by R.J. Ellory
“Oh, Carson, I’m sorry …”
Carson shook his head. “You ain’t got nothin’ to be sorry for, Ma,” Carson said. “Pa neither. You done good by both of us. Okay, so maybe we ain’t all you wanted us to be. Maybe we’re a disappointment every which way you could imagine, but whatever you might think about me, I am not one to betray my brother or my wife. Bad things I may have done, but not to my family. Family is different, Ma, and you well know it.”
With that, his tone and expression evidence enough that he didn’t want to hear another word, Carson opened the car door and got back in.
He accelerated away, kicking up a cloud of dust behind him.
Grace stood there, her heart racing, her whole body taut.
Bad things I may have done, but not to my family.
Was this what she’d been afraid of? That Carson had been involved in something terrible, something involving Roy Sperling and Warren Garfield, something that tied them all together in such a way as to never be untied?
Grace hurried back into the house. She wished she’d gone with William to Austin, ludicrous notion though it might have been, but the very last thing she wanted to be was alone.
FORTY-FOUR
“For a man who’s been here all of five days, you sure have caused some trouble, ain’t ya?”
The expression on Alvin Lang’s face was of a man assaulted by a malodorous scent. Something rank had invaded his nostrils, and the sense of displeasure it gave him was writ large on his features.
Henry and Evie had driven over to his place. It was early, a little before eight on Tuesday morning, and in the light of day, it seemed that this was akin to sharpening a stick with which to wake a slumbering wolf.
“I didn’t plan to cause any trouble, Deputy Sheriff Lang,” Henry said.
“Oh hell, you just go on and call me Alvin,” Lang said. “I ain’t even had time to get my uniform on.”
“You gonna ask us up for coffee?” Evie said.
Lang smiled. Many was the time he’d thought about what he would do with Evie Chandler. After all, he wasn’t so many years older than her. He was single, had a couple of little intrigues going on here and about, but nothing serious.
“Sure, Evie,” Lang said. “You can come on up for coffee, but I gotta be away in a while. Got work to do, places to go, people to see.”
Lang led the way, Evie and Henry following on after. Once in the kitchen, Lang busied himself setting out cups and cream and sugar.
“So you got Sheriff Riggs madder ’an a shithouse rat,” Lang said. “He sure as hell don’t appreciate you snoopin’ around in his family business, my friend.” The communication was directed at Henry Quinn, and Lang made a point of making my friend sound like a couched threat.
“Just wanted to deliver a letter,” Henry said.
“Sure you did,” Lang replied. “Just like you wanted to play dumbass with a pistol back in San Angelo, and look where the hell that got you.”
“Don’t need to be reminded about that,” Henry said.
“Well, maybe you do, Henry,” Lang said, “because you sure as hell don’t seem to have learned your lesson.”
“I think this is a little different,” Evie said.
Lang poured coffee for all three of them, passed around the cups and sat down. “Circumstances are different, sure, but that don’t mean that whatever Henry Quinn is doin’ is any less foolhardy.”
“What you did was wrong, Alvin Lang,” Evie said. “That stunt with the package. That was a setup, and it was plain wrong. Searchin’ my pa’s house, Henry’s car an’ all. You don’t think you’re gonna get away with something like that, do you?”
Henry reached out and touched Evie’s arm. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s not get into a fistfight here.”
It seemed that Henry’s physical gesture, perhaps the fact that he was familiar enough with Evie to tell her to back down, irritated Alvin Lang. Perhaps he felt challenged by Henry. This was his territory, and he had known Evie Chandler a great deal longer than Henry, after all. Regardless, this ex-con troublemaker had somehow secured her attention and affection.
Evie—being Evie—acted as if Henry hadn’t even spoken.
“People screw up, Alvin. Everyone fucks up one time or another, and you got no right to—”
“Well, you can stop right there, Evie Chandler,” Lang said. “You are in no position to be telling me about what I do and do not have a right to do.”
“Alvin, you know what I mean—” she started.
“Evie, seriously—” Henry interjected, but Lang raised his hand and silenced him.
“Let her talk, boy,” Lang said.
Henry felt tense, as if waiting for news that could only be worse than expected.
“You set him up, Alvin, you and Carson. You got Henry all wound up in a knot with another year in Reeves hangin’ over his head. What for? Because he wants to get a message to Evan’s daughter. Seems to me that this is a very strange response to a very simple situation.”
Lang shrugged. “Carson says he don’t want to help out his brother. Isn’t that enough for you to leave well enough alone? Evidently not. You wanna keep stickin’ your fingers in the socket to see if the shock feels the same. Sometime soon you’re gonna get burned real bad.”
“Are you threatening us, Alvin?” Evie asked.
Henry leaned forward. “Evie, enough.” His tone was firm and certain.
“You her keeper all of a sudden?” Lang asked. He looked at Evie. “He responsible for everything that comes out of your mouth now, girl?”
“Like I said, I didn’t come here for a fistfight, Alvin,” Henry said. “I never intended to upset anyone.”
“Well, you walked into it blind, didn’t you?” Lang said. “Or you done got yourself set up by Evan Riggs. Seems to me he’s the cause of what’s happening here, eh? The real problem here is between them brothers.”
“So what is the problem between them?” Evie asked. “You must know.”
“What I know and what I discuss with you are two very different things.”
“Never known so many people with so many secrets,” Evie replied.
Lang sighed. “Hell, you’re beginning to irritate my nerves, little lady.” He looked at Henry. “Maybe you should take charge of what comes out of her mouth, because it sure as hell is gratin’ on me right now.”
“I am perfectly capable of takin’ responsibility for what comes out of my mouth, Alvin Lang,” Evie snapped.
Lang sneered, looked sideways at Henry as if conspiratorially masculine. “I don’t know that any woman can say that with a clear heart,” he said.
“Christ Almighty, you really are as much of an asshole as I thought,” Evie said.
Lang laughed sincerely, heartily. He believed her antagonism a source of real humor.
Looking at Henry, Lang said, “Tell her to shut her chatter, boy, or I’ll quiet her down some myself.”
“Fuck you, Alvin Lang,” Evie said.
“This is bullshit,” Henry said. “You’re as bad as each other. I don’t know what the hell is going on here, but we were supposed to be having a perfectly civil conversation about this situation. This is fucked-up, and I am really getting to the point where I don’t want anything more to do with it.”
“You should listen to your man here,” Lang said to Evie. “Walk away. That’s what we’ve been telling you, and that’s what we’re gonna keep on tellin’ you.”
For a few moments there was an awkward silence in the small kitchen.
“Why you so scared, Alvin?” Henry asked.
Lang turned slowly and looked at him unerringly. “Who said I was scared?”
“Writ all over you,” Henry said. “Secrets. That’s what we’ve got here. Evie is right. Never been anyplace where there’s so many people who are afraid to open their mouths.”
Lang laughed dryly. “What the fuck is this—some kind of bullshit backwoods psychology? Oh sure, I’m afraid to open my mouth.” He shook his hea
d. “Like hell I am. Go fuck yourselves, the pair of you.”
Neither Evie nor Henry responded.
“Maybe it’s time to leave,” Lang said, and leaned forward as if to rise from his chair.
“What happened to you?” Henry said.
Lang looked at him askance, his expression one of immediate suspicion.
“Heard word you used to be a straight shooter, Alvin. Heard word you were on the up-and-up. Knew where the lines were, knew when you were over them. What the hell happened to you?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Henry shook his head. “Was it the thing with the woman?”
Lang bluffed it, but the color draining from his face was something that would have been visible from the end of the street. “Wh-what are you talking about, boy?” he said, doing all he could to sound as controlled and direct as possible.
“You know, Alvin … all that trouble that went down a few years ago. Is that what Sheriff Riggs has over you?”
Alvin Lang was white, not only with shock but with anger. “You haven’t got the faintest fucking clue what you are talking about,” he said. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with. This has nothing to do with Sheriff Riggs—”
“What doesn’t, Alvin?” Evie asked. “Are we talking about what happened in May of sixty-six, or are we talking about something else?”
Lang said nothing for a good ten seconds. Those seconds stretched and distorted as he looked at Evie, then to Henry, and back to Evie again.
From Henry’s viewpoint, Evie’s expression was implacable, yet he knew a deep and profound panic simmered beneath the surface. She was terrified. He could feel it there in the room, something almost tangible.
“You just crossed the line,” Lang said, and his voice was gentle, almost sympathetic, and—as a result—altogether disturbing. “You open your mouth about whatever you have heard one more time, and—”
“And what, Alvin?” Henry said, feeling now that it had gone far beyond any point of retraction. The wound was opened, it was bleeding, and nothing would cauterize it. “Your daddy works up in the Department of Corrections, I hear, and your granddaddy is the lieutenant governor of Texas. You got stuff buried here that’s gonna upset them real good, I guess …”
Lang seemed to slip into some sort of slow-motion reality, a reality unrelated to that within which Henry and Evie existed.
Evie looked at Henry. Henry shook his head. He didn’t know what was happening. He didn’t understand what they had done here, and he had no inkling of the consequences.
“You people are as good as dead,” Lang said, and even as the words left his lips, he rose from the table, pushed the chair back, and walked to the kitchen counter. From a drawer beside the stove, he produced a .38 revolver.
“Jesus, Alvin, what the fuck are you doing?”
“I d-did what Evan should ha-have done,” Lang said, his voice kind of slurring, as if he were drunk, losing control of his faculties. “Oh, fuck,” he said. “He told you, didn’t he? He’s gonna tell everyone. I knew it. I knew it would come to this. Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty …”
“Alvin, seriously, put the fucking gun down,” Evie said. She looked utterly aghast, didn’t know whether to stay seated or get to her feet, then decided on the latter but rose slowly, her arms out toward Lang as if entreating him to set the .38 aside and not do whatever the hell he was thinking of doing.
Lang pointed the gun at Henry. Even as the barrel was aimed unerringly at Henry’s heart, Henry could see Lang’s hand shaking. Lang wasn’t even looking directly at Henry, his gaze flitting back and forth between Henry, Evie, and some vague middle ground that may very well have been nothing but a thought.
Lang smiled then, and the expression was unsettling.
“All comes back, doesn’t it?” he said. “Past is the landscape that follows you no matter where you go.”
“Alvin,” Evie pleased, her voice edged with real panic and distress. “For God’s sake, nothing is worth this. Please … please don’t shoot him …”
Lang just looked back at her and smiled. The smile was almost peaceful. “All of this because of shame,” he said.
“But it doesn’t have to be this way,” Evie said, her tone was pleading, desperate.
Henry couldn’t move, his gaze fixed dead ahead, watching Lang’s ever-shifting expression as he wrestled with the reality and possible consequences of what was happening. If he shot Henry, he would have to shoot Evie. If he was to commit murder, then there could be no eyewitness.
Alvin seemed to look right through Evie, and then he turned back to Henry. He held Henry’s gaze for a good fifteen seconds, then looked down at the gun as if it were being held there by some force he could not control. He sighed audibly, the sound like something deep inside him as it collapsed in slow motion.
“Only shame for me is that I won’t see Carson’s face when it all falls apart,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
The hand tightened on the gun.
“Fuck it,” Alvin said.
“Alvin, no …” Evie gasped.
Alvin gave one last vacant smile, turned the gun around, aimed it at his own heart, and pulled the trigger with his thumb.
The sound wasn’t anywhere near as loud as Henry Quinn had expected it to be. Compared to the sound of the gun with which he’d wounded Sally O’Brien, it was nothing at all. A firecracker, a punctured tire, a hand clap.
There was no drama, no blood, no agonizing death throes. Alvin Lang just slid to the floor, his hand releasing the pistol as he hit the floor. It skidded across the linoleum and stopped against the baseboard.
The only sound, in fact, was Evie’s screaming, and to Henry it seemed the most deafening thing in the world.
FORTY-FIVE
Morning of Monday, August eighth, Ralph Wyatt rose early. Seemed the hours he slept and the hours he lay awake restless and agitated could no longer be separated. For the previous weeks since Rebecca had been up at Ector County Hospital, his daily visits had become ever more difficult and exhausting. It was like watching his wife die for a second time. He was losing his mind, and there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. Physical and mental exhaustion assaulted every sense. He found himself mumbling and then turning suddenly to hurl expletives at someone existing only in his mind. The law was down on him, medical opinion, too, and now the psychiatrists at Ector had their claws into his daughter, and it seemed that she would never come home. And if she did, well, he didn’t believe that she would really be his daughter anymore. Already she was vacillating between periods of intense introversion and wild excitement. They had given her medication. He didn’t even know what it was. He worried not only for her but for the child inside her; any kind of medication surely couldn’t be right for an unborn baby.
Ralph had started drinking. He had drunk as his wife died, seeming to find some brief solace in the oblivion that liquor gave, and after her death had sworn off the stuff for life. That oath had now been broken, and broken far too easily. There was a thirst inside him that could not be quenched, an emptiness that could not be filled, and it was all because of Carson Riggs.
Work on the farm had gone undone. He had thought to call Gabe, but had decided against it. He was not of a mind to supervise anyone. He was not of a mind to engage in anything but the rescue of his daughter from the clutches of Ector County Hospital, and after that the clutches of Carson Riggs and his scheming family. William and Grace Riggs must have known what Carson was going to do. By doing nothing, they had in fact colluded, wittingly or unwittingly, and now, even now—Ralph Wyatt watching his daughter fade before his eyes—they could have stepped in, could have insisted that their son relinquish whatever obsession he felt to punish her so severely. Rebecca was their daughter-in-law, after all. They were duty-bound to help, if not from any sense of loyalty they might feel toward Rebecca, then because their younger son had been the one to create this situation in the first place.
Ralph Wyatt was not
so narrow as to consider that Rebecca bore no responsibility for what had happened. The girl was a wild one—always had been, always would be. Took after her mother in that respect. Both she and Evan were as moths to flames. Ralph saw that, had been aware of it since they first met as children. They had grown up together, both Riggs boys and his daughter. He’d known that there would be a problem at some stage, that one of them would lose out, but if he’d been told that this would be the outcome, he would never have believed it.
On a couple of occasions Ralph Wyatt had considered marching over to the Riggs place and confronting Carson, William, Grace. He had practiced his speech, the vehemence pouring out of him as he paced the kitchen, in his mind’s eye the Riggs family standing in front of him, all of them stunned into shamed silence as he told them exactly what he thought of them, as he demanded they do whatever was necessary to see his daughter out of that terrible place. But the words had stayed in his kitchen, and they had echoed back at him and lodged in his mind until they became bitter and twisted. He was aggrieved, distraught, wound tighter than a watch spring, and the thought to go on over there and vent his anger, to demand immediate action, just grew ever stronger. His daughter had to be out of that place, and if neither her husband nor the father of her child wanted her, then so be it. She would stay with her father, and as soon as was feasible, they would move away from this godforsaken place and disappear forever. He could help her raise the child. He would be the best grandfather a child could ever wish for.
The thought to kill Carson Riggs came like a bolt out of nowhere. It came with the force of a truck, and yet it arrived silently, almost gracefully, and it sat in and amongst Ralph Wyatt’s dark and twisted thoughts as if it had been there all along.