The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told (33 page)

Kim Barlow was two months in the ground when her brother first learned she was dead.

Glen got an e-mail from a deputy sheriff up in Arizona. Of course, the message had been gathering virtual dust for a couple of months in Glen’s inbox, because Glen hardly ever checked his mail. Not because he couldn’t. Sure, the rig was forty miles off the Texas coast, but there were computers around. What there wasn’t was anyone Glen Barlow heard from that way. Except for Kim, and Kim had been pretty quiet since Glen tossed her boyfriend through her living room window last Christmas Eve.

Glen had only clocked a couple months with the company, but the Installation Manager liked him well enough to okay emergency leave. Some young suit from Houston was headed back to the mainland after touring the rig, and Glen caught a ride into Galveston on the company chopper. Seventeen hours later he parked his truck in front of the El Pasito sheriff’s office. He’d already talked to that emailing deputy on a cell phone he’d forgotten in the Ford’s glove compartment when he ditched the mainland for his time offshore. Glen used that cell phone about as much as he used his e-mail account.

The deputy—whose name was J. J. Bryce—had spent most of the day waiting for Glen to show up. One look at the guy and Bryce shook his head. He shook his head when he saw Glen’s pickup, too. Try to describe that old hunk of Ford in a report, he’d note the color as rust or primer, take your pick. And the guy who drove it was pretty much the same way. Headed towards forty with the years starting to show. Bryce was real familiar with the type. A drifter—one of those guys who was wiry as a half-starved animal. And that might mean you were talking jackrabbit, or it might mean you were talking coyote. Sometimes it was hard to tell going in.

But Bryce already had an opinion about this guy. He’d heard all about Barlow tossing Kale Howard through that living room window last Christmas Eve. In fact, he’d heard more about it than the talk that went around the cop shop. Not that any of that mattered right now. The way the deputy saw it, right now things were all business.

The two of them sat down in the deputy’s cramped office and ran the drill. There wasn’t much to look at. Not in the office. Not in the file Bryce had on Kim Barlow’s death. But Glen looked, and he took his time about it, and that wasn’t something the deputy much liked.

After a while, Glen closed the folder and slid it across the desk.

“Having a hard time buying this,” he said.

“No buying it, really. It’s what happened.”

“You don’t have a suspect?”

“You read the report, Mr. Barlow. You don’t have a suspect in a case like this.”

“You talk to that asshole Howard?”

“Yeah. I talked to Kale. Read his file, too.”

“Then you know he used to beat up my sister.”

“I know that. But I also know that Howard didn’t do this. No man could have.”

Glen just looked at the guy—kind of grinned, didn’t say one word—and Bryce all of a sudden felt his pulse hammering, because it most definitely wasn’t the kind of look you got from a jackrabbit.

Glen Barlow said: “You’d be surprised what some men can do.”

There it was. Cards on the table, and all in the space of ten minutes. But the gents named Bryce and Barlow hadn’t quite played out the deck, so they went a few more hands. Bryce reminding Glen about the restraining order, warning him how hard he’d go if Glen went after Kale Howard. Glen asking questions, the deputy batting them off or not answering them at all. The words exchanged weren’t getting either man anywhere he wanted to go, or anywhere he wanted to take the other. The two of them were running neck and neck, and neither seemed to like that very much.

Finally, Glen said: “I want to see the pictures.”

“Look, Barlow. I understand that your sister was your only living relative. You know the land out there. As far as we can figure it, she was alone, rock-climbing at Tres Manos. She must have taken a fall. After that . . . well, she was hurt pretty bad. She had a broken leg. It was a couple days before anyone found her. Something got hold of her before then . . . a pack of coyotes, or maybe a big cat. We had some experts in and they said—”

“I don’t care what they said. Kale’s mixed up in this some way. Wouldn’t surprise me if he wanted a little protection after I tossed him through that window. Maybe he got himself a pit bull.”

“We checked that out, Mr. Barlow. Kale doesn’t have a dog.”

“That doesn’t change anything. I still want to see the pictures.”

“Trust me on this. You don’t.”

“How many times you want to hear me say it?”

The deputy drew a deep breath and tried to hold his temper.

“You want me to, I’ll say it again.”

Bryce was so pissed off, he could barely unclench his jaw, but he got the job done. “Okay, Barlow. You want pictures, pictures is what you’ll get.”

The deputy yanked open a file cabinet harder than he should have and tossed another manila folder across the desk. Barlow looked at those photos for a long time—the way Bryce figured time, anyway.

“All right,” Glen said finally. He closed the folder, slid it across the desk, and got up so quickly that he took Bryce by surprise. There was more that the deputy needed to say, but Barlow didn’t give him the chance. He slammed Bryce’s office door before the deputy could say another word, and a handful of seconds later he slammed the door to his busted-ass pickup hard enough to leave a shower of rust on the ground. Then he drove straight out of El Pasito, foot hard on the gas. Past the town’s lone bar . . . past the funeral home . . . past the gun shop . . .

Two miles into the desert, Glen Barlow laid rubber and pulled over.

The goddamn deputy was right about those pictures.

At the base of a dying yucca tree, Glen puked his guts dry.

J. J. Bryce filed the folders on the Kim Barlow case and shared the story of his run-in with her older brother with the sheriff. He sat around the office killing time, but he just couldn’t take it sitting there with the sunset slicing through the Venetian blinds and the edge of the desk marred by cigarette burns from the lazy-ass deputy who’d had it before him.

So he clocked out and got in his own pickup, a brand-new Ford which was a hell of a lot shinier than the one Glen Barlow drove. That didn’t make Bryce feel any better, though. He was still boiling, and there wasn’t much he could do about it at the moment—El Pasito only had one bar and Sheriff Randall didn’t like anyone who wore a badge drinking there.

So Bryce drove out of town, south, towards Guadalupe. He figured he’d swing by a Mexican grocery store he knew in Dos Gatos. The place was about thirty miles out of his way, but that’d give him some time to cool off before heading home. Besides, you could get pork carnitas at the grocery, already marinated and ready to go. Bryce figured he’d grab a sixer and some tortillas while he was at it. Later on, he’d drop those carnitas in the banged-up cast-iron skillet he used on the barbeque, watch the stars wink on in the sky while he downed a couple of brews, and the night would go down easy.

Or easier, anyway.

By the time the deputy edged his speedometer past seventy and got the A/C cranking just right, Glen Barlow had chugged half a warm Dr Pepper that had been playing tag with a bunch of burger wrappers on the floor of his truck. The good Dr didn’t do much for him besides wash the taste of puke out of his mouth. Still, that was a plus.

Glen drove south. Same road as Bryce, but in the opposite direction. He didn’t plan to be on the road long. There was a crossroad just ahead, a narrow unpaved lane jagging west through creosote, coyote brush, and amaranth.

Down that road was where Glen Barlow was headed, because there was other stuff he needed to know. Stuff a guy like Bryce wouldn’t tell him. But that was okay—Glen knew where he could find some answers. It was the same place he’d left a whole mess of questions when he cut out of town last December.

That thought chewed on him. He hung a left, pulled over at the side of the dirt road and took another swallow of warm Dr P. For the first time that day, he felt nervous. And that was strange, considering the cards he’d been dealt in the last few hours.

A yank on the handle and the truck door creaked open. Glen climbed out of the cab and stood there in the dry heat. He was dogtired after a full day behind the wheel, but he couldn’t relax. Still, he tried. He needed to catch his breath before going any further.

He closed his eyes for a minute. There were crickets out there somewhere . . . sawing a high, even whine that wouldn’t go away. Glen was so used to being on the rig, listening to the sea and the gulls and the equipment. It was weird listening to something different. But he wasn’t really listening, no matter how hard he tried. He was thinking. Remembering last Christmas Eve . . . remembering pulling to a stop right here, as a cold December moon shone above.

Right here in the same place that he was standing now. Glen churned the last gulp of soda in his mouth. He thought about that night and the nights that had come since then, and he thought about where those nights had taken him. Full circle. Right back to the place he’d begun.

He shook his head, glancing at his reflection in the banged-up driver’s door mirror.

Guess you only have one gear, you stupid bastard.

Glen almost laughed at that. But he didn’t. Instead, he spit warm Dr P on the dirt road. Then he climbed in the truck, keyed the engine, and kicked up some roadbed, leaving that wet patch on the ground for the thirsty red earth to drink up.