Bluebird, Bluebird Page 7

  He knew he shouldn’t love her more for this—the knot of stinginess in his wife’s heart, the parts of him she wanted for herself—but he did. “If something happened to you,” Lisa said, unable to bear the end of that sentence.

  “It’s the job,” he said, repeating her words.

  “I’ve been too rigid. I know I have.”

  Some part of him knew she was only saying this because she thought he was through with the Rangers, but he didn’t care. He’d been waiting for weeks to hear those words, might even trade his badge for them. “I love you, Lisa.”

  She was not the only woman he’d been with—he’d been a sex-starved college student for many years, with a girlfriend more than a thousand miles away; things had happened that they’d both agreed not to talk about—but she was the only woman he’d ever loved. It didn’t hurt that Clayton adored her.

  He was embarrassed by how much that mattered to him.

  “I don’t like the drinking,” she said, offering up a condition.

  “It’s under control,” he said, sitting in the parking lot of a bar.

  He was just going to have a look around, for his own peace of mind, before he left this little town. And you couldn’t very well walk into a bar and not drink anything. He’d need a prop, after all. A bourbon before him was just like the cigarette in Geneva’s backyard, only this time he planned to inhale.

  “I’ve got something I have to finish up here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Doing a little job for Greg.”

  “Greg,” she said, the single syllable hard as a stone.

  Darren didn’t bothering digging around behind the icy tone. He was too close to home base. He laid out his plans: he’d turn in his badge tomorrow, as Lieutenant Wilson expected, and they’d all see what happened next, whether Mack was indicted or not and what that meant for Darren. Lisa never said a word about law school, no mention of anything beyond tomorrow, and he loved her for that.

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  He felt so good he almost considered skipping the bar altogether and heading out now. Highway 59 was a straight shot down to Houston. He could be there in time for one of the shows Lisa liked to watch—Scandal or Real Housewives of Somewhere or whatever it was. But no: he had a drink waiting.

  He’d been in and out of honky-tonks many times in his life, had a crush on a drill-team captain his sophomore year—before he and Lisa got serious—and he’d spent nearly every weekend that fall semester burning up gasoline driving to a stomphouse in Victoria, almost two hours outside the city, where kids from his high school could drink without anyone asking questions. He never did learn to two-step or get more than a peck on the cheek from the girl, who said he was cute, but her daddy would kill her if she brought home a black guy. The white kids from his high school were cool with him, though. They let him sit at their tables, even bought him a beer or two. It was everybody else that was the problem. The women who rolled their eyes if he got too close on the dance floor; the men who made sure to give him a little shove every time they passed, muttering nigger or coon loud enough so he could hear; the stares he got, menacing eyes peering at him from beneath the brim of ball caps and cowboy hats. He felt the same eyes on him now as he entered Jeff’s Juice House.

  There was a pool game going.

  At least there had been before Darren walked in.

  To a man, the players around the felt table, dressed in grass-stained Wranglers—one of them was wearing a Cruz 2016 T-shirt—stood stiff as stone, cues in hand, eyeing the black man who’d just stepped over the bar’s threshold. The interior of the icehouse was like an oversize playroom, with a station for pool, two pinball machines, a dartboard, and a jukebox that, unlike the ancient one in Geneva’s, played CDs. And country music, of course. George Strait was singing, “Easy come, girl, easy go.” The Dixie flag was on display all over, pinned to the walls beside highway signs and posters for Luke Bryan and Lady Antebellum shows in Dallas. It was a mostly male clientele, and there was one buxom bartender on duty. She was a woman on the wrong side of forty, with thin bark-brown hair and a decent face marred by what looked like late-stage acne or a telltale sign of meth. East Texas had a saying for white women like this: rode hard and put up wet.

  He approached the bar and ordered bourbon, neat, and she took no time putting into words the animus he felt coming from every corner of the icehouse.

  “You lost?” she said.

  “Not even a little bit,” he said, hiking up his left hip as he climbed onto a bar stool, making sure the leather holster holding his .45 showed. The bartender relented with a scowl. Darren watched her pour, making sure nothing extra found its way past the lip of his glass. When she slid the drink across to him, he lifted the glass and said, “To open carry.” He left a twenty on the bar to show he meant to stay awhile, then turned and found a seat near the back of the room.

  There was another girl on duty, a waitress dressed in cutoff jeans and a tight Jeff’s Juice House T-shirt, the same uniform Missy must have been wearing when she was working last night. He glanced at the men around the bar, ages nineteen to fifty, and considered the bullish energy in the room, the smell of cigarettes and sweat, the tits and ass on display everywhere. Boobs on bikes, on the hood of a Corvette. There were pictures of nearly naked girls everywhere. Maybe no woman was safe leaving here alone. It had to be considered, he would tell Greg, who, if he could get a copy of the autopsies, could do a lot more for Michael Wright and Missy Dale than Darren could kicking dust around this town. He sat back and let the bourbon settle in, like hot butter through his veins, everything coming loose. A bathroom door opened behind him, and, not liking his back exposed, he turned and was shocked to see not only that the icehouse had a women’s restroom but also that the woman coming out of it was black.

  She was wiping stray beads of water from her face. Drops of it darkened to caramel on the winter-white coat she was wearing—not an item that, if you knew any better, you would ever wear in a place like this. Her pallor was almost gray, and she clutched a black Furla handbag against her side as she wove through the sticky tables, making eye contact with no one, including Darren, who did not for an instant take his gaze off her. Only a few times in a cop’s career does he feel the kind of certainty that came over Darren in that moment.

  The wife has been notified.

  At a table across the room, she sat alone, spoke to no one, only stared at her surroundings—the Confederate flags, the white men nudging each other in her presence, the plates piled with pork and beans and toast the size of textbooks—as if she were trying to read street signs in a foreign country, as if she didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten here. Darren rose at once, almost without thinking. Until he arrived at her table, and she looked up at him not with relief but confusion, he’d forgotten he wasn’t wearing a badge, forgot his limited role in this. “Are you okay?” he asked. Her response was lost in the music and electronic games and the two televisions set to Monday Night Football. He sat down across from her and watched her flinch. He said his name—naked, without a title. She nodded and said something he still couldn’t make out, so he leaned in, close enough to see the slack skin under her eyes, which were red-rimmed and moist. She shook her head and said, “I don’t know why I’m here,” then stood hastily, knocking over a water glass with the edge of her purse. The water rolled in shallow waves across the tabletop and landed in Darren’s lap. “I shouldn’t have come,” she said, moving toward the door that led to the porch and the parking lot. Darren grabbed her hand and stood to follow her out. “Don’t touch me,” she said, yanking herself free of him.

  They’d created a scene by now.

  The bartender nodded to a guy in a black shirt and a Steelers cap at the far end of the bar. He uncrossed his beefy, tattooed arms and started toward them. Michael Wright’s wife pushed past Darren and marched toward the front door. He followed a few steps behind, chasing her through a room full of men who were all staring. Outsi
de, the music faded, and a rig heading south roared past the icehouse, blanketing the parking lot in a cloud of exhaust. The sun was gone, and the bar’s neon sign painted the ground amber and a bluish white, the name of the icehouse reflected in the windshields of the pickup trucks in the lot.

  Darren was at the bottom of the porch steps when he heard the sound of boots behind him. He turned to see the big guy in the Steelers cap now guarding the front door. “Go on and get,” he said, pronouncing it git and shooing them as if they were stray dogs. “Both of you, go on and get the hell out of here.”

  Darren scanned the parking lot, searching for her.

  “Not looking for any trouble,” he said to the man in the black T-shirt.

  “Well, you in the wrong place, then.”

  The man stepped forward, just enough to catch light coming off the neon sign, enough for Darren to see the ink on his arms. He counted at least three marks that meant trouble. Matching crests on both biceps, outlined in black and topped with the letters A and B and shot through with a T-shaped dagger, dripping a tiny dot of blood. And a pair of SS lightning bolts on his left wrist.

  The door behind the big dude opened, and four other men stepped out onto the porch. Darren recognized at least one of them from the halted pool game. Two of them were strapped. So was Darren, of course, but he was grossly outnumbered. He knew even a gesture in the general direction of his holster would get him—and maybe Michael Wright’s wife, too—killed in a matter of seconds. She’d come up from behind him then. “I want to know what happened,” she said, her voice rougher than it was before. She was speaking to the men standing sentry in front of the icehouse. There was an accusation in there somewhere. Darren heard it, and he knew the mob on the porch did, too. He held out an arm to stop her from coming any closer to the men, who would cut her in two as soon as look at her.

  “Someone here knows something,” she said.

  Chicago, Darren remembered suddenly.

  She has no idea where she is.

  She was dressed in clothes that, as Darren knew from living with Lisa, cost a lot of money, including that white cashmere coat. It was October cool, by Texas standards, but the coat was too much, and she was starting to sweat, that gray pallor spreading across her face from her hairline down. She wore it loose, waves of it in a bob that fluffed in the humid air. He looked directly into her eyes, which were round and wide and the same shade of amber he met in a glass most nights.

  “Don’t do this,” Darren whispered.

  “Someone must have seen something,” she said. There were actual tears now, twin streams running down the sides of her face. “What did you all do to him?” She marched past Darren to the foot of the stairs, where she was met by one of the men from the pool game. He was in his early thirties, his icy blue eyes red-rimmed and desperate, shooting his own tear-streaked rage from beneath the bill of his ball cap. He wasn’t going to let her talk anymore, if he had to lay hands on her to stop it. He reached out as if to grab her.

  “Keith!”

  The beefed-up man in black stomped down the steps, coming up behind him, putting a suppressing hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. Keith. The name tickled the hairs at the back of Darren’s neck. Was this Keith Dale?

  “Lady, you need to quit all that hollering and listen to your man here,” the tattooed man in black said, making cheap assumptions about the two black people in front of him. Behind him, one of the armed men lifted the flap on his holster as he, too, came down the steps. By Darren’s calculation, the night was about sixty seconds from taking a very bad turn. This woman did not seem to understand in the least what those tattoos meant. But she saw and understood the guns, and for the first time he felt her backing up behind him. He needed to get her out of here right now, away from these men, hopped up on hate and suddenly gifted with a physical target for their rage: a black woman talking too much. Darren’s truck was close enough for him to say, “Get in.”

  He grabbed her by the elbow, guiding her to the Chevy.

  “I have a rental car.”

  “Where?”

  “I parked…”

  She scanned the lot as if she couldn’t remember which American-made sedan was hers. Ford, Chevy, Chrysler—they all looked the same to her. She was panicked and confused about which way to go, the tears blurring everything.

  “Leave it.”

  As he opened the passenger-side door to his truck, she said, “I’m not getting in a car with you.” Her hands were shaking as she fished for her rental-car keys.

  He leaned into the Chevy’s cab and opened his glove box so that in the light from the icehouse his badge shone. The familiar words rolled out, and he felt the same swell of purpose as he had the very first time he’d said them. “My name is Darren Mathews, ma’am,” he said. “And I’m a Texas Ranger.”

  8.

  HER NAME was Randie Winston, and she’d gotten the call three days ago—from her agent, actually, who’d reached her in Saint Albans, outside London, where she’d been on assignment, photographing a spread for British Vogue. She’d been traveling nonstop ever since—a train ride into London, then an eight-hour flight to New York, where she had to change planes to get to Dallas, because she’d been told it was closer to the Shelby County sheriff’s office where she was to meet Sheriff Parker Van Horn. Except it wasn’t the sheriff who’d greeted her at the tiny station in Center, Texas—another three-hour drive on top of the twelve hours she’d been traveling—but a deputy who couldn’t have been a day over nineteen, the class ring on his right hand cutting into the extra pounds he’d put on since graduation. He’d been sucking down a gas-station chili dog when she walked in, and he nearly choked when she gave her name. “Michael Wright’s wife,” she said, the last word nearly swallowed by a sob that rose in her throat.

  She and Michael had been separated for more than a year, but she was his wife until the end, dropping everything and arriving with only the clothes she’d been working in. She was a fashion photographer, rather sought after around the world, and the cashmere and fine jewelry that suited her world marked her as an outsider here. Her camera equipment was still in the rental car, and Darren told her repeatedly that he would get it, walk the six miles back to the icehouse if he had to. He’d gotten them rooms for the night at a motel up the highway a piece from Lark. She was shaking by the time the truck hit the highway, leaving the icehouse in Darren’s rearview. In the front seat of the truck, exhaustion and grief collapsed her limbs. She was going on fumes by then.

  The motel was a ten-room horseshoe-shaped building with a neon sign atop a twenty-foot tower made of old tires. The Lucky Ten, it was called. The desk clerk in the lobby offered them two rooms without Darren having to ask, her eyes sliding between the wedding band on his left hand and the one that was clearly missing from Randie’s. The clerk had what could only be a home permanent, the curls tight and dry and the color of tarnished silver. She was in her sixties and wore a gold cross around her mottled neck, and she made sure they each had only one key. Darren had given Randie the room with the bigger bed. She was sitting on the edge of it now, facing the thick yellow curtains.

  Darren was in a straight-backed chair cushioned in dark green vinyl. He kept both boots dug into the thick pile carpeting, kept his hands where she could see them, and took no notes. He wanted her to know she was safe.

  “So the sheriff never talked to you?”

  “He was out of the office,” she said.

  She’d peeled off the coat and was sitting in jeans and a gray T-shirt, and Darren saw how thin she was. Her shoulders were hunched, and she’d pulled her hair back so that he saw more of her face now. Darren knew Van Horn had been in Lark this afternoon, but he said nothing. He hadn’t mentioned the other death or the name Missy Dale, and he wouldn’t now—not yet, at least.

  He could hear semis passing every few minutes on 59, late-night hollers down the highway followed by pockets of quiet when nothing moved out there, when there was no sound but the whir of tree frog
s in the surrounding woods.

  “I met with one of his deputies,” she said. “He laid out a plastic bag containing my husband’s things, saying ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘The body is in Dallas’ and a lot of other stuff I can’t really remember. And then he asked me to ID him from a photo.”

  “What things?”

  She turned and felt along the bedcover for her purse. From inside she pulled a small plastic bag, cloudy with condensation, packed more sloppily than a cop ought to wrap his lunch let alone potential evidence. Drowning, the official autopsy report had said. But according to Greg, the medical examiner had stumbled over the manner of death, whether what happened to Michael Wright was a homicide. Darren felt the question in the air. It was in the foul odor coming through the plastic bag, the stink of the bayou wafting over this case. He had latex gloves in his truck, a whole box of them. But he wouldn’t leave her right now. Instead he inspected what he could through the plastic. Inside there was a wallet, black leather, waterlogged and swollen; a gold band, not unlike the one on Darren’s hand, the one he’d worn as a gesture of hope to the courthouse this morning; and a BMW key chain, a leaf, black and torn, stuck in the grooves of the silver ring, which held half a dozen keys. All of it weighed less than a pound, what was left of Michael Wright. “This is what they found on his body,” she said. “He’d been in the bayou for a few days before being discovered, and he was swollen almost beyond recognition.” Her voice caught. She swallowed and tried to go on. “It was the wallet—that’s how I knew it was Michael,” she said. “I bought it for him our last Christmas together.” She started to cry again, softly and with a sense of deflation, oxygen leaking out slowly as she sank into herself, salty tears falling.