He hung up and moved to the couch, his eyes growing heavy after eating.
And a night sleeping on a metal bench, sitting up with his back to the wall.
He slipped into sleep, his skin sun-kissed and his belly full.
He woke in total darkness, no idea what time it was.
It was a noise that had stirred him, a creak in the floorboards.
Night had fallen before he’d turned on the porch light, so it was in blackness that he sat up from the couch where he’d been lying. His eyes began to adjust to the dark at the same time he sensed he wasn’t alone. There was a bend in the air, a sense of motion. Just as Darren’s eyes took in the wisp of moonlight coming from the windows on the back side of the house, he realized he’d left the back doors open. His heart beat a two-step in his chest, picking up speed. He remembered his attorneys’ warnings about some idiot with a gun coming after him just to make a point, snagging a trophy of a buck, black and traitorous. He was a sitting duck out here. His Colt was on the kitchen table where he’d laid it after bringing it in from his truck. To get it would take more time than he had if someone had breached the property, was in his house right now.
He strained to hear more.
There were crickets outside, a pleasant percussive buzz.
And the low hum of the old Frigidaire.
But other than that, there was nothing. It was a quiet so stark it ached, made his head hurt trying to make sense of it, the certainty that there was another soul in this room with him. He started to speak, but then thought better of it. Instead, as quietly as he could, he stood from the couch, praying his middle-aged knees wouldn’t make their opposition audibly known. He moved from the living room to the kitchen, had made it all the way to the entryway when he heard a voice in the room. “Was it worth it?”
Ronnie “Redrum” Malvo was sitting at his grandmother’s table.
Squat and compact as Darren remembered him in life, with an unkempt mustache and hair lying in greasy swirls across his pointy head, and mean eyes, so blue they were nearly as white as ice floes. Darren could see straight through them.
“I musta put down ten of y’all in my time,” Malvo said, licking lips that were crumbly looking, dry and flaky like bark peeling off a river birch. “Niggers on my belt.”
He gave Darren a wry smile. His teeth were cloudy.
They looked like they were made of smoke.
“And yet you staked your career, your life, on making my killing look clean. Lying and hiding evidence when you coulda just said the nigger shot me and claimed the victory, admit that I probably had it coming, that some things just need killing.”
Darren felt his face flush, burn with the truth beneath the accusation, the part of him that wished he was as ruthless and brazen as men who would take his life without blinking an eye. “I never hid anything,” Darren whispered in the dark. “It was Mack that did that. I was just protecting him from going to prison for shooting your ass.”
“That Breanna gal, you mean.”
Malvo lit a cigarette that Darren didn’t know he had.
It materialized as quickly as Malvo himself had.
“So I’m asking, was that worth it to you? If you end up in a prison cell over all this, ABT at your back, when you got time to sit and think on it…” Malvo took a long drag and blew smoke in Darren’s direction and asked, “Would you do it again?”
That Darren didn’t have an answer was the red-hot coal of his discontent.
He wished he had the stones to publicly admit he didn’t give a shit that Ronnie Malvo was dead, and he wouldn’t let a black man go to prison for killing him. But he didn’t and Malvo knew it, and he hated the man for making him feel like a coward, one who was comforted by his own principles. Principles that Darren, despite himself, still believed were the last line against chaos and violence. Cops shouldn’t lie.
Nobody in power should.
Keep your cases clean, son, he imagined his uncle William admonishing him now.
What he might have warned if he knew about Darren’s misdeeds.
Leave no meat on the bone, nothing they can make a meal of.
William didn’t live to see Darren wear the badge, but Darren had started his career following in his uncle’s footsteps, policing as his uncle had preached. The power of the badge, its ability to provide protection for all Texans, rested on leaving no daylight between what was righteous and what was right. Being above reproach gave moral ground to black men with badges and guns, ensured their future role in the state.
“You a fool, Mathews,” Malvo said. “Let a cracker-ass piece of shit like me make you doubt yourself, doubt your instincts… even about that gal out to Nacogdoches. When, deep down, you know something is wrong, don’t you, boy?”
He cracked a smile, his lips peeling.
“Go on, look outside.”
Darren shot up in bed, awakened by his own fevered mind.
He grabbed the Colt .45 by the side of his bed and crouched through the house.
He swore he could smell tobacco and stale sweat in the air, traces of Ronnie Malvo. But the house was empty, the scene conjured by Darren’s dream state, the torment coming from inside his own mind. The feral chatter of his own making.
Look outside.
Pistol at his side, he walked out on the front porch of the farmhouse, moving only by the light of a crescent moon as he came down the stairs. Beyond the hulking shape of his Chevy truck, he saw the silhouette of a sedan, low to the ground, a faint stream of smoke curling out of the car. Darren crept along the side of the vehicle, raised his gun, and tapped it against the driver’s-side window. Behind the wheel a white man started and had his weapon out and pointed back at Darren in the time it took Darren to realize it was a Thornhill cop, one of the men who had escorted him out of the town.
“Oh, shit,” the man said.
He was young, hair the color of wet sand.
And his hand shook as he and Darren faced off.
“The fuck are you doing on my property?”
