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“A girl needs you. You have to get her home...to her mother.”
“Put her ass on the bus.”
“Jeremiah.” Her voice sharp, scolding.
“I don’t have time to rescue wayward girls.”
“Baby, I’ll be here whenever you get here. Tomorrow, next week, next year, I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.” She grabbed his eyes tightly, held his hand just as tight. “I’ll wait forever.”
The ballroom tightened around him. “There’s something else. What is it?”
How could her eyes be so brilliant, shining in a sea of mocha skin, when she had been dead so long? How could her hair still be as shiny as onyx?
“Someone’s coming.”
“For me?”
With a nod, she forced him to twirl her again. “Yes, Your Honor, for you.”
2
The finger shocked him.
It was nearly lunch time. The poker game, just another anonymous game with vague promises of Mariana’s hunk of tin, had run through the night, the players’ moods as black as the west Texas night, and had fallen apart amidst clenched fists and hot spittle and vows of retribution for the assumed cheating by the big winner. That had been six hours ago and ultimately there had been no word of her tin. Bean had walked out angry and tired and five hundred and sixty bucks lighter.
Now he was all those things AND seriously hungry.
Johnny’s Barbeque was on tap for lunch, then a quick meeting with a Barefield detective, an even quicker meeting with the delivery driver. Then Bean was back on the road to Langtry West and some sleep, the sleep he should have gotten last night for all the good the poker game had done him.
Troubled sleep, Mariana would call it.
It was all troubled anymore.
When Judge Bean walked in to Johnny’s joint, which he used as an off-the-books mailing address, a package waited. Inside the thick, padded mailing envelope was a small box and a note. Inside that small box was a human finger. At least a couple weeks detached and stinking to holy hell.
The note was a shitty photocopy of a Texas Ranger badge, and the words, They lied to you.
3
The hammer cocked. A metallic click explosively loud in the tiny room.
Hardly a room, just a flop for a cheap whore. Empty whiskey bottles and old pizza boxes. Smelled of menstrual blood and shit. Of piss and despair.
“Know that smell, baby.” Pressed the gun against the whore’s throat. “Now...how many times I’m gonna ask?”
It was a woman again. Made no fucking difference...man...woman...they all knew where the Judge was.
“Please...I swear to God—”
“This might sound kind of...I don’t know...but God does everything I ask.”
The whore cocked her head. “What?”
“The Judge, woman.”
“God? What?”
The gun nuzzled her neck, a metallic lover.
