A Swollen Red Sun (22 page)

Wade Brandt left Algoa in faded Levi’s that threatened to slide off, a pair of steel-toed boots, and a T-shirt advertising Snag’s Pool Hall that read
liquor in the front, poker in the rear
. It was his favorite shirt when he went in, but since he’d lost weight it was a size too big.

He passed the main gate and a thin black guard with skin stretched tight across his face warned him not to come back. Then Wade stepped into that harsh golden sunlight and what he saw stopped him in mid-stride like a brick wall.

Darlene was waiting. She had parked in a handicapped spot and was perched on the front of a 1977 Bonneville like a hood ornament. There was a GPC with at least three inches of ash fused to her lip. She blew him a kiss with lips the color of red paint, then dropped her GPC on the parking lot.

When she stood, the whole car moved and he saw a mess of hair that had been many colors at many different times, though none of those colors ever seemed to fully wash out. Darlene had a solid frame with shoulders as wide as her brother’s and a face just as fat.

Wade, almost reluctantly, climbed into her Pontiac and saw a case of warm beer between the seats. A set of pink fuzzy dice hung from the rearview mirror that looked like they’d been dragged behind a garbage truck.

Darlene had him by a good hundred pounds. She told him she and Ray were twins. Then she pulled from the parking lot in the Bonneville and left dark plumes of smoke behind her.

Wade was nervous and looked over his shoulder. When he asked Darlene where they were going, she didn’t tell him. She just handed him a beer, which he accepted and opened and drank. He looked out the window as she rambled and smoked. Told him how she liked it rough. Hinted at the promise of the night that was to come.

She shook pills inside a brown pharmaceutical bottle and asked him if he wanted a bennie.

When they left Algoa, Herb Feeler was behind them. In his four-wheel drive. There was a score to settle and a job to do. Wade Brandt would have to go. Darlene would, too, unfortunately, unless he came up with something better.

Herb Feeler was playing this part by ear, but murder-suicide was an option. It would be a stretch and he knew it—because two suicides in one week was asking a lot of the people—but Herb Feeler was sure he could pull it off. Make it look like Wade Brandt was a psycho. Just another convict society had run through a garbage disposal.

Darlene went to a dump called Bud’s Place where the best room in the house was sixty dollars and room service was nonexistent. The television worked when it wanted, and the carpet smelled like hobo piss. But the bed was soft, and he spent the first night doing things to that woman that only three years in prison could make a man do. The first time they made love; he rolled off of her and puked in an ashtray. He told her it was the nine hot Stags he drank on the way to Bud’s Place.

The next few pokes went a little smoother, though she was a bit rough with him at times. When she’d said she liked it rough, she had not been lying. Darlene pinned him to the bed and used her size to her advantage. Manhandled him in ways he had not expected—ways reminiscent of how prison life could have been had he not been a fighter, and had he not been protected by the outside world, an advantage spearheading a crank operation inside the joint had afforded him.

Herb Feeler sat in the parking lot and lingered. Watched Wade Brandt go through parked cars after dark and take what he could carry. Herb smoked and listened to country music while he honed his Buck Knife on an Arkansas stone and waited.

He thought about the way things had been going. Once Wade Brandt was dead, Herb was free, and the future belonged to him. The connections he’d made in Jefferson City were finally paying off.

But he could not have something sneak up behind him a year or two down the road. Nor could he have some countrified dipshit popping up on his radar. Asking for a favor, or threatening to expose him. Herb had worked too hard to see that happen. Any strings connecting him to methamphetamine were cut.

They left Bud’s Place the next evening with an extra forty dollars and a hot new pistol. He’d found the gun in a station wagon with a bumper sticker that read
ted keneddy
’
s car has killed more people than my gun!

He looked in the mirror at the cut above his eye where Darlene had hit him with the ashtray once he’d had enough. She was crazy; he could see it. As he drove, she sat beside him, texting her husband. Telling him who she was with and what she had done.

He rubbed his finger along the cut and took a big gulp of rum. Darlene squeezed his leg and crammed a handful of diet pills down his throat. They’d been eating them nonstop, and that was the primary cause of all that fornicating back at Bud’s Place.

Wade raced the Pontiac at a high rate of speed as they blew down the back roads of Gasconade County. He hadn’t driven in years, but the wheel felt natural in his hands. This seemed to excite Darlene and she yelled for him to go faster, so Wade jammed the gas pedal to the floor and they listened to the Pontiac choke. The carburetor gagged, and the car pumped an oil cloud of thick black smoke as the motor screamed and pleaded and tried not to blow up.

Everything was fine until they took a corner outside Bland in the wrong lane and the right front tire blew off the rim.

Darlene screeched as the wheel dropped onto the asphalt and began grinding down. Sparks flew up into the window and peppered her big freckled arm.

Wade yelled and yanked the Bonneville to the shoulder.

“My Bonnie,” Darlene cried.

He pulled over once they found good shoulder and hoisted the bottle upright. He finished off the rum and asked Darlene if she had a jack.

She grabbed him and hugged him, but he pushed her away and told her she smelled like sweat.

“You got a spare in this beast?”

Darlene said she did, and Wade walked to the back and slid her key in the hole, but Darlene never got out. She fired up a GPC instead and blew a mouthful of smoke out the window.

In the trunk, he found bags of dirty clothes and cat litter and a box filled with sex toys. There were leftover Happy Meals and half-eaten pizzas. He did not see a spare.

“It’s there,” she promised.

He set the box on the roof and dug a little deeper and found a semi-bald tire under a pile of dirty whites that no amount of laundering could ever sanitize.

He rolled the tire to the front of the car and went back for the jack. The trunk was deep, and it was packed with clothes and trash. The stench of garbage in the afternoon heat took his breath away.

Herb Feeler had followed them in his Dodge Ram. Toothpick between his teeth and a smoke behind his ear. He’d been waiting for his chance to confront them and would give Wade Brandt his terms: return to Algoa for stealing a handgun, or pistols on the shoulder.

Herb knew Wade had a burner. Had watched him swipe it from the wagon.

It was the convict’s choice and it did not matter to Herb which decision he made, though a gunfight was right up his alley, and a dead witness was the best kind.

Once that fool had a blowout, Herb saw an opportunity. Set his plan in motion. Pulled up behind Wade and climbed out of the truck and made his way to the Pontiac.

Wade Brandt was on his knees when the sheriff walked up and gave him a hard look with his eyes.

Herb stood in front of the Bonneville, and Wade’s pulse hammered his ears.

His mind was on fire from two days of sex and Stag and Benzedrine.

“Y’all’s goin’ a little fast back there, huh, speedy?”

He looked up and met Herb Feeler’s eyes. Said he knew it was a matter of time until he found them.

Sheriff Feeler stood over him as tall as he could like a good ol’ boy and grinned. “Didn’t take long.”

“Now, Herb, I just want you to know that I’m done with that life.”

“You think so?”

“I do. Fixin’ to go ’n’ see my dad right now.”

Sheriff Feeler shook his head no.

Wade opened and closed his fists and swallowed hard.

The sheriff read his expression. Held the palm of his hand against the butt of his gun.

Told the outlaw,
Make a move.

Wade saw the Bronco pull up behind Sheriff Feeler and heard brakes squeal as its driver applied pressure. It came to a stop and parked at an idle with the engine running.

Herb recognized Banks and relaxed his stance, though he kept his hand on the gun.

Banks brought the Bronco to a stop, though he kept it in drive. Foot on the brake, glasspack exhaust rumbling. He said all that was required with the look of unspoiled vengeance he wore so well.

Herb met his eyes and matched Banks an angry scowl of his own. The air was electric. The pressure incredible. Everyone within that odd circle knew they could die.

Wade, on the ground, tire tool in his hand, watched nervously. And waited. And hoped and prayed, after all he had done and been through, not to have it end this way. Not like this. Shot on the side of the road like a dog by the hand of a redneck coward.

Darlene was terrified for the first time in her life. She missed her husband and her kids and their trailer. It wasn’t much, but it was theirs. Bought and paid for, and no one could ever take it from them.

How she longed for that security. How, at that moment, no place in the world had ever sounded as appealing. The drone of the river and the boats. Ronnie was dirty, but good. Honest for a meth cook. He was a family man, to the best of his abilities, and he had always loved Darlene.

If she survived the afternoon, she would return to their trailer. Beg Ronnie to take her back. Promise to be a good mom and a good wife and hope he could forgive her.

She was scared and missed home and was no longer having fun.

Herb knew Banks would be a problem, but he had not expected this. Why couldn’t the prick have just stayed home? Now it would come down to the thing he never wanted. A shoot-out with a good man who should have kept his mouth shut.

He said, “You dumb—”

Banks drew the cap and ball revolver, quickly and unexpectedly, and fire belched from the barrel and the Bronco filled with smoke.
Now
it was done. Banks used the gun Olen Brandt had planned to give the son who’d died, to save the son who’d lived.

Wade heard the gunshot, and Herb dropped flat on his back. Arms splayed out, hands open. Face smashed in and blackened. A hole had been bored through his forehead that smoke escaped from in a gush.

Darlene screamed and tried unsuccessfully to heave herself onto the floor. The whole car rocked; the worn-out springs shook and bounced. She was stunned beyond words, with lines of shock etched in her face. She’d seen a man’s head blow apart because a lead ball plowed through it.

She held her head in her hands. Crying. Tapping her swollen calves together like a white trash Dorothy Gale.

The smoke was dense, the cloud it formed impenetrable.

It poured heavily from the window of the Bronco. Rose from the body on the pavement in great waves the wind took and carried over the ditch and across the bean field and into the trees.

Banks let off the brake and rolled forward. He could not see out the window. When he pulled away, he saw Wade drag Sheriff Feeler’s body to the back of the Pontiac.

Wade stuffed Herb’s body in the trunk and slammed the lid. Grabbed the sex toys off the roof and jumped behind the wheel and pulled away gently, careful not to leave any black marks.

He recognized the Bronco and wiped the sweat off his face. Told Darlene they were free—but Darlene was in a state of shock. Told him to take her to her husband.

“It was fun while it lasted,” she said. But the ride was over, and she’d had enough.

She told him he could keep the car. She did not want it back. Not after there’d been a dead man inside it.

Wade looked out the rearview mirror and saw smoke. It leaked from the sheriff’s head wound and seeped from the trunk and blew across the pavement with the exhaust fumes.

He would dispose of the sheriff in the best place he knew of, a place he had visited many times before. The Tar Hole was an ancient clay pit with four steep walls that grew from pitch-black water of unfathomable depth. A burial ground for a hundred years’ worth of collectibles. There were cars and trucks and tractors—even people—who sank to whatever bottom waited all those feet below its dark surface.

Wade Brandt had stolen a tractor-trailer from a truck stop once, and after cleaning out its contents, had driven both the tractor and the trailer into the hole, where it disappeared forever in a thunderous splash, an elongated hiss, and a cloud of boiling steam.

They drove in silence. She never asked about the man in the Bronco or the man in the trunk, and Wade never told her. He just drove her to a gas station and dropped her off and told her she was pretty.

Then he ripped the dice from the rearview mirror and threw them on the road. Limped the car to the fastest speed he dared and removed a butt from the ashtray.

Wiped off the lipstick and relit it and drove her Bonneville to the Tar Hole.

Becky Hastings left Gasconade County in a U-Haul truck with her dad behind the wheel. Her parents had come up from Florida. She was hurting, and they missed her. She had her mind made up she was leaving, never to return.

She had been a vibrant florist who prided herself on the love she shared through her flowers and her gift baskets. Now she was devastated and heartbroken. She did not know how to feel. Or what to feel. The man she loved was gone. Shot dead in a mobile home by a man who beat his mother.

The thoughts of that. How he had lied to her. What could her man have really been doing? There was money in his car unaccounted for. Drugs. They could not belong to him, not to the man she knew.

She had not been herself since Bo Hastings died.

He had been her world. Her everything. In love since college, she watched him play football and she watched him ride bulls. She was there when that monster threw him. Then she nursed him back to life, convinced him to be a deputy. Refurbish the name his old man had tainted. They had a family to plan and a child to raise.