High White Sun

by J. Todd Scott

  Earl crushes out his cigarette with a boot. “One other thing, you hit my boy like that again, embarrass him, and he will kill you. I reckon it’s just for the one more day, but you gotta stay clear of him as best you can, because if it comes to it, I won’t stand in his way. No matter what, he’s still an Earl.”

  “He’s blood and I’m not?”

  “That’s right, and that’s a damn shame, too. You would’ve made a helluva Earl, son. But I ain’t worried about it. You’re a damn hard man to put in the ground in a fair fight, so keep those eyes in the back of your head, ’cause if he does find the belly for it, he’ll not likely want you to see him comin’. That’s one reason I like you, Danny, you’re a hard man all the way around, kinda like me. And that’s what I need.”

  They buried my father because he was shot in the back on a dark road. He never saw it coming, either. He never had a goddamn chance.

  You would’ve made a helluva Earl, son.

  A helluva Earl.

  That’s what he just said.

  Son.

  Earl reaches into his jeans and pulls out the Ruger with one hand and presses it into mine, and then walks past me and slaps me on the shoulder with his other hand.

  His shooting hand.

  * * *

  • • •

  AFTER HE’S GONE I stay out on the porch alone, out in the sunlight, glad to have finally stepped out of the shade.

  There’s a vulture up high in the clear sky, turning circles around and around—America Reynosa’s words all over again, this time in the flesh—marking a spot where something has died. Another joins it, and then another, so that there are three of them. They’re black marks against the blue, the only things scarring the sky, and I wonder why they spin around like that, why they wait so long to claim the dead thing that is already theirs.

  There’s a short bark of laughter back behind me in the house, someone watching TV.

  I’ve been telling myself all along I want to help Jenna and Kasper, even Sunny, but maybe the deputies are right and there’s nothing I can do for any them, if I don’t do something for myself.

  In the end, it’s always just been one more lie I needed to believe . . .

  But I can warn Deputy Reynosa and Deputy Harper about the girl in Terlingua, and I can tell them what I know about Earl’s plan for tonight. Maybe it’s the bank or maybe it’s not, but whatever it is, I can get all of us ready.

  The sky is now empty and unmarred again, and the vultures are all gone.

  34

  This is a dream . . .

  They are out on the lake and she’s sitting in the front of the boat, her hair pulled up, laughing at something he just said. The water behind her is blue, capped white, catching the sunlight and sending it back skyward. Everything is bright and she has on her sunglasses so that he can’t see her eyes and her head is thrown back and there is light playing on her throat and her skin shines like a new day dawning . . .

  There is wind between them, drying the water that falls against them as quickly as it lands, as if it never touched them at all.

  There’s a radio somewhere playing the Eagles, her favorite song, and she’s singing along with it.

  And he wishes he could see her eyes . . . goddamn wishes he knew what he just said to make her laugh like that, so he can say it again, forever and always. He can’t take his eyes off her shining skin and wants to take her up and hold her and feel that shine with his own hands . . . hold her tight . . . so they can both glow together. But he is darkness and always has been and always will be and he’s ashamed that he exists only when reflected by her, by stealing her light.

  It doesn’t matter to her, it never did. She never thought he was stealing what she was willing to give . . .

  She says something to him but he can’t hear her, the wind snatching away the words at that moment. Maybe it’s “I love you” or just his name . . . they are both the same to him. He calls back to her but something has caught her eye out on the shore, and she’s turned away from him, looking out over the water.

  Her hair’s come loose and it streams behind her like the memory of a now falling star.

  He goes to catch her, to hold her, before she reaches the ground.

  This is a dream.

  This is all it will ever be.

  He’s ready now.

  He woke to a banging on his door, a pounding in his head, and the bottle of Balcones, along with others he didn’t remember finishing off, scattered around the couch. There were chess pieces, too, flung everywhere, as if he’d started a game and upended the board. “So What” by Miles Davis was still playing, the last thing he’d heard before everything had gone black. It was a nine-minute arrangement, but he’d been out a lot longer than that. It had been dark before, and now it was bright, early-morning sunlight burning through the thin curtains Modelle Greer had strung up in the place.

  He had no idea how many replays of the song he’d gone through, had no idea even what day it was. He felt as old as he ever had, feeble and lost. He stumbled, searching for the Colt that had last been in his hand, only to find it was still there. He’d passed out with the gun in his fingers and grew cold even in the hot room at the thought of what that meant.

  Far colder than the gun itself, which was still warm from his night-long grip.

  Maybe he’d dreamed of touching it against his temple or feeling its metal against his teeth. That’s all it had been, though, a dream.

  He pushed the Colt beneath a couch pillow, unwilling to look at it again.

  “Goddamn, I’m up, come in, it’s unlocked.”

  The door opened, revealing Amé, her hands full. She looked the way he felt, only worse. Her eyes were hollowed, dark. At least he had drunk himself to sleep; it appeared she hadn’t slept at all. He tried to stand and go to her, but his body wouldn’t cooperate, not fully.

  She took in the bottles around him but didn’t say anything, just pushed a few aside with her boot to join him on the couch.

  “We’ve both had better mornings, I see,” he said, reaching for one of the coffee cups in her hand. “Are you okay, nothing happened, right? Nothing with the Earls . . .”

  “No, not that. Not them.” She had another bag, and pulled from it a bottle of Bayer and a couple of silver-wrapped packets of Certs. “You’re going to need these, a lot of both. You have to pull yourself together. We have something we need to do today.”

  “That sounds serious. You know, Chris left for El Paso this morning.” He blew on the coffee that was still too hot to drink.

  “Sí. It might be better he’s not here anyway, for now.” She opened the aspirin bottle and dumped four into Harp’s hand, followed by two Certs. “I talked to Azahel Avalos last night.”

  Harp struggled, reaching. “You mean that dumbass that hit Tommy, the guy still in lockup? The guy you punched?”

  “Sí, that one.”

  He dry-chewed the mints and the aspirin before trying the coffee again. “Goddamn, why? He’s got a lawyer. You can’t talk to him.”

  “He wanted to talk to me.”

  “Was Paez there?”

  “No.”

  Harp took one more aspirin. “Then it does us no good, it does him no good. It’s like it never happened at all.”

  “Lo sé. I think that’s the point.” She sat back, felt something, and pulled out a chess piece and Harp’s gun from beneath the pillow. She tossed the chess piece aside and didn’t check to see if the gun was loaded, since they both knew well enough that it was. But she looked at it a long time before dropping the magazine and popping out the lone chambered round, catching it clean with her free hand. She put the gun and the magazine on the small coffee table, muzzle pointed away from them both, out of habit. It sat in the middle of his empty chessboard, but she held on to the single bullet.

  “So that’s where that went to.”
Harp tried to joke, giving up on the coffee and putting it on the table next to the gun, realizing that Jackie’s Archangel Michael pendant was there on the little table as well, where it gathered up morning sunlight. He didn’t remember bringing it in from the car.

  “When I came in, you thought I was going to tell you something about the Earls?”

  Harp shrugged, keeping his eyes clear of the pendant and the Colt; anywhere, really, but the gun. “I thought . . . I mean, yeah I did, something other than Avalos, anyway. I’d forgotten all about him.”

  “We all did,” she said, but Harp could tell she was lying. She hadn’t forgotten about him at all, not even close. “But this does have to do with the Earls. John Wesley Earl.”

  “I don’t get it,” Harp said.

  She picked up the coffee he’d abandoned. “I didn’t either, not at first. This is going to take a while.” She tried to take a sip, found it too hot as well.

  “It starts with my brother, Rodolfo . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  LATER, THEY WERE WAITING in the sun for Customs agent Elgin Bartlett.

  Harp had called him over an hour ago, but Elgin was dealing with a tractor trailer full of onions crossing through Presidio—onions, and about two thousand pounds of weed. All the agents at the POE were tied up with that and would be a while longer, and it had been Bartlett’s canine, Big Max, who’d found it. All those thousands of stinking onions from Ahumada in Chihuahua, and the shepherd-Labrador mix had smelled the weed hidden beneath them anyway.

  Bartlett had texted Harp that he was on his way as soon as he could get free, but they were running some other trucks through secondary, and both he and Big Max were working their asses off. Sometimes the cartels tried to shotgun multiple loads through at a time, figuring if one got taken off, that upped the chances of success for the others. Sometimes, they hoped a load got ripped—it was easy enough to sacrifice a ton of weed if fifty or a hundred kilos of coke, meth, or even heroin got through behind it.

  It was the cost of doing business.

  The impound lot didn’t offer much shade, and they could have waited together inside the department, but Harp wanted to be out here in the sun anyway, to give it a chance to burn away the last bit of his headache that the aspirin hadn’t quite reached. Amé wasn’t complaining, so they swapped turns sitting in his air-conditioned truck, taking small breaks, when they weren’t walking around Azahel Avalos’s—Miguel Suarez’s—car examining it from every angle.

  Searching it a third, fourth, fifth time; so many they lost count.

  And each time, it stubbornly refused to give up its secrets.

  * * *

  • • •

  BACK AT HIS APARTMENT, sitting with his gun in front of them on the table, Amé had finally told Harp about Rodolfo—how he’d worked as a BP agent in the Big Bend, but how his real job, the one that had mattered, had been moving drugs and money for a cartel called Nemesio back and forth over the river. Rodolfo had done it with the help of Big Bend’s then sheriff, Stanford Ross, and his chief deputy, Duane Dupree. At some point, Rodolfo had learned that the sheriff and Dupree were double-crossing Nemesio, holding back money or just outright stealing it, and they’d killed him because of it. There was more than that—Dupree had also been fixated on Amé, stalking and threatening her, while he succumbed to a raging meth habit and rapidly fell apart, body and mind. But before her brother had died, he’d left her a gun and a phone that Nemesio had given him. Desperate and alone, she’d used that phone to make a call, and a boy named Máximo had arrived not long after, bringing with him revenge; fire and death.

  Some of this Harp had suspected already, and other parts he’d picked up from Chris, who’d played his own role in it all. But Amé told him that Chris never knew about Máximo, and still didn’t, or what had become of all that money Sheriff Ross had stolen.

  No one had, except the sheriff’s son, Caleb.

  And her.

  * * *

  • • •

  ELGIN BARTLETT WAS A BIG MAN, and his blue Customs uniform was soaked through. His hat was crooked on his large head, barely hiding thinning hair and a sunburned scalp.

  He’d had a miserable morning, and looked every bit of it.

  Big Max looked worn-out, too, sitting on his haunches in the thin shadows tossed by Bartlett’s truck. The dog watched them with eyes that made it clear he knew who was going to do all the real work.

  Bartlett wiped his head with his hat, but since it was drenched, too, it didn’t help.

  “Goddamn, Harp, you could have called Vazquez over at the BP checkpoint on I-67, or whoever’s working Sierra Blanca or 118. You know they got dogs, too. We all get trained at the same damn place nowadays.”

  “Maybe, but they’re not as good as you and Big Max. Not half as good. Blue shirts, green shirts, hell, I don’t know the difference anymore with you guys and your uniforms, but I know a good dog.”

  Bartlett looked sideways over at Amé, who was checking her phone. “You just didn’t want Vazquez ’cause he’s Mexican.”

  Harp rolled his eyes. “My partner is Mexican, you racist dummy. And I don’t even give a shit if Big Max is Mexican, will you just get to it?”

  “Okay, okay.” Bartlett patted his back pocket to make sure he had Big Max’s rolled-up yellow towel, the dog’s reward for doing a good job. The dog spied it and stood up, knowing it was time to get to work. As Bartlett walked past Harp toward the Nissan, Big Max loping behind him, Harp caught the sour smell of onions.

  “Hey,” Bartlett said, “did you call those breeders in Sanderson that we talked about? Did they get that dog for you?”

  Harp watched Big Max start making his way around Avalos’s car, nose down. “Yeah, thanks for that. I really appreciate it. I got him. But he wasn’t for me.”

  * * *

  • • •

  HE’D BROKEN DOWN AND MIXED a lot of the too-hot coffee she’d brought with some ice and a little of the Red River bourbon he had above the fridge, just a fingerful, to help even him out. He’d made a point of holding up the bottle so that she saw him put it away; so she knew that was all he was having.

  “No one cares about what happened to Dupree and Sheriff Ross, Amé. Sounds to me like they got what was coming, what they deserved, and it’s what would have happened anyway, one way or another, no matter what you did or didn’t do. As for the money? The sheriff isn’t looking for it, and I sure in the hell don’t care. If you need to unburden yourself about it, tell a priest. Otherwise, fuck it. I hope you bought yourself something nice. Nicer than that little house over in Beantown . . .” Harp had stopped, looked away. “Sorry about that, but you know what I mean. I hope you bought a lot of nice things.”

  “I don’t know if I deserve nice things,” she said. “Anyway, when I realized Avalos knew who I was, I got afraid he was here for that money. If he knew about it, then Nemesio knew as well. That’s why I wanted to talk to him. I was worried for you and Sheriff Cherry.”

  “Fair enough, but we can take care of ourselves. But you said Avalos knows you?”

  “He knows about me. He says that everyone knows about my brother and me, because of our uncle, a man they call Fox Uno. He’s Nemesio, so was Rodolfo, and . . .”

  “And so are you,” he’d finished for her, sitting back next to her on the couch, shoulder to shoulder. “I get it, and that’s complete bullshit. That man means nothing to you.”

  “Él es la familia.”

  “You don’t believe that. The sheriff is your family. Your Mel is your family. I and those other asshole deputies we work with are family, if you want us to be. We’re the only family that matters, at least more than this bogeyman across the river. If people want to think differently, fuck ’em and prove ’em wrong.”

  “You make it sound so fácil. You didn’t grow up here, you don’t know.”

 
“Maybe, maybe not. But I know it’s going to be every bit as hard as you make it.”

  She’d nodded and took one of the aspirin she’d brought him for herself, chasing it with his coffee and Red River mixture.

  “If Avalos wasn’t here to scare you or take back that money, then what the fuck was he here for? And what does he have to do with the Earls?”

  “It still has everything to do with money, just not the money I’ve been holding on to these last two years.”

  * * *

  • • •

  BIG MAX BARKED, once, twice, and then sat down by the left front fender of the Nissan.

  “Looks like we got a winner, winner, chicken dinner,” Bartlett said, mostly to himself, but loud enough that Harp could hear . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  “AVALOS TOLD ME the car has a clavo. It means ‘nail,’ but what it really means is the car holds a big trap, a secret compartment for smuggling money or drugs or whatever. The people Avalos works for were working with Earl and the ABT. All the money Earl’s been making all these years dealing drugs was being kept by those men. They provided him the drugs he sold, and held on to most of the money he made. Avalos was supposed to bring Earl that money, as well as a new license and passport. It’s all in the car, and Earl is the only one who knows how to get it out.”

  Harp had laughed, bitter. “I can’t believe Earl trusted those fuckers more than his own people, or his own family. The Mexicans have been the goddamn bank all along, and that car was the fucking vault, Earl’s safety deposit box. I wasn’t wrong about that, after all. I was just looking in the wrong damn place. He’s cashing out.”

  “Sí. I didn’t push, but that’s what I understand. Last night Avalos was desperate and wanted my help getting the car and the money inside it to Earl. But today he will find out he’s getting bonded out anyway.”