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Except now it was different. Now there was a note and a picture of a badge.
Wait for me, Mariana, I’ll be a little while longer yet.
A mortal sin, Jeremiah, but I will wait for you forever.
The detective stared at the Judge’s hand, which bounced over the table. “I’m missing something.”
“Need me to find it for you?”
The Judge narrowed his eyes. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you the man who lost his son? Are you anymore adept at finding missing trucks?”
For a span of heartbeats, the detective glared at the judge. For a moment, the Judge thought he might get up and leave. Instead, the man wiped his face and kept his trembling hands on the table. “A truck?”
“Should have been here an hour ago. A delivery...all points south and more than a few north.”
The detective picked at his fingernails. “How about I stay out of whatever illegal shit you’re distributing all over the western half of the fucking state.”
“Yeah...probably best.”
Around them, Johnny’s was mostly silent, the outdoor patio peopled with only a few customers. This was the Judge’s favorite table and had been since long before he’d been forced to flee Barefield and set up shop in the far desert of the Texas-Mexico border. From this table everything that was anything in Barefield was visible. All the movers and shakers, all the cops and political robbers, the wildcat drillers—what few were left—the bankers and swindlers.
Frequently the same people, the Judge thought, the same motherfuckers who dictated his life after Mariana.
Calm down. Water under the burning bridge.
“Don’t understand the empty holster,” the detective said.
The Judge swallowed some ice.
“I mean, come on, this is Texas. We let anybody carry a gun. Hell, we almost force them to.”
“So you think it’d be a good idea for Judge Royy Bean, II to openly carry? In this particular town? I think I’ve pushed certain Barefield citizens just about as far as they’re going to let me.” He laughed. Mariana always said his laugh had an edge sharp enough to cut a throat.
The detective shook his head. “Well...fair point.”
Again, not the total truth about the empty holster he always carried, but enough for this detective.
The Judge shoved a forkful of brisket in his mouth, chased it with thick, buttered toast. Bean was irritated. The detective’s face was so alive with want, so riddled with anxiety about his son. You want to know where your grown son is? And if he really shot a cop? Was he really carrying around a dismembered foot he believed to be his biological father’s? Had he really left a church in ruins beneath fires and automatic weapons fire?
Well, maybe he did want to know that, but that at least meant this man had a child who could get himself into a nightmare of bullshit.
The Judge didn’t have that.
Not anymore.
Sometimes, when the days left him bathed in heat and sweat and the nights’ relief could only be measured by multiple fingers of Tequila Don Julio, the Judge imagined both of his women alive. A few healthy belts and Mariana hadn’t died in childbirth and their daughter hadn’t died in a house fire.
Let me tell you about the World, the Judge wanted to say. Let me tell you—
The words died in his throat because he finally heard it.
The hulking thrum of eighteen wheels against asphalt. Could have been any of a million different trucks, each running cargo through Barefield to somewhere else. But something about this truck sounded familiar, though the Judge had never seen the truck before and what did that matter? A truck was a truck was a truck. But as the sound grew, easing up from faint to distant, then to near and then distinct, he knew. The air split with the whine of engine braking and t
he purple nose came around the corner a short block away.
“Bassi.” His voice was a relieved whisper.
“Judge?” the detective said.
