Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  It hung there like a second shadow. Take a thirty-aught-six over there and kill the son of a bitch. So he was sheriff. What did that matter? If he was going to kill Carson Riggs, then Ralph himself would be done for anyway.

  A little after eighty-thirty, Ralph Wyatt took a bottle of bourbon from the kitchen counter and poured a good slug. He drank it down. He went to the back of the house and fetched down a Springfield. Had it for years, kept it cleaned and oiled, rarely used it. He loaded the rifle, went out to the truck, and set off for the Riggs place.

  As he drew close to the turnoff for the farm, he saw William Riggs heading off in the direction of Calvary. He guessed that he was en route to see Carson.

  Ralph Wyatt floored the truck and overtook Riggs as the dirt track reached the highway. He came to a staggered halt, Riggs swerving off the track and slamming on the brakes before he hit a tree. The front passenger-side wheel wound up in a rut.

  William Riggs got out, his blood up, and stood there for a moment as Ralph Wyatt got out of his truck.

  He saw the rifle immediately.

  “What the hell are you doing, Wyatt? You damned near drove me off the road into that there tree. Christ, man, what are you thinking?”

  Ralph Wyatt looked like half the man Riggs knew. Hair all mussed, eyes wide, black beneath them as if he hadn’t slept for a week. He was unshaven, his clothes disheveled, and he carried a Springfield. He took a step toward Riggs, and Riggs recognized the lack of surefootedness that came with drink or physical exhaustion. The man appeared to be on the edge of collapse.

  “Ralph,” Riggs said, almost as if Wyatt needed a reminder of his own name. “What’s the deal here, Ralph? What you doin’ with that gun?”

  “Where’s your boy at, Riggs?” Wyatt said.

  “Ralph, calm yourself. Christ, man. I don’t know what’s gotten into your head, but it can’t be right. You look like hell. Come on back to the farm with me. Let’s get you fixed up, get some clean clothes, get you some breakfast, some strong coffee, eh?”

  Wyatt raised the gun. He held it at waist level, cradling it in his nervous hands. He caught flashes of bright light out of the corner of his eye.

  “Now, look here, Ralph. This is just plumb crazy. You and I have things to talk about, sure … Maybe we got trouble, you know? We need to work this thing out. Carson done her wrong, man. I get that. But she done him wrong, too, and we gotta take responsibility for our kin and help them sort out their troubles.”

  “Gon’ ask you one more time, Riggs,” Wyatt growled. The lights in his eyes were fiercer. He raised one hand as if to shield himself from a sun that wasn’t there. “Where’s your boy at?”

  “You want Carson? You want to talk to Carson? Is that it?”

  Wyatt sneered. “This here Springfield got everything in it I wanna say to Carson Riggs.”

  Riggs backed up a step. There was a .45 in the glove box of his truck. He couldn’t even remember if it was loaded. It had been there forever. Longer than forever.

  “Ralph … seriously, my friend—”

  “Friend?” Wyatt laughed cruelly. “This from a man who sees his own daughter-in-law in that place? Don’t know what the hell Carson has going on with Roy Sperling and Warren Garfield, but they cooked up all manner of deceit and labeled her crazy. You coulda done something, Riggs. You coulda dealt with your boys, but you didn’t. Now I gotta take care of it, and it ain’t right. You call me a friend? We known each other all these years. Our kids done growed up side by side all these years, and this is what we got now, man. This is what we got and it needs to be dealt with …”

  Riggs took another sideways step, but it was unsubtle and awkward.

  “Back the hell away from there, Riggs!” Wyatt barked. “What you got in there? You got a pistol? You gon’ get a pistol outta there and shoot me? Is that what you’re plannin’ to do?”

  “You got your rifle there, Ralph. You gotta rifle aimed right at my heart.”

  “I ain’t gonna shoot you, Riggs. Christ, what kinda person you think I am?”

  “I think you’ve lost your mind, Ralph. I think you done lost your mind some, and you need to come on back with me and get some rest and some food and whatever, and then we can sit down and talk this out.”

  “Your boys is the ones you need to talk to, William. Both of them. They done a bad thing here, and it’s too late to fix it, isn’t it? She’s gonna have this baby, and neither one of them is gonna want it. But I want it, Riggs. I will take her away and look after her and the kid, and I hope to hell that kid don’t look like a Riggs, ’cause you people done me enough hurt to last a lifetime already.”

  “I understand, Ralph … I understand how much you’re hurtin’ …”

  “You don’t understand nothin’,” Wyatt said, “and after I’m done with them, your boys gonna understand nothin’, too.”

  “Meanin’ what?”

  “Meanin’ I’m gon’ find the pair of them and kill ’em stone-fucking dead.”

  “Can’t let you do that, Ralph.”

  “Can’t do squat to stop me, William.”

  Riggs went for the gun. He believed he didn’t have a choice. He moved quickly, but Ralph Wyatt was just as quick, and even as William Riggs turned back out of the car and looked back at Ralph, that Springfield barrel was pointing right at his head.

  The .45 was loaded, even chambered, and William Riggs acted out of nothing but instinctive response when he saw Ralph Wyatt’s finger tighten on the trigger of the Springfield.

  Two gunshots went off as one.

  Grace Riggs heard it. Wondered if that troublesome old truck was misfiring again.

  Wyatt took a bullet in the throat, fell back into the ditch.

  Riggs was jolted with the recoil of the pistol. He hadn’t fired it for a long time, and it sure had a kick. He saw Wyatt go down, knew there was every possibility the man was still alive, still clutching that Springfield, and he made a cautious approach.

  He saw the soles of Wyatt’s boots. Those feet weren’t moving. Riggs’s heart was running like a train, adrenaline coursing through him, and he didn’t know whether to feel relief or terror or both. He was alive—that was the main thing—and he had acted in self-defense. There was no one who could question that, even taking into account the fact that his son was the sheriff.

  It was as he looked down at Ralph Wyatt’s lifeless body that William Riggs felt something in his side. His arm felt weak, and for some reason the gun slipped involuntarily from his fingers. He looked down as a wave of nausea and light-headedness overtook him, and there was blood on his hands, his arm, blood down the front of his pants. He frowned. He had not touched Wyatt. Where had the blood come from?

  Something kicked him in the right side, something hard and sharp, and it was only then that he understood that Ralph Wyatt’s bullet had found a mark.

  A weight dropped on him, and he went to his knees.

  With a sense of disorientation flooding through him, he pulled back his jacket, saw the red rosette of blood blooming out through his undergarment, his shirt, his vest, and he knew that there had to be some hole in him to be leaking that much.

  William Riggs felt as if he’d been kicked in the back. He went forward onto his hands and knees, and an unearthly pain ripped through him. It was like being struck by lightning. Maybe things weren’t so good. Maybe he wasn’t going to walk away from this.

  He could hear himself then. It was a terrible sound, the sound of a man running out of air awful fast. His only thought was to make it back to the house. He started moving, and with each staggered motion, the pain tore through him again. Blood on the leaves beneath his hands, blood in the dirt, his own blood, and every foot he made felt like a mile.

  Stubbornness alone got him twenty yards. How long it took, no one would ever know. He fell facedown in the mud within sight of the house, but there was no one there to see him.

  William Riggs spent his last seconds wondering why the Riggs family had been dealt such a losing hand.
/>
  It was Carson who arrived first at the scene, not because it had been reported, but because he was on his way back home to relay one last thought to his mother.

  The message with which he’d driven over and the message he then delivered were not the same thing.

  He came up on the house with blood on his shirt and blood on his hands and a look in his eyes like God had punished him good.

  FORTY-SIX

  The urge to run was overwhelming.

  Henry held her down, but Evie fought back like a wildcat. She scratched his face. She was out-and-out hysterical.

  Alvin Lang sat slumped against the kitchen cabinets, an expression on his face like relief and disappointment all rolled into one. Whatever guilt had burdened him was a burden no longer. Now he just had his Maker and the afterlife with which to contend.

  Ten minutes, fifteen perhaps, and Henry managed to get Evie to her feet. Hauling her out of the kitchen and getting her into the front room was a Herculean task, as if she believed that staying in the kitchen would somehow enable her to turn back time. She held on to the frame of the door, still crying, still hyperventilating, looking at Henry with wide-eyed horror and abject disbelief.

  She didn’t speak for another ten minutes after that, and then it was some kind of shocked rambling monologue about Alvin Lang and Carson Riggs and what the hell were they going to do.

  “We are calling the Sheriff’s Department,” Henry said. “We have no choice.”

  “Let’s j-just g-go,” she said. “Let’s j-just go … No one knows we came here … No one know we’re h-here. Let’s just g-go.” And with that she started for the front door. Henry had to grab her and haul her back and sit her down and hold her shoulders so he could get her focused and talk directly at her.

  “Evie!” His voice was like a whipcrack. “Evie! Stop! Quiet! That’s enough! Listen to me!”

  She sort of snapped to, and then she was gone again, trying to get out of the chair. Henry held her down and she started crying.

  Henry slapped her face hard, the sound as sharp as his tone.

  Evie started hyperventilating once more, and then she kind of hitched her knees up toward her chest and held on to them, turning on to her side and lying there in the armchair.

  Henry walked through to the front hall and called the operator.

  “Put me through to the Sheriff’s Office, please,” he said.

  He held on for just a moment.

  “This is Henry Quinn. I am over at Alvin Lang’s place. He just shot himself. He’s dead. You better send over whoever the hell deals with this shit.”

  Henry hung up. He went back to Evie and got a number for her father.

  Henry called it. There was no answer. He went back to the living room and lifted Evie out of the chair. She walked with him to the front of the house, and he sat her there on the porch steps. It was a matter of minutes before Carson Riggs’s car drew to a halt outside the Lang house.

  Riggs got out and stood on the sidewalk. He looked at Henry Quinn, at Evie Chandler sitting there beside him on the steps, and he said, “Now what the fuck have you done, boy?”

  “Done nothin’, Sheriff Riggs. Came over to talk to your deputy, and he done shot himself.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  “Well, I’m gonna go on in there and take a look. You stay right there, both of you. You move a goddamned muscle and I’m arresting both of you, you understand?”

  “Not going anywhere, Sheriff. I called it in. You got nothin’ on me.”

  Riggs shook his head and started toward the front door. “I wouldn’t be so damned sure of yourself, Henry Quinn. Can have you back in Reeves in a heartbeat.”

  “Is that so?” Henry said, feeling the color rise in his cheeks, feeling his heart start to race.

  “It is, boy. It sure as hell is.”

  “Well, you know what I think you should do, Sheriff Riggs?”

  Riggs hesitated, standing now no less than six feet from Henry and Evie.

  “I think you should go fuck yourself.”

  Riggs laughed. “You really got a bad mouth, son. Mouth like that winds up swallowing teeth.”

  Henry didn’t rise to the bait. “Your deputy said something very odd just before he turned his gun on himself, Sheriff.”

  “And what might that have been?”

  “Said he done what Evan should have done. You know what that means?”

  “No idea what he was talking about.”

  “Maybe something to do with May of sixty-six and what he had to take care of down in Nueva Rosita? Take care of an unwanted child, maybe …”

  Riggs’s face changed. Implacable superiority was replaced with something bitter and enraged. Henry could see it in the man’s eyes.

  “You don’t talk about my deputy. You don’t talk about my brother. You hear me, boy? You’ve done enough damage here. This ain’t your town. It’s my town. This is my territory, and I control it. I don’t need the likes of you comin’ down here and stirrin’ all manner of private business up. You know nothing about Calvary or the Riggs family. It ain’t none of your damned business, and you’d best be leavin’ ’fore I do whatever the hell I have to do to see you back in Reeves or six feet under.”

  Riggs pushed past Henry and went on through the screen door. He was not gone long. When he reappeared, he merely glanced at Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler, an expression of disdain on his face. He went to the car and called it in, asked for the coroner, told the woman at the desk to call in a couple of special deputies, have them bring the necessaries to close off the scene.

  “No doubt that he killed himself, is there?” Henry said. “Make it look whichever way you want it to look. You and I still know that your deputy shot himself in the heart rather than deal with whatever you people are fuckin’ hiding down here. What’s so big that people are gonna die for it, Sheriff Riggs? What’s so big a secret that you’re gonna threaten folk, run this place like it’s your own little county farm, stop me gettin’ Evan’s message to his daughter, even try to put me back in Reeves? What the hell is really going on here, Carson?”

  Riggs turned suddenly. His face was red, his eyes wide, his lips white as he gritted his teeth and leaned close to Henry Quinn. His face was inches from Henry’s, his words a hissed threat.

  “Don’t use my name,” he said. “Don’t ever use my name, boy. You have no right to use my name—”

  “Carson? What’s the problem with that? Carson Riggs. Asshole sheriff of Calvary. What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell did you people do? You and Roy Sperling and Warren Garfield? What was so bad that you had to hide Rebecca up in Ector, that you had to put your mother there, that you had to blackmail and threaten everyone into silence? Did you kill Warren Garfield, Carson? Is that what you did? Did you ki—”

  Henry never finished the word.

  Riggs’s first strike hit him square in the face. Henry had never his nose broken before, but that didn’t alter the certainty with which he knew it had just been broken.

  He went down like a tenpin, and Riggs was over him, fists flailing, and then his sidearm was out and he was beating down on Henry with the butt of the gun, and Henry just rolled on his side and got his hands up over his head, and his knees were tucked up into his chest much the same as Evie had done in the house, and he kept his mouth shut because that’s what Evan had told him to do the last time he’d taken a beating like this in Reeves.

  The beating didn’t stop.

  Henry remembered Evie screaming once more, but he couldn’t connect her screaming with what was happening to himself. He remembered thinking that they needed to get things under control. But they were out of control. Completely.

  Henry was unconscious before Evie managed to drag Carson Riggs off of him. Riggs was still a whirlwind of thrashing fists and kicking feet. He caught Evie Chandler broadside and floored her. She went down, too. And then it was all over. Sheriff Riggs stood breathless over the broken body of H
enry Quinn, Evie Chandler unconscious at his feet, and an ever-increasing crowd of people gathering in the street, each of them asking what the hell was going on, what had happened, where was Deputy Lang, why were two people on the ground in Lang’s yard, one of them spattered with blood.

  Was he dead?

  Had Sheriff Riggs killed someone?

  What the hell was going on?

  And then the special deputies arrived, two of them, their names being Lucas Wright and Donny King. Wright, ironically, was distantly related to old Ralph Wyatt. He’d heard word of the daughter who went crazy and died up at Ector, but he never followed it.

  Special Deputies Wright and King took one look at the situation and knew it was as good a mess as either of them had ever seen. Then Wright went on in the house and realized there was a dead deputy sheriff in there.

  By the time he got back out onto the front yard, Sheriff Riggs was sitting on the ground. King had taken the blood-spattered pistol off of him with no resistance. Had he understood something of what had happened, he might have decided to handcuff Riggs, but he did not know the details. Riggs was sheriff. Riggs was still the boss. King saw no guns or weapons in the hands of the girl and the guy. There appeared to be no other weapons on the veranda, in the yard, or in the front of the house. Wright told King about Lang. King wanted to go take a look. Wright told King there’d be plenty of time for that.

  Wright called for both an ambulance and the county coroner. He went on in to look at Lang’s body again. He got down on his haunches and stared at that dead face for the longest time. He’d seen dead animals, sure, but this was different. This was altogether creepy. It made him feel a little sick, but he would never have admitted it.

  He shouted for King, told him he could come on in and take a look. King didn’t say much of anything. He was surprised that there was so little blood. He asked Wright what he imagined might have happened here, but the question sort of hung in the air and Wright didn’t reply.

  And then there was hollering in the street, and Donny King and Lucas Wright—as familiar with police procedure as they were with Wright’s family tree—hurried back out to the yard to discover that Sheriff Carson Riggs had gotten to his feet and taken off.