he increased pressure on her throat and her eyes started to bug out.

  “Retribution is nigh upon you, Mr. Oswald.” His voice had a singsong quality to it. His skin glistened with perspiration.

  He smiled and kicked my kneecap. I screamed and curled into a ball.

  I barely heard him speak over the din of my pain. He said, “Three of my men paid a visit to your fudge-packing gun dealer today. Can’t find any of ’em now. Tell the faggot I’m coming after him next.”

  “Your guys aren’t that good then.” I spoke through clenched teeth. “Look for ’em south of the border.” I braced for another blow.

  Bullet Head laughed as if I were Stand-Up Comic of the Year. “Billy used to tell me you was a tough guy. He wasn’t fooling, no sir.”

  In one motion he hit the START button, released Nolan, and threw her against the wall. He pressed his face against hers, his mouth to her lips, one hand on a breast, the other maintaining pressure on her throat. After a few seconds, or an eternity, depending on your point of view, he released her and stepped out of the elevator. She fell to the floor beside me.

  I tried standing. My knee still hurt like hell and felt like it was made of rubber, but it worked, more or less. Nolan was on her hands and knees, spitting repeatedly in a corner. The doors were closed; we were on the ground floor.

  “You okay?” I tried to quash the nausea that came from getting a heavy shot to the gut.

  My partner looked up. Her face was white, eyes blinking repeatedly.

  “Nolan?”

  Sweat dotted her face. She clutched her stomach and heaved but nothing came out.

  “Don’t know why he’s here.” A fresh wave of pain swept across my kneecap. “I’m sorry.”

  Nolan wiped her mouth. “I will kill that Yul Brynner-looking motherfucker if it’s the last thing I do.”

  I remembered why we were there. We looked at each other and spoke at the same time. “Oh, shit.”

  “What’s the number?” I hit the button for the top floor.

  “Four-eleven.”

  The ride up took an eternity. The doors opened, and we spilled out into a narrow carpeted hallway. The sign across from the elevator indicated 411 was to the right. I limped that way as fast as possible. Nolan followed with her gun drawn.

  The door was cracked open about an inch
. I didn’t waste time knocking or crouching or being careful. I kicked it open with my good leg. My bad one went south and I fell into Tess McPherson’s apartment on my face.

  Nolan hopped over me. I pushed myself up on my good knee. A dark-haired young woman sat on a sofa underneath a framed print advertising a French Impressionist show at the Dallas Museum of Art.

  She appeared to be in her late twenties. A look of stark terror marred her otherwise attractive features. She wore a white terry-cloth bathrobe and her hair was damp. She was shivering, her arms crossed. It took me a moment to realize she wasn’t looking at us but rather at the door.

  Two people busting into her living room with weapons drawn wasn’t very scary after a visit from the bullet-headed man.

  “He’s gone.” I holstered the Browning.

  The woman didn’t say anything.

  “Are you okay?” Nolan sat beside her on the sofa.

  The woman looked at her but still didn’t say a word. I made a quick inspection of the apartment. It was a one-bedroom unit. Kitchen to the right, sleeping chamber to the left. The living/dining area was in the middle. Nobody else was in the place. The bedroom had a balcony overlooking the street scene. The same people were still there, going from one place to another, laughing and having a good time, unaware of who or what walked among them.

  Something brushed against my leg. I reached down and picked up a large Siamese cat and carried it into the living room.

  The woman watched me walk toward her, cat cuddled up in the crook of my arm. I handed the pet to her. She clutched the animal to her chest and shivered.

  _______,

  After a few minutes Tess McPherson put the cat down. “Why are you here?”

  “Your family’s friend. Senator Black was worried.” I gestured to the door. “With good reason.” I decided not to mention anything else. Hysteria wouldn’t do at this point.

  “Who was that guy?” Tess shivered again.

  “We don’t know.” Nolan rubbed the back of one hand across her mouth for the tenth time at least. “He’s not long for Planet Earth if I have anything to say about it.”