The Far Empty

by J. Todd Scott

  Caleb pushed his hands against the side of his head. “Is there anything that comes out of your mouth that isn’t a fucking lie? Do you even know what the truth is anymore?”

  “You just haven’t been listening, Caleb. I’ve been telling you the truth your whole goddamn life. Hard words . . . hard truth.”

  Caleb laughed, crazy. “So this was all somehow for my benefit, your way of making me a man? Jesus Christ.”

  He nodded at the boy, took the Ruger, put it up on the dresser—still within his reach but out of Caleb’s—and raised his hands. “Man enough. You tried to handle business just now, and I’m proud of you for that.”

  Caleb kept his eyes on the gun, breathing hard. “Do you fucking hear yourself? You’re crazy . . . fucking crazy.”

  “I’m your father,” the Judge said, smiling. “As much as neither of us might want it, you are my blood. You see that now, you said it yourself. I love you the only way I know how. I know you, and you know me.

  “Like father, like son.” They stood that way for what seemed like forever, watching each other, listening to each other breathe.

  He knew Caleb could still make a move for the Ruger. It was even money as to whether he would try. He had Evelyn’s eyes, the way she’d always stared at him—that same intensity, all the same questions. Full of mysteries, deep as the ocean. There were no answers there, ever.

  Caleb broke the silence. “I know what’s up in the attic. I found what you’ve been hiding there. All that damn money . . . I guess that was the price of your family, this whole town.”

  Now, that did surprise him. He didn’t have anything to say but didn’t have the chance to anyway, because right then someone started hammering on the front door. It echoed throughout the otherwise still, silent house. The aftermath of the gunshot.

  “Expecting visitors?” He glanced at the windows, the stairway walls, waiting for the smear of reflected blue-and-red lights. It wouldn’t be his own deputies coming for him, but he wondered if Caleb or Chris Cherry had already talked to the feds or the Texas Rangers. But Caleb looked twice as surprised. He glanced down the hall, as if he might see a ghost walking toward him.

  The Judge reached out and hefted the gun, pointed it at his son, making him lead the way.

  “Clean your face and get the goddamn door, Caleb. Let’s see who we have for company.”

  21

  ANNE

  She wasn’t sure what she’d see, still in mid-knock, when Caleb opened the door. He was pale in the porch light, unmoored, translucent, and there was red at his mouth and a cut on his cheek, another smaller one on his forehead, both weeping blood. If it had been warmer, there would have been bugs fluttering against the light, battering against them with soft wings as they stood there, urging them on. But it was too cold for that, so it was just the two of them, their breath in streamers, the only thing moving in the chill.

  “Oh my god,” she said, almost reaching up to touch his face.

  “Why are you here?” Caleb said, hoarse.

  “Please get your things, Caleb, you’re leaving, now. Chris sent me. You haven’t been answering his texts or calls, or mine . . .” She trailed off as Sheriff Ross appeared behind his son.

  “Anne, do you want to explain why you’re telling my son to leave with you?” The sheriff put a heavy hand on Caleb’s shoulder, his fingers pressing down. He tried to stare her down, make her go away.

  She held her ground. “Chris Cherry wants you to come down to your office. He’s waiting for you there.”

  Chris had called, begging for her help. It was more than he had any right to ask, he knew that, but he had no one else. He explained most of what had happened with Caleb in El Paso—what he’d read in Caleb’s journal and the money he’d found there.

  He’d already left the hospital with his girlfriend Melissa, driving back to Murfee, but was afraid he would be too late—kept saying it, over and over again, too late, too late—and she could tell that he wasn’t doing all that well himself. He laughed that he was bleeding on everything, making a goddamn mess, just to make her smile over the phone, but told her none of that mattered. He’d whispered every word, each one an immense weight. Too hard, like Marc, the night he’d died.

  He needed to get Caleb away from the sheriff, but Caleb wasn’t answering his goddamn phone and there was no one else he could trust, no one in all of Murfee. She was the one who had to make sure Caleb was okay, stop him before he did something stupid, something fatal. Chris knew she’d helped him earlier tonight by lending him her car and now she needed to help him again. If she could do that, Chris promised to take care of the rest. She asked him what would make either of them—Caleb or the sheriff—listen to her? Then he told her what she had to say.

  “Chris wants you to come tell him face-to-face why you tried to kill him and Duane Dupree.”

  The sheriff blinked. “That’s what he said? Those exact words, to you, about me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “Does it matter? Caleb is coming with me now, and you can go deal with whatever you need to.”

  “You’re going to talk to me like this, on my own porch, my house? Anne, I thought you were smarter than this. This is ridiculous. Chris is . . . well, Chris is still suffering a lot of trauma.”

  Anne’s heart hammered. Caleb looked at her, pleading silently with her to go away, but everything had come down to this moment. There was nowhere else for her to go, not alone. Not without Caleb. “Chris said if you don’t come right now, he’s going to the federal authorities. He hasn’t yet, but he will.”

  “With what? About what?”

  “I don’t know, don’t care. But he said you would.” She repeated it just like he told her. “He said you needed to remember your talk at El Dorado. How you said secrets lead to trouble and to good people getting hurt.”

  She thought the sheriff might reach out and strike her, grab her hair and pull her into the house and swallow her up along with Caleb. In the dim light, for one horrible moment, he looked so old—ancient, mortal, collapsing right before her eyes.

  “And if I say no to all of this?”

  She looked at him, then to Caleb. They were all standing too close in the small circle of the porch light.

  “Please don’t,” she answered, adding her own words, not Chris’s: “Either way, you’re not going to hurt anyone anymore, so I don’t think you have a better choice.”

  • • •

  The sheriff drove away while she waited in the front hallway for Caleb to grab a few things. She looked around for signs of disturbance, something to show there had been a struggle, but from there, everything was in place. Only the smell of smoke in the air.

  Still, if half of what Chris had revealed about Caleb’s journal was true, there’d been constant struggle in this house—a battle of wills between a father and a son. Chris was convinced it was coming to a head tonight, and maybe it had. She had no idea what she interrupted when she came to the door. The only hint was Caleb’s pale face, the cuts and the blood. When she asked him about that, he had nothing to say. They didn’t talk anymore, even when they came out of the house and both saw a truck sitting in the shadows up the street, idling. At first she was afraid it was the sheriff, returned and waiting for them, but that wasn’t it. Caleb saw it, recognized it, and didn’t say anything at all. He left the front door open, though—wide open—as if expecting someone.

  22

  CHRIS

  He sat at the sheriff’s desk, surrounded by all his relics of people and places that no longer existed. Of a time that no longer existed.

  He had a gun on the desk in front of him, next to a few of the dollar bills that had fallen out of Caleb’s notebook. The rest were tucked safe inside the envelope with Morgan Emerson’s picture, waiting for Garrison back in El Paso.

  He didn’t have th
e key for the office, but Miss Maisie kept spares and a master in her cube downstairs. Mel had helped him break into her file cabinet to get it. He’d unlocked the office, leaving the door wide open behind him, waiting for the sheriff to walk through it.

  Chris prayed he didn’t bleed out before that happened.

  • • •

  Sheriff Ross was wearing his duster and his black Serratelli, as if he’d stepped right out of one of his old pictures on the wall. He laughed when he saw Chris sitting at his desk, a sound without light or heat, and pointed a gloved finger at Chris, as if to confirm he was there. Marking him. And Chris caught a faint smell of whiskey.

  He leaned against the doorjamb and crossed his arms, ignoring the money and the gun on the desk. “Well, I guess you decided you’re ready for that chair after all.” Adding, “You don’t look well, Chris. Not at all. You shouldn’t be out of the hospital.” He glanced down. “You’re bleeding all over my goddamn desk.”

  “This is over tonight, Sheriff.”

  The sheriff examined the wooden doorframe. “What exactly would that be?”

  “Everything. I know about those agents being here in Murfee. I know why they were here. I know about Rudy Reynosa and I’ve read a journal that Caleb’s kept for years.” He pointed at the money with his bandaged hand. “I know about the money . . . all of it.”

  The sheriff nodded. “I see . . . a journal.” He pushed away from the frame, took a step into the room, his boots loud on the wood. “Do you think anyone is going to care, much less believe, what Caleb wrote? He’s a boy.” Another step. “And we already know that no one gives a damn about Rudy Ray and never did.” Another. “And if you know anything about those agents, well, then you know a helluva lot more than me. So where does that leave us?”

  Two more steps, moving just like Duane Dupree had at Mancha’s. Then a final one that left him looming over the desk, huge. “With some money you say you’ve found? You’re going to make something out of that? You haven’t thought this through, Chris. Not long enough, not hard enough.”

  Chris picked up the big gun with his unbandaged left hand and aimed it unsteadily at the sheriff, roughly at his heart. He recognized it the second Chris touched it, and the way it gleamed in the light. The Model 1847 Colt Whitneyville-Walker, once owned by Texas Ranger Sam Wilson; for a while the most powerful handgun in the world. The one that had made Sam Colt himself say it’d take a Texan to shoot it. Chris’s service weapon had been taken by the state lab for his part in the Far Six shootout, so he’d pulled this one from the sheriff’s collection.

  “I’ve thought it through plenty, all the way on the drive back from the hospital you fucking put me in.”

  23

  MELISSA

  She sat out in the car, watching shadows move through the bottle-green glass of the windows upstairs—Chris and the sheriff. She’d thought this entire idea was crazy, told Chris as much, but when he was unable to reach Caleb Ross, he’d become convinced it was the only way. They fought with the hospital to release him, before the on-call staff finally threw their hands up in defeat.

  On the long drive back she’d offered to go to the sheriff’s house, begged him, but he told her the teacher would do that. She listened when he made the call near Presidio, where they had cell service; heard the familiar way he talked to her, but also heard everything that wasn’t there. Afterward, when he leaned his head against the window and grabbed her hand—held it tight as he could—that had been enough. It would have to be. Instead, he’d needed Mel’s help to get him upstairs to the sheriff’s office. He leaned on her the whole way up, unable to stand, and she knew he wouldn’t be able to get out from behind that desk without help. He was trapped in there alone, but wouldn’t let her stay.

  He kissed her when she had propped him up—no better expression for it—like a store mannequin, plastic and bloodless. He told her which gun to get out of which case and how to check if it was loaded. He had her wipe off her fingerprints, like any of that would matter if he had to use it. Then he’d smiled from somewhere behind bloodshot eyes and told her to get the hell out of there.

  When she came back to the car there was blood on the seat from his wounds. The car was filled with copper, with Chris, but she kept the windows rolled up anyway, even if that meant staying trapped with that awful smell of him bleeding. Dying. Then she’d searched around in her purse for that folded napkin Duane Dupree had given her, and dialed the number.

  Now she kept watch on the window, guessing at shadows . . . phantoms. Guessing at what they said, what might happen next—one of them near dying and the other already dead, because no matter what, the sheriff wasn’t escaping tonight. She’d talked to Dupree . . . and also because, if it came to it, there was a second gun, another she’d taken from the sheriff’s collection, sitting heavy in her lap, cool to her touch. Chris never saw her slipping it away.

  24

  CHRIS

  You’re done here, done with Caleb. Use tonight to get whatever you want, and then get the hell out of town.”

  “That’s it? You’re riding me out of Murfee? Out of my town? My home?” The sheriff didn’t take his eyes off the Colt 1847. They were gunmetal gray, flat and unreflective and unresponsive. But his voice thundered. “Son, I made this town. I am this town.”

  Chris nodded toward the pictures on the wall. “It was here before both of us, it’ll survive long after we’re both gone. You can wait here with me until the feds show up, or you can start walking. I’m giving you a chance you never gave me, for your son’s sake. So he doesn’t have to live with your fucking shame. Do you really want to stay here, answer all the questions? Read about yourself in the paper? Have to look the people of this town in the eye? That’s the deal. There is no other.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or . . .” Chris shrugged. “Or I guess I’ll have to shoot you right where you fucking stand.”

  The sheriff shook his head, like he was shaking away other voices. “You won’t shoot me, Chris, it’s not in you. It’s not you.”

  Chris tried to hold the heavy gun higher, knew it was shaking because it was in his weak hand. All of him was weak. “Tell that to the three men I left dead out at the Far Six.”

  The sheriff paused. “Shooting a man in the dark where you can’t see his face is one thing. Putting a bullet right here”—the sheriff pointed first at his chest, then his head—“or here, like this, where you can see his face and feel his breath and see the blood? That’s a whole different kind of thing.”

  “Maybe, I guess you’d know. But know this too, you kill me now and everything is out for everyone to see. It’s done, all done. Just walk away, keep walking.”

  The sheriff spoke low. “Do you really think you have enough friends to help you, to save you . . . to see this through? Melissa, Caleb? That goddamn whoring schoolteacher? That’s not much of a posse, Chris.”

  Chris used everything he had left to hold the gun firm. He zeroed in on a point between the sheriff’s eyes, right behind them. “Don’t make me, but I will. I promise.” The gun didn’t waver. “You can’t kill us all, Sheriff. Not everyone. And I only have to fucking kill you.”

  The sheriff nodded slow, once, twice, and backed toward the door. A hand hovered near his Colt.

  “So now we draw, see who’s faster?”

  “My gun’s already out, Sheriff. Seems like I’ve already won.”

  Chris cocked the hammer.

  The sheriff raised both hands. “Okay, Deputy Cherry. Okay.”

  Chris pointed the gun barrel at the money. “Some of what’s happened I can understand. I can almost wrap my head around.” He shook his head. “But we both know you didn’t want me dead over Rudy Ray, least of all that. That never even mattered. Or even because of what I knew about those feds. In the end, it was because of Anne, right? That was it all along. Between you and me, it always was.

&nbs
p; “You wanted her.”

  The sheriff didn’t answer, just raised his chin, defiant. It was the one thing Chris had never told Garrison—the one thing that made the most sense, and still somehow didn’t make any sense at all.

  “And why did you kill Evelyn? For God’s sake, why did you kill your wife?” But he was asking emptiness, because by then the sheriff was gone.

  25

  THE JUDGE

  He saw her sitting in the car, waiting for him. He could have put his hands on her then, hurt her, put the muzzle of his gun against her head, and told her to beg him to stop. He could have circled it around her eye, up and down her cheek, across her mouth, like a goddamn kiss.

  Chris would have heard the shot from the office but wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing about it, no more able to stop it than catching smoke. He would have been left stumbling and falling down the stairs, into the street, looking for her, afraid of what he’d find but knowing what it would be all the same, leaving his blood behind with every step. Always carrying the burden of what had been done to her. It wasn’t that the Judge couldn’t do such a thing—that even in his situation, as bad as it was, he wouldn’t contemplate making the time and then finding some small pleasure in it.

  But what stopped him was the way Melissa Bristow stared back without blinking. Working out his thoughts, not afraid of them, as something rose in her eyes like the moon over the Chisos. Not fear or worry. Just anger. She raised another of his own goddamn guns, held it high. Shooting through the windshield might hurt her as much as him, might send the bullet wide or leave her blind. That was a chance she was willing to take. Up in his office he wasn’t sure Chris could pull the trigger, but he had no doubt this goddamn woman would. No matter the damage, no matter the cost. No doubt at all.