The front of the house hadn’t fared any better. Danny had hammered up boards over the shattered windows, but there were still plenty of visible bullet wounds all across the front face and on the porch rails. Mel walked along the porch and ran a hand over the holes, feeling them as if checking to see if they were real. There were even more inside the house, from those bullets that had passed through the broken windows.
There were holes in the roof, and the wind whistled through them.
It was all silent testimony to the furious violence that had occurred here, to just how lucky Chris had been to walk away a second time.
That was the doubt he saw in Mel’s eyes. This had been their home, a place she had come to love, but Chris had almost died here, again.
Maybe no home was worth so much.
* * *
—
SHE’D BEEN STAYING OUT AT JAVY CRUZ’S, away from the media circus in town, while he’d been living out of the Budget Inn in Murfee. But now that the circus was finally packing up and leaving, it was time to make some decisions.
Bringing her out here was the first one.
He took Jack from her, felt his son’s familiar heartbeat and warmth, and let her wander around inside and outside the house. He’d told her what had happened and she’d read some of the news accounts, but none of that had prepared her for this sight.
He gave her all the time she needed, as Rocky—nose down, ears up—traced unseen paths through the scrub, following the steps of the investigators who’d set up shop at his home for days. They’d tried to re-create the shoot-out, to figure out exactly who had been where, at what moment, and although Chris had lived it . . . survived it . . . he couldn’t remember many of those exact details.
But I remember I shot at men I thought were cops, agents. I was willing to do that, to save America, to save Danny.
To save myself.
To survive.
Another choice he’d have to live with.
He hadn’t bothered to read all the reports and findings. They meant nothing to him. He knew all he needed to know.
Mel walked out slow onto the porch, holding two things: one of his election signs, shot through with two holes, and a broken picture frame. It had been blasted off the wall, shattered, the picture inside ruined. She dropped the sign and turned the frame over and over and then gently put it down on the porch rail. She kissed Chris, and tried a smile that never quite made it to her eyes.
She might have been crying when she was alone inside the house.
“Okay, Sheriff, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to rebuild. That’s what we’re going to do. I’ve already talked to Judah Canter about the work.”
“Jesus, Chris. The work. Even with the insurance, the money it’s going to take . . .”
“I know.”
She looked at the picture on the rail, talking to herself. “I can go back to Earlys, steal back some of my hours from Vianey. She’ll understand.”
“Well, maybe you should think about something other than working in a bar, since you’re a mom now and all. We need to keep you respectable.” Chris kissed the top of Jack’s head; he was awake and blinking. God, his eyes are beautiful. Like his mother’s. It was almost like Jack knew he was home, too. “I’ve been talking to Homer Delahunt about his bookstore in town. He’s trying to get out from underneath the place. He’s looking for someone, anyone. He won’t drive a hard bargain.”
Mel granted him a ghost of a laugh. “Chris, we don’t have the money to fix this house, much less buy a bookstore. I don’t know anything about managing a place like that, and neither, for that matter, do you.”
“You can learn, and it seems I may have come into some money.” He fished around in his pocket and pulled out a folded-up letter. Inside the letter was a check.
Mel read them both. “You sold a story?”
“Yeah, I did. Just a small one, to an even smaller literary magazine in Arizona.”
She hugged him and Jack both, tight. “I’m so proud of you. It’s great.” This time her smile was genuine, but she held up the check and read it again. “I mean, it really is great, Chris, but this barely covers the cost of one of our windows.”
“I know. Truth is, short stories don’t pay a whole lot. I guess I need to learn how to write a novel now.”
“Do you have any ideas for one?”
Chris smiled. “Yeah, a few.”
* * *
—
THEY WALKED AROUND for a while longer, surveying the last of the damage together, before making their way back out to his truck. With the true onset of fall, it was getting darker earlier, and there was even a chill, the coming night showing sharper teeth. In another month or so they could stand out here with their breath pluming in the air, frost sparkling on the caliche. But now, although the sun hadn’t gone down, a full, silver moon had already risen. It was one of those moments when both sun and moon were in the sky at the same time, fighting for attention, hanging high above the Big Bend and each lighting it in its own beautiful way.
Everything was so clear and illuminated and perfect, the world around them a painting.
“How’s Joe?” Mel asked. “Is he still back east?”
“Yeah, he finally got his wish to get the hell out of Texas. He’s there overseeing the interviews of Fox Uno. They’ve got him stashed somewhere, getting treated for chronic myeloid leukemia, and Garrison said he’s talking. Really talking. He’ll live, for a while longer. Long enough. The best damn medical care money can buy.”
“Is Joe seeing his daughters?”
“That I don’t know, babe. I assume so.”
“Is he coming back?” Mel asked, leaning hard into Chris as they both stared up at the sky.
“I don’t know that, either, but I don’t think so. There’s nothing out here for him anymore.”
Mel seemed to think about that, as she pulled Jack’s blankets around him more. He’d fallen asleep again as they’d walked around the Far Six, and Rocky was at her feet, head on his paws, just as tired from racing around after them.
“But is there something here for us?” she finally asked.
“Well, the good citizens did reelect me sheriff,” Chris said.
She punched his arm. “Against your goddamn will, almost kicking and screaming. You didn’t want it then, Chris—is this really what you want now?”
And that was the question . . . What did he want?
He thought he had wanted his own version of America’s freedom.
But what he really wanted were moments like this, with Mel and Jack and Rocky the dog. All of them safe and warm, and the hard truths of the world at arm’s length; or even farther, as far away as the sun and moon above them now. Although he wanted to believe he could have those moments anywhere—that he’d finally earned them, by honoring his promises to America Reynosa—he’d tried twice now to leave, and both times had found himself right back here anyway.
Even if he didn’t need the Big Bend, maybe it still needed him.
He thought about all his chalk marks still etched across the rocks and trees of El Dorado, that language all his own that spoke so plaintively of his search for Evelyn Ross.
The futility of it, but also its importance.
It was another promise he’d made, this time only to himself, and one he wanted . . . needed . . . to keep.
Because when the rains and the snows washed away all those marks, he’d start again. And again. As many times as it took.
He’d never ask so much of Mel again, but he couldn’t ask any less of himself.
He bent down and scratched Rocky behind the ears and then wrapped his arms around his wife and son, careful that the badge and gun on his belt didn’t get in the way.
“Ya tengo lo que quiero, aquí mismo,” he said. I have everything I want, right here.
And although Mel didn’t know all the words, he knew she understood what he was trying to say anyway.
IV
As Chris drove them away from the Far Six, talking again about his ideas for the bookstore, Mel rolled down the window and just let him ramble.
He needed to do this, to talk about something other than what had happened. He needed to move on.
Chris had been worried all along if things would be different for them after Fox Uno, and she’d worried the same thing.
She wasn’t sure she had an answer before, or now.
In the days after, she hadn’t told him about the young boy and girl she and Javy had found out at his ranch. There hadn’t been a right time, or a right way.
Listening to Chris now, that time seemed to have passed altogether.
There were no good ways to lie.
* * *
—
THEY’D SHOWED UP OUTSIDE JAVY’S HOUSE in a stolen Charger, exhausted and gravely injured.
Javy had greeted them with a raised shotgun, only to find the girl had suffered a recent, horrible cut to her face, and the boy a more recent, and serious, gunshot wound. Javy spoke to the girl in Spanish and learned they’d crossed over the river, but they were never at the Far Six.
They knew nothing about Fox Uno or Chris or Danny or America.
They’d seen smoke over that way, a circling helicopter low in the sky, but nothing more.
Their injuries had come from other men.
* * *
—
BUT MEL UNDERSTOOD that their arrival, and their wounds, had everything to do with Fox Uno—and with all the events that were happening at the Far Six and the Big Bend in the days leading up to it. She couldn’t draw a straight line between those two things, but it was there all the same. She could feel it, as sharp as that splinter of Chris’s decision to risk everything to help America.
Fox Uno was a hole, sucking everything down. He’d nearly swallowed Chris and his friends.
Her family . . . the only thing that mattered to her.
By the time the boy and the girl arrived, Mel knew that Chris was okay—she’d heard from him, and then Joe Garrison. But she couldn’t, wouldn’t, leave Javy to deal with those two injured kids alone. While he settled them in one of his bunkhouses, she called Vianey Ruiz, who in turn reached out to a young Hispanic EMT she knew from Presidio. His name was Lucas, and when he got to Javy’s place and took one look at the boy’s gunshot wound, he said he needed a hospital. When it was clear he wouldn’t go, Mel promised to pay Lucas whatever was needed to treat him at the bunkhouse, and Javy promised to make sure it was done.
Javy also got Zita to promise she would not tell anyone about what she’d seen, and she said she was good at keeping secrets, better than anyone she knew.
Her papa had already taught her how important keeping secrets could be.
That night, after Mel shook free from Garrison’s agents, she went and bought bandages and pain pills and everything else Lucas had asked for, as well as new clothes for the girl and the boy. For the next five days, she brought them anything she thought they might need and, with Javy translating, learned their entire story.
Everything that had happened to them, and how they had come to the Big Bend.
She cried more than once, holding both their hands, but cried hardest when the girl asked to hold Jack.
* * *
—
JAVY AND LUCAS spent one whole afternoon pulling the police equipment out of the Charger—after their story, and talking with Chris and Garrison, Mel had a damn good idea where it had come from—and they buried it all out on Javy’s property. Javy then used a sledgehammer to put some fresh dents and scratches in the car, and to finish the disguise, splashed some green paint along the wheel wells and the trunk.
He also found a new license plate, but Mel never asked him where he got it.
* * *
—
WHAT SHE WAS DOING was wrong, in the strictest sense of the word.
She was, after all, withholding information about a huge federal investigation, helping to hide two illegal aliens, and, in every way but saying the words out loud, lying to Chris. But Mel remembered what she told him only a few days before Fox Uno and America had descended upon their home:
There isn’t any real right or wrong here, only what you have to do.
And right or wrong, this thing with the young couple was something she had to do. If she and Chris were going to live with his decision about Fox Uno, then she was going to live with her decision about Chayo and Neva.
She was fine with that.
* * *
—
SHE SETTLED BACK INTO THE SEAT, as Chris continued to talk. She let the wind through the open window hit her face.
It felt good.
Before Chris had brought her out to the house, she’d asked Javy how Chayo and Neva were doing today, and he’d pretended not to know who or what she was talking about.
But he’d said it with a smile.
Neva had talked about having relatives around Murfee, but she’d also talked about Houston . . . Dallas . . . the whole wide world.
The last time Mel had seen Neva and Chayo, they’d been sitting on the bunkhouse bed together, holding hands, sharing secrets of their own.
The future.
And if that was the last time she was ever going to see them, that’s how she wanted to remember them.
She reached over and grabbed Chris’s hand from the steering wheel.
There were no good ways to lie, but some secrets had to be okay.
V
Garrison leaned down next to her, close, and told her everything.
They were in the room that overlooked a small ornamental pond, her favorite in the house. One whole wall was perfect glass, with a sweeping view of the bright green slope down to the pond that was ringed with cattails and daylilies and geraniums and sword grass. Beyond the pond was a deeper, darker green of old, leafy trees, and there was a shaded stone bench that they sometimes sat on when he came to visit, but only for a half hour at a time—even on a cooler day like today—because she’d lost so many sweat glands in the fire, and her body did a poor job of controlling her temperature. A hard workout could lead to a heatstroke, so most times they met in this room—bright and beautiful and clean but always colder than the world outside—and just watched that other world together through the glass.
Morgan Emerson’s parents had originally relocated to Atlanta so they could get her into the Joseph M. Still Burn Center at Doctors Hospital, in Augusta. It was one of the best in the country, and after the fire that had consumed her in Murfee, she’d needed months of in-patient care at the burn center. When that was done, and they had to move her from Still back home, they decided to stay on in Augusta, and looked for a place in historic Summerville that everyone called “The Hill.” Morgan’s father was ex-military and knew certain people, and they’d helped him find the house, which wasn’t even on the market at the time, and took care of all the arrangements. For a couple of months, a private security firm supplied a twenty-four-hour protective detail on Randall Emerson’s daughter, and more than once, when Garrison had arrived to see her, he’d pass a dark SUV or a limousine leaving the residence, the smoked, bulletproof windows hiding the person inside.
Each visit was the same.
Garrison and Randall Emerson shook hands, shared a silent glass of Glenmorangie Signet in the kitchen, and then his wife, Marjorie, walked Garrison just as silently back to their daughter.
* * *
—
HE TOLD HER ABOUT THE EVENTS AT THE FAR SIX, and the surprising phone message he got from Deputy America Reynosa, explaining how she and the sheriff needed his help—that her uncle Fox Uno was hiding out with them, but that men were coming for him and he wouldn’t be there much longer. She wasn
’t sure how much time they had left. She talked about Danny Ford hiding somewhere in the desert, dressed in army fatigues, and voices on phones, and a little girl named Zita. It had all sounded so strange, so unexpected, he almost wrote it off as a bad joke. But the real concern in the deputy’s whispered voice, and the very last thing she’d said before the message ended, made him a believer.
She’d said she was calling from baby Jack’s nursery at the Far Six.
He told Morgan that he later learned from Sheriff Cherry just what that call had cost the young woman—a choice between the new family she’d found in Murfee and the one in Mexico—and how it was a good thing that damn helicopter had finally gotten repaired, because if it hadn’t, he and FAST might never have made it out there in time.
He wasn’t eloquent, but described the best he could the terror of flying fast and low over the darkening desert, desperately searching for the house.
Described that resigned but calm look on Fox Uno’s face when the cuffs were put on him.
He told her all about the aftermath—the debriefings and the hearings and the interviews. He told her that it had been explained to Fox Uno in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t fully cooperate with U.S. investigators, he’d be charged with the death of one federal agent and the attempted murder of another, and be forced to stand trial in a U.S. court on the outstanding RICO charges that El Paso, New York, and San Diego had on him. That is, if he wasn’t simply handed back over to a Mexican government that was extremely desperate . . . too desperate, most would say . . . to get him back. The government of Mexico had started with promises and ended with threats, but in the end, for Fox Uno, it was one of those choices that wasn’t a choice at all.
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