THEY DIDN’T stop till they got over the county line. Darren instructed Randie to pull into the parking lot of a bowling alley in Garrison. He was a cop running from the law, and much as he appreciated the ridiculousness of it, much as it galled him, he was not about to stop and explain himself to a sheriff he technically outranked. A verbal standoff with local law enforcement over pecking order would piss off Lieutenant Wilson and earn a mark against his name that Darren couldn’t afford, not after just getting his badge back. Let Van Horn deal with the reckless gunplay out of Wally’s place. Darren was not going to be questioned about the way he was running an investigation the sheriff had all but dumped at his feet.
He ordered Randie out of the car. She was lit with terror, her limbs like live wires she couldn’t stop from quivering. He had to tell her twice to stand back from the Chevy while he changed the rear tire that a bullet had shot clean through. On the ground, fixing the spare into place, he scraped his right shoulder on concrete and tore a pin-size hole in the fabric of his shirt. He sweated as he worked, lines of it running down his back. Randie shivered as nightfall crept closer. She’d dumped the white coat and was wearing only her T-shirt and jeans. He had the spare in place in less than fifteen minutes and got on the phone with his lieutenant right afterward. He wanted a warrant on the grounds of potential drug possession with intent to sell, using the Brotherhood connection as probable cause. While he was searching Wally’s icehouse he’d seize Missy’s work schedule. It was the kind of bait and switch cops did all the time. But Wilson was furious.
“Ranger, you’ve got less than twelve hours before some stringer from Chicago touches down on Texas soil, sniffing around, and you’re dicking around about meth sales? You practically begged me for this, remember? You’re there to gather evidence on the Michael Wright homicide, and that’s all.”
“I’m telling you it’s connected to the Missy Dale murder.”
“You don’t know that.”
Darren explained his strategy: they could use the drug issue to get inside; they could bury a request for employee schedules in the warrant. It was potential evidence that could put the two deceased together on the same night, the very night Michael Wright disappeared. But Wilson wasn’t having it.
“This is not a drug case.”
“Wait,” Darren said. “When I was working the task force, I wasn’t allowed to bring up race crimes, and now I’m in the middle of a race crime, and suddenly you don’t want me to bring up drugs?” Randie was standing on the other side of the truck’s cab, leaned against the door. She’d heard every word.
“You don’t know this is a race crime,” Wilson said.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Watch it, Darren.”
“Why is it so hard for you to admit what’s right in front of your face? I’m in this town that’s swarming with members of the Aryan Brotherhood, and two of them tried to make a trophy out of my ass tonight.”
“What?”
Darren stopped himself. He hadn’t told his lieutenant about the shooting; some part of him didn’t trust his department to back him in this situation. If he said a word about Ronnie Malvo, with a grand jury indictment still hanging in the air, Wilson would pull him out of there instantly, and Randie would be on her own. Wilson’s end of the line went silent, save for the soft trill of phones ringing in the background. Darren remembered the quiet hush of the sensibly carpeted Houston headquarters, how civilized the public corruption investigations and assists in the world of white-collar crime seemed as he stood on cracked asphalt in a shitheel town on the outskirts of Shelby County, having just been shot at by a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He told Lieutenant Wilson he was working on a few leads, then got off the phone as quickly as he could, cursing under his breath. Randie crossed her arms over her chest.
“What now?”
Darren told the only truth he knew right then. “I need a drink.”
He tossed his tools into the narrow backseat, then started for the bowling alley. Randie seemed confused at first but followed him anyway. Because the bar inside the bowling alley had only beer and wine—and fuck that—they made a quick turnaround to the truck and ended up at a tin-roofed joint up the highway. This side of the county line, he could breathe a little more deeply. They were playing blues when Darren held the door open for Randie, a Koko Taylor song filling the one-room bar and dance hall. It was black folks mostly, wrapping up a late afternoon of day-drinking. There were a few men in T-shirts setting up for some kind of a show tonight, bringing in drum kits and portable speakers.
Darren tried to remember what day it was, how long it had been since Greg had called him about the two murders in Lark. Some part of him knew he was edging around a mistake sitting inside this bar, that the heat from the run-in with Brady and Keith Dale was blurring his judgment. It wasn’t yet six o’clock: the sun was still setting when they’d left the parking lot. If Randie didn’t have anything, he thought he could keep it to one drink. But she met his bourbon with an order for a vodka martini, which somehow came back as two shots of vodka mixed with Sprite and a maraschino cherry tossed in. Randie took a sip, made a face, then drank half of it. They sat in silence for a bit. The music played as two men in their sixties wearing nearly identical checkered shirts played dominoes at the next table, the pieces clinking musically against the wooden tabletop, matching time with the blue notes pouring out of the speakers. Darren was trying to figure out another way into the icehouse, another way to prove Missy’s whereabouts on Wednesday night, to verify Lynn’s story, when Randie pushed her drink a few inches away and crossed her arms. She spoke so softly that Darren had to lean forward, setting his elbows on the sticky table. The whole thing tilted, startling Darren and nearly upending Randie’s drink. But she didn’t flinch.
“I was leaving him,” she said. “I never said it. But he knew. I was setting him free.” She lifted her drink and took a big gulp. The admission weighed her down, sinking her shoulders, the hot shame of it caving her chest. “I never should have married him. I didn’t mean it. The love…yes. The life…no.”
“This isn’t your fault, Randie,” he said. “You didn’t do this.”
He’d been trained in this particularly difficult area of police work, and he knew that folks grappling with sudden death often blame themselves to some degree, even when it makes no sense. He’d felt such a stab of guilt after his uncle William’s death—even though he’d been nowhere near the traffic stop that took his life, wasn’t even in the state—that he’d lost a few weeks in a nearly blinding depression over the loss of his favorite uncle, the man he’d considered his North Star, the light by which his life was guided. He didn’t sleep or eat with any regularity, and his grades suffered, making the decision to leave law school that much easier. William had been killed by a suspect he’d pulled over for expired tags, shot twice in the face as soon as he approached the driver’s window. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t Darren’s fault. And joining the Rangers wouldn’t bring William back. He knew all that. But years later, he was still wearing the badge.
“I’m the reason he came here,” Randie said finally.
“What do you mean?” He remembered the scene in Geneva’s suddenly, the tense moment playing out right before he got the medical examiner’s report. “The guitar,” he said, trying to follow. “Michael was bringing it to Lark?”
“He was chasing a love story.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He must have told me a dozen times,” she said, a bittersweet smile finding its way to her lips. “The story behind that guitar. He grew up with it. It’s what he wanted to believe about us. A love that turns your life around in a single day, a love that changes everything.” She reached across the table for her drink and downed the rest. “His uncle, Booker, used to tell the story all the time.”
“Booker Wright?” He’d seen the name on Joe Sweet’s Wikipedia page.
She nodded and ran her finger around the rim of her glass, repeating the name. “Booker.”
He played bass in a band with Joe Sweet. That’s the way the story always began, she said. Sometime around 1967, Booker and Joe were doing a string of gigs with Bobby Bland. Starting in Detroit, Gary, and Columbus, up north, then down through Missouri, Kansas City, and Joplin, then on to Little Rock. They were heading into Houston that summer, had a few dates set for the Eldorado Room and the Pin-Up Club. They’d met in Chicago in the late fifties, Joe and Booker, and had played as a team for most of their careers, either doing session work for local labels that produced rhythm and blues or crashing chitlin’ circuit tours, playing backup for Etta James and Wilson Pickett, Johnnie Taylor and O. V. Wright, even one time jumping on a run of shows with Otis Redding in Atlanta and the Carolinas. They were men who roamed, forever on one highway or another, off to the next town, the next gig, sleeping in motels that would rent to colored folks or in their car—a ’59 Impala they shared the note on. Neither was married, though Booker kept girls in several cities, and neither was looking. It was music first and where they could make a dollar second. They hopped on Highway 59 just outside Texarkana, heading south to Houston, speeding through the East Texas woods, where Booker was raised. He and Joe were in the first car, some other cats from Bobby’s band following behind, chasing a dream, too. Multiple telegrams had made their way to Don Robey, and there was talk he could get them a spot on a revue he was putting together, something steady around Houston. They thought Robey might actually let them lay something down on wax, recording under their own band name, the Joe Sweet Midnight Revelers.
It looked for all the world like this was their big break, a shot at signing with Peacock Records. A new sharkskin suit or two had been purchased, and pairs of Stacy Adams had been polished in the front seat of the Impala, Booker with a kit at his feet, brush and polish in hand, as Joe drove them down Highway 59.
And this is where the story always took its turn, the way Booker told it. Joe ain’t ever make it to Houston, he told Michael, who told Randie, who told Darren now, sitting across from him in a one-room juke joint not that far from the one Joe and Booker rolled up to one July night forty-some years earlier.
It was called Geneva’s, and it resembled a very well-constructed shack, with sanded wooden slats and scalloped shingles on a roof that was strung with tiny colored bulbs. It had been built by hand, the kind of homey place that looked like it catered to Negro folk traveling on the north–south main line in and out of East Texas. There was no gas pump back then; there was barely what you could call a kitchen, just a pit out back and four burners on a mint-green porcelain stove. And no staff, of course. Just a woman called Geneva who opened the door for them at a quarter past eleven at night, even though she had already closed. There were six in their party, and they were hungry and not ready to make the rest of their trek through Klan country, where city law met its ugly, racist cousin in the faces of small-town cops and rural sheriffs—not on an empty stomach, at least. Geneva fried up a few pork chops with onions and thinly sliced potatoes and let them root around in the cooler she kept out back. For three quarters, they could each have a couple of beers and a nip or two of the gin she didn’t have a license for.
Wasn’t long before they got to jamming a little, once Geneva said she didn’t mind a little music. She wasn’t but a few months past twenty-one years old, and a party was all right by her. She owned a few blues records herself but had never gone past Timpson, had never seen a live show, so this was something. Joe had his guitar out first, the Gibson Les Paul on which so many people’s fates turned—Joe’s and then Michael’s and now Randie’s and Darren’s. Geneva stopped dead in her tracks when she heard him play.
Joe was nearing thirty. He was a dark-skinned man in a pale blue cotton shirt rolled to his elbows, and the ropy muscles in his forearms danced with each note he picked. He was playing a piece of a Lightnin’ Hopkins number, Better make it up in your mind, baby… little girl, do you know you traveling a little too slow, and he kept his eyes on Geneva as she set a steaming plate in front of him, his nearly black eyes peering into her wide, oval ones, lit gold from the gas lamps dangling overhead. As Joe sang the words to her, Booker watched what was happening, felt a current tickle the air around them, felt the one-room cafe grow warm, damp with the breath of seven people packed in a tiny shack on a summer night—five people too many, by the looks on Joe’s and Geneva’s faces. Never in his whole life had Booker seen two people home in on each other like that. Time Joe walked in, Geneva never took her eyes off him, and he watched her move as she cooked, the way she ducked her head to the beat while flipping meat, twirling onions in pork fat. He picked that guitar and watched her hips sway in a damp chambray dress. Tommy and Bones, runaways from Bobby’s band, played a set next while Booker got good and drunk, double-fisting Joe’s untouched beers and the flask they kept in the Impala’s glove box as Houston slowly slipped away.
He didn’t remember losing track of Joe, only that at some point the food had been eaten and the plates were still sitting on the table. Bones, Tommy, and Amon Richmond, another one of Bobby’s boys, were talking about getting back on the highway, thought they could make it to Houston by sunrise, unless ol’ girl had a place they could stay. Because of the booze, Booker couldn’t remember if he was sent outside to ask Geneva if they could crash on her floor or to tell Joe it was time to leave. He didn’t even really remember how he knew they were outside—except where else could they be?—and anyway he had to relieve himself in a way that felt epic. He was just getting his fly down when he saw the two of them backed up against an oak tree, Joe’s shirt sticking to the skin on his back and sweat running down Geneva’s neck as Joe ran a hand up under her thin cotton dress. Booker felt weird holding his johnson while this was going on, and he quickly slipped back inside. Joe came into the cafe a few minutes later and said he wasn’t going to Houston. They were welcome to spend the night—at this Geneva nodded, already acting like it was her decision as much as his—but Joe was staying in Lark.
It broke Booker’s heart in a way he wouldn’t understand for years to come. It was a betrayal first and foremost; there would be no Joe Sweet Midnight Revelers now. But it also lit up some deficit Booker felt in his own life: of all the women he had bedded, pressed up against in the nighttime, not one of them would he want to look at come sunrise. He hoped Joe didn’t wake up with any regrets, but either way, Booker wouldn’t be around to see it, didn’t even want to look him in the eye by daylight. Joe let him keep the car, and in the frantic rush to pack the Impala—grown men avoiding any moment of silence that might be filled with talk of hurt feelings—Joe’s Les Paul got packed back into the car. Booker was about ten miles outside Space City before he realized it was in the backseat.
There were good intentions over the years, plans to return it, but over the rest of his career, whether his front mind knew he was doing it or not, he never found himself on Highway 59 again—not through East Texas, at least. In fact none of the Wrights returned to Texas. There was always another way to Chicago, his adopted home; the heart always has a workaround. Joe Sweet was like a brother to him, and it was a loss that ate at him for years, compounded greatly when he heard that Joe died before Booker ever got a chance to make peace. When Booker got diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, he left the guitar to his nephew, along with a note about a pretty brown lady down in East Texas to whom it rightly belonged.
“That’s beautiful,” Darren said.
Randie shrugged. She was into her second drink by now, and he was cozying up to his third, right on the line between a nice time and a mistake. “Too good to be true,” she said flatly. But Darren didn’t buy her cynicism. Joe and Geneva, they’d made it more than forty years; it was real, and they both knew it, even if they didn’t recognize that kind of loving devotion in their own lives.
“Not a romantic, huh?” he said, picking beneath the surface of her doubt, wondering what made a woman hear a story like that and turn her back on it.
“I resent it, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“Telling that story was a way for Michael to suggest I didn’t love him enough to leave the road for him,” she said. “It was manipulative and unfair.”
Darren found himself taking Michael’s side, not realizing until the words were coming out of his mouth how much they sounded like Lisa’s. “Maybe it was just love. Maybe he just wanted you home as much as he could have you there.”
At least he wanted to believe that’s what Lisa wanted. She’d accepted the idea of him as a Ranger behind a desk, but joining the task force, his push to do more work in the field, had changed something between them. The boots and the truck, the shining five-point star, it was all of a piece of Lone Star swagger that drew a stark contrast between the young law student she’d married and the man life had demanded he become. It terrified him to consider that maybe their marriage had been built on conditions in fine print he never bothered to study, requirements his wife had buried beneath a thousand kisses, a thousand times she said she loved him. “Maybe he wasn’t forcing you to make a choice,” he said, a wistful hope in his expression that lay naked his own unease around the subject of marital constancy. He looked across the table at Randie, smiling tightly, attempting to play the moment light but failing. By then the band was playing a Sam Cooke song, a slow drag hoping to freeze a moment in time. To say it’s time to go, and she says, yes, I know, but just stay one minute more.
Darren felt something painful settle in his gut then, saw clearly what he’d been previously unable to face, as if the truth had pulled up a seat at the table and offered to buy the next round. His eyes watered slightly, blurring the neon beer signs on the walls into a kaleidoscope of liquid color. He felt at sea against a rising tide, and he gripped the half-empty glass of bourbon in his hand tightly.
Randie nodded at the ring on his left hand. “What about you?”
She was opening a door, he knew; it was an invitation to talk if he wanted to. Her hand inched the slightest bit across the table, and he had a panicked thought that she might reach out and touch him, that the simplest kindness would break him and make him say things out loud he still didn’t want to believe. He and Lisa—he wasn’t sure they were going to make it. He leaned back in his chair and built a dam for the rising emotion from the loose stones in another man’s marriage, pivoting back to the case.
“There’s something I need to tell you.”
There was a blues-filled beat of silence before she spoke.
“The white girl,” she said, shrugging as if she knew this was coming.
“I don’t know if anything happened,” he said carefully.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” she said.
He suddenly remembered Lynn’s words out back of the icehouse. Some people never learn.
“White women?” he asked.
“Does it matter?”
“Around here it does.”
Randie sighed and looked away. In profile, she looked younger somehow. By daylight hours, he’d put her at thirty-six or thirty-seven, but in this darkened bar, the low light kissed by amber and rose from the neon signs, the skin on her face was so smooth, and her features so tiny, that she looked girlish, even more so when she raised her glass to the bartender, a plump girl in her twenties who was talking on one phone while texting on another. Darren laid a hand on Randie’s arm to stop her. He couldn’t come back from a fourth drink, but neither could he resist if it showed up at his table. He was still touching her arm when Randie said, “There were women—black, white, who knows? I don’t know how many. He never said, and I never asked.” She fell silent for a long moment, glancing toward the guitarist on stage, a man in his seventies wearing a gray wide-lapel suit. “I was gone a lot.”
“None of this is your fault, Randie.”
“Never said it was.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you.” But he had been trying to deflect his own pain. He said softly, “I just wanted to let you know there may be some connection between your husband and another woman.”
“I knew that was a possibility when I got on the plane,” she said. “And I’m still here.”
She ordered another drink anyway, and so did he, as he told her his suspicion that Michael left the bar with Missy, that Keith had found them on the farm road, that this was where the initial confrontation had taken place.
Something in the story still didn’t fit.
He felt it like a ghost limb, something missing on his body, an itch he wanted to get at but couldn’t. The bourbon and the music, the heat rising from the bodies in the room dancing to a Jackie Wilson song the band was playing. It all swirled, and he couldn’t get his thoughts together.
At one point Randie said something he couldn’t hear above the bass player, and he’d had to lean in so close that strands of her hair brushed his cheek. She turned and, her lips sticky from her sweet drink, whispered in his ear.
“I was a shitty wife.”
Darren placed a hand on her back. She leaned in so he could return a whisper in her ear. “There is sufficient evidence that I’ve been a shitty husband.”