This Side of Night Read online

  As they would say over in Juárez, he really was the damn burro now.

  * * *

  —

  HE WAS STILL UNPACKING one of his boxes when Special Agent in Charge Don Chesney walked in. Chesney was only three years younger than Garrison but had aged better. The trenches hadn’t been kind to the older agent, and he knew it; a lifetime of long surveillances and late nights were visible in his heavy midsection, the gray at his temples, the deep lines carved in his face. Chesney, however, was tall and still thin, his hair dark—perfectly cool and composed in an equally dark, perfect suit he’d had tailored while assigned to Chiang Mai. He’d reported to El Paso directly from headquarters well after the events in Murfee. He’d read about it, read about Garrison, but both were no more than a set of reports to him, thick file folders he’d glanced through a handful of times. He didn’t know Garrison, and he sure as hell didn’t know the border, either. The city across the river was just another report to him.

  It wasn’t that Garrison didn’t like the man—he hadn’t worked with him long enough yet to have an opinion one way or the other—but Chesney had a way of looking at him he didn’t like. It was a mixture of sympathy and shame. Embarrassment. The look you reserved for your lonely drunk uncle, or a newly divorced friend who was talking and laughing and crying a bit too fast and loud at the bar, both situations that Garrison understood all too well. Chesney probably saw Garrison as a relic, an unpleasant reminder of all the things that could go wrong on the job or in life. Garrison figured Don Chesney was waiting him out, hoping he’d retire so he could bring someone else in, one of his own men. Someone he trusted. The decision to keep Garrison and promote him had been made above Chesney, and that still rubbed the new SAC raw. No doubt it got under his expensive tailored suit and his skin.

  What his look said was: Sooner or later, you’ll make another mistake. You know it, and so do I.

  And that was the look in Chesney’s eyes now, as he stood in Garrison’s door.

  “I was wondering if you were ever going to move up here,” Chesney said, in a way that meant he’d never wondered about it at all. Even after getting promoted, Garrison had resisted relocating to the front office. In a way he couldn’t explain, he’d been reluctant to let his view of Juárez go. They were old friends, old lovers, older enemies. He’d taken some time off and headed back east, made a thousand smaller excuses about changing offices even before that, and Chesney hadn’t pushed him. Most of his duties were merely administrative anyway, overseeing budgets and intel and staffing. It was push-button stuff he could do from anywhere, including home. But if there was one place colder and emptier than his new office, it was there, and both men knew it.

  “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been dragging my ass, but I’m here now.” Garrison shrugged, as if he had been traveling for a long time in a place far, far away.

  For a second it seemed that Chesney was going to come in and sit down, make some attempt at camaraderie that neither man wanted or felt, but he thought better of it and stayed in the doorway. “Well. I know you’ve been on leave and have a lot to catch up on.” He made a vague gesture at Garrison’s bare desk, at the bookshelf free and clear of anything personal: family photos, awards, mementos. “But I was hoping you’d take a look at some of the reporting about those students in Ojinaga. It’s a mess down there, and that’s an understatement.”

  Garrison had read about it on the plane back to Texas—a brutal attack on students from a tiny rural school called Librado Rivera in Ojinaga, Chihuahua, Mexico. Three students were confirmed dead, six injured, and nearly two dozen were still missing. Vanished. Less than a week old, the attack had already drawn international attention and outrage, and the government of Mexico was in full panic mode. Even the cartels, who’d always been eager and willing to take credit for every single beheading and atrocity, were wiping their hands of it. There was plenty of finger-pointing, leaving the border in turmoil. The Mex Feds, followed closely by worldwide media, had swarmed the Ojinaga area, and the government of Mexico had deployed specialized Mexican Marine units to strike known cartel strongholds in a series of brazen airborne raids. Publicized raids. Everyone was searching for answers, and a scapegoat. Drug and human trafficking on the Texas-Mexico border was a violent and bloody business, but also a very lucrative one, and right now, business was not good for anyone.

  “I’ll take a look today, draft something for you,” Garrison said. The division’s field agents and intel shop would already be canvassing their human and signal intelligence—HUMINT and SIGINT—to find their own answers. That meant talking to all their informants, and it wasn’t lost on Garrison that the last time he’d been personally involved with cartel border violence, specifically in Ojinaga, it had all gone to hell with the disappearance and ultimate murder of the informant Rodolfo “Rudy” Reynosa, and the subsequent attack on Darin and Morgan.

  Ojinaga was right across the river from Murfee, Texas.

  Garrison ignored the mostly empty box he’d been sorting through and sat heavily in his new chair. He turned it to face Chesney. “Speaking of drafts, did you have a chance to read what I pulled together about that drug suppression unit operating in Terrell? The Tejas unit?”

  Chesney nodded, smoothing out his tie. It looked as expensive as the suit. “I did, but I failed to see your point.”

  Garrison spread his hands on his desk. It still surprised him that his wedding band was no longer there, as if he were noticing it again for the first time. He wasn’t. “Terrell County sheriff Chuy Machado set up the Tejas unit two years ago. It’s made up mostly of deputies from his own department, a couple from neighboring Val Verde and Crockett, and a cop or two from Sanderson. Chuy’s own son, Johnnie, leads the unit. Their seizure and arrest numbers are impressive.”

  “They’re doing good work,” Chesney agreed, still fixated on his tie.

  “Don, no one is doing work that good. Not a handful of cops way out there in the middle of nowhere.”

  Chesney finally let his tie go. “Are you implying they’re not good enough cops? I checked, and several of them have been through our very own narcotics training classes, right here in the division. Whatever they’re doing is exactly what your agents taught them, with equipment we paid for.”

  “No, what I’m suggesting is maybe a few of them are, in fact, bad cops. Straight-up corrupt. The numbers don’t add up. Nothing about that unit adds up, and I think . . .”

  Chesney held up a hand, stopping him. “Joe, you’ve been on this border a long time. We all know your history. I get it, this interest, obsession, you have with corrupt law enforcement. You lived through it, and at some point in time, we will deal with something like it again. We always do. I’m just not sure that time is now.”

  You lived through it.

  Chesney was right, Garrison had lived through the final, bloody days of former Big Bend County sheriff Stanford “Judge” Ross, and his chief deputy, Duane Dupree. He’d survived their reign of terror because he’d been safe and sound here in El Paso, in his office down the hall. Rudy Reynosa and Darin, on the front line down in Murfee, had not. Not even Morgan . . . not really. Not as she’d been.

  Everything always came back to goddamn Murfee, Texas.

  “You think I’m seeing ghosts?”

  Chesney started to answer, but stopped. His eyes, for the second time, said enough.

  And Garrison wasn’t going to argue, not now. Darin Braccio was dead, but Garrison had seen that ghost a thousand times since. Every time he closed his eyes. He was the only thing haunting Garrison’s empty house now.

  Chesney continued, “Look, I’ve met Chuy Machado a few times. He’s colorful, but corrupt? I’m not convinced, not even close. Admittedly, I’ve never been introduced to that son of his, but nepotism isn’t uncommon. Not in a small town, and not in Texas. What does your friend Sheriff Cherry say? I noticed from your own write-up that he doesn’t have a deputy assign
ed to the unit.”

  That was true. Big Bend County bordered Terrell and was probably three, maybe four times as large, but Sheriff Chris Cherry—taking over from the deceased Stanford Ross—had never shared a deputy with the Tejas unit. Not that he had many to spare to begin with.

  “Let’s be clear, Chris Cherry is not exactly my friend,” Garrison said. And although that was true, too, it was a hell of a lot more complicated than that. Three years’ worth of complicated. “But it’s curious that the two counties sit side by side and Terrell’s seizure stats are easily double what Cherry is reporting from the Big Bend.”

  “You know as well as I do those numbers are always in flux. Holidays, our own surge operations, a handful of tea leaves the cartels are reading, or some plaza boss who’s making a power grab. There are a thousand variables. This week they’re pushing hard in one area and next week it’s somewhere else. We can’t predict that any better than the weather.” Chesney checked his watch, and given the suit and tie, Garrison couldn’t help wondering just how expensive it was, too. Chesney focused on him again. “Joe, it could just be someone’s doing their job really well, and someone else isn’t doing it well enough.”

  That was possible, too, and that was the real fear Garrison still couldn’t quite let go of even three years later, long after the corrupt Stanford Ross had been gunned down in Murfee in his own living room. Fear that the corruption hadn’t died with the former sheriff or his deputy, Dupree. That it was still running through the county down there like poisoned blood, soaked into the very soil of the place. Buried way down deep. Bone deep. Too deep for the young, inexperienced Sheriff Cherry to see, or something he was unwilling to look for.

  That’s why he and Chris Cherry could never quite be friends.

  Chesney glanced at his watch again, and Garrison’s audience was over. Chuy and Johnnie Machado and the Tejas unit were Chesney’s problems now, if they were problems at all. And although the same should be true for Murfee and the Big Bend, Garrison didn’t know how to escape that place. The shadow of everything that had happened there still hung over him. It chased him in his dreams, a horrible creature of black ash and bloody flame. Darin and Morgan had been set on fire, and although Darin was already dead by then, Morgan had burned alive for ten minutes on the banks of the Rio Grande. She’d tried to crawl into the water to put out her own flames.

  “I’ll review our Ojinaga intel today, and have something on your desk by Wednesday. I’ll sit in on some of the informant debriefings myself.”

  “Your Spanish is that good?”

  Garrison nodded. “I’ve lived here on the border a long time. It’s gotten better.”

  But that’s all he would commit to. He didn’t want to admit that although he knew the region, the language, and the people as well as anyone working in the division, he still didn’t know a damn thing at all.

  “Joe, there’s one more thing. I got a call from international ops. They want to send FAST out this way this month. Just one team. They’re looking to do some environment training. HELO insertions, land nav, that sort of thing. They want it to be as close to the real thing as possible, and I guess that means our little corner of Texas.”

  As close to the real thing as possible. That meant Afghanistan. DEA’s FAST program—foreign-deployed advisory and support teams—had been stood up to run counternarcotics and counterterrorism operations in the Afghanistan theater. It comprised a handful of elite squads—handpicked agents from all over the agency—that trained with Special Forces and rotated through the region and its war-torn provinces. FAST liked to say they used overwhelming firepower in an open-ended legal framework, and with the slow wind-down of U.S. operations over there, the teams were now being deployed in other countries as well. Some questioned the FAST mission statement, not convinced the risk was worth the reward, but Garrison couldn’t deny the skill set of the agents involved. Agents who’d worked for him had been chosen for FAST, and they were always some of his best investigators.

  They were the lions.

  It wasn’t lost on him that when they came looking for a place to approximate a blighted war zone, they came to the West Texas border.

  “There are some very specific requirements. It needs to be remote, somewhere people won’t get all up in arms over guys in helicopters with guns. They’re going to be working with explosives ordnance as well. I’ll forward the specifics they sent me. I want you to handle that, okay?”

  “No problem. It’s done.”

  Chesney turned to leave. “You already have a place in mind that’ll work?”

  Garrison nodded. “Yeah, I think I have just the place.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER CHESNEY LEFT, Garrison walked back through the building to his old office to get the last few things. A new group supervisor was taking over his place, some kid who was transferring in from Kentucky or Alabama or Georgia. Somewhere green. He wondered what that kid would think when he stared out at Ciudad Juárez for the first time through his window.

  Garrison stood in what used to be his office, remembering the twelve years he’d worked in Texas, a decade of them in this very spot watching the afternoon sun burn shadows into Juárez’s streets and alleys across the river, just as he was now. The city’s poor colonias . . . Anáhuac and Chaveña and Anapra. Other places, even more infamous: Villas de Salvárcar, where, in 2010, fifteen young people were killed during a birthday party for an eighteen-year-old named Jesús Enríquez. Cartel sicarios attacked the house and the partygoers, carrying guns that were later alleged to have come from the U.S. in Operation Fast and Furious. And in 2001, Campo Algodonero, the “cotton field”—at the time nothing more than a vacant lot—where the bodies of eight young women were unearthed. It had become a symbol and memorial for the hundreds of women who’d disappeared in the city over the years. It was painted now with pink crosses bearing the names of the original eight women, and sat across the street from a mega-mall and a few streets away from the American consulate.

  Finally, Cerro del Cristo Negro. Where the mutilated bodies of three other young women were found after a rainstorm. Allegedly the mother of one of the girls had recognized her daughter’s hair exposed on the muddy hillside, and in the wake of the discovery, there were persistent rumors the girls had been killed as part of a satanic rite—the sort of rumors that had always swirled around the Nemesio cartel he’d been hunting for more than a decade.

  The same cartel that had been at the heart of Darin and Morgan’s investigation.

  As Garrison watched, a dark helicopter circled once, twice, and then flew south deeper into Mexico, into parts of the country he’d never visited, had never seen. He’d been told it was truly beautiful over there, beyond Ciudad Juárez; beyond the city reflected over and over in his office window. But this was all he ever saw.

  Maybe he’d had it wrong these last couple of years and it wasn’t Juárez, or even Mexico, that was the real enemy. He’d only ever had two agents hurt while working on the border, and that had occurred on this side of the river. And they hadn’t been attacked by faceless cartel sicarios, but most likely by a fellow law enforcement officer, Big Bend County Chief Deputy Duane Dupree—acting on the orders of Sheriff Ross—although that had never been conclusively proven.

  That was because before Dupree could answer for what he’d done, someone had beheaded him, and then set his body and home on fire, the same way Darin and Morgan had been burned.

  Someone who was still out there . . . a creature of black ash and flame.

  Dupree’s home had been far outside Murfee, in a remote corner of the Big Bend, as rugged and unknowable and violent as anywhere Garrison had ever visited.

  Yeah, I think I have just the place . . .

  It wasn’t Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, that Garrison truly hated.

  It was goddamn Texas.

  THREE

  The goddamn sign was
still crooked.

  Sheriff Chris Cherry stood back and looked at it, hammer in hand, as a thick gust of Texas wind threatened to take his Stetson Brimstone. Deputy Marco Lucero was on the other side, staring into the middle distance past Big Bend Central High School, into a hard blue sky polished with low clouds, but Chris knew the young man was trying hard not to laugh.

  He wasn’t doing all that good of a job of it.

  No matter how Chris tackled the sign, how he tapped down one side or the other, he couldn’t get the damn thing straight. Based on his earlier remodeling efforts at the ranch house at the Far Six, both he and Mel knew he wasn’t particularly good at anything involving tools, but this was ridiculous. It was just a hammer. Just a goddamn sign. But it was like the earth itself was refusing his efforts, pushing him away.

  He should take that as some sort of hint.

  Frustrated, he finally asked Marco, “What do you think?”

  Now serious, his newest deputy cocked his head sideways, the only way to get the sign straight. “Almost there, sir.” Marco scratched a freshly shaved chin, uncomfortable, obviously buying himself time to think up something polite to say. He gave up and pointed at the sign. “I think they got the spacing all wrong, though. Your name, I mean. To be honest, sir, it runs all together. Makes it hard to read.”

  Chris took a step back to get a fresh view of his crooked sign. He’d picked up the signs this morning from the printer and never looked at them too closely. He hadn’t wanted to. In fact, he was embarrassed by them, embarrassed by the whole process.

  But Marco was right. Mel had chosen the theme and the script for him, colorful and fancy lettering more suited for a movie poster or a carnival banner than a simple sign. It was printed brightly on both sides so that you’d see it coming and going, but it was also most definitely wrong.