High White Sun

by J. Todd Scott

  But it wasn’t all about his ex-wife. It was also about the gambling debts he owed, roughly to the tune of seventy-five thousand. Killing had been an escape from turning into salt himself. Just before he’d left Tacoma, two men had showed up at his apartment, ethnic Vietnamese who ran one of the gambling parlors he frequented. The slopes had been armed, one with a claw hammer with the price tag still on it and a cherry-red bucket and a thick roll of painter’s plastic, and the other with a stun gun and packs of condoms and cigarettes, and if Clutts hadn’t been there to put a gun in their faces, they’d have taken Thurman away.

  Killing was going to be his safe place, his haven, and Earl’s money was supposed to buy him the time and space to make it so. Now all that was shot to hell and back, leaving him trapped with a madman, waiting for the end. Earl was worse than his ex-wife and those fucking slopes with their stun gun and their hammer.

  Earl was a problem that needed solving, and fast. He was a fucking nail, but at least Thurman still had a trusty hammer of his own.

  That’s what he was thinking as he glanced up at Clutts.

  He could feel the other man desperate to reach for his own gun, just waiting for a signal from him . . .

  47

  Little B picked the house. It was dark, no lights. After they pulled up behind it and T-Bob shut off the van, they sat with the engine ticking, waiting fifteen, twenty minutes, but there was no movement. A few streets over a car passed, painting a long smear of light across a crooked fence, but that was it. Satisfied, Little B told Kasper to help him with the gas cans.

  “We really got to do this?” Kasper asked, another not-question. Little B was his friend and in his dreams so much more than that, and they had talked for months about starting a band, with him on guitar and Little B on whatever instrument he finally decided on. He’d always gone on and on about singing, but as much as Kasper thought he loved him, he didn’t think he had the voice for it. Not for the music they wanted to play, like the Bully Boys or RAHOWA. But since his dad had shown up, Little B had lost all interest in Kasper and the music and their band altogether.

  It was Earl who had told Little B to do this thing with the fire, and Little B wanted more than anything to please his dad.

  Still . . .

  “I told your dad I can be quick with the car, lightning quick. It’s not gonna take me any time at all. There’s no need for this, B.” He wanted to reach out and put a hand on the other boy’s shoulder, but didn’t dare.

  Little B looked at him while T-Bob disappeared behind his upended bottle, the last of the Teacher’s disappearing fast. “It ain’t just about that, Kaz. And anyway, it’s gonna take longer than just the hot-wire.” He pointed at the tires bunched around Kasper as an explanation. “We’re gonna be workin’ fast anyway and it’s still gonna be tight. Daddy said we could do that shitty bar, Early but this will be a lot better. We’re gonna need every bit of this distraction, so let’s just get ’er done.”

  They got out of the van, each holding a heavy can of gas. Free finally of that horrible space, Kasper stretched; his body sore and tight from the cramped and bumpy ride out of Killing. It felt good to stand in the dark, waiting for any kind of breeze, hoping to feel it on his face. He caught the sound of a television turned up loud, but far enough away, it came to him only as a whisper.

  “I don’t think I’m going back to Killing, B. You don’t have to, either. We just keep going, you and me, please.”

  Little B appeared to be deciding about lighting a cigarette, but thought better of it with the gas can still in his hand. “You know I ain’t gonna do that. That’s my family back there. They’re gonna need me. I ain’t mad at you for goin’, though.” Kasper thought Little B was going to say he was sorry about the band, but he didn’t, not directly. Instead: “One day you can write a song about all this. Some people are going to remember this here shit.”

  Kasper didn’t say anything, finally remembering himself that he’d left his guitar down in Killing. His mother had bought it for him and it was the only thing he owned that was worth a damn, and like his friend, he was never going to see it again.

  Angry at himself, he hoisted up the can. “Okay, let’s get it over with, then.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY DREW LINES in the dry, brittle grass with the gas, connecting the house Little B had parked behind to the one next to it. Little B traced his initials in the backyard and sprayed a stunted mesquite tree like a dog pissing on his spot. Kasper emptied what was left of his can on a bed of withered flowers and then tossed the empty into the backyard.

  He could smell their handiwork. Everything smelled like gas.

  Little B wiped his hands on his jeans two or three times, and then got back to lighting that cigarette he’d passed on earlier. He offered a pull to Kasper, but he turned it down. He just wanted to get back in the van and get on their way. He wanted to disappear and never look back.

  So he never saw Little B actually toss the burning cigarette end over end into the grass.

  * * *

  The ignition temperature of gasoline is only about 495 degrees, pretty low.

  The business end of a cigarette, after a good draw, can hit 700 degrees. The gas itself, spread thin, was already hot, like everything else around Murfee because of the summer drought, and even more so after being trapped in those cans for days in the RV. The dry, dusty grass held the gas vapor tight; a layer as thin as smoke, and even more combustible than the liquid gas itself.

  The fire started before the cigarette hit the ground.

  There was a definite sound like a harsh intake of breath, and a white-orange flash that was visible for two blocks, if anyone had been looking. The flame took off and leapt skyward from the gas runways made for it, leaving behind a trail of hungry sparks that ate up grass, jumping from patch to patch, and before long, yard to yard.

  The walls of the first house boiled, caught fire, and seconds later, so did the second house.

  And by the time the white van with Washington plates turned out of the neighborhood and headed back toward the Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department, some of the flames were ten feet tall.

  48

  I hear the first shot, then another. We both do.

  There’s no way not to, they’re so goddamn loud. They echo back and forth and back again, like a dozen guns firing.

  She’s not going to leave him out here, and I wouldn’t let her anyway. I learned that in Wanat—we don’t ever leave our people behind.

  So even before the shooting is done and the echoes have all faded away, she’s turning back to the place we last saw Deputy Harper walk off, and then she’s running.

  I’m right behind her.

  * * *

  • • •

  HE’S FACEUP, looking at the stars, and his eyes are open.

  He’s about ten yards from the Marquis, if that, the AR-15 still in his hand. He never let it go, even when he fell. I move up to check him, while Deputy Reynosa moves a little to my left, aiming in at the car, where there’s no movement, only sound. The radio is on, but it’s mostly static: maybe a bit of music, some Spanish really loud, then a hellfire preacher at a revival, before finally one long hum and a hiss. The radio clicks off and the lone headlight goes dark, an eye closing, plunging us both into a black so deep it’s like falling down a hole.

  We wait, let our eyes adjust to the stars, and I try to take the AR-15 from Harper’s hand. I have to pull his cooling fingers from it and he’s still reluctant to let it go. Once I have it, I get Deputy Reynosa’s attention and let her know we can slide forward. If she nods, I don’t see it, but when I move, she moves right along with me—my shadow.

  We flank the Marquis, come up on it slow, and find the driver, Joker, sprawled in the sand. Unlike Harper, he’s facedown, legs still back in the car, tangled up in it. Joker’s rifle is an arm’s length away, and his brains
, most of them, are painted all along the car’s roof and the doorframe. They’re a weird color in the even weirder light of the night; they glow and steam like they’re still hot. I taste the copper of Joker’s blood and the acid of piss in the air; he also shit himself when Harper shot him through the face.

  He was going to die anyway, sooner rather than later, because as I get up close, I find two other exit wounds. Even with all of that bouncing through the desert, all that firing wildly into the night, Deputy Reynosa got him. She is a damn good shot.

  We find Lee Malady still in the backseat, everything above the eyes gone and violently sprayed around the inside of the car. I pull him clear of the Marquis and strip both of them of their guns and check the remaining ammo, while Deputy Reynosa drifts around Harper. She’s pulled there, his body a magnet.

  She kneels over it like she’s praying and I give her a few minutes.

  I fumble through the med kit I brought with me from the truck, which is better than I thought it would be. It’s a combat tactical kit, containing a lot of things we used in Afghanistan. There’s antiseptic and some emergency trauma dressings and several packs of QuikClot hemostatic bandages, more than enough to get my bleeding stopped and my wound bound up. It’ll hold for a while. This stuff would have even kept Deputy Harper alive a while longer, although maybe not long enough to walk him out of here.

  I try not to think about that; how he sacrificed himself for Deputy Reynosa.

  For me.

  When I’m done, I go back over to the Marquis and Deputy Reynosa is there. She left Harper with his arms folded over his chest, and she’s trying to get the car started again, just like I did back at the truck.

  “Nada,” she says. We have two vehicles and neither of them are a go. We spend a minute messing with all the cell phones we collected between us, standing in different spots, with neither of us getting a signal. For a moment she has one lone bar and tries to dial out quick, but loses it before the call goes through.

  “There are dead spots all around this fucking place. If we get closer to the highway, we’ll be okay,” she says.

  Dead spots.

  We’ll be okay.

  In Afghanistan, after a firefight, there was always a moment like this; a moment when you realized that somehow, someway, you’d survived. A moment when you truly understood just how close death had slipped past you even as you were surrounded by all the dead; like catching a glimpse of a great shark sliding beneath you in dark water before disappearing into the depths. In that moment, everything was brighter, clearer. Everyone who talked to you sounded too loud. And everything that had happened so fast before suddenly slowed down again. Although you might be fighting back tears, and might still be shaking so hard you could barely hold your weapon, at least they were the shakes of the living.

  You knew then you were okay, or as okay as you could ever be again.

  I go and lift up Harper. With Deputy Reynosa’s help, I get him hoisted over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry without tearing wide my bandages. Unlike my dad’s badge from the funeral or Jesse’s bloody T-shirt, he’s surprisingly light.

  Like the real Ben Harper and everything that had been important about him has already flown away.

  As we start walking, Deputy Reynosa flicks on the SureFire she took off Harper’s body and looks past me, back into the desert, where there’s a darker band along the horizon. It’s eating up the stars, one by one.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  She turns, leading me back toward the highway. “Rain.”

  49

  Buck Emmett wasn’t much of a drinker, but he liked to hang out at the occasional bar.

  Not as much as being out on the river or hiking along the Chisos Basin, or holing up along a trail for a whitetail buck, but you couldn’t spend your whole life outdoors.

  And, truth be told, he had a bit of a crush on Sheriff Cherry’s girl, so whenever Mel was working a later shift at Earlys and it lined up right for him, he found a way to slip in. He’d get himself a Coors Light or a Bud, whatever was cheapest for the night, and park himself at the bar and let the beer go warm in the can. He’d talk to Javy Cruz or Terry Macrae or Ben Harper—who spent a lot of time in Earlys as well, doing some real drinking—and swap bullshit stories and tell the same old jokes and the whole time he’d slide his eyes over to Mel and smile at her whenever he got caught, and she’d never get mad, just always smile right back. She’d dump out the beer he wasn’t drinking and get him set up with another and never say a word about it, and still take the time to lean over the bar close and ask him about his day or what was going on at work or how his brother Birch was doing. Birch had a girl in Nathan he kept time with, but everyone said she kept time with a lot of men, and Buck had seen her and she wasn’t much to look at anyway. Not like Mel, who Buck counted as one of the prettiest women in all of Big Bend County, although Amé Reynosa wasn’t too hard on the eyes, either, even if he personally didn’t much go for Mexicans. For a while Tommy Milford had been whispering around town that Amé was a lesbo (and that’s exactly how he said it), until Buck had cornered him and told him to knock it off. Buck had decided long ago something like that wasn’t his damn business and didn’t matter to him one way or another anyway, and it sure in the hell wasn’t Tommy Milford’s business to talk about another fellow deputy. Plus, it just wasn’t right to gossip about any woman. Buck thought Birch’s girl in Nathan probably was a bit of a skank and ugly to boot, with her one cross-eye and those gaps in her teeth, but he’d kept that to himself, the way a gentleman should.

  He’d brought his second burger and leftover fries from the Hamilton and was now finishing it all up at the bar. He knew he needed to lose some weight, could feel the way his uniform shirt was too damn tight in the shoulders and gut, and how the buckle of his river belt dug into him, but his daddy had always been big (until his heart gave out), and his brother was, too. It was the curse of the Emmett men, adding pounds every time they added years. Getting in and out of his truck, sitting at his tiny desk in the department, was starting to be a royal pain in the ass, but somehow he never felt any of that weight when he was out camping or hunting or fishing.

  Somehow it all disappeared then, and he was seventeen years old again: tall and strong and sunburned, with his hair colored copper by the summer and his stomach smooth and flat.

  He could’ve turned the head of a woman like Mel back then, but that was a long, long time ago. Talking with her did the trick, though, and she had a way of making him feel like that teenager again; like that’s who she was seeing when she looked at him, instead of the heavyset, aging man he was. She made it all worth dragging his fat ass into the bar and perching on the uncomfortable bar stool to have those summers back, just for the price of a few beers.

  She was leaning into him now, talking about her new dog. She’d toyed with the idea of bringing him with her into the bar, but had thought better of it, and was now feeling guilty. He was locked up in one room at the house, waiting for the sheriff to show up. They were going to have to make a dog door or something for him eventually, but she wasn’t sure how big it would need to be.

  Also, she laughed, she wasn’t sure she wanted the sheriff taking tools to any part of her house.

  Buck laughed right along with her. The stories about Sheriff Cherry’s handiwork out at the Far Six were becoming legendary, and unlike Amé Reynosa or his brother’s ugly girlfriend, those were fair game.

  “Whatcha going to name him, your dog, I mean?”

  Mel straightened some glasses behind the bar. “Don’t know. I was trying on names all day.” She laughed again, smiled. “He doesn’t seem to like any of them.”

  Buck pretended to take a drink of his Coors. “I had me a pup once when I was kid. He was a mongrel, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I called him Rocket, which was funny, ’cause he was kinda dumb and a whole lotta slow. I’d go to school and he would lie
down at the kitchen door and still be lying right there when I got back. I don’t know if he was missing me or just plain lazy, but boy, I loved that dog.”

  “Rocket. That’s not bad. I’ll think about it and see what Chris says. I’ll see if the dog likes it, too.” She winked at him.

  “You call him whatever you want, Ms. Mel. Dogs and men ain’t that different. We’ll always come runnin’ whenever a pretty woman hollers for us . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  LATER, HE STEPPED OUTSIDE THE BAR and stretched, popping his shirt free from his sweaty skin. Mel had a couple more hours of work, and on most nights he would have sat there the whole time and then walked her out to her car, even though it was only a few paces away in the lot, but he needed to swing by the bank again tonight, like he’d promised the sheriff, and Javy Cruz said he’d do the escorting for him. He was a bit surprised that Harp had never come in, and was thinking about giving him a call, too, when the van caught his eye.