High White Sun

by J. Todd Scott

  Chris thought about that, turned it over. “Maybe.”

  Harp shrugged. “Ever the cautious one. Look, even if they had nothing to do with Bravo’s murder, which I seriously fuckin’ doubt, they are going to be a problem, an ongoing problem. Men like this always are. We can’t wait around to see what they’re going to do, Chris—”

  Chris interrupted him. “Yeah, I got it. Action versus reaction, we can’t finish what we don’t start . . . he who hesitates . . . et cetera, et cetera. I’ve heard this all before, in all its variations. You should write a book. And you know what? I’ve been looking into this since you talk about it all the time, and some studies have actually shown—” Chris stopped, reading the hard expression on Harp’s face; he wasn’t smiling or laughing along with him. “Okay, okay, never mind. But what do you want me to do, evict them? Smoke ’em out?”

  “Look, Chris, I know what you read in all those books of yours, all that kinder, gentler policing stuff. But that world exists only in those pages. That’s the only place it can exist, because in this world, where a man like John Wesley Earl gets to walk free, it falls to poor bastards like us to deal with him and put back together everything and everyone he breaks. And he will, because that’s all he knows how to do. He was born that way and no one like him changes that much.”

  “No better than new paint on a shitty house, huh?”

  “Exactly. I’m not going to be around forever and you don’t have forever to figure this out. I’m doing my best to open your damn eyes.”

  Chris nodded, feeling the heat of Harp’s words. It was more than just too many beers and too little sleep. “I know, I really do, and I’m not trying to be a smart-ass. I hear everything you say and I’m not blind, either, to the way the world really works. I haven’t been for a while.” He didn’t have to say Sheriff Ross’s name for Harp to understand. “But you’re going to outlive all of us, anyway. That I’m not worried about.”

  “Okay, well, hear me out now, ’cause we’re right back where I started with all this . . . these are not the sort of men Amé is prepared to handle. She’ll only be fanning the flames. Let me deal with them and Bravo. Let me figure out why they’re here.”

  “You don’t think she already gets her fair share of racist bullshit here?”

  “No, I don’t. It’s not the same at all. Not even close. A couple of ranchers mouthing something stupid underneath their breath when she pulls them over is abso-fucking-lutely not what I’m talking about. Look, you’re going to catch hell from Amé, I get it. I’m going to as well, ’cause she’ll figure out I put you up to it. If I didn’t think I was right on this, I’d save us both the misery. But you brought me here to help you, advise you, and that’s what I’m doing right now.”

  “Goddammit, Harp . . .”

  Harp rubbed his eyes, and even the bar’s weak light was enough to reveal every one of his fifty-seven years. They circled his eyes, lined his face. All those years were in the spider’s web of veins on his rough hands. Chris had thought of John Wesley Earl as an old man, but realized Harp and Earl were almost the same age.

  Harp sat back on his stool, resigned. Then he sat up straight again, as if he’d decided on something. “All right, I’m going to tell you a story, and then you think about it. But don’t take too goddamn long.” When Chris nodded, Harp continued. “In 2010, a young black kid joined the department by the name of Andre Lawson. Former Navy, he got through college on the GI Bill and decided he wanted to be a cop. We used to joke with him that Midland was a helluva long way from the ocean. He laughed and took it all in stride, but he was smart . . . probably should have been a lawyer.”

  Harp looked over Chris’s shoulder to where Mel was pouring a beer, and pushed ahead. “So, he’d been on maybe eight months when he and his partner get caught in the middle of a robbery in progress at a place called Dooley’s, Midland-Odessa’s version of a 7-Eleven. Right off, his partner, Brian Cox, takes one here”—Harp pointed at a spot on his chest, near his heart—“the slug working its way beneath his vest. One-in-a-million shot. Goddamn outlaw luck, right? Sort of shot only bad guys ever make. Anyway, Andre is trying to pull him away when the perps grab them and drag them both back inside. Now they think they have a couple of hostages, although Brian soon bleeds out all over the aisle where they keep the chips and soda. He had a daughter. She graduated from the University of North Texas maybe a year ago, and I sent her a card.”

  Harp started peeling the label off his empty beer, letting the thin strips pile up on the bar wood.

  “Chester Peltz and Charles Elley were the guys who took Andre Lawson hostage. Pieces of shit, both of them. Peltz had done some time at Dalhart and Mineral Wells, and he was the smarter of the two, which wasn’t saying much. They stayed in there for about three hours, making all sorts of crazy-shit demands. They wanted two large pizzas from Nino’s, and helicopters. They wanted to read some sort of manifesto to the news. They were meth heads with almost no options, making shit up as they went along, but every now and then they put Andre on the phone so we’d know he was okay. But he wasn’t. Not really at all.”

  Most of the bottle was naked now, peeled down to the glass. “I was on the SWAT entry team, number three on the stack, when we finally got the green light to go in. If it had just been those two in there we might have tried to keep talking them out. Goddammit, we still might be trying to talk them out, but with one dead and Andre trapped, we weren’t going to wait forever. Plus, the negotiators who’d heard Andre on the phone, who’d tried to talk to him . . . well . . . trust me, those two fuckers had more than enough time to hurt him, torture him, and they did. You’d be surprised at all the ways you can break a man, Chris, if you really put your mind to it, or if you’re already out of your fucking mind. And we allowed it to happen. We never should have waited even half as long as we did, but it wasn’t my call.”

  Harp set aside the bottle, swept up the torn label into his hand and dumped it into the ashtray. “Anyway, we flash-banged it going in, and when I saw Chester Peltz through the smoke, eyes shining like stars and mouth open and his hands almost raised but not quite, I shot him in the chest, double-tap, and then one more in the head as he went down. Elley, however, tried to make a run for the back but slipped over the spilled beers he’d been drinking, and that’s where the rear entry team found him . . . flat on his face, soaked in shitty beer, with Andre Lawson’s blood still wet on his fucking hands.” Harp stopped, caught his breath, like he was seeing that day, that moment, all over again, but after all the years still couldn’t find the words for it, and Chris didn’t want him to. “Right after I shot Peltz I found Andre, and he fell into my arms, and the weird thing was, the flash bang should have knocked him silly, too, but he was already gone, Chris, like nobody was at home. I’d never seen a person’s eyes like that, and never have since. They were glass, mirrors, and I was reflected in them a thousand times over. I could have rolled sand off them and he wouldn’t have blinked.”

  Chris was unsure what to say, if there was anything to say at all.

  Harp looked straight at him. “I put Andre in Ricky Mumford’s arms, gentle, to keep him standing because I wanted to make damn sure he was going to walk out of that place, and then I went over and leaned in close to Charles Elley so he’d get a good look at my face, and I shot him where he lay sprawled on the floor, crying and trying to wipe Andre’s blood off on his goddamn shirt. It had some sort of smiling cartoon character on it, like a little kid would wear, and I’ll never forget that . . . that bright yellow shirt, stained all red. The official report read that he died during the entry, resisting arrest, and every single man stood by it. We never talked about it, never planned it. But I lied, we all lied, and I’ve never said a word about it again until tonight. And Andre Lawson never wore a badge and gun again.”

  “Ben . . . Jesus . . .” Chris started, but Harp stopped him, leaning in close.

  “Look, I know what you’re thi
nking . . . check that, I know what you think you should be thinking, and what I’d be thinking right now if I was you, but we aren’t exactly the same, and maybe that’s not even a bad thing.” Harp smiled. “Brian had it easy in some ways, they just shot him dead. Quick.” Harp snapped his fingers. “But while we waited around too goddamn long to do anything about it, we left that other poor kid in there with those two fucking animals. They did those things to him and when it was over I held him in my arms. He let me hold him, like he never wanted me to let him go.

  “So I guess they killed him, too, in their way. A part of him anyway. Andre Lawson died inside that store. I don’t know who it was who walked out.”

  Chris looked away, uncomfortable, not wanting to catch his own face in the bar’s mirror. A man he liked, that he’d come to trust more than anyone else, had more or less just admitted to murder, to killing a helpless defendant . . . a prisoner. And only hours earlier Chris had read Amé the riot act over striking a handcuffed Azahel Avalos. He wanted to hate what Harp had done, it went against everything he was trying to do in the department and all those shadows of Sheriff Ross he was trying to banish, but if he imagined something like that happening to Amé, or to Mel, he couldn’t quite hate it enough.

  I know what you think you should be thinking.

  It scared him, and his thoughts must have been easy to read.

  “I get it,” Harp continued. “That struggle. But they were fucking animals. There are wolves in the world, Chris. These criminals . . . outlaws . . . bad men, whatever you want to call them, they’re pure predators and everyone to them is prey, and that’s how we have to think of them. That’s how we have to treat them. Don’t forget that. Don’t ever forget that.”

  Harp straightened up, looked back toward Mel and gave her a brief wave, a thin smile—his way of saying good night.

  “And sometimes we gotta be the wolves, Chris. Sometimes we just do.”

  He stood and stretched. “Okay, how about you give me that lift home you promised?”

  10

  For the second night in a row, America watched the darkness, eyes wide open, counting her own breaths.

  If you stared into the dark long enough, you could pick out colors, even there. Different shades of black and blue, rolling like ocean waves. She’d left Murfee to see the ocean, had traveled to Miami and stayed for months in an expensive hotel on the beach—all bright glass and chrome—just like she’d always imagined. She had spent her days on the sand, beneath a sun not quite as hot as the one hanging over her Chihuahuan desert, but hot enough, and at night she’d sat on her balcony with the salt wind in her hair, her sliding door open, watching the night touch the open water, trying to pick out where one began and the other ended.

  She’d paid for that hotel, all those nights, with the money Caleb Ross had taken from his father. Money that had been stolen by Sheriff Ross from the cartel called Nemesio—which her brother, Rodolfo, had worked for, and which some people in town wanted to believe she worked for now as well. It was the same money that had brought the boy Máximo over the river from Ojinaga and that had left Sheriff Ross and his chief deputy, Duane Dupree, dead.

  It was the same money that she still kept locked in a suitcase under her bed.

  She wondered if all that money was cursed and destined to only bring bad luck.

  Sheriff Cherry knew something about the money, probably guessing it had gone east with Caleb to disappear forever, but he knew nothing about Máximo or the part America herself had played in Dupree’s death—how Máximo had gone to the chief deputy’s little house out beyond the pecan grove and killed him for her, setting him and the house on fire.

  How Máximo had come back later to her with all those ashes in his hair, smelling of smoke.

  Smiling.

  How she had almost shot Dupree herself with her brother’s silver gun.

  Avalos had called her la chica con la pistola.

  And he knew her name.

  Azahel Avalos had known exactly who she was the minute he’d put eyes on her, and if he did, that meant others did, too; others, maybe, from across the river.

  Others like Máximo . . . like Nemesio.

  So they might also know the truth about the money, the whole truth. And they might be ready to come and get it back.

  She’d been quiet and careful with how’d she spent what had remained, moving into a tiny house in the same neighborhood where she grew up; not flashing a lot of it at any one time, and definitely not since returning home. She wasn’t necessarily afraid, refused to be, because she’d lived like that once before and had made a hundred promises to herself she never would again, but she was cautious. Her parents had returned to Ojinaga after she’d left Murfee, and she’d spoken to them a handful of times when they’d begged her to come visit them, to stay with them, but she wouldn’t. That was the one promise she’d made to her brother that she had kept and always would keep—she would never cross the river. There were still men there that Rodolfo had been afraid of, and that she knew she should be afraid of. She remembered the things her mama had said about her own brother, Amé’s uncle—a man mysteriously called Fox Uno—and her other familia scattered throughout Camargo and La Esmeralda and Maijoma. She’d once wanted to believe Rodolfo had been recruited into Nemesio by a pretty woman he’d met at a bar, but knew in her heart it wasn’t a stranger who’d approached him. It had been someone he’d trusted from the start . . . la familia. Although she was sure there was nothing for her over the river, that didn’t mean something, or someone, couldn’t come looking for her over here, and that brought her back to Avalos. She needed to say something about it sooner or later to Sheriff Cherry and to Ben; it wasn’t right, or safe, to keep them in the dark about her. She just wanted a better idea of exactly what all those shadows were, and who hid within them.

  All those different shades of black.

  * * *

  • • •

  AMERICA GOT UP AND CHECKED the duty-issued Colt she kept on her nightstand. She padded through the house in just her T-shirt, looking through the blinds covering each window.

  Looking for a car in the street or someone standing outside smoking a cigarette, pretending not to watch her house.

  Esperando.

  But tonight there was nothing, just a high moon lost in clouds. A faint silver circle, like a ring you might wear on your finger.

  With Avalos still sitting in jail, she guessed she had a little time, just not how much. He’d made at least one phone call, so when she came home earlier tonight, after her long day with Harp at Terlingua and Killing, she’d had a cold dinner of leftovers, and then she got ready.

  In the kitchen, she’d dumped out a drawer holding some of her mama’s old forks and replaced them with a Beretta Storm she’d bought out of a pawnshop in Galveston.

  In her hall bathroom, she’d duct-taped a S&W Governor revolver to the inside door of the medicine cabinet, along with three stacked moon clips where her NyQuil bottle once sat. She’d taken that gun from a man in Savannah who’d tried to rob and probably rape her. She was pretty sure both the Beretta and the Governor were untraceable.

  She’d stabbed a matching set of Spyderco Ronin 2 knives blade-down into the thick soil of her potted orchid cactus, hidden by the leaves.

  And last, she’d put the Winchester Model 12 shotgun she’d bought from the Walmart in Odessa underneath the coffee table in the living room, facing the door. She’d had a friend of Victor’s cut it down for her to make it a little more manageable.

  Now, she took out the shotgun, cradling it in her arms, and sat cross-legged on her couch, knowing that just like last night, she wasn’t going to sleep for a while. She cut her blinds open a bit to let in that watery moonlight, letting her count all the shadows up and down the street. A car passed, slow, but it didn’t hit its brakes, and then it was gone.

  For the first time in a while, she wante
d a cigarette—a way to pass the time, to watch and wait. A lifetime ago she and Caleb Ross had shared endless cigarettes, waiting.

  She thought about Killing and the men there. Los hombres malos. But one of them, the one they’d called Hero, had smiled at her after she tossed her card at JW Earl’s son. And it hadn’t been a smile like Azahel Avalos’s, half menace and half fear. It had been something else altogether.

  Respect.

  Ben had probably seen it, too, as they had driven on to Terlingua in silence, but she knew what he’d been thinking anyway. He didn’t want her around those men. He was worried what they might say to her, what they might try to do. But she’d been dealing with men like that her whole life and there was nothing they could say or do to bother her.

  Such men meant nothing to her anymore.

  She aimed the Winchester at the place where the car had gone by, scanned once, and put it back in her lap.

  She’d made a hundred, a thousand promises to herself.

  No, she wasn’t afraid. Not anymore. Nunca más.

  But she was ready.

  La chica con la pistola.

  11

  Harp was as surprised as anybody when they showed up unannounced at the department before noon, both dressed in jeans and identical black long-sleeve Sturgis T-shirts despite the unholy heat. Trying, he guessed, to hide as many of their tattoos as they could. They stood together outside and shared a cigarette, laughing, watching the thin traffic slow down and drivers stare before passing them by on Main.