This Side of Night

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This Side of Night Page 24

by J. Todd Scott


  All things Chris had been doing.

  And in a subtle reference to the fires of a year ago, he emphasized that because Murfee didn’t have its own city police—the county sheriff’s department had always filled that role—one of his priorities would be “Murfee First.” He planned on focusing on the safety of the town, something that had been ignored for far too long.

  Murfee First. It’s OUR Big Bend. Bethel’s case could be made with a couple of easy slogans, and backed up by a lifetime of law enforcement work—he’d been a constable before being a ranger—they made for a damn compelling argument. Chris had plenty to say, too, and good work of his own to defend, but would never escape the specter of the deaths and fiery violence that had occurred on his watch, or the lack of experience that many felt had helped ignite it.

  Chris wasn’t sure how many of the debate questions Royal Moody helped write, but plenty of them took direct aim at Chris again and again—how Chris was simply unqualified to carry a badge and a gun, an inescapable fact that had compromised everyone’s safety. On his watch, Murfee and the Big Bend had all but been overrun by illegals and white supremacists and drug runners and murderers, most of whom Chris had failed to anticipate or deal with, if not outright aided and abetted by his incompetence.

  It wasn’t necessarily his fault, but Chris was simply too young, too naive, too unseasoned, and as the debate rolled on, Bethel—who claimed to have helped capture the notorious serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells outside Del Rio—only had to nod sagely. Sorrowfully. He was the veteran lawman the Big Bend needed to ride out of retirement and set things straight again.

  When Royal finally gave Chris a question about ISIS—goddamn ISIS, some vision of turbaned terrorists sneaking through the desert—he’d had enough.

  He clutched the microphone on its tall, silver stand, wiping sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. He scanned the audience, searching out a familiar, maybe even friendly, face.

  He settled on Dave Wilcher, one of the moderators. Dave was in his late sixties, and although he wasn’t tall, he was strong. The muscles were corded in his neck as he worked a wad of long-cut tucked between his cheek and gums, and his arms stuck out thickly from the rolled-up sleeves of his chambray shirt.

  Chris took a deep breath. “Dave, how long has your family owned the Monument?”

  Dave looked left and right, uncertain that Chris was addressing him, although he was the only person who owned a ranch called the Monument in West Texas, and it ran right alongside the Rio Grande. “That land’s been in my family for about a hundred and fifty years. Hell, you know that, Sheriff.”

  “Exactly. One hundred and fifty years. Now, how often in all that time have you ever seen a terrorist crossing that river, sneaking over your pastures?”

  Dave laughed, shook his head. “Well, now, I can’t say I’ve ever seen one, exactly.” Then he added, “Don’t reckon I will, either. But if I do, I’m damn ready.”

  A small ripple of laughter ran through the gym. Most of the men had guns openly displayed on their hips.

  “I’m sure, so if Mr. Turner here wants to spend his time hunting for terrorists, I think we can all agree he’s going to be looking for a long time, and he better find them before most of you folks do.” Another roll of laughter, louder, and Chris pressed on. “Now, how many times have you asked me to come out and deal with some illegals on your land?”

  Dave paused, uncomfortable, so Chris answered for him. “It’s okay, Dave, I’m not trying to put you on the spot. You’re a good man, we all know that, so I’m just going to go ahead and tell everyone here that the answer is never. In all my time with the department, you’ve never fretted about that. You see it the way I do. The way most of us do. We’re talking about mostly good men themselves, sometimes even women and kids, looking for work. A better life. And we can all understand that.”

  Chris looked down at the microphone. “Fact is, Dave, last time you called me up, it wasn’t about terrorists or illegals or anything like that at all. It was about your daughter, Tammy. She’d gotten all worked up about that boyfriend of hers, Carl Rider, and hightailed it up to Monahans in that nice new F-150 of yours, the pearl-colored one you’d just bought from Sandy Dean. You asked me if I could bring her home.”

  Everyone knew about Dave’s legendary battles with his redheaded nineteen-year-old daughter. She’d been dating the much older Carl Rider, who worked seasonally at the Comanche. Everyone also knew Carl still had a wife and three kids in Odessa. It was a natural fact of living in a small town that all your problems were always on display, and Dave himself had been particularly vocal about this problem to anyone who would share a beer with him at Earlys.

  Dave looked over his shoulder at someone in the crowd, maybe his wife, Margaret Ann. “Yes, yes, that’s right, Sheriff. Actually, you and Ms. Reynosa. Deputy Reynosa.”

  “And we got that new truck back without a scratch on it, didn’t we?” Chris asked, adding, “Of course, we got Tammy back all right, too. Not a scratch on her, either.” The laughter was loud this time, clear and honest, and now Bethel Turner wasn’t nodding. Instead, he looked uncomfortable.

  Chris pulled the microphone off the stand and took a step forward, toward the bleachers. “That land of yours at the Monument is as pretty as there is around here. Tammy was born right out there, like you were. Constance Merrill did the midwifing. My daddy knew both you and your daddy, Malcolm, although I never had the pleasure. But my daddy always told me that Malcolm believed if you’re born a Wilcher, the first and last thing you were ever going to see is that land. It’s your birthright, the land your family has lived and died on, laughed and loved and cried and bled on, for more than a hundred years.”

  Chris wasn’t sure at what point Mel had walked back in, or how much she had heard, but she was now standing by the propped door out into the parking lot, holding Jack in her arms. That large exit sign glowed above her and shadowed her face.

  “To be honest, I don’t have any stories about terrorists, but I have a hundred stories like that one about Dave’s truck and his daughter. I have a story like that for almost every one of you in here, the things my deputies and I do every day. The little things, which maybe don’t seem like much, but to me, make all the difference in the world. It’s what makes Murfee and the Big Bend the only place I want to raise my son. That, and land like the Monument. All those beautiful views that are ours to keep, that are like no place else in this whole damn world.”

  Chris turned to look straight at Bethel. “Bethel Turner was a fine Ranger, and he’ll make a good sheriff. He’s a serious man, experienced. There’s no doubt about it. There’s plenty I don’t know about this job, including how to keep you all safe all the time. I can’t . . . won’t . . . promise that, and if he can, then he’ll get my vote, too.

  “But I do know this town.” Chris pointed the microphone into the dark. “I know you. Your sons and daughters, the way many of you have known me my whole life. And I know the Big Bend, this land we all love. The Far Six is my Monument, and I nearly died out there trying to defend it . . . to defend us. The same way my deputies do every day. None of us will ever buy the safety and security of the Big Bend with another man’s blood.” Chris glanced at where Royal Moody and some of the others were sitting. “I’ve proved that. I’ve already bled plenty enough for it.”

  He stopped, looked down at the microphone in his hand, at his ravaged body. “I’ve enjoyed being your sheriff. It’s been an honor, the greatest honor of my life. But I think I’ve already talked too much tonight, so that’s pretty much all I have to say.”

  He turned and held out the microphone to Bethel, who looked as if he wanted to do anything but grab it, but he finally stepped off his chair and did. Chris shook Bethel’s hand, and turned back to the silent gym.

  The last time he had been inside this gym, people were cheering for him.

  He looked over to where his deputies w
ere sitting—Tommy and Dale and Till and Marco and Danny and America. He nodded at them and smiled.

  His dad, calling out his name.

  Then he looked for Mel again, standing beneath the exit sign. The Big Bend night was out there, just on the other side of the door, and its breeze was moving her hair.

  The whole world laid out in front of him.

  He walked toward her, past the assembled town and all the people he knew, and out into the night.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Martino was sitting on the whitewashed balcony in his room at Las Hadas in Manzanillo, a resort once made famous by an actress in an American movie, an actress like his mother. It was primarily Canadians who flocked here now, to the brown-speckled sand and the blue ocean and the green sweep of the mango and palm trees all the way to the water’s edge.

  The resort got its name, which meant “the fairies,” from mariners who saw sparkling lights illuminating the ocean at night—a chemical by-product of phosphorus in the waves, but entrancing all the same. Magical. Martino had seen it before, too, on his other visits here.

  Martino did not know much about his mother, but understood that she had been born near here, in Comala. She’d been an actress, successful in only small parts in telenovelas like María Mercedes, before she’d somehow caught the eye of Fox Uno. She had circled in his orbit for a while, but not long after Martino was born, she was gone. He’d been raised by a woman he only called Abuela, a much older version of Luisa, the woman who had looked after Zita (and like Luisa, Abuela was now gone). Martino knew only a little more about Zita’s mother, a onetime beauty pageant winner in Nuestra Belleza Nuevo León, who was killed along with three of his father’s men in a shoot-out with soldiers at a checkpoint on a dirty road outside Saucillo. She came out of her truck firing first, eight rounds from a 9mm pistol, before she was shot at least twenty-seven times, including twice in the face that had made her a pageant winner. The truck was later found to contain three AR-15 assault rifles, a dozen more 9mm handguns, more than eight hundred rounds of ammunition, and eighty-five thousand dollars.

  Martino had seen the pictures of her body in a newspaper when he was barely sixteen years old.

  He had not chosen this life. It had chosen him.

  Actresses and beauty pageant winners. Martino had bedded both, and men as well, preferring the latter, since those he could not impregnate. He found them in small towns like Comala and put them up in a hotel like this one for a week, and gave them more money than they had ever seen in their lives. He then returned them to their towns again with all the clothes or watches or jewelry he had bought them and a thick envelope with even more money—enough for the inevitable six brothers and sisters and sick grandparents. He didn’t love them, didn’t care for them all that much. They simply fulfilled a need, like drinking cold water on a hot day, and he wanted nothing to tie him to them or nothing to remember them by.

  He never wanted to see them again.

  He never wanted to look at a bloody picture of them in the newspaper.

  He wanted no threat of heirs, no sons or daughters of his own, who might ever tear him down.

  * * *

  —

  HE SIPPED A CHILLED GLASS OF LOUIS ROEDERER, the setting sun turning the sea a thousand different colors; the colors of the legions of brightly hued fish that swam below. From his room he could see the towering cruise ships, as well as ugly gray navy ships that he couldn’t name, since Manzanillo was also the base for the Fuerza Naval del Pacífico. He wondered how many of the marines chasing his father had stared out over the same water, watched these same sunsets. His father had never come here, had never seen this place. It was possible he’d never seen the ocean with his own eyes.

  What was he looking at now?

  Where are you, Father?

  He was still lost in thought when Xavier came up out of the darkened suite behind him, a room lit only by the lights of three laptop computers and six charging phones. Xavier was twenty-one or twenty-two, looked even younger shirtless. His skin was smooth, flawless. He was wearing silk shorts and his hair was still a bird’s nest from the bed.

  He had one of Martino’s phones in his hand.

  “It has been insistent,” he said, handing the still-buzzing phone to Martino, who exchanged the glass of champagne for it.

  “Go inside, Xavier, get ready. We have reservations soon. There is a suit for you in the closet, the white one. With the red shirt. Choose no other.”

  If Xavier had a complaint, he did not voice it. He finished Martino’s glass of champagne and disappeared back into the room. He wanted to be a singer but had a horrible voice, although he had many, many other talents. He was from Poncitlán or Jamay, Martino could not remember which, and it did not matter; Xavier had traveled several times to the United States, which at least had made for more interesting conversations.

  Martino checked the phone, scrolling through a series of messages via WhatsApp.

  He read them, read them again, and almost laughed out loud.

  * * *

  —

  THREE DAYS BACK HIS MEN had finally tracked down Gualterio, holed up in Saucillo of all places.

  They took him without incident. He became cooperative, though, only after they tortured Gualterio’s favorite nephew, Juan Daniel, who’d been traveling with him. They did it in front of him, with pliers and a hammer, making him watch it all. Trusting the fat pig after what Martino had done at Manuel Benavides was an impossibility; long as he lived, he would be a significant threat. He had his share of loyalists, too, and had made contingency plans of his own throughout the years. Martino suspected that if he hadn’t moved against his father with the Serranos’ help, Gualterio would have eventually done it on his own.

  He was a pig, and a pig always wanted the whole trough to itself.

  But if there was anyone his father trusted more than Martino, anyone who knew most of Fox Uno’s secrets and his little hiding places and war chests, it was Gualterio.

  Trusting him was impossible, but keeping him alive a little while longer had been necessary.

  Just as it had been necessary after the mess at Manuel Benavides to leave others of Fox Uno’s people untouched and in place, a safety net designed to snare his father whenever he decided to move.

  A move that had finally, mercifully, come yesterday morning.

  In the end, Martino was not all that surprised his father had turned to Gualterio, not him. The only real surprise was this girl’s involvement—America. Allegedly his prima. He knew of her, knew that Fox Uno had always favored her for reasons of his own, but never imagined her involvement in this thing. It was a shame now he would never have the chance to meet her. He would like to have known what she thought of her uncle, and of him.

  It also reminded him just how much he had already underestimated his father and how that had nearly cost him everything.

  Not anymore, never again.

  Martino stood to take one last look at the ocean.

  Outside his suite door were twelve armed guards, and two on each floor down to the lobby. In the lobby were six more, mixed in with the crowd, including two federal police officers. This was the last safe place he’d be for a while. Tonight, he needed to be on a plane back to the heat and dust of Ojinaga to oversee the arrangements Gualterio had made with his father and this girl, America. If it all went well, Fox Uno would be dead in seventy-two hours, as would that fat pig Gualterio, and that was something Martino would gladly do with his own hands.

  Like Diego Serrano had said, he had to personally get involved. He simply could not fail again.

  Xavier reappeared in his red shirt and the Giorgio Armani suit, holding two fresh glasses of champagne. He looked like a young American executive, perfectly complementing Martino’s own Brioni slim suit in amarena red, and his expensive Lucchese boots, cut out of black elephant leather with a stitch pattern reworked
as a skull, something you could only see if you got close enough to them and stared hard.

  The boots were called Terlingua, and they’d been handmade in Texas. It was this silly coincidence that had made Martino laugh out loud as he read the WhatsApp messages on his phone.

  Martino took the offered glass of champagne from Xavier, who did look amazing in the clothes he’d bought him. It was a shame that he had to leave, but staring at the other man, and thinking of his prima, had given him an idea. “Xavier, I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to go to dinner as we’d planned, but I do have a question.” Martino sipped the champagne, which had somehow gone warm and lifeless. It was bitter, no longer sweet.

  Martino poured the rest over the balcony.

  “Your passport and visa are current, correct?”

  PART THREE

  TEJAS

  FORTY

  CHAYO & NEVA

  Their most constant companions were murciélagos.

  They had first appeared at dusk, when Chayo and Neva were starting to stir from wherever they had hidden for the day. As much as Chayo had hoped they could travel only at night by the glow of the moon and the stars, it was proving too risky—too easy to fall down a ravine, or simply lose their way when the sky was made unreadable by a thick smear of clouds. He had never been afraid of the night before—not of the animals that moved or hunted in the dark—but after Neva tripped and tumbled face-first into a shallow, rock-lined arroyo, he was all too aware of the dangers hidden there.

 

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