High White Sun Read online

  Danny stepped past Jesse, putting himself in front of Ben’s gun. “No, Deputy, we were just leaving. T-Bob, get out.”

  Amé stood aside to give him some room, but her pistol stayed on him.

  T-Bob walked out the door, angry. “Shit, and I never got my beer or my whiskey.”

  Danny had a hand on Jesse’s shoulder, steering him that way, too.

  Jesse shrugged off the arm, but kept walking. He looked back at Mel and blew her a kiss. “Nice to meet you. I reckon we’ll run into each other again.” And as he and Danny moved past Ben and Amé, he leaned in close. “And you two? We’re definitely gonna have our moment . . .”

  Then he was out the door, gone.

  Ben watched them go, then walked up to the bar and popped open one of the Pearls that had never made it to T-Bob. He raised it to Javy, who had gone back to reading his paper. Mel saw that the old ranch hand was also slipping something long and sharp back into his left boot.

  Amé remained by the door, watching the street to make sure the others were truly gone, as the song Jesse had chosen finally ended, leaving a welcome silence.

  “So those were the wonderful Earls?” Mel asked.

  “Some of ’em,” Ben answered, as he finished up the beer.

  “Charming,” she said. “I appreciate it, Ben, but I had that handled, it was okay.”

  Ben crumpled up the beer can and put a couple of dollars in the tip jar. “You don’t handle men like that, not for long,” he said. He grabbed her hand, squeezed it, and then turned around to go.

  “Sooner or later you have to put them in the ground.”

  24

  Chris was as mad as Harp had ever seen him.

  “You’re telling me this now? And I guess Mel wasn’t going to say anything at all?”

  Harp got up to shut Chris’s door, although this late in the day, the department was nearly empty; mostly shadows and faded sunshine and the sound of desk fans and air conditioners. Miss Maisie peeked in their direction at the raised voices, but she already had her purse over her shoulder and was ready to walk out. Harp waved at her, smiled and shooed her on, before sitting back down to let the sheriff finish.

  “I’m sure she’s going to tell you tonight, when y’all get home. I just didn’t want her blowing it all out of proportion.”

  “Blowing it out? Jesus, Ben, you’re telling me you pointed a gun at a man inside Earlys today. In the bar where my wi—” Chris almost said my wife, but stopped short. Harp couldn’t figure out why they just didn’t go ahead and get married. It would make it easier for everyone. “Where Mel works.”

  “Look, it sounds bad when you put it that way, but you met him, Jesse Earl is not the sort of man you reason with. But the business end of a gun? Trust me, he understands that just fine.”

  “Dammit, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re trying to provoke them. You’re hoping one of them gives you a reason, or you’re damn close to making up one of your own.” Chris took a deep breath. “Amé was there with you. She respects you and watches everything you do, and she’s learning from you. What the hell are you trying to teach her?”

  “Stuff she’ll need, Chris, sooner or later.”

  “Sooner if you keep pulling stunts like that. Do you really want to start a war with these people?”

  “You can try and tell yourself they rolled into Earlys for the hell of it, but Jesse and his daddy were sending you a message. So I sent one of our own.”

  “But Danny was there?”

  “Danny’s hanging on by his fingernails. He’s got no more control over what the Earls do than Nichols does.”

  Chris thought about that, shook his head. “And you really think Jesse went there just to see Mel, because of me?”

  “I know he did.”

  Chris looked defeated. “Maybe, it’s possible, I guess. He more or less suggested it . . .”

  Harp popped in a Certs and an aspirin, chewed them together. “Exactly. Who else lives down in Killing, the Joyces, those fucking inbreds? Didn’t we pick one of them up on a D-and-D outside of Earlys a while back? They’re probably no friends of yours, Chris, and you’re almost sorta famous. I know you don’t want to think so, but in these parts, you are. If for no other reason than you stepped into Sheriff Ross’s boots and those were pretty damn big boots to fill.” Harp offered his last Certs to Chris, who shook his head. “But yes, I absolutely think he went there to fuck with you. That’s what someone like him does. He’s a dog worrying at a bone. He doesn’t know any better and couldn’t stop himself anyway.” Harp took another aspirin and changed the subject. “You finally talked to Nichols, right?”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to dodge him forever. Right after I finished with T-Bob and Jesse. I let him scream and holler a bit. I should have told him you made me do it. If he wasn’t scared of everyone knowing what the hell was going on with his little secret operation, he’d probably already have taken a bite out of Moody and Judge Hildebrand as well for giving me those shitty warrants. He’s not finished with it yet, though. There will be plenty of hell to pay, somewhere down the line. You call Dyer?”

  “Yeah, I told him we met with Danny today. That he looked good, okay for now. I told him I didn’t know if we’d made a difference or not.”

  “Did we?”

  They’d covered some of this earlier, but Harp could tell Chris wanted to go through it again. He wanted to convince himself that the misery with Nichols was worth it. “He’s confused, Chris, and hell, he’s been undercover for a long time, long before Killing and John Wesley Earl. It can mess with you. Maybe he doesn’t know how to do anything else.”

  “You ever do anything like that?”

  “I worked narco for a while, but it was in-and-out stuff. Vice, too, chatting up hookers. Nothing like what Danny was doing, staying under for days or weeks at a time. He’s been living that life, with those people, nearly twenty-four/seven. I don’t know if you forget who you are, but I can see where you definitely forget what you’re doing sometimes, or why you’re doing it. These people you’re supposed to despise are laughing and telling jokes and sharing their problems and you’re hearing about their kids or their wives or whatever. Their dog dies and you see them cry all over it and it plays hell with your compass, here”—Harp pointed at his head—“and here.” Harp tapped his heart. “No way it doesn’t. I had an old narc tell me once that the secret to undercover work is not so much the lies you tell, but how much truth you’re willing to reveal. The best lies start with the truth, so I just don’t know. Honestly don’t. But I think Amé made a lot more headway with the kid than I did.”

  Chris ignored Harp’s last comment. “Amé? She talked to him, too?”

  Harp hadn’t mentioned that before. “C’mon, what the hell was I supposed to do? She walked on over and hopped in, and honestly, I’m glad she did. She did better than fine. Maybe it wasn’t even what she said but how she said it, because I’m not sure she was trying all that hard to talk him out of shooting Earl between the eyes, and I know I wasn’t. But he understood her. He believed her.” Harp hesitated, rubbed his jaw. “We did the right thing, Chris. We tried, anyway. And no matter how it ends for Danny, I do know how it ends for the Earls. The way it always ends. The only way it can end.”

  “You really aren’t making me feel any better about the two of you trying to save this kid’s skin.” Chris shook his head, like a man watching a barn burn who couldn’t do a damn thing about it. “But I need you to hear me for once. I don’t care about dealing with Nichols, I’m fine with that. And although I don’t want either you or Amé in the Earls’ crosshairs, that seems to keep happening no matter what I do, so I have to own that. But I cannot . . . will not . . . risk Mel right alongside you, so for God’s sake, don’t put her there. Not like you did in Earlys. Danny isn’t worth that, not to me.”

  Harp wasn’t sure how much Chris meant it, but he g
ot the point anyway. “You know I’m not going to let anything happen to that woman. You know that.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re my hero.” Chris took a drink of the same cup of coffee that had been sitting on his desk all day; that Harp had brought him before the Earls had showed up. “You really think Earl is casing our bank?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “But Earl’s working with the feds. He’s got a deal with them . . . it’s all squared away. They’re looking over his shoulder all the time. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, Chris, we’re the ones looking over his shoulder. Nichols is just hoping and praying. He’s blind, only knows what Earl is telling him. It’s like what Danny said about Earl’s relationship with Jesse. Those two nearly hate each other, and either Nichols doesn’t know it or doesn’t care.”

  “But what about you, are you okay? This thing with the Earls and Danny has gotten to you.”

  Harp rubbed his eyes. “I guess. I’m tired, just tired, more each day.” There was no point avoiding it. “And maybe I’m slipping, too. Little things that I never would have forgotten, that I would have seen coming. Some days it feels like everything around me is moving too fast or I’m just too slow. Maybe you do reach a point where you have to hang up the gun and spurs before they hang you.”

  “You’ve done enough for me, for the department. God knows I’ve needed you, but these aren’t your fights anymore and I understand that. You can walk out of here tonight and I’ll never ask you to stay.”

  “And I’d never do that. Not with all that’s going on. You need me now, even if you don’t see it, which is how I know I’m right. Let’s get past the Earls. That’s what I need to finish, what I need to see to the end.”

  What was it Danny Ford had said? Just a little bit more time, then it will all be over.

  Chris said, “Fair enough. Anyway, I’m done talking about Danny Ford and the Earls, at least for tonight. Remember I have to go to El Paso in a couple of days for that damn HIDTA meeting. I’ll meet with Garrison and run this whole Nichols operation by him then, see what he says. I already gave him a heads-up.”

  Garrison was another federal agent that Chris knew from a ways back. He was a supervisor in the DEA office in El Paso, and although Harp wasn’t sure exactly what their connection was, it had something to do with Chris’s shooting. Chris talked to him every now and then and seemed to trust him, even if he didn’t exactly consider him a friend.

  “And if Nichols calls you anymore, put him through to me, I’ll handle that righteous prick.” Harp laughed and stood up, then added, “But I do think about her all the time, Jackie, I mean. It’s hard, so goddamn hard. Harder than I ever imagined.”

  “I know,” Chris said.

  But Chris didn’t, not really, and Harp knew there was no way that he could. “Okay, get on home to that wife of yours. She’ll tell you herself all about that nonsense at Earlys. Just remember, it wasn’t half as bad as she’s gonna make it out to be.”

  “And that makes both of you liars. And you know she’s not my wife.”

  Harp wanted to tell Chris how much he wanted to have someone tell him that . . . get on home to that wife of yours . . . to even have that as a choice anymore.

  How important it was . . . how needed.

  But he worked hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice as he got up and walked out.

  “Well, by God, she damn well should be.”

  25

  It was two days after Jesse and T-Bob came back from Murfee that Thurman Flowers finally showed himself.

  And it took only one look for Earl to know he’d been right about him all along.

  He arrived in an old van filled with white power DVDs and books and boxes of clothes and a hot plate and other shit, so it looked like he’d been livin’ in it and he probably had. A man named Marvin Clutts was following behind in another car, a Jap sedan with Washington plates that was also full up of crap. Flowers wore dark pants and a white button-down shirt that had long gone yellow under the arms, with his hair slicked over to one side, held down with somethin’ that glistened beneath the Texas sun. He had a small mouth and tiny eyes behind frog glasses that didn’t make those shifty eyes any bigger, and he reminded Earl of a warden he once knew in Dalhart. That man had been vicious, a real prick, to both the inmates and his own bulls. He’d bullied out of fear and weakness, not strength, and he’d died hard from throat cancer, rotting from the inside out. First he lost his tongue, then his whole lower jaw, and then it went straight on up to his brain and that was that.

  After he was gone no one said a word about him; didn’t talk or tell stories about him. No one remembered him and it was like he’d never existed at all.

  Flowers was just that sort of man. He thought of himself as too damn important, controlling everything, and he looked at the world through those glasses like it was his own damn prison to run; to do as he pleased. He didn’t—couldn’t—understand the real secret that all smart bulls and wardens soon learned: that they didn’t really run the prison at all. It was an illusion that they had any control of the place, a bit of dress-up and pretend made fancy and almost real with their suits and guns and rules and walls. None of that was really needed because none of it mattered—all of that shit appeared to work only because the inmates pretended right along with it. For the most part, the world inside those walls was nicer and easier than anything they had to deal with outside of them, so most of ’em were never trying that hard to get out anyway.

  And eventually, when Flowers was gone, he’d be no more missed or remembered than that warden from Dalhart.

  He’d never really been needed at all.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE MORNING AFTER FLOWERS’S ARRIVAL, after he’d made the rounds the night before, meeting everyone he’d only heard about from Jesse, he came up to Earl last, sitting outside smoking beneath the porch with Sunny and Little B. The boy hovered around both him and his mama, always underfoot, waiting for Earl to talk to him. Flowers, too, had his own fan club—the man Clutts staying right at his shoulder, and Earl guessed Flowers didn’t go very far without him. Flowers wanted you to think he was dangerous, but Earl could tell with one glance that Clutts was the one you maybe had to watch out for. He wanted to be menacing, like Joker, but at about a third of the size. Clutts weighed maybe a hundred ten pounds soaking wet, most of that his big lace-up boots. He had a scarred-up face and big teeth—too big for his mouth—that made Earl think of a rat. His dark eyes moved up and down over Sunny, detoured back to her tits, before flashing those big fucking teeth at Earl.

  Sunny pretended not to pay any attention, drinking a sweet tea and swirling the last of it around a Disney World glass.

  But Flowers was looking, licking his tiny mouth and adding and re-adding her measurements in his head. Earl flicked a spent cigarette past him, just to make him duck and break up his figurin’, and started up a fresh one.

  Flowers pulled up a chair and looked across Killing like he owned the place already.

  Playing at goddamn warden.

  “It’s good to sit down with you, John. Jesse’s told me a lot about you, and I’m glad we’re finally meeting face-to-face. Particularly here, in Killing. This place is going to be good for us, a new start for me, for Jesse, even for you. More importantly, for our race. We’re going to build something here.”

  Earl laughed, waving a cigarette at Killing’s sunken buildings and blowing dust. “This shithole? This is where you’re going to build your white empire? You do know there are more beaners per square inch here in this part of Texas than about anywhere else. And that”—he pointed back over his shoulder to the mountains—“is fucking Mexico. You’re surrounded by wetbacks here. This place isn’t yours and never will be. It’s enemy territory, Preacher. Hell, we’re just leasing.”

  Flowers pulled his glasses off, rubbing dust off them on his dirty shirt.
He also took out a folded handkerchief and touched it to his mouth. “I assure you, I’m well acquainted with Texas history. We took this land from the mongrels, we’re not giving it back.” He settled his glasses on his nose, but kept out the handkerchief, wiping his mouth a second time. “At least there aren’t many niggers, isn’t that right, Marvin?” Clutts laughed, slapping a hand lightly on his leg at a joke he’d probably heard a hundred times. “Anyway, Killing is the place, and God saw fit to lead us here.”

  “God? God ain’t got nothin’ to do with it. It so happens Jesse’s girl is related to some folks who live down this way. He learned about it from her. It wasn’t God talkin’, it was Jesse’s lucky dick.”

  Clutts started, “Pastor Flowers . . .”

  But Earl shut him off with a cool, long stare. “And you, you can shut the fuck up. This here’s adults talkin’ . . .” He looked Flowers up and down. “More or less.”

  Clutts was reduced to glaring, waiting for Flowers’s next order. Flowers coughed into his hand, nodding toward a silent Sunny like he was apologizing that the two of them were the most reasonable on the porch; the only reasonable people. “And that’s what we need to do, John. Talk. Talk about the way forward now that I’m here, maybe just the two of us.”

  Earl wanted to see where this was going. “Anything you want to say, you can say in front of Sunny and the boy. It’s no skin to me.”

  Flowers shrugged, and motioned with his kerchief for Clutts to stay as well. “Okay, if that’s what you want. And you’re right, there’s no need for secrets here. More like-minded people will be coming. We’ve put out the word and have been for months, and we’re going to build a haven here on the principles of racial purity and freedom. We’re going to cut it right out of this earth, free from the government, free from interference.”