by R.J. Ellory
Carson Riggs raised the gun in his hand and pointed it at Sperling’s face.
Sperling looked back at him, his expression less of surprise and more that of someone anticipating the predictable.
“You’re gonna shoot me? Is that what we’ve come to, Carson? Alvin Lang is dead, or did you forget that already? His father isn’t coming down here, no matter what the fuck you say or do—”
“He is coming down here. Chester Lang, too … They’re gonna come down here and sort this out.”
Sperling started laughing, and blood bubbled from his nose. “You are just downright crazy, Carson Riggs. You and that lunatic fucking brother of yours. Jesus, why the hell me and Warren ever got involved with you, I do not know.”
“Because you were greedy and you wanted the money, that’s why … Same reason as everyone.”
“Ironic though, wasn’t it … ? You and your dumbass brother. He beats some poor schmuck to death and spends the rest of his life in jail. And Charlie Brennan may very well have been a fucking useless sheriff, but he didn’t deserve what you did to him. You beat Charlie to death in just the same fucking way … beat the poor son of a bitch’s brains out because he wanted a bigger cut and you wanted his fucking job. Well, you got the bigger cut and you got his job. You also got a dead wife, a crazy mother, and a brother in Reeves. And what the hell has happened now, huh? Some poor naive kid who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow comes wandering in here with a letter, and your whole fucking world falls apart. Hell, you don’t even know what’s in that letter, do you? I bet that’s been driving you fucking crazy …”
“Shut the fuck up, Roy! Just shut the fuck up,” Riggs snapped. “You don’t know a goddamned thing about this—”
“Is that so?”
Riggs’s expression changed for just a split second. He sneered at Sperling. “You don’t know a goddamned thing about what’s in that letter.”
“You think? You don’t think my oldest and dearest friend, Warren Garfield, didn’t tell me that he was gonna screw you sideways over a barrel if anything ever happened to him? He always knew you were crazy as a shithouse rat, Carson. He guessed that one day you might even try to kill him. Well, he died anyway. His heart gave out … And you know what I did? You wanna know what I did? I followed his last wishes exactly, and one of those wishes was sending a letter and a very interesting document out to your brother in Reeves—”
Riggs lunged forward and grabbed Sperling around the throat with his left hand. He held the gun close to Sperling’s face. Sperling looked back at him implacably, a response that seemed to anger Riggs even more.
“Fucking shoot me. I am done, Carson. I am gonna die right here and now, or I am going to jail for the rest of my life. Hell, I might even get to room with your brother—”
Riggs let go of Sperling’s neck. He swept the gun sideways and brought it back to connect with Sperling’s cheekbone. Sperling both heard and felt it crack. He nearly passed out as the lance of excruciating pain almost took his head off his shoulders, but within moments he was looking back at Riggs with that same determined and defiant glare.
“That will your daddy wrote when you put your wife in Ector … That’s what Warren sent to your brother, Carson. He sent him the last will and testament of your father, the one you overruled, the one you thought would never come to light. That was Warren’s dying wish … that the truth of what you did came out. You fucking killed Charlie Brennan. You beat the poor, greedy, stupid, dumbass son of a bitch to death, and I falsified the death certificate. You got what you wanted. You got the land, you got the oil rights, you got all the money, and you’ve paid your way into the Sheriff’s Office for the last thirty years. Well, fuck you, Carson. It ends here and now. That kid is gonna find Evan’s daughter, and he is gonna give her that letter, and she is gonna find out who you are and who her daddy is and how you robbed her of her inheritance. Because that’s what your father did, Carson … He left everything to Evan’s daughter. You betrayed him, you betrayed your ma, your brother … You betrayed everyone far more than Evan ever betrayed you. Your daddy knew that, and he took everything away from you. He wanted you to have nothing after what you did to Rebecca and that baby. You killed Charlie. You saw your own wife dead after what they did to her up at Ector, and you might as well sign your own mother’s death certificate, because she is gonna die up there soon enough—”
“Shut the hell up, Roy! You shut the goddamned hell up right now. There ain’t no will—”
“There is. I seen it, Carson. I seen it with my own eyes. I was the one who got it in the mail after Warren died, and I knew exactly what I was doing. And I am fucking glad, Carson … I am fucking glad. I made a lot of money from what we did back then, but you have held court and controlled this town and told us what to do ever since, and it ends here—”
Riggs grabbed Sperling by the throat again, squeezed it hard, a cruel and fierce madness in his eyes as he looked down at the bleeding man on the chair in front of him.
“Kill me, Carson … and then if I were you, I’d kill yourself. Them Langs … man, they are not gonna let you bring down their family. They have way too much power and way too much money. Hey, I bet you they even got it rigged that you killed Alvin. Shee-it, I bet you that’s the way it’s gonna turn out in the papers. Would they want a suicide on their hands? No siree, Bob. Suicide makes it looks like the Lang family has got something to hide. Deputy sheriff of Calvary shoots himself for being complicit in what? Hell, I don’t believe they want that kind of scandal slurring their upright and prestigious family name. But Calvary sheriff goes crazy, shoots his deputy, shoots the town doctor, and then shoots himself … Well, man, it’s the South. These things happen. Three weeks and no one will even remember that you knew the Langs.”
“You were in this as much as me, Roy,” Riggs snarled. “You were right in there with Warren and me. We did what we did for the Langs. We arranged everything, covered everyone’s tracks—”
“Sure we did, Carson … and you got Alvin’s daddy on your side, and he called the Redbird DA, and Warren destroyed the last will … or so he said, and you got the farm and the oil rights and more money than you knew what to do with. But it was never about the money, was it, Carson? It was about the authority and the power and being able to do just what the hell you liked. Christ, man, you’ve spent your whole life getting revenge on people for things you made them do!” Sperling started to laugh, but the pain shot through his face and he grimaced. “We cooked up those medical records and affidavits, my friend. We did what we did. We hid both of Chester Lang’s sons behind a veil of lies so they wouldn’t have to go to war. We did it for Chester Lang and for anyone else who had the money. Go take a look in the cemetery. Memorial down there for all our brave boys who died in the First War, but is there anything for the Second? Hell, no. Fucking ironic that the only one with any balls when it came to the war was your dumbass brother. Second irony is that the most powerful and influential families in West Texas are still the most powerful and influential families in West Texas. They had the money to pay us, and we did what they asked us. You think they’re gonna let some greedy small-time sheriff expose their cowardice? You think they want the world to know that they paid to keep their kids out of the army? You think they are gonna admit what they did and say sorry and be all ashamed? Hell, you are even fucking crazier than I took you for—”
Riggs hit Sperling again. “You shut the fuck up—” he started, but his words were interrupted by the voice of Ozona sheriff Ross Hendricks. That voice came loud and clear through a bullhorn, and the message was unequivocal.
“Sheriff Riggs! You hear me in there, Sheriff Riggs? This is Hendricks out of Ozona. We got some kind of trouble here, and we’ve come down to try to sort it out. Now, whatever the hell has happened, we can straighten it out, but I am told that you and Doc Roy Sperling are in there and there’s some kind of problem. Well, I am a reasonable man, just like you, and we can straighten it all out. You come on out here and we�
��ll get to talking, and you might be surprised how easily we can fix whatever the hell is going on.”
Sperling tried to laugh again. “Jesus Christ in a chariot, they don’t have the faintest goddamned idea of what you did, do they, Carson?”
“You did the same, Roy … You did the fucking same, and you are going down, too …”
“Difference is, Carson, that I know I’m done for and I don’t care. I’ve had enough. Shoot me, or let them shoot me. Put me in Reeves and throw away the key. I’ll just tie a bedsheet around my neck and hang myself. It’s over, Carson. Warren bailed out. I’m an old man. I don’t think of anything nowadays but what we did to your wife, how they drugged her and stuck things in her brain and whatever … all to make it look like she was crazy so she would never have a hope of taking that land and that oil off of you. I just have to close my eyes for a second and I can see her screaming her head off in the back of that hospital car as they drove her away. ”
From out in the street, Hendricks was hollering through the bullhorn. “Sheriff Riggs … Carson … you gotta come out of there and talk to me. I don’t wanna have to come in there, my friend.”
“Lang will come,” Riggs said, his tone desperate, as if he was now struggling to believe what he was saying. “John Lang will come to find out what happened to his son … and if he doesn’t come, then Chester will send someone, and this will all get straightened out.”
“They’re gonna find the girl, Carson. They’re gonna find Sarah. Hell, she lives no more than twenty miles from here. Terrible shadow that must have been. Keep her close or send her far away. How that must have tormented you. Well, it wouldn’t have mattered, because that dumbass kid from Reeves is gonna deliver that letter. This whole house of shadows will come crashing down around you … and you won’t even hear it. Only person they’re gonna send, even if they do send someone, is gonna be here for one reason and one reason only. To make sure you never say a goddamned word about the Langs and what we did back in forty-four. John Lang, Robert Lang, the Webster boys, the Deardens, the Wesleys, all of them fit and well, all of them more than eligible for armed service, and we hid them all. While honest German people were hiding Jews from the Nazis, you were hiding the sons of the rich and powerful so they didn’t have to go to war. You really think the lieutenant governor of Texas wants America and the world to know what we did?”
Riggs looked at Sperling like he was facing his own executioner.
“Carson Riggs!” Hendricks’s voice bellowed through the bullhorn. “Come on out now, or we’re comin’ in!”
“It’s all over, Carson,” Sperling said, and then Carson Riggs raised the gun once more and shot him in the chest.
Even from the kitchen, Carson Riggs heard the response to that single gunshot. It sounded like an army was advancing from the street.
He looked at Sperling. He looked at the gun in his hand. He had just murdered the doctor. That, if nothing else, would see him in Reeves for the rest of his life.
And it was that thought—the thought of seeing Evan every day—that turned the tide of his thoughts.
He looked once more at Sperling, and then he turned toward the door.
Sheriff Carson Riggs went out there, gun raised, pulling the trigger even before he’d exited the house, and the sound that welcomed him was something Vernon Harvey—he of Snowflake, Arizona, he of the pocket watch that Evan himself carried to a different war—would have recognized. It was a cannonade, an assault, and Carson fell forward from the veranda and never got up.
Ross Hendricks came through into the kitchen.
Doc Sperling stirred.
Hendricks hesitated for just a second, and then he was hollering for a medic, a doctor, an ambulance.
“Sto-o-op,” Sperling slurred. He tried to raise his hand, tried to motion for Hendricks to come close.
Hendricks went to the man’s side.
“Too l-late,” Sperling gasped. “He-Henry Qu—”
“Henry Quinn,” Hendricks said. “He’s here. He’s outside.”
Sperling seemed to smile then. “G-get h-him h-here. Get h-him h-here. Need to tell hi-him … tell him wh-where th-the girl i-is …”
Hendricks sent for Henry Quinn. Henry came at a run. Evie, too, the two of them kneeling beside Doc Sperling to hear the last halting syllables that left the man’s lips before his eyes rolled white. He died right there in his own kitchen, and with him went the truth of how Carson Riggs had held sway over him and Warren Garfield for nearly thirty years.
The Langs would never have come to Calvary. In truth, Carson Riggs had known that all along. In the end it was face his Maker or face his brother, and he had chosen the former.
Somehow that had seemed the easier option after all the wrongs that had been done.
FIFTY-ONE
She did not look how Henry had expected her to look. There was so little of Evan in her. Perhaps she simply took after the mother she’d never known.
It was early on the morning of Thursday, July twentieth, and behind a small house off the highway between Sanderson and Langley, just a stone’s throw from the Pecos River, a woman of twenty-two called Sarah Forrester hung washing on a line. Nearby there was a basket, within it a baby, and she sang to the baby, and the song was something simple and sweet, and Sarah’s voice was soothing, and the baby gurgled and cooed as if joining in with the song.
Henry stood there at the edge of the road, Evie beside him, the letter from Evan in his hand, and he looked at Evie and the question was in his eyes, same question he’d been asking himself ever since Roy Sperling had told him where Sarah now lived and the name she had married into. Sarah Forrester. Twenty-two years old, alive and well and now a mother, living with her husband in a small house off the highway between Sanderson and Langley.
It was that complex, and then—all of a sudden—it was that simple.
Henry looked down at the letter in his hand, a letter secreted beneath the lining of his guitar case ever since he’d arrived in Calvary, and he wondered how this had all happened. It was the twentieth of July. He had arrived in Calvary on the thirteenth. One week. Seven days. Three men were dead. He felt like he had known Evie his whole life. He felt as if he had never been anywhere but here, never done anything but chase the ghost that was Evan Riggs’s daughter.
And now here she was.
He could see her.
And she did not look at all as he had imagined.
“Go,” Evie urged, and Henry left the side of the road and walked across the dried and rutted track to the fence that bordered the backyard.
Evie hung back a step or two.
This was Henry’s job now, and most of him knew he needed to do it alone, despite what he thought or felt.
“Mrs. Forrester,” he called out.
The young woman stopped singing. The baby stopped singing, too.
“Yes,” she replied.
“I am Henry Quinn,” Henry said. “You don’t know me. I have been looking for you. I came to deliver a message.”
“A message?” Sarah asked. “About what?”
Henry held up the creased and grubby envelope. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what the message is.”
Sarah Forrester smiled and shook her head, puzzled, wondering what this was all about.
“Who is this message from?”
Henry held out the letter. “I think you need to read this and find out for yourself.”
The young woman came forward and took the envelope from Henry’s hand.
She studied him closely for a second, glanced at Evie, a fleeting frown across her brow like the shadow of a cloud across a field.
Had Evan been there to see her, he would have recognized that expression. She looked like her mother. So much like her mother. Snake hunting. The rats’ nest. The bundle of clothes on the veranda. The way she looked as they hid in the barn and waited for Gabe Ellsworth. The expression on her face when he glanced back at her on the night of the party, the guilt of what they
had done somehow extinguished by the passion of having done it.
Sarah Forrester read the letter.
She looked at the enclosed document; she looked at Henry, at Evie, back at Henry once more.
She read her father’s letter one more time, and then she started to cry.
FIFTY-TWO
Roy Sperling was buried in Calvary on Friday, July twenty-eighth. Alvin Lang was already gone, his family plot somewhere near Fredericksburg. Clarence Ames, George Eakins, the Honeycutts, even Ralph Chandler went out there for the service. They’d known Alvin, many of them since he was a child, and they wanted to pay their respects.
“It’s done now,” was the only comment her father made when Evie asked him why he wanted to attend. “When they’re dead, they gotta deal with a far higher power, I reckon. Who are we to judge?”
The Lang family did not order an independent inquiry into the suicide of Calvary’s deputy sheriff. Seemed they wanted the whole thing laid to rest and forgotten along with Alvin. Likewise, the killing of Roy Sperling seemed to be now the only motivation for Carson Riggs’s actions. Why had he killed Sperling? What was it that took place between those two men in that kitchen that resulted in Carson killing the town doctor and then walking headlong into a hail of gunfire, the only outcome of which would be his own death? Folks like Clarence Ames and George Eakins perhaps knew, but they kept their mouths shut and looked no one in the eye. There were theories, of course, but theories would always remain theories without the evidence to back them up. And no one was looking for evidence. Seemed no one was interested in finding it.
For the people of Calvary, the Sperling funeral was somehow significant, perhaps even cathartic. All that was left of the Riggs family was a crazy old woman in Odessa and a killer in Reeves. Aside from the girl. Rebecca’s girl. She showed up alongside Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler the day before Roy Sperling was buried. They told her what they knew of her parents, her grandparents, of the events that pulled her family apart so violently. They took her out to the old Riggs place, now nothing more than a footprint of the original farmhouse and tracts of land, all of it marked and bordered and punctuated with sinkholes where drills had punched deep into the ground in search of oil pockets and reservoirs. Whatever fortune came from that land was either gone, or buried so deep in legal paperwork that it would probably never surface. Carson Riggs had been spending that money for more than twenty years, and when the lawyers and the tax collectors and the court officers were done with it, it would very likely turn out that he owed the state.