High White Sun

by J. Todd Scott

  America then took the brown bag and opened it, revealing a small black and silver revolver: a Taurus 85 .38 Special. When she and Ben had originally searched Billy’s trailer, they’d recovered several guns, all makes and models and spanning decades, most of them unregistered or unlicensed. All of them were still locked away safely at the department, except this one.

  Last night, America had checked and double-checked the .38, cleaning the barrel and the cylinder the way Ben had shown her, and taping the plastic grip so it would be even easier to hold.

  She gave it to Vianey, making sure she understood how it worked so she wouldn’t blow her hand off. She’d almost replaced the original rounds with the federal hollow-points the department issued, but had thought better of it. She told Vianey to carry it with her for a while, just to be sure. She also reminded her again to stay out of Terlingua and stay close to Presidio, or even cross the river, and wrote down her personal number. She made Vianey promise to call her if she had worries about anything . . . cualquier cosa.

  It was in that moment, awkwardly holding the gun in one hand and America’s phone number on a business card in the other—looking out over the brown water going black with the sinking sun—that Vianey’s tears finally came. America hadn’t been sure before, but she was now.

  She left Vianey there and walked back toward her truck.

  And the whole time they’d been standing on the riverbank, she hadn’t seen a single silver flash of un pescado in the water.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE VERY FIRST STARS were hanging on the horizon as she drove away from Terlingua, many of them caught on the mountain peaks. Other than a quick text from Ben letting her know they had gotten to Lubbock, she hadn’t heard anything else from him or the sheriff. She didn’t think that was good . . . there was no way it could be. If nothing else, it meant they weren’t getting home until very late tonight, maybe tomorrow.

  She toyed with the idea of driving into Killing, but both Ben and the sheriff had been very clear about not wanting her down there, and although their concerns were silly, tonterías, she didn’t want to hurt the investigation. But if the sheriff was right, and if the Lubbock trip was going as bad as she was afraid it was, there might not be an investigation anymore, anyway.

  She didn’t know what she thought about that. Much like the question of whether you could change or should even try to, she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to think about it. She didn’t know if there was a right answer, or if there ever could be one, but she didn’t feel ready yet to let Billy Bravo’s murder go that easily.

  She’d heard Vianey’s prayers by the river. She’d made similar prayers of her own when Rodolfo had disappeared, and right or wrong, they’d been answered.

  However, she did slow down at the turn-off for the old mining town, just for a heartbeat, but that way was deeply shadowed, already lost beneath the mesas and the setting sun. She passed by a flood gauge sign, a familiar sight across the washes and low areas of the Big Bend, this one set to measure the rising water from Alamito Creek if it ever rained again and the creek filled, but it was dusty as the dirt it stood in. The wooden sign had two ragged bullet holes in it, at the three-foot and five-foot mark, and the dying sun winked at her through them.

  Almost like eyes, watching her.

  And if there were lights already on in Killing, she was too far away to see.

  17

  It was Dyer who talked, slow and steady, while Stackpole sat next to him, looking at nothing.

  “I knew Danny’s daddy years back when we came up through the ranks together. Robert Ford was a good man and a damn fine Ranger, a legend in his own way. Back in the summer of ’99 he was investigating a bank robbery in Roscoe, Nolan County, and putting the squeeze on a wannabe biker named Daryl Lynch, who owned a strip club outside of Sweetwater called the Aces High. Daryl had snitched for Bob before, and word was he could put names and faces to the Roscoe robbery. One of them was supposed to be John Wesley Earl.” Dyer waved at the spot where Earl’s picture had rested on the table.

  “Bob Ford was shot down on a highway outside of Sweetwater. Left there to bleed out, leaving behind a wife and his young boy, Danny. Me and a bunch of others worked the hell out of it, but came up empty. It didn’t help that the Aces High burned down a week after Bob’s shooting, with Daryl Lynch inside it. We all figured Earl for the whole mess, the shooting and the fire, but he got sent up first on that other attempted murder beef Agent Nichols here talked about, so for most of us, it was done. It had to be.”

  “But not for Danny?” Harp asked.

  “No, not for Danny.” Dyer looked at a spot on the floor. “Imagine you’re a nine-, ten-year-old boy, and you gotta deal with that? You need to figure out how to wrap your head and your hands around it and make sense out of it. Some do a fair bit better than others.” Dyer breathed hard, like he was clearing dust out of his throat, and Chris thought about Jesse Earl, growing up the same as Danny without his father, for pretty much the same reasons. “So, you know, things were hard for him and his mom, Catherine, real hard. Danny joined the army as soon as he could, got some waiver to get in the second he turned seventeen. He had his mom sign off on it, and then just like that, he was gone. He went over to Afghanistan and did real well, if you can say such a thing about a place like that.”

  Dyer took a sip of water. “When he got back he joined DPS. He eventually wanted to be a Ranger, like his daddy. He worked his way up fast to the Criminal Investigation Division, and got himself assigned to a multiagency state task force created to crack down on these Aryan gangs and racist skinheads. That task force was a big deal, very high-profile, and Danny was right in the thick of it. He was shipped off to Tyler and then McKinney and then Ballinger, working his way into these groups. Danny was a born natural for undercover, and since all these wackos were always on the lookout for guns, the bigger the better, that became Danny’s story, his in . . . that he was just out of the military and could still get grenades and rifles, that sort of thing. Like I said, he was a natural, and very, very good. Too good. He even got himself tattooed just like them, and then inked over later whatever he’d done. It was like writing and then erasing his damn skin, over and over again. I took issue with that, and said as much.” Dyer’s jaw clenched, like he was biting on something hard. “But it wasn’t my call, and they bought him hook, line, and sinker, every damn time.”

  “And he knew all about Jesse Earl, right? Who he was, but more importantly, who he was related to?” Harp asked, before Chris could.

  Dyer nodded. “Let’s just say it came up, more than once. If you want to think that’s why Danny pushed so hard to work that task force to begin with, I’m not going to argue with you. Even though CID has its own command, I still felt responsible for Danny because I brought him into DPS, and because of everything that had happened with Bob. I tried to keep an eye on him, even talked to his immediate supervisors, but it didn’t help much, honestly. Then before he ever got close to Jesse, they had to pull him out anyway. Things went bad for him in Ballinger. This young pregnant girl was being used as a punching bag by some skinhead piece of shit she’d taken up with. Danny took exception to that, and put the man down, hard. The girl ended up going back home to her family in Austin, so I guess you could say Danny saved her and all, but still . . .”

  “And the skinhead?” Chris asked.

  “Well, he breathes okay, so long as you don’t trip over any of his wires. It’s fifty-fifty whether he’ll ever wake up again, and those odds are going south every day. Danny was put on admin leave so that it could get sorted out. I made some calls and pulled some strings and took him in for light duty, had him filing paper in my command. The truth? We needed to get Danny sorted out. You lay in the gutter with folks like that, listen to them say that shit they do, all day every day, and you’re going to get dirty. It’s going to take more than a shower to wash it off.” Dyer looked o
ver at Nichols, weeks of long history passing in one glance. “Anyway, he would have been okay,” Dyer kept on, almost as much to himself as to the others, “we’d have gotten him over what happened in Ballinger, and eventually, one day, he would have made the Rangers.”

  Chris could hear the sound of Dyer trying to convince himself of that. “Then why is he down in Killing now?”

  Dyer look pained. “Because I had to tell him that Earl was getting out. That against all sense, that sonofabitch had made parole.”

  You need to figure out how to wrap your head and your hands around it, make some sense of it. Some do a fair bit better than others.

  “But you didn’t know Earl had cut a deal, did you? You didn’t know anything about that at all.” Chris turned back and forth between Dyer and the still-silent Stackpole, then Nichols, who was looking down at one of his phones. “Then Danny hears his father’s killer is now a free man and—”

  Dyer stepped in. “Like I said, he didn’t hear about it, hell, I told him. He needed to know. And right after I did, he turned in his badge and gun that day. Two weeks later I get word from that task force that he’s in Lubbock, trying to get in with Jesse’s bunch again . . . this time all on his own.”

  “And he did,” Harp finished for him.

  “It seems he did, hook, line, and sinker. Earl’s testimony, the RICO case, this thing now with Flowers, is all federal. We had nothing to do with it and didn’t know anything about it, at least I didn’t. That only came out to me later.” Another long glance in the direction of Nichols, who was holding his phone and stared back without blinking, without any emotion at all. “As far as we know, Danny still doesn’t know a damn thing about it.”

  Harp shrugged. “And now he’s not taking your calls. I get it. But he’s been with Earl for a few weeks now, and if the boy isn’t over his daddy, why hasn’t he just put a bullet in him and be done with it?” Harp looked to the other men at the table as if that was a perfectly acceptable solution.

  And there was a lot Chris could say about revenge, how it could be as strong and cold as the ocean’s tides, and so much worse when it involved the lightless and deep mysteries between some fathers and their sons. How then it truly was unfathomable, unknowable. He’d caught only the very end of Caleb Ross’s struggle with Sheriff Ross, but that had been going on for years before Caleb had decided to end it with a bullet. John Wesley Earl was not Danny’s father, but what was it like to finally stand in the presence of the man who’d taken away the only father you’d ever known?

  “We never proved that Earl killed Bob Ford, and during all the long talks he was so eager and willing to have with Agent Nichols here”—Dyer pointed at Nichols, who had put his phone down but didn’t seem inclined to add anything—“I guess it just never came up. I’d bet all my money and yours, too, that Earl was the shooter, but knowing isn’t the same as proving it. I expect Danny wants to hear it from Earl’s mouth himself. No matter what he’s been through, or what’s going through his head now, Danny’s decent. He isn’t a cold-blooded murderer.”

  “And when, or if, he hears some sort of confession or admission from Earl, then what?” Chris asked. “Is that when he finally decides it is okay to shoot him? Are all of you just hoping you don’t find yourselves tripping over Earl’s wires in my hospital?”

  “Well, he’s no murderer,” Dyer said, and gave Nichols a raw smile. “But he’s no saint.”

  Nichols finally joined in again. “So you can see, Sheriff Cherry, like I’m sure the major relayed on the phone . . . it’s complicated.”

  Chris laughed. “It appears, Agent Nichols, that you’re the one making it complicated. You have a serious problem being forthcoming. You do like your secrets. You didn’t tell anyone in DPS about your deal with Earl, and you didn’t tell me about the little operation you’re running in my county until you absolutely had to.” Chris waved at the files and folders. “What are you calling this thing, anyway? I’m sure it has a name, like the others you showed me. I might as well know what I’m getting myself into, or is that a secret, too?”

  “It’s not about secrets, Sheriff, it’s about operational security.” Nichols thought about it, and then shrugged, relenting. “But if it matters to you, we call it Sol Blanco. White Sun.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY TALKED for another hour, maybe two.

  Chris started to see it slowly, like something ominous taking shape out of early-morning fog, or surfacing from that ocean he’d been imagining a few minutes before. They weren’t actually talking about Billy Bravo’s murder in Terlingua anymore; that had been set aside as a distraction and a nuisance. Center stage now was this never-ending argument between the Texas Ranger and the federal agent, and Chris and Harp were the audience—bystanders—or even worse, the tie-breaking votes. Dyer wanted to rescue Danny a second time, pull him out again, like he’d done in Ballinger. He wanted Danny to know that Earl was untouchable, and that made Nichols understandably nervous, since Danny might take that knowledge and just go ahead and pull the trigger then anyway. After all his hard work, Nichols had to live with the fear that this Danny Ford was going to upset all the knives he had spinning above his head. The agent had probably contemplated a hundred ways of spiriting him out of Killing, few of them feasible, and none that didn’t run the risk of scaring off Jesse Earl and Flowers. He’d probably even turned over the idea, more than once, of just outing Danny to Earl, but couldn’t bring himself to do that without first having Flowers in his sights—because no matter what he said or how sure of himself he pretended to be, Nichols didn’t quite trust the old outlaw, either. He had no idea what Earl would do if he did figure out Danny was recently a cop, and more important, the bitter son of a Texas Ranger he may or may not have murdered.

  Chris even sympathized with Major Dyer and his concerns for Danny, but as much as he didn’t like Nichols or his secrets or his juggling act, he also didn’t envy the responsibility and the calls the young agent was being forced to make. Day by day, almost minute by minute, and all the people he had to answer to who weren’t in the room, although their presence was heavy and just as real, as real as the phones Nichols had in front of him and kept constantly checking. Chris couldn’t help wondering if Earl was on the end of one of them, too.

  At the end, Nichols showed them more photos, gave them names of other people who should be in Killing with Earl, and made sure that Chris had several cell numbers to get ahold of him anytime, day or night.

  And then it was over.

  But when they got up to leave, breaking into their own groups with Nichols left standing alone, Chris wasn’t sure what, if anything, had been decided. Nichols wanted Chris and his people to leave the Bravo investigation alone if it pointed toward Killing, and keep him in the loop about any of the Earls’ movements if it brought them into Murfee. But for the moment, it was still simply a request, a professional courtesy he’d been reluctantly forced to extend. It could become an order, though, one with sharp teeth. That was easy, and all it would take was a call from one of those phones.

  That was the only damn thing that was really clear.

  Major Dyer finally had Stackpole, who in all the time still hadn’t said a word, walk them out.

  No one shook Nichols’s hand, and he didn’t offer it.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY’D CLEARED THE BUILDING and were walking to their truck with Stackpole still in tow, when Harp suddenly turned toward the Ranger.

  “Dammit, Rodney, it’s been a long time.” For the second time that day, Harp grabbed the hand of the other man, who smiled back wide.

  The Ranger nodded. “Don’t I know it? I knew you had left Midland PD, and then I heard about your wife, right? Damn shame, I’m so sorry about that. Word was you were down in Murfee, but I had trouble believing it. Then you were calling around from down there about John Wesley Earl, and that stirred th
ings all up, and when the major said we were meeting with Sheriff Cherry here, I figured you’d come along. I told the major you’d be here, and I was right. I also told him all about you, that you were good people. One of us.”

  Chris stared back at Harp. “You two know each other?”

  Harp grinned. “Yeah, Rodney and I worked together before, back when he was CID like Danny Ford.” Harp released the Ranger’s hand but clapped him on the shoulder, glancing back to the bank building, as if to make sure Nichols wasn’t standing at a window, watching them. “I recognized him straight off when we walked in, but thought I would let it play out.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Stackpole said. “Nichols doesn’t know we have history, and the major won’t tell him. But he wants me to ask your help in getting Danny out of there. Whatever you have to do, just get him out.”

  Chris stepped in, pointing at the lieutenant. “You sat there and didn’t open your goddamn mouth for hours, and this is what you’re saying now?” All that fog back in the room suddenly cleared away, burned off by the late afternoon sun above them.

  Stackpole looked pained, and turned to Harp for help. “Sheriff, I get it, I do, but it’s the major. He and Danny go way back, and he can’t just stand by and let it go down bad for him. Sooner or later, Earl and Danny are going to make each other for what they really are.”

  “Or Nichols is just going to up and tell Earl,” Harp added, echoing Chris’s earlier thoughts. “Nichols can’t risk his golden goose getting a bullet behind the ear from Danny, but what can he do? He doesn’t want Flowers to slip through his fingers, either.”

  Stackpole agreed. “Nothing good can come out of it either way. Nichols doesn’t see Danny as a lawman anymore. He’s a civilian. An obstacle, a problem.”