High White Sun Read online

  That had been the plan all along.

  The kid was coming up on the sergeant and was going to trip right over him; I still didn’t know if he was alive or dead. But I couldn’t let him take another hit, so I brought my Minimi around on the kid until he disappeared behind my barrel, a darker shadow in the dark. He wasn’t even a person anymore; just the hint of a thing, a memory of something else. It was still too dark to see his face anyway, or that’s what I tell myself.

  But in my dreams, like Sergeant Wahl’s blood, I see it so damn clear.

  Small, round, boyish. A mole beneath his right eye and a wisp of a mustache around a tiny mouth.

  He was crying as he ran forward.

  And like the hotel roof, I turned him all to dust.

  I killed my first person on the dawn of my eighteenth birthday. It wasn’t my last.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE DEPUTIES LEAVE, and Jesse and T-Bob have questions, a lot of them.

  T-Bob was ducked down in the Fleetwood and Jesse holed up in the house, but they were here the whole time, trying to catch a peek from their respective hiding places.

  Earl knows they won’t be able to hide forever, and that we’re all going to have to deal with this mess they’ve left in Terlingua, even though Jesse and the others aren’t about to leave, period, no matter what, until Flowers shows up. I know that Earl doesn’t really care about Thurman Flowers and any of his racist church bullshit, or the plans that Jesse and Flowers have been mulling for years, but there is something around here he does care about.

  There’s a reason he came out here and is willing to wait it out in this goddamn desert.

  None of this is what I expected or what I planned for. So far Earl’s not what I expected, either, and now I’m trapped here with him, and it’s like being in that observation post in Wanat all over again.

  Flowers . . . this whole setup in Killing—these are nothing but diversions for Earl.

  Just stones pretending to be grenades.

  * * *

  • • •

  EARL TAKES THE GIRL’S CARD from Little B and tells him never to talk to that girl or any of those deputies again. If he does, he’ll pull out his fucking teeth with a set of pliers. When Jesse tells his daddy to lay off and that Little B doesn’t have to take attitude from a fucking spic, Earl gives him the look I’ve come to know—his eyes flat like a TV tuned to a lost channel. If the sound of static between radio stations has a color, that’s it. Most times that’s enough to shut someone up, even Jesse, even though it’s rarely turned on him, but this is one of those times. There’s this ongoing tension between Jesse and his daddy that hums beneath everything they say like a high-voltage wire. They don’t openly fight, at least not yet—neither of them quite ready to grab hold of that wire—but we all feel it. It’s been bad since I arrived, and given what happened between me and Jesse in Lubbock and how Earl’s treated me since, it’s only getting worse, particularly now that Flowers is on his way to Killing. But today—again, one more time—Jesse shrugs it off and tells his daddy it’s no big thing, nothing to get mad about, and leaves it at that. But what happened in Terlingua is a big thing. We all know it, even if Jesse acts like he doesn’t have the sense to see it. He’s smarter than that, way smarter than Little B or Kasper or the Maladys or any of the others that he’s drawn to him. He’s smart like his daddy . . . a natural-born leader.

  He probably would have been a damn good soldier, if he wasn’t such a coward.

  The whole thing breaks up, with Jesse and Little B going off with Sunny and Jenna, and the others finding something else to do to give Earl some space . . . some time. T-Bob, still bruised from his earlier beating, tries to speak, but Earl doesn’t want any part of it, so T-Bob slides off as well, probably to get another cup of Maker’s. His drinking is going to kill him, but not fast enough for Earl.

  That leaves Earl and me alone in the front room; too hot and close. It’s like the sun outside is trapped with us both inside, and I give him a second if he wants to say anything. Sometimes he does. There are these moments when he talks to me more than any of the others, far more than even his own two sons. He might ask me my opinion about something or tell me a little bit about Walls or the other places he’s been locked up. He’ll play cards with me, Texas hold ’em mostly, shuffling fast and fluid with his thick and dangerous hands and talking the whole time, never missing a beat. He can carry a story better than anyone I’ve met, and he’ll leave you laughing with a joke or an observation even when he’s not laughing at all. I don’t know if he’s still checking me out or if he actually thinks he likes me . . . whatever that might mean for a man like Earl. But I’ve had this image of him for so long, crudely put together from the things I wanted to believe . . . that I needed to believe to get me this far . . . only to find it doesn’t quite square with the real thing.

  He’s weighing me out, like one more stone, and I don’t know why or what that means.

  Compared to Jesse, it’s easier than I ever imagined not to hate John Wesley Earl, and I hate myself that much more for even thinking it. He saved my life, but he owes me so much more than that.

  The time can’t be counted on a calendar, although I’ve marked each day off in my head for years.

  He doesn’t want to talk to me now, though, and just keeps staring at the Hispanic deputy’s card . . . America Reynosa . . . not reading it because he’s already memorized it, tapping it in his hand.

  I like how she dealt with Little B, how she didn’t flinch or back down. I can guess how hard it is to be a deputy in a place like this, and figure it has to be twice as hard for a young woman like her.

  She’s even younger than me.

  I hope she doesn’t ever come back, though. I hope, for her sake, we never cross paths again, because I still don’t know how this all plays out or how it ends.

  Earl finally turns those static eyes on me and tells me to go on and get the fuck out, even though he does it with one of those half-smiles he sometimes shares with me that, like his stories, I can’t quite interpret. It’s our secret, and I don’t ever want to have too many secrets with John Wesley Earl.

  So I walk out, leaving him there alone, flipping the deputy’s card over in his fingers like it’s the ace of diamonds, wondering what he’s thinking, and if any of those thoughts are about me.

  9

  Earlys smelled like stale beer, polished wood. Mel had the ceiling fans turning fast but even this late it did little to make the air move or cool the place down. Chris sat with Harp at the bar nursing his first beer, the older man somewhere between his third and his fifth. It had been a long, shitty day and both men were tired and neither sure of what they’d accomplished.

  Chris gave Mel a look, carried it on toward the coffeepot, so that she knew to start setting up Harp with mugs rather than beer bottles.

  Harp had wanted to meet here tonight rather than in the morning at the office, which meant something was on his mind. When he’d showed up he still had Terlingua’s and Killing’s dust on him and needed a shower, bad, and Chris had noted as much when he sat down, but Harp had waved it off.

  “They had the prelim for Avalos. Quarter of a million, just like Moody said. He’s not going anywhere for a while,” Chris said.

  “No one showed up for him? Nothing?” Harp asked through a last mouthful of beer.

  “No. You still going to call BP to get a canine for the car?”

  Harp half nodded, turned his empty bottle in his hands. “I’ll call the Presidio POE instead, have Bartlett and his dog, Big Max, work on it. I know Elgin Bartlett better.”

  “Doesn’t matter, please just do it. Royal wants to take the Avalos hit and run away from us, and he wants to take Bravo’s murder, too. He’s watching us. He wants to bring in the Rangers, Bethel Turner.”

  “Fuck Bethel Turner . . . he can’t find his own ass with a flashlig
ht.”

  Chris chuckled. “Maybe, but Royal’s going to give him one, if that’s what it takes. A goddamn spotlight.”

  Harp looked into the mirror that ran behind the bar, staring down his own face there. “I said I’d do it and I will. I’ll have Buck follow up. Fuck, though, the Avalos kid isn’t going anywhere, you said it yourself. And Bravo’s getting colder by the minute.”

  Chris raised his hands in surrender. “I can do it if you want.”

  “Goddammit, Chris, you’re the sheriff, I’m the deputy. I’ll take care of it.” In the office, out on the street, he was Sheriff Cherry, but between the two of them, when they were like this, he was just plain Chris. Harp raised his bottle to Mel. “Darlin’, you want to bring another for me and this lousy lay you married?”

  Mel stepped over, sliding a coffee mug into his hand. She’d already worked eight hours; her hair was pulled out of the way and she was wearing very little makeup, and to Chris she still looked pretty damn good, beautiful. Mel pointed at him. “We’re not married, remember? And how do you know what he’s like in bed? I think you’re spending too much time together.” She patted Harp on the hand, sniffed. “You need a shower, Ben Harper.”

  “That’s from hard work. Jackie liked my manly scent,” he grumbled into the coffee, which he’d set aside without tasting. “It was a turn-on.”

  “And that’s more than I needed to know. It’s a good thing you were married to her for so long, because she must have been the only one—” Mel stopped, realizing what she was saying, and looked to Chris, desperate for help. Talking to Harp could be a minefield, always having to step lightly over the memories of his dead wife. Chris had also stumbled before and would do it again.

  “Hey, babe, give him one more Rahr for the road. I’ll make sure he gets back to his place. I’ll take that coffee, instead.” Chris slid over the mug Mel had given Harp, winking at her to let her know it was okay. He’d get Harp home and then swing back by and follow her on the long drive to the Far Six. She brought a new bottle for Harp, but before moving away to the far end of the bar to let the two men keep talking, she grabbed Chris’s hand and squeezed hard.

  He knew what it meant, full of all the things she couldn’t say . . . Take care of him . . . Don’t let him get worse tonight . . . Don’t leave him alone if you think it’s bad.

  She let go, and Chris drank the coffee that had been meant to sober Harp up—hot, black, no sugar—ready to get him talking again about something else.

  “Okay, so what about Bravo?”

  Harp shook his head, like he was shaking away the sight of something only he could see; something other than his own face in the mirror. “You mean William Haley, aka Billy Bravo, aka Bear? Rough man, hard life. I don’t need the forensics to tell me how it ended.” Harp took a long pull from his fresh bottle. “Badly. Beat to death . . . it’ll probably be two or more days before I have something more definite.”

  “How about interviews? His girlfriend, all of that?”

  “Cute little Mexican girl. Don’t think it was her, but kind of wish it was. It’d make it a lot easier. Everyone else we talked to in Terlingua loved him. ’Course, that didn’t stop someone from opening his skull anyway. Like I said . . . he was rough, and he had history. A history like that has a way of catching up with you, or you have a way of catching up to yourself. You can’t outrun your shadows, those dark parts of what you are.” Harp took another long drink, nearly finishing off the bottle, and Chris wondered if he was really only talking about Billy Bravo. “Anyway, there’s more to do there in Terlingua, lots more.”

  “So people can’t change? Someone can’t turn their life around?” Chris asked, genuinely interested.

  Harp made a face. “Not so much, no. Sure, you can hide for a bit, pretend maybe, but that’s it. Fresh paint and wallpaper and fancy lights do not make a shitty foundation suddenly strong. Remember that, Sheriff, as you continue to build that money pit of yours out there at the Far Six.” He pointed his beer bottle at Chris.

  Chris laughed. “Advice noted. What else?”

  “Best timeline we got is Bravo closed down the bar with a person or persons unknown. It wasn’t unusual for whoever was tending the place to leave before the last customers, popping the top on the final round of beers and heading out. Hell, you could even grab one yourself and leave your cash on the bar. All you had to do was pull the door shut behind you. We know Billy Bravo was one of the last people at the bar last night, but after that, it gets all muddied. Those boys from Killing were probably still there with him, but no one knows exactly when they left. It doesn’t help that I’m asking a bunch of full-time drunks, and nobody knows who was where or when. The Wikiup makes Earlys look like the goddamn Mirage in Vegas. You don’t go there to be seen, you go there to be forgotten. To forget.”

  Chris took another slow sip of coffee. “Amé told me before she headed out tonight that you all stopped at Killing.”

  “Yeah, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Here, away from the department, away from . . .”

  Chris finished it for him so Harp wouldn’t have to. “Away from Amé . . .”

  Harp nodded, slow, uncomfortable. “It’s no place for her down there, Chris, no goddamn place at all. I want you to pull her off this thing and give her something else to do.”

  “C’mon, I’ll be fighting Royal every day as it is just to hold on to the damn case, and now you want me to tell Amé to let it go? I need more than that. She deserves better than that. You know I can’t let her mess with the Avalos thing anymore after she lit him up. You should see his eye.” Chris was ready to take another sip of coffee but then put the mug down. “You don’t think she can help you?”

  “It’s not that, and you know it’s not. She’s smarter than Till and Buck and Dale put together, maybe the both of us.” He looked at Chris over the lip of his bottle. “Someday she might have your job . . .”

  Chris laughed. “That’s the second time today someone’s talked about wanting my job . . .”

  “It’s not about her anyway. It’s about those men at Killing. I thought Terlingua was something else, until I saw that place. Killing’s a snake pit.”

  “Just a bunch of bikers, right?”

  “More than that.” Harp pushed his beer away for the first time that night and pulled a couple of folded sheets from his jeans, spreading them out flat on the bar. It was an NCIC printout stapled with some other papers. “They’re ABT, Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, or at least they used to be, and that’s not the sort of club you just up and quit. The Brotherhood’s a prison gang all tied up in drugs and extortion and murder. From his tats alone I think the big mute one, the one they call Joker, is a Nazi Low Rider. Now, the Low Riders are hard-core bikers, but they’re also errand boys for the ABT. They’re the muscle out on the street and outside the prison walls. All the bikes parked out in Killing come back to nobodies, clean criminal records, which is bullshit, and which also means they’re smart. Too smart, like our Amé. The only full name I had to start with is the one I talked to face-to-face, this SOB . . .” Harp tapped at the papers in front him, stained now with spilled beer. “John Wesley Earl. This is just the first couple of pages, ’cause the rest of it was too big to haul around.”

  Chris pulled the pages forward and tried to read them in Earlys’ dim light. John Wesley Earl was in his mid-fifties and had gone to prison the first time in 1980, when he was twenty-one years old, for burglary and assault. Additional assaults and drug possession crimes in prison added time and kept him there until he was finally released in 1993, thirteen years later. After that he was tagged for a handful of misdemeanor offenses that dotted his record through the years—domestic violence, bad checks, drug possession. He went in again in 2000 for attempted murder of a biker outside of Abilene, and stayed there until May 2015, when he was paroled. That was just a couple of months ago.

  Chris did the math. Earl ha
d spent almost half his life behind bars.

  Harp tapped at the pages. “I imagine what’s there is only part of the story. I put a call in to Walls, where he did his most recent time, so hopefully someone there will get back to me tomorrow, day after at the latest. There should be a prison intelligence unit that tracks gang activity. I have a hunch that Earl was not just an ABT spear carrier. I think he was someone important, very important.” Harp shuffled the papers around, held up one sheet where he’d written some notes. “He talked about a brother, T-Bob, who I figure is this character, Thomas Robert Earl, who’s the registered owner of their RV. And JW apparently has two sons, Jesse and Bass. There’s nothing much on the uncle, just misdemeanor stuff, and the younger kid, Bass, is completely clean. But the older one has some terroristic threats, a couple of possessions with intent to distribute, and other petty stuff. I’d also put my money that he’s neck deep in gang and white supremacist shit, too, just like his daddy, but I’ll know more in a few days. I made some other calls, and Texas DPS has their own gang intelligence index. Maybe there’s something there, maybe not. Billy Bravo’s girlfriend puts the uncle and Jesse in the Wikiup with Bill Bravo last night.”

  “And this John Wesley just got out on parole? For murder?” Chris shook his head. “Did he get time off for good behavior? And what the hell is he doing in Killing? There’s nothing out there.”

  “Attempted murder. But . . .” Harp pulled the papers off the bar, refolding them and putting them back in his jeans. “Maybe there’s going to be something out there soon, like a biker clubhouse or a goddamn vacation time-share for racists. Hell, I don’t know. They’re supposedly renting that property from Ray Joyce, and when I spoke to him about it, he wasn’t all that friendly or talkative. He’s a piece of work, that one. Anyway, maybe he’s scared of them or wired into whatever they’re doing, but my gut tells me they’re going to be there awhile. So now we have this JW Earl and his clan and a whole bunch of other fucking racist skinhead pricks . . . moving in right next door.”