Part 2
THE MOMENT WE GOT off the highway in Fort Stockton, she said, “Wait! Turn right here!” I did. It took us between a Motel 6 and some kind of redbrick office building thing. “Stop here!”
I did. “What’s up? You sound like it’s mighty urgent.”
“It is. You seem like a sweet boy. So I am very sorry.”
“For—”
She puked Darkness right in my face.
I tried to weave out of it, but my dang shoulder harness trapped me. It’s amazing how hard it is to keep track of even simple, everyday things when ace-powered blackness suddenly blots out your vision. I’d just tripped the belt release when I heard my door open and felt hot air wash over my left side.
She yanked me out onto the hot asphalt on my back. “Ouch!”
“Sorry. You’ll get your car back, too. Eventually.”
My vision cleared in time to watch the back end of my RAV4 dwindle down the street and hang a sudden left. Without a signal.
“Shoot,” I said, slowly picking myself up. My muscles hurt more than the vertebrae, at least. I rubbed my lower back. “I need to wash Baby something awful.”
Yes, I named my troca after Dr. Tachyon’s spaceship. Yes, I really am a cowboy nerd.
All three of ’em were standing in the middle of a motel room that was precisely as crappy as you’d expect a motel called the Hide-a-Way in the nether reaches of Fort Stockton to be, talking loudly, when I walked in the open front door.
“Knock knock,” I said. Then, to the striking girl who was towering over me from several feet away, not, “Really? Pigtails?”—though I surely was thinking it—but, “I’m Jesse. I’m the one who talked to you on the phone.”
“How the fuck did you get here?” Candace said.
“Uber.” La Familia Gutiérrez was running up quite the expense total. Well, I didn’t ask them for the job.
“Who—” Billy started.
“He answered that, dumbass,” Mindy-Lou snapped. Ooh, trouble in Paradise.
But nothing compared to what came in through the big black hole that suddenly appeared in the water-stained wallpaper.
I already said I was no Sherlock. Looks like I’m not an action hero either. These two dudes came strolling in, right through the wall, one a weedy little runt in overalls with a shock of dirty-looking hair, the other being what looked for all the world like a human crossed with a hound dog, with the lovely parts of neither. The weedy one had him on a leash. The doggy one looked us over with sad, bloodshot brown eyes sunk in saggy folds like a bloodhound’s, and drooled down his slack lower lip.
And me? I stood there staring like somebody had sneaked in and superglued my boot soles to the scary brown-like carpet.
“We’ll take it from here, Darkness,” the guy on two legs said in a Louisiana drawl as the hole vanished behind them. “Looks like you lose.”
The piteous joker guy, who seemed to be wearing ratty gym shorts, for which I was powerfully grateful, pulled rubbery lips back from a mouthful of yellow teeth whose disturbingly human appearance was only made worse by prominent fangs.
His baby blues practically bugging out of his head, Billy Rainbow started pointing at the dog-man and gibbering. “What is that?” seemed to be the essence of what he was trying to get across. Candace just stood there looking cool as always. “Buck and Blood. Eh, bien. So our boss double-crossed me and farmed the contract out to you. What makes you think he won’t do the same to you?”
“’Cause we win,” the one I took for Buck said, with the air of a man who’s discovered an irrefutable argument. “We bring him back the goods.”
“Are you talking about me?” Mindy-Lou demanded. “Because if you are, that’s, like, totes demeaning.”
“You cochons haven’t won, as you Americans say, dick,” Candace said. And suddenly, where the two interlopers stood, was one irregular blob of Darkness.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “They are dumb but danger—”
With a savage snarl the dog-man came flying out of the black cloud and hit her with his palms. His weight knocked her right over. I heard her head bounce off the edge of the writing desk with one leg shimmed up by splints of wood. Then she landed on her back beneath the high wall mount where a TV that was older than me was shackled as massively as if it would’ve brought more than five bucks at a pawnshop.
The standing man was laughing nasty-like. “Ol’ Blood, he don’t need to see you to strike. He can smell your brown sugar just fine!”
Candace had to be groggy from the head crack, but was gamely fending those scary-toothed canine jaws from her face, while managing not to let the joker get a tooth lock on her arms. I reached out with my mind for a handful of dust.
It’s like groping with my own physical hand, best I can describe it. Housekeeping here was the sort where they charge you extra if you want the sheets changed before you take the room, and we were in way southwest Texas, which meant dust should not be in short supply. But for some reason it took me a spell to feel some. Then I ran my mind over it—that sounds way creepier than it is, but let’s keep moving—and managed to scoop a pinch off the bedspread and stain-mottled pillowcase.
This I tossed in Blood’s nose, open mouth, and hound-dog eyes. My power doesn’t work just on literal dust; all it has to be is what you call your fine particulate matter. I reckon this was mostly human dander and dust mites, which sounds disgusting, but that might not matter much to some poor son of a one cursed by the wild card to be as much dumb animal as man. What did matter to him was that he started sneezing and choking violently, and left off trying to bite Candace to dab at his own eyes and whimper.
She got her feet up against his chest and heaved him right off her. She got up smart quick, then, but swayed.
“Dumb cunt don’t know when you’re beat,” Buck said, and pulled out a gun. A snub-nosed .38 of some kind. Not my first choice, or second, and he held it down by his hip, which is second worse only to holding it sidewise for hitting what you think you’re shooting at. That didn’t make him any less deadly. Especially since he struck me as none too tightly wrapped.
So here we were: Candace too woozy to Dark him. Me needing a minute or so to recharge the mental batteries to go foraging for more dust. Billy apparently still losing whatever mind he had in buckets over the admittedly unsettling and unhappifying appearance of Blood.
And Mindy-Lou, all six feet of her in her little short Catholic schoolgirl–looking skirt and blouse, brown pigtails flying, said, “Fuck this,” rared up, and fetched Buck a mighty clout over the ear with a wooden chair.
Somehow Buck managed not to trigger off a shot as he went down in a heap of busted-up chair parts, a lucky man it was too cheap-ass to cave in his skull. He also managed to keep a hold of his snubby. He was moaning and stirring his limbs vaguely, like a drunk penguin, even before he finished sitting down hard on his skinny butt.
“Good job,” I said, grabbing Mindy-Lou by the wrist and towing her in the direction of the still-open door. Fortunately, the Valkyrie fury, if that’s a thing Latinas can catch, had drained right out of her. She came along docile as a puppy.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “That was supposed to knock him out.”
“That’s just movies,” I said, as we emerged from the hot and dim of the motel room to the hot and bright of late afternoon. “Reckon you gave him a concussion, though, that makes you feel better.”
The RAV4 was unlocked and running, which of course meant the keys were in. Candace seemed to have wanted a quick getaway more than she worried about getting her car stolen. My car. Which she had stolen. Easy come, easy go, I guess.
I bundled Mindy-Lou any which way into the passenger seat, trying not to pay an unseemly amount of attention to bare brown legs that looked as long as all of me. I vaulted the hood, which made my durned back twing but looked boss, I’m just sure, and ducked behind the wheel. Which was blistering hot, of course. Apparently Candace’s limited driving experience had not clued her in to things like sunshades.
“Ow, ow, ow,” I whined as Candace yanked the right-side rear door open and literally dove across the seats. She got herself righted just as a second, longer person folded himself into the other side.
“Shut the door!” I yelled at Billy Rainbow as I screamed Baby in a backward arc, shifted, and sent her squealing and bouncing across the cracked and weed-sprung asphalt parking lot toward the street. “And what is he doing here?”
“The exit’s that way,” Mindy-Lou said, pointing off to my left and waving her hand in front of my face in the process.
“Irrelevant.” We bounced over the curb, I screeched us more or less parallel with the road, and off we went.
“Why are you turning here?” Candace demanded as I hung the second left on two wheels, between a warehouse with a forklift parked outside and a strip club that looked as if it had been closed for years.
“Getting out of line of sight of those clowns who walked in on our cozy little soiree. I don’t want ’em dropping through the roofs in our laps.”
“Helps if he shoots at us, too,” offered Billy, who had recovered his composure smart quick out of Blood’s presence. Though Buck had about as much chance to hit us if he threw that snubby.
“So what was all that back there about?” I gobbled. “Who were those guys? Is everybody an ace these days?”
“Was that a Dr. Strangelove reference?” Billy asked.
“Yep.”
“Well,” Candace said, tentative for once, “perhaps I didn’t tell you the whole story of who I’m working for.”
“Which is to say?”
“The record label that’s so hot to sign Mindy-Lou is owned by the Syndicate. So am I, you might say. And those two connards back there.”
“What?” Mindy-Lou and I said at once. I was still driving around at random. If I got lost, Google Maps remembered where I-10 was. I had faith.
“Fuck,” said Billy. He seemed pretty quick on the uptake for such a dedicated screwup. “We are so fucked.”
“I am fucked,” Candace said.
Beside me, Mindy-Lou burst into tears.
Little as I could blame the child, current events considered, it did nothing to help my considerably frazzled composure. “Listen,” I said over her wailing. She had a good voice even doing that. “I think we all need to sit down together, calm right the heck down, and talk about all this in a rational matter.”
“So says the big, strong cowboy,” Candace sneered. Which was unfair, since I am by no means big. I like to think of myself as average height for an American. Plus I’m a wiry little lagarto, as my grandma likes to say. “Why didn’t you shoot him? You’re an American. This is Texas. Where is your gun?”
Why, it’s right there in the glove compartment in front of our Ms. Gutiérrez, I thought. Where you never bothered checking. I had, though, right quick before walking into that motel room.
“We still need to deliver Mindy-Lou back to the contest without raising a public ruckus,” I said. “If I shot him, no matter how justified, a mighty ruckus would ensue. So far the police still don’t care enough to connect the dots on our little petty crime spree. Somebody dead on the floor around a bullet wound would change that pronto. So we need to think in terms of less drastic solutions. Or at least less noisy ones.”
“Take her back?” Billy chirped up from the back seat. “So you’re kidnapping her? Cool!”
That brought us a moment of blessed silence. Mindy-Lou gave off sniffling and sobbing to stare at Candace and me with big, brown, deer-in-headlight eyes.
“That … depends,” I said. “Now everybody please pipe down while I figure out a place we can light without attracting any more unwanted attention.”
“First things first,” I said, as we all tucked into the bags of McDonald’s we had set before us on the weathered wood picnic table tucked away in a corner of Pat Taylor Athletic Field on the southwest side of Fort Stockton. Where fortunately no athletic events were taking place, nor seemed in the offing. “How did those slasher-movie nutjobs find you?”
Candace sat across from me, chowing down on a Filet-O-Fish. She looked thoughtful, chewed, and swallowed. Raised up proper, whatever else she was. “I told you the cops could track Mindy-Lou’s phone by cell-tower hits, non?”
“Sí. And I told you they had no reason I could see to do so, since the crimes involved were minor.”
“Just because they do not do so officially, does not mean they cannot do so as individuals, on the side.”
“You’re saying the Syndicate bought a cop?”
She laughed. “No need. I’m saying they have any number on the inside of any law enforcement agency you know about, and very, very many you do not. Or perhaps they rented somebody else’s mole. They do that a lot too. Somebody made an official-sounding request for the data, and the cell company obediently handed it over without raising any fuss about due process. One thing I learned since joining your underworld is what a very great favor all your antiterrorism laws do for criminal organizations. Your law enforcement groups all share information so freely these days, there is hardly any infosec at all.”
“They’re not mine,” I said. I wished I could’ve said I was surprised. “So now we get to our big question: Mindy-Lou, do you want to go back to San Antonio now?”
She nodded vigorously. Her mouth was occupied by being stuffed with a big old bite of Triple Cheeseburger. I already knew the kids hadn’t gone hungry on their little jaunt. That was the source of one of the biggest problems I could see in our road that wasn’t a pair of murderous sideshow freaks. “Yes, please,” Mindy-Lou said, wiping her mouth with a napkin. “I wish I’d never laid eyes on this asshole.”
Billy looked as hangdog as a body can who’s stuffing his face with Chicken McNuggets and sucking on a strawberry milkshake like a five-year-old. “I’m sorry, hon.”
“Don’t ‘hon’ me, you—you loser. I trusted you. I believed in you. And then your car broke down before we even got out of San Antonio, and you’ve been getting me deeper and deeper into this—this shit since!”
He looked at us as if expecting sympathy. Yeah, lemme point that out in the dictionary for you, pal. “Man, I feel so bad about everything,” he said. “I never thought it’d all go south like this.”
Well, for that I could sympathize with him. Almost. The plain fact was, he and Little Miss Muffet here had made a truly wondrous mess of things in a really short period of time. It was an impressive achievement, looked at from the perspective of someone who wasn’t me and staring down the three horns of a joker dilemma: Who was least terrible to wind up on the wrong side of, the cops, the Mob, or mi abuela?
Okay, maybe just a nat dilemma. Disappointing Grandma was not an option.
“I mean, I woke up this morning and suddenly it hit me: I probably shouldn’t have boosted that poor peckerwood’s truck and his bank card, even if it was only just the one. I mean, he probably misses ’em mighty bad ’long about now. That was just mean. And ‘mean’ just isn’t me.”
“You know,” Candace said, swigging a bottled water, “I make a habit of trying extremely hard not to kill anybody. But I am much more tempted to make an exception for this one than even for Buck and Blood.”
Leaving aside the odd little tint to her voice that suggested this no-murder policy was a relatively new development on her part, I was gut-inclined to believe Billy. He was coming across to me not so much malicious, or even stone cold like a real con man, as somebody who had never learned the habit of thinking things through.
Billy had lost what color he had in his face and, at least for the moment, his appetite. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I—I just want to make everything right. Like all of this never happened.”
“Well, one of those things is actually going to happen,” I said. “You are most certainly going to help us make things right, my friend. And you best pray it’s possible.”
“I’m an atheist,” he said.
“Well, thank God you’re not a Protestant, as my mom would say. But right now, Candace, I think we all need to hear a little more detail of what kind of people you’ve been bent on delivering Mindy-Lou to.”
She sighed. “Bad ones.”
“What’s all this about Titan Records and the Syndicate, anyway?” Mindy-Lou asked.
“They are the same. They want you back very badly, child.”
“But they were gonna make me a star!”
“Why’d you run off with Billy Sunshine, then?” Candace asked.
“Rainbow,” Billy said.
“Shut up,” we all three said.
“He was gonna make me a Hollywood star! The first marquee actress and movie scorer, like, ever!”
I had to admit she had the looks for it. And apparently the talent. The “Mozart of Modesto,” remember?
The abuela and I had had another conversation about Mindy-Lou’s family applying healing transfusions to my own fast-fading bank card. “You want more money, pendejo? They’re already making unhappy noises about how much all this is going to cost them.”
“They ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And tell them even that is going to mightily pale beside how much it would cost to defend their little songbird from all these criminal charges she’s been ringing up. Anyway, they agreed to cover expenses.”
“That they did,” Granny said, and I could hear the twinkle in her eye. “And they better not try to weasel out!”
Guess who paid for dinner? Yeah, I was hungry, too.
“I am worried,” Candace said. “Not just that they sent out Buck and Blood after they’d promised me the job. But what the job really is. They may not be intending to groom the girl as America’s next pop star. Someone like her could fetch quite a price in certain corners of the world. Especially if she is a virgin.”
“Hey, man,” Billy said, “don’t look at me. I didn’t touch her.”
“He most certainly did not!” Mindy-Lou said indignantly. “I told him I was saving myself for marriage, and he was a perfect gentleman. Well, that way, anyway.”
“Then may God have mercy on your soul,” Candace said.
I was looking at her pretty hard. “So that’s what you were going to give her up to? To be sold for a sex slave?”
She dropped her eyes to her grease-stained yellow sandwich wrapper. “I hoped not. They can make a great deal of money if she hits big as a performer in the U.S., or even in Europe. The Syndicate owns a lot of the pop music business, you know.”
“I didn’t, no. Easy to believe, though.”
“But not even they can control all the outcomes. It is always a gamble. If they are offered a big enough amount up front, that will tempt them strongly. In a way such people are not used to resisting.”
“You reckon they got an offer?” I asked. Mindy-Lou and Billy, who also sat opposite each other at the table, were following our conversation like onlookers at a tennis match. You could almost hear their eyeballs clicking left and right. At least they weren’t saying anything. Small favors, you know?
“First I must give you more background.”
“Make it fast.”
“Please. This is important. I never meant to work for the Syndicate. I was a freelancer, doing all kinds of jobs where my talents proved useful. Some of them were even legal. Most of them were gray. Then I found out I’d unwittingly contracted with a minor Mob boss, a Ukrainian. And once you sign on with them, they have a way of sinking their claws into you.”
“Just like a movie!” Billy said, and I swear he perked right up.
He perked down at the look she gave him. “I spent the last couple of years … not wholly my own woman. Doing things even I find distasteful. At one point in my life, I was a monster. I never want to be one again. I would rather die—and I am a survivor, I assure you. But their tasks made it hard. I worked out an arrangement: one last score, and they’d let me walk. I trusted this was it: they believed enough in Ms. Gutiérrez’s star potential to offer a premium contract to get her back. Enough to buy me out of what they thought of as my obligation to them.
“Or so I thought. Until the wall opened up and Buck and his brother walked through, back at the motel. That’s Blood’s power: he can make a tunnel from anywhere to anywhere. Otherwise, he is simple—impaired.”
“I kinda gathered,” I said, starting on my second Triple Cheeseburger with jalapeños. Which were not as good as real green chiles, but the alternative was “chili,” and nobody wants that.
“The gun is new, though. In the past Buck has been content to let his brother do the violent work. You saw. They’ve mostly played taxi for heavier hitters. It looks as if Buck is aiming for promotion.”
“So maybe they’re auditioning—like, for your old job?”
“My place in the hierarchy, perhaps. Their involvement makes very clear to me that the Syndicate has no intention of letting me leave their employ. Alive, anyway.”
“What does all this mean for me?” Mindy-Lou sounded as sick as anything else. And who could blame her.
Candace shook her head. “I—I will not take you back. Fuck them.”
“But I want to go back!” Mindy-Lou said. “I miss my band. Well, except Jillian. She’s why I left. She’s a total bitch, and I’m sick of her pushing me around. But I’ve worked so hard for this. I want to be in the contest. Let Billy run off to L.A. This is what I’m supposed to do.”
“My employers do not take happily to disappointment,” Candace said.
I put down my sandwich—regretfully, because I still felt a powerful hunger upon me—laced my fingers together, and thumped my hands down on the table. “Okay,” I said. “There’s a way to work this out. There’s always a way.”
“Yeah, what?” Mindy-Lou said, a beat after Candace did.
“We’ll get to that.” When I pull it out of my narrow fanny. “See, you have a problem, Mindy-Lou. Which is the little crime spree you and Charlie Starkweather Junior here have gone on. Now, it’s too small-time for cops to bother with. But it gets out you ran away from the big-band contest in San Antonio, with the national spotlight awaiting you and all, that’ll change muy pronto. If they put all the petty scams together and douse the heap with possible publicity, prosecutors start pulling out their lighters.”
Okay, it’s possible I let my metaphor kinda run away with me, here.
“Best bet is to claim you were flat kidnapped. That Billy used his rainbow power to make you commit crimes. That makes you a victim instead of an accomplice.”
“He didn’t,” she said. “The only time I saw his rainbows before was when, like, he shone them in other people’s eyes at the contest. Sort of a party trick, like hypnosis. I didn’t see any harm in it. But I wasn’t kidnapped.”
“Good for you,” I said, and meant it.
“But you saw through his bullshit pretty quickly,” Candace said.
“Hey!” Billy burst out. “I’m right here!”
Candace gave him a quelling look. He quelled. Then to Mindy-Lou, “Why did you keep going along with his rip-offs, then?”
“Well, we needed to eat. And a place to sleep. And he was like, ‘Sorry, bae, but we’re already in this together.’”
“Wait,” I said. “He called you ‘bae’? Literally that?”
“She’s still beyond all else to me!” he said proudly.
“I never killed anybody at all,” I said. “But that makes me want to reconsider.”
“You’re the one losing the plot, now, Dust,” Candace said.
I blinked at her. It was a childhood nickname—never Dusty, which I hated. People started hanging “Dust” on me once they noticed I had something going for me normal people didn’t. Years before I ever did. “Sorry. Been a long day for me too. Anyway. These things happened. Fortunately nobody’s gotten hurt, nothing major’s gotten broken. Right?”
“Right!” Billy almost yelled.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Mindy-Lou said, and actually crossed her heart. I don’t think I’d seen anybody do that since I was thirteen.
“Here’s our situation. We got to track down the victims of your various misdeeds and get them all to agree to forget about pressing charges. And quit looking eager, Billy. We will do that without making use of those rainbows of yours.”
Against honest folk, I thought. Because the seed of a plan had started sprouting in my mind. It was not a good plan. It was an insanely risky plan. But it was also way better than every other course I could see. All of which wound up with us certainly boned and maybe dead, instead of just probably.
“Once we do that, and we are on a tight schedule here, we will deliver you safe and sound back to the contest.”
“You just want to make sure you get paid,” Billy sneered.
“Of course he does,” Mindy-Lou said. “He’s not an idiot, like you.”
“Of course I do. But keep in mind that none of the things we are about to do will stand the light of day. They may be legal, I hope. Some of them. But—once people start looking for dirty bits here, they’re gonna find ’em.”
Mindy-Lou had been nodding along. Now her face turned green. “But won’t that mean the record company—”
“Nobody is selling you into slavery. All right?”
“But how do we stop them?”
I ticked a finger at her. I hoped it made me look more grown-up than I was feeling, right then. “In due time,” I said, because for a fact I hadn’t got it thought all the way through. And also because if I told them what I was thinking of, they would have all gone bounding off across the plains like ol’ jackrabbits. Including Candace.
“First we got to get you off the hook with the law. Then we work things out with the, uh, the record label. And, yes, for you, too, Candace.”
“So you, the White Knight American Cowboy, aren’t even considering calling the police?” Candace asked.
“No. You’re not from around here, so maybe you don’t know how things go. I was raised to walk the straight and narrow by a mama who believes things authority figures tell her. But I’m a working-class, rural Latino. Brown skinned in Texas, ¿sabes qué? I did not grow up believing that la policia are my friends.”
“You know, Mexico’s right nearby, and bein’ as I got my powers, and all, the border won’t hold us up—” Billy started off, giving Mindy-Lou a soulful blue-eyed look. I could see how he was used to melting a girl’s heart.
Too bad hers had annealed, at least where he was concerned. “No! And fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Billy McConaghy!”
That was the first I heard of his last name. He shrugged it off with a sad smile and began sauntering around the table toward Candace. “Y’all seem like well-intentioned people,” he drawled, “even toward a sinner like me. I think you mean that, honest I do. But I think it’s really best for me to—”
He rolled his right palm over. A rainbow spurted out of it, arcing directly into Candace’s big black eyes. It even dazzled me, off to one side.
For a moment she just stood there. Then she whipped out a shin and caught him in the crotch so hard she lifted his boot heels plumb off the ground.
The rainbow went out.
“If you ever try that again,” she said, “I swear I will cut your throat and bury you under a cactus.”
Billy looked at me with a tentative grin. “Keep that shit away from me, gabacho,” I told him, “or I’ll dig up the cactus for her.”
His shoulders sagged. He honestly looked about to cry. Which I took for sincere. “Make you a deal,” I told him. “You help us, and don’t try any more funny business, and at the end we will let you walk away with a bill of health as clean as Mindy-Lou’s. On the other hand, if she or any of the rest of us sink, you will sink as well, and a good deal deeper and more painfully. ¿Me intiendes, ese?”
“I don’t really speak much Spanish,” Mindy-Lou said, “but he means, do you understand?”
“I know what it means.” Billy swallowed hard. “And yes, sir, I do. You may not trust me, and your reasons are sound, but I do trust you.”
“Especially on that ‘sinking painfully and deep’ part,” Candace said.
“Mindy-Lou?” I asked.
“Do I have a choice?” She brightened, slightly. “Whatever you’ve got is better than any kind of future I can see. Probably.”
“Fair enough. Now, while we’re still on the clock, here, we got a little prep work to do. You got a smartphone, right, Candace? And I bet it’s a burner?”
She nodded at that first part, looking a little suspicious, which didn’t seem any out of the ordinary for her. Her look curdled up plenty on that second, like I’d asked for her PIN to her bank account or something. “You have a plan?”
“It’s coming.” I stood up. “Well, now that we’re all happy friends and all, we got us a job of work to do. Grab up your dinners, kids, and eat ’em on the run or chuck ’em in the trash. We got no time to sit around chewing!”
