High White Sun
Page 4
How much of himself he’d left behind and lost—both good and bad.
Mel slid next to him above the sheets, the way he was. She’d put up two box fans in the bedroom and even with them turning full-blast the room was still too hot. Chris had on boxers but she was naked, trying to stay cool, wanting to lie closer to him yet feeling the heat coming off his body. He moved in his sleep, said something to himself, as moonlight touched his face.
It was hard sometimes for her to imagine how he’d almost died out here, somewhere just outside, maybe within sight of these very bedroom windows. She’d never admit to him how she was afraid to look out them when she was here alone; afraid she might see the ghost of who Chris once had been walking over the creosote and caliche, lost and unable to find his way back home. She knew he took some sort of strange comfort from being out here, as if he could reach out to that younger version of himself; maybe have a talk and remind himself of who he’d once been, even though that person was truly dead and gone. Everything that had happened at the Far Six, in Murfee, had changed him irrevocably. It had killed some parts and strengthened and darkened others, all made worse now by the constant stress he was putting himself under to run the department well and protect those who worked for him. To be nothing like the men who’d tried to kill him—Sheriff Stanford Ross and Duane Dupree. But she’d lost something, too, when he’d been attacked: a sense of security, an untroubled future. She needed him and it was a need that was as strong as ever, since any Chris was better than no Chris at all. But she’d always be afraid living out here, sharing space with the ghost of the man she’d first fallen in love with. The only man she could ever love.
It was the sort of fear that wouldn’t go away with alarms and security lights, even though they had plenty of both installed in the house.
Maybe it was the sort of fear that’d never go away at all.
* * *
• • •
IN FACT, Ben had wanted her and Chris to get a dog, a couple of them even, to keep her company out here alone, and she knew he’d been out to Artesia this morning looking at some before the chase. He’d mentioned it a few nights back while nursing his drinks at Earlys, when she’d told him if anyone needed a dog, or a friend, it was him. Better yet, he needed a new woman in his life.
Mel wasn’t sure if Chris knew just how much Ben continued to struggle with Jackie’s death. How he barely slept in that efficiency above Modelle Greer’s garage and was probably drinking way too much, even when she wasn’t serving him at Earlys. She really liked the older man, who was still good-looking in a sharp-edged, cut-your-finger sort of way. He was too damn thin—always pulled tight like a wire—with his peppered hair shaved down to a memory and his eyes the color of a cold sky threatening snow; eyes that reminded her of the smoke and clouds streaking the oil fields of her youth. She enjoyed his company, trusting his wisdom and appreciating the help and confidence he gave Chris. She couldn’t imagine Chris managing the department without him, but also couldn’t imagine Ben Harper without the job of managing Chris. The two men appeared very different, true, but they were really just opposite sides of the same coin. Chris and Ben needed each other, even if they didn’t know how much. Still, she worried about him, wondering about all his empty nights drinking alone and listening to his jazz music in his apartment. Dreaming—when he slept at all—about his wife.
She thought about Amé Reynosa hitting Azahel Avalos and smiled. Just like everyone else in Murfee, she’d questioned whether it was smart to bring the young girl on as a deputy. Even now, Mel still caught the occasional whispers about Amé’s long-dead brother and her remaining family in Mexico. But Chris swore she was doing a damn good job and that hiring her had been a needed step forward for the Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department. A necessary one. He trusted her, and told Mel that the young deputy reminded him of her when they met back in Baylor—that they both shared a hell of a temper and a mouth. Baylor seemed like such a long time ago, first seeing Chris standing on the sidelines with a football in his hand. He hadn’t thrown one since the night he was shot, when she’d watched him throw ball after ball into the cold desert dark at the old house before heading out to meet Duane Dupree here at the Far Six. They’d been having troubles for months by then, arguing over stuff that didn’t matter anymore and probably never did, but he’d been the old Chris for at least that night, laughing with her, kissing her, throwing his footballs before holstering his gun and walking out the door. After all their fighting, she’d felt like she’d just gotten him back that very night, only to find out that the man who returned from the Far Six—survived it—wasn’t the same; but, then again, neither was she. There was no way she could be.
The Melissa Bristow Chris had met at Baylor was now a ghost, too.
Mel was turning thirty this year, and although Chris was older than all the deputies who worked for him except for Ben—always joking about “the kids”—she still knew they were both way too young to feel this way. They were scarred, true; but only bent, not broken. She wasn’t sure what to do about it, but she didn’t want them ending up together and somehow still alone, holding on to nothing but the memories of how they used to be.
She rolled over, watching him sleep. Wondered what he dreamed about. A few months back he’d started writing longhand on some yellow legal pads he kept for just the occasion, hiding them away in a drawer in the study. She had no idea what he was writing—stories or memories or just notes about things he wanted to change at the department—but he always had the same expression on his face when he did it, the same as when he’d thrown those footballs that night in the yard at the old house. Focused, completely lost in the moment—his body present but his mind somewhere else; traveling far away. He looked like that now, too, dreaming, with his eyes closed.
She kissed him lightly, not wanting to wake him, wishing him well on his journey, before closing her own eyes.
* * *
• • •
SHE WOKE SOMETIME LATER—panicked—to the sound of Chris’s voice. He was sitting up on the bed, talking low on his cell. She’d never heard it ring, the sound lost behind the turning fans.
Something’s happened . . . to Tommy Milford, or the kid they were keeping in the Big Bend jail. Maybe to Ben? She struggled upright, covering herself with the abandoned sheet, checking the windows where moonlight had been replaced by a different kind of glow, the hint of a dawn sun—that brief moment when a brand-new sky comes up all gray, like an old photo exposing. Chris clicked off the phone and was now looking out the window with her, right into that slow and rising light, pulling himself together.
Getting ready to leave, when he realized she was awake.
“What happened? Is everything okay?” she asked.
He shook his head. “That was Harp. There’s a body, just found over in Terlingua, outside the Wikiup. That’s a little bar there, been there forever.”
“I’ve heard of it.” Mel sat very still, holding the sheet close, holding it tight; cold now, even though the room was thick and hot. The last time a body had been found, Chris’s attempts to discover its identity had been like a match starting a fire, leading to the death of one federal agent and the murders of drug-corrupted Sheriff Ross and Duane Dupree, and Dupree’s house actually burning to the ground around his decapitated body. It had forced Sheriff Ross’s teenage son Caleb to flee Murfee and fueled Amé’s desire to join the department after they learned the body Chris had discovered out in the desert was her brother, Rodolfo—murdered because of his own drug connections. It had finally flamed out, with Chris nearly dying right here on the Far Six, but not before shooting three cartel killers himself. It sounded wild, improbable, like someone else’s story, but it was every bit true and it was theirs—hers and Chris’s. And if the thing with Tommy yesterday was bad, Mel was afraid another murder so soon . . . another goddamn nameless body . . . was going to be a lot worse. She searched Chris’s face for clues.
“Yeah, we know who it is, a river guide, Billy Bravo. He’s been identified by his girlfriend. She’s the one who found him. Doesn’t look like an accident, but . . .” Chris let it go and stood up, and even in the dim, his white scars seemed to glow. “I’m sending out Harp and Amé. I have to deal with our prisoner today and meet with Moody.”
“I’ll start some coffee,” Mel said, getting up as well. She was relieved Chris wasn’t going to Terlingua and twice as relieved that this body already had a face, a name; that there was no mystery about it. Those were ugly thoughts, but true. People died all the time, bad things happened, and she wished they didn’t all have to be Chris’s sole responsibility, his personal burden; except maybe out here, they did.
“You don’t have to, but thanks, babe. You know, when it rains, it pours,” Chris said, still looking out the window into the light. It was growing brighter by the heartbeat, turning the glass copper and blood.
“But goddamn, it’s going to be another hot one today.”
3
Ben Harper couldn’t count the number of dead bodies he’d seen; too many by his very own hand.
Between his decade in homicide and twenty years on SWAT, he’d gotten used to them all, except for one—his own wife laid out at the Jessup Funeral Home, wearing the dress she’d married him in. Her face had been dusted with too much makeup, the touch of the mortician’s finger almost visible on her cheek, as if he’d brushed a tear from there. Her eyes had been bruised and closed but so much like sleeping; almost alive.
No matter how they died, the dead all had the same tragic beauty about them—a body in motion stopped suddenly; a snapshot, forever suspended, a well-aimed grace. The beautiful dead were trapped between clock ticks and heartbeats. It was their moment . . . their place. So goddamn small, but spanning a lifetime. It was a sanctuary where they’d never feel pain or be hurt again, unlike all those they had to leave behind.
No matter what people said, dying was easy, effortless. It was living that was twice as hard.
* * *
• • •
HARP SIPPED HIS COFFEE, glancing up from the body to Amé Reynosa, who was standing a dozen yards away with the woman who’d found it and who claimed to be the girlfriend. She was young, Hispanic, like Amé, her black hair one long thick braid tied up by different-colored bands. She was crying, moving her hands, and even if he could hear what she was saying, he wouldn’t have understood it. They were talking in Spanish, fast. Every few words Amé looked over to him as if something might have changed with the dead man sprawled beneath the ocotillo.
Nothing did, nothing would again.
Amé had picked him up with two black coffees, both for him, and four aspirin, which he’d dry-chewed with a couple of wintergreen Certs on the drive down to Terlingua. She knew he’d been drinking since he drank pretty much every night, but she didn’t make a big deal about it. She drove and he drank and chewed and neither of them talked about what they’d find out here as the sun slowly came up to meet them.
Sunlight that did nothing to make Terlingua look better, or give the old ghost town any more weight or substance. It had started as the base for the Chisos Mining operation in the 1800s after cinnabar—quicksilver—was discovered, but all that remained now were the capped ancient shafts with names that meant nothing to anyone anymore, like the Rainbow, the 248, and the California Hill. In the years since, Terlingua had become an out-of-the-way hideout for all sorts of drifters and artists and hippies. It had gained some notoriety for its November chili cook-offs, and Harp had been here once before with Jackie to experience it. They’d stayed at the Lajitas resort, but had spent one clear and blue afternoon not far from where he was standing now, trying rattlesnake and elk chili and drinking the coldest beers they could find, getting downright drunk. They’d made love later in the hotel room that was far too expensive, fumbling off their clothes, laughing. Her skin had smelled like pepper, her breath like smoke, and when she came she had said his name a handful of times, each one faster until they ran together into nothing. What were the chances he’d ever be back here again, this time without her? It seemed that everything led back to Jackie.
Everything started and ended with her.
Terlingua had also become a popular spot for rafting. Terlingua Creek fed right into the Rio Grande, what the Mexicans called the Río Bravo, and there were several outfits that arranged multiday trips that took you deep into the gorges and dunes and beneath the high cliff walls. You could still find petroglyphs there if you knew where to look . . . stories about a time and people who’d long passed, if you knew how to read them.
And that’s where Billy Bravo came in, who, according to his girlfriend, everyone called “Bear.” He’d been a river guide in Terlingua off and on for five years, working the Salt River in Arizona and Colorado’s Green River before that. He knew the water and the geology and the wildlife and all about those petroglyphs and those ancient cultures. He’d been hard and tough; a big man who came by his nickname honestly. Whoever had killed him—crushing his skull like they had—had either been a pretty big bastard himself, or had caught Billy Bravo by surprise.
Harp knelt down, where the high, ripe scent of alcohol cut through all the blood. Bravo had been drinking, a lot, right up until the moment he died.
Caught by surprise was still very much on the table, so that didn’t quite rule out the crying girlfriend herself, even as small as she was.
Bravo lay beneath an ocotillo, but he hadn’t died there. Harp had already noted the drag marks, and that was a point in the Mexican girl’s favor. All that deadweight, literally—Bravo would have been a hell of a lift for even a grown man. It was a pretty shitty attempt at concealment, too, although Harp didn’t figure the killer had been too worried about that given all the blood still pooled in the sand where Bravo had actually been killed, about twenty feet away. He died within sight of the bar, the Wikiup, where he’d been drinking the night before. The name was a stolen Indian word for a domed Apache dwelling, like a little hut or house. And just like Bear, the Wikiup was perfectly named—a damn cave almost, half underground, built up from all sorts of flotsam and jetsam flanked by a couple of barbecue pits. Outside there were hand-painted signs and a collection of weathered lawn furniture and row after row of naked lightbulbs strung through the branches of some mesquites. There was also an old car sitting flat on its axles that visitors had been scratching their names into for years, and a bunch of blown-out cushions had been crushed into the open trunk so you could lie back there and stare up at the stars, which way out here would fill the sky end to end. It was said that Apache women could put up a true wikiup in a couple of hours if the right wood was available, and the bar carrying the name looked like it hadn’t taken much longer to build.
Bravo lay on his side, arms pulled above his head, dropped from where he’d been dragged. His shirt was torn, hiked up around his chest beneath his armpits, revealing old scars, monochrome tattoos—names that meant nothing; some Latin script and numbers and a rough picture of a bear’s head where his heart would be. His pants were undone, unbuckled . . . maybe he’d been taking a piss, or had been about to. And lying there, he looked for the whole world like a passed-out drunk, until you glanced all the way up . . . to the head.
The right side of Bravo’s face was gone, pieces of it matted into his thick, black beard and spilled down the front of his shirt. There was no eye there beneath the shaggy hair, not even an eye socket. It had all been pulverized, turned to blood and dust. That entire side of the man’s head was a misshapen crescent moon, like something large and fanged had taken a bite out of his skull. Standing up, facing him, the killer would have struck left to right . . . a left-handed assailant, unless—like Harp favored—Bravo had been surprised from behind. Either way, the attack had been vicious, meant to end the man’s life. Mens rea . . . intent . . . with malice aforethought. It w
ould take an ME to help determine if it had been one blow or many, and they still might never know. There were pieces of Bravo’s skull, brains, lying back near the Wikiup. The murder weapon might be around as well, something hard and flat—a rock, a piece of rebar, a damn shovel—tossed into the scrub.
Harp stood up, catching the first buzz of flies. A few people were milling around, watching him and Amé, but most of Terlingua still lay quiet under the early-rising sun. The heavy tropical odor of the nearby river pressed down, but he couldn’t see it, and rainbow-colored banners and other flags he couldn’t place hung limp and unmoving from posts, just like a wooden windmill with all of its paint peeled off that refused to turn. Morning light shined off corrugated metal from a few RVs parked here and there. The entire place was sepia-toned, except for odd flashes of man-made color: trash and other stuff people had brought with them and left behind. A dog barked somewhere, joined by others, and then he caught a glimpse of an impossibly thin man jogging up a trail road, shirtless, his skin baked dry as beef jerky. Turned sideways, you might lose sight of him altogether, except for his tight, bright green shorts and the pink water bottles strapped to his waist. His head was bare, hair in wild corkscrews, and his feet were bare, too. He was running barefoot through the low hills, past the abandoned mines, out into the desert. If he knew he’d just passed a dead man, he gave no sign, and never slowed down to look back.
It was a goddamn miserable place to die.
* * *