High White Sun Page 20

  Chris had admitted the whole idea was a Hail Mary toss, but Harp also knew the sheriff had been a pretty damn fine quarterback in college. He didn’t know what had moved Chris to make the decision, whether it was the sour taste they’d both had after the meeting in Lubbock, or listening to a few of Flowers’s so-called sermons, or just his own fears about having Flowers and Earl and the rest of them so near to Murfee, but Harp knew it hadn’t been easy for him.

  It had required Chris’s calling Royal Moody and begging for a favor Harp knew he didn’t have and somehow still pulled off. Worse, it also meant facing the wrath of Agent Nichols, who’d been burning up the phone lines for the last twenty-four hours. It had obviously taken no time for Earl to yank his agent-on-a-leash and scream bloody murder about how his son and brother were still being harassed by the local yokel cops. Chris had avoided the calls, but after another long, ugly recorded tirade from Nichols, he’d told Harp not to be surprised if the agent showed up in Murfee with an arrest warrant for Chris himself. Knowing there was going to be fallout, even if he wasn’t sure exactly what it would be, Chris had never considered letting anyone else put their name on the affidavits; he’d done it all on his own and sworn them out in front of Judge Hildebrand himself, and he was going to be the one to serve them. Harp respected the hell out of his young sheriff—he was doing right by Danny Ford and risking a lot along the way, refusing to expose anyone else to the trouble he’d brought on himself.

  Unfortunately, Harp also knew that it didn’t always work out like that, and whether Chris’s plan succeeded or not, there was going to be plenty of trouble to go around, no two ways about it.

  * * *

  • • •

  SO NOW HE WAS HIDING OUT in Jackie’s car, the AC turned way up, drinking his whiskey and Coke and staring at the street for what had come to feel like hours, because the Earls were late, very late. Amé was a little way down on the other side of the street in her own truck, also on lookout, since Chris had decided he wasn’t going to let Harp approach Danny without another pair of eyes on them both. She was also the only other person in the department who’d actually put eyes on the Earls or Danny up close, not that it would matter if they never showed up at all.

  He rolled a mouthful of whiskey around, let it burn his tongue, and scanned the sun-bleached street some more. No matter how hard he tried to look anywhere and everywhere else, his eyes were drawn to the little silver chain with the medallion that Jackie had left wrapped around the rearview mirror. The medallion was shaped like a badge, etched with the visage of Michael the Archangel, the patron saint of cops. Michael had led God’s armies against Satan, fighting the good fight against all the world’s monsters and wolves.

  How many times had Jackie held that medallion in her fingers and prayed for him? Praying to keep him safe, to keep him alive?

  And now here he was, and she was the one who was gone.

  Like everything else in her car, he was afraid to touch it. Doing it would be like touching her skin again and that would be too much, too overpowering. It would blind him, turn him to dust, and as much as he might want that—and part of him did want that a little more each and every day, more than he’d ever wanted anything—he also knew he wasn’t quite done here yet. All her prayers had to have been for something. He still had some fight left in him, and there were still wolves circling those he’d come to care about.

  He finished the drink, rummaged around in his pocket for two Certs and started chewing them.

  The Earls might come alone, or in a different car. They might have their own countersurveillance. They might show up on those damn motorcycles of theirs or they might not show at all. Agent Nichols may have even told Earl they could ignore the summons, because whatever happened in Terlingua didn’t matter anyway, just like the law out here in Murfee didn’t seem to matter much to him, either.

  Nichols may have gone as far and told Earl all about Danny, and one or both of them were already dead.

  There were a thousand ways this wouldn’t work, and only one that it could.

  Chris’s Hail Mary pass and Jackie’s Hail Marys; all of her prayers for him . . . that’s all they had.

  How often did either actually work?

  Harp checked his watch for what felt like the hundredth time, and was about to call Chris and Amé to suggest they pack it in, when the gun-shot Marquis came sliding down Main Street.

  But behind the sun’s glare, he couldn’t tell who was inside it.

  * * *

  • • •

  BUCK EMMETT WAS A BIG MAN, reminding Chris of himself once. Buck had been the first deputy he’d hired after he was officially elected sheriff, and he’d been a constable before that and also did a stint with the Pecos Sheriff’s Department for a bit, but had a brother in Murfee who worked at the Comanche Cattle Auction, and so was more than eager to come back to the Big Bend to be near him. The two hunted and fished together whatever the season allowed almost every weekend, and Chris thought the man would have been just as happy spending the rest of his life outside, instead of cooped up in buildings that probably always felt small to him.

  Chris knew the feeling.

  Buck had brought Chris the DNA swab kits, and his big hands dwarfed them, threatening to crush them.

  “Just go put them in the interview room, Buck. If those boys do show, I’ll do it in there.”

  Buck nodded, squinting down at the packages in each hand. He’d never used one. “So Harp says these are some bad folks down there in Killing . . . that these two showing up are some of the worst.”

  I don’t know about the worst.

  “Let’s put it this way, they are a little rough around the edges,” Chris said. “But this will go easy. I don’t even need Doc Hanson here. Just a quick swab on the inside of their cheeks and then I’m done.” In truth, Chris hadn’t done one of these, either, and he’d watched a video on the Internet just to be sure he had it right. The buccal kits were commonplace now both in state and local departments and with the feds. For years many states had been collecting involuntary DNA samples from sex offenders and violent criminals, even probationers and parolees, and dumping them into the National DNA Index System, until the Supreme Court had ruled that law enforcement could collect those samples from anyone arrested. Civil liberties lawyers were still howling about it, but it was the policy now in a lot of places. However, if you didn’t have enough probable cause to even make an arrest, which admittedly was a pretty damn low threshold, getting an involuntary sample still took a warrant, like the ones he’d wrangled out of Moody and Judge Hildebrand. Although Doc Hanson had gotten some skin and hair from underneath Billy Bravo’s nails, it was just as likely to be his girlfriend’s as anyone else’s; more likely, in fact. So he and Moody had fought about it for hours, with the DA arguing Chris might as well pull samples from everyone in Terlingua, until Chris had finally threatened to do just that.

  Although Chris didn’t need much to throw handcuffs on either of his primary Bravo suspects, he needed more than what he had—some eyewitness hearsay and Harp’s intuition—and he refused to arrest them just as a pretext to get to Danny Ford. He wasn’t willing to push Nichols that far, either. He could make weak but plausible arguments for the search warrants—at least ones he could live with—and with some promises and concessions and begging had finally even won Moody over on them. But just hauling T-Bob and Jesse into Murfee and locking them up? That was stepping over a line he was afraid he couldn’t step back across.

  Because that felt far too much like something Sheriff Ross would have done. And maybe Chris was drawing a line where there wasn’t one, desperate to split hairs as fine as those under Billy’s nails. But that’s all he had, even if it left him with dark thoughts he couldn’t quite shake, as he looked uncomfortably at the signed warrants on his desk.

  Buck was still standing there, mesmerized by the little boxes he was holding, when Chris’s
phone buzzed. He checked it, thankful it wasn’t Nichols again. He didn’t know if it was funny or not that the kits had been provided to the Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department with fed money to support the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System.

  Maybe one day he and the agent would laugh about it, but he didn’t think so.

  It was a text from Harp. Chris read it, and folded the warrants.

  “Well, Buck, let’s get on it with. It looks like they’re here.”

  * * *

  • • •

  T-BOB AND JESSE EARL had walked into the building two minutes ago, and Ben still hadn’t approached the car.

  The driver was sitting in it, but America couldn’t see if it was the ex-soldier, now ex-cop, Danny Ford, or someone else.

  Ellos no iban a tener mucho tiempo. The sheriff could stall inside, but not forever, so she wasn’t sure what Ben was waiting for. She glanced back and forth between the old Marquis and the front door of the department. The car looked out of place, like it didn’t belong. It seemed to take up the whole street and cast no shadow.

  There was talk of rain soon, but the sky was so clear, as sun-glazed and as empty as the earth beneath it, it was difficult to tell the two apart.

  The sheriff and Ben had told her all about Danny Ford: who he was . . . who he’d been . . . and she tried putting those different uniforms on the man she’d seen in Killing, but it was hard to look past the tattoos and the harsh white blaze of the sun that had been over them that day. A sun that was still overhead, like it was going to hang there forever and would never dim or set.

  But she thought she had caught a glimpse of the real Danny Ford when he’d smiled at her. The sheriff had tried to explain to her how or why someone like Danny could end up with the Earls, but he’d really just been trying to make sense out of it for himself. Ella ya sabía. Anger and loss had led her to many dark places and then all the way back to Murfee again to join the sheriff’s department. A need for vengeance demanded hard choices; it was a wish for sangre. Y sangre exige sangre. No different from Vianey Ruiz’s prayers to Santa Muerte on the riverbank; if they were answered, it was always with a price.

  Siempre había un precio.

  No, she understood Danny Ford a lot better than the sheriff or even Ben ever would.

  She was about to call Ben and ask him what he was waiting for, when she saw him finally walk down the street toward the Marquis.

  * * *

  • • •

  WHEN HARP GOT to the car door and leaned down to look in, he thought at first he’d fucked up, made a mistake. The car was empty. His hand left a clear print on the roof where he braced himself, joining the tracks of a dog or coyote or wolf that had recently run across the dirty hood, bounding onto the car and standing sentinel on top of it, keeping watch over the desert around Killing.

  The clawed tracks were the only evidence of its passage. Leaving its mark, like Harp.

  The engine was still ticking, making noises, and he was about to back away, when the passenger window rolled down to reveal Danny Ford looking up at him.

  Something played behind his eyes, recognition, from their encounter in Killing.

  Danny shook his head. “What’s the problem, Deputy?”

  * * *

  • • •

  BUCK STOOD BY, silent, arms crossed. He refused to let Chris be alone with the Earls.

  Chris had let them sit for a few minutes before getting the uncle, T-Bob. The old man had smelled like dirt and whiskey, his splotched hands dancing a drinker’s waltz. He must have been told by Earl to keep his mouth shut, because the only time he opened it was when Chris did the buccal swab.

  Jesse Earl was a whole different story.

  * * *

  • • •

  AMERICA COUNTED OUT the seconds as Ben lingered at the car door, staring down at his hand for some reason, before he started talking to someone through the window.

  He looked like he was just going to walk away again, but then he opened the car door, or it was opened for him, and he disappeared into the Marquis.

  Ben was supposed to get Danny to drive around the block, away from the department, but the car was stubbornly not moving. It remained as immovable, as dead and fixed, as that first day she had seen it in Killing surrounded by tumbleweeds.

  She bit her lip, drummed her fingers on her steering wheel, willing it to move.

  When it didn’t, she got out of her truck and walked toward it.

  * * *

  • • •

  HE’D MADE NO ATTEMPT to hide his tattoos, like Harp had said he’d done last time. He wore faded jeans with black lace-up boots and a thin, sleeveless T-shirt, and the exposed skin shined blue, green, and a handful of other colors. The red eyes of a lion glowed hot from his rib cage, just visible beneath his arm.

  Jesse Earl smiled at Chris, addressed him by name.

  “Well, you’re Sheriff Chris Cherry. The Sheriff Cherry. Pretty damn famous. My daddy told me about you. I did some asking around, too. I should shake your hand, for those damn beaners you killed. A few less makes this world a better place.”

  Jesse stuck out his hand, aiming one of the guns tattooed on his forearm at Chris, but he ignored it, so Jesse kept on.

  “Well, maybe when we’re done here, I can leastways buy you a beer, one for each of ’em you put in the ground. I hear there’s a good bar around here, a cool place where a man can get a drink. Like I told that busted-up ole deputy of yours before when I was here, I guess I’m not much for going back to the Wikiup anymore.”

  I hear there’s a good bar around here . . . did some asking around, too.

  Chris was sure Jesse was hinting about Earlys. He looked at him a long time before answering. “I don’t drink to men I’ve killed, whether they deserved it or not.”

  Jesse shrugged. “Guess it depends on the kinda man. What kinda man are you, Sheriff? Shoots a beaner one day, puts a badge on a little beaner girl the next?”

  Buck leaned forward, jamming a thumb at Jesse with his bulk shadowing him. When he spoke, his words were deep and slow; syrup. “None of your damn concern. Stop running your goddamn mouth and let the sheriff do his job.”

  Jesse turned on Buck, chuckled. “You his dog? Bark when he tells you to?”

  Chris shook his head at Buck to stand down, and rapped on the table to pull Jesse’s attention back to him. Jesse’s eyes were bottomless.

  “Let me tell you the sort of man I am. The sort who doesn’t let another man get beat to death and turn a blind eye to it, the sort who doesn’t take kindly to threats, subtle or otherwise. And as the sheriff here in Big Bend, the sort who doesn’t have to put up with you, understand that?”

  Jesse, mercifully, stayed silent.

  “So, as my deputy said, do me a favor and stop running that damn mouth so I can do my job . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  SHE COULD TELL it wasn’t going well.

  She slipped into the backseat, where it smelled like hot leather and old beer, with both men turning to look back at her, their mouths open. Ben’s hands were raised like he was trying to show off the size of something, something too large to fit in the car, and although she had no idea what he’d been saying, it was clear from Danny Ford’s face it wasn’t moving him.

  And it wasn’t making the car move, either.

  Danny was shaking his head, like he was about to push Ben back out of the car and into the street, and only America’s sudden appearance had stopped him.

  She focused on him. “We don’t have much time. I know you remember us from Killing, and we know who you really are. We know a lot about you. We just need to talk with you, that’s all. I’m sure Deputy Harper told you to drive, so do it, por favor. Just give us that, and then we’re done.”

  Danny looked back and forth between her and Ben, as if wondering wh
ere these crazy people had come from.

  “It’s about you and your padre,” she said, and she put a hand on his shoulder. “Drive.”

  He did.

  * * *

  • • •

  HARP TOOK A DEEP BREATH as Danny pulled out onto Main and left the department behind.

  Then he started again, and told it all fast—all about Special Agent Nichols and Major Dyer and the meeting in Lubbock. How they knew what had happened to his father in Sweetwater, and everything about John Wesley Earl and the rest of them in Killing.

  He ended, finally, with what he’d suggested back in Lubbock. “If you’re still pissed off about your daddy, then shoot the son of a bitch and be done with it. But Earl is a free man and he’s protected. He cut himself this deal with the FBI. If you kill him, it’s straight-up murder and there’ll be no mercy or understanding for it. Your daddy’s death doesn’t count for anything right now.”

  Danny wouldn’t look at him, just gripped the wheel harder. “You’re telling me that Earl’s doing all this to protect Jesse? That’s utter bullshit. Earl doesn’t care about his sons, either of them. He doesn’t care much about anyone other than himself, and Jesse’s no better. If anything, he’s worse. There’s no love lost between those two. None. Whatever reason Earl is helping this FBI agent, it’s got nothing to do with saving Jesse from Thurman Flowers.”

  “And you’re betting your life on that?” Harp asked.