High White Sun

by J. Todd Scott

  However, the sheriff had ordered him to sit fucking tight. To not approach any of the Earls or the impound lot at all, even if they drove off. The sheriff was going to radio Dale Holt and have him go out to the Lights instead, and then he was going to come directly to Buck. With Till over in Beantown and Amé and Harp lost somewhere out at the Lights, and Tommy Milford still laid up after getting hit by a car, they were all out of deputies.

  But the sheriff had told him again to stay put and not move, no matter what, and then had signed off to find Dale.

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT HAD BEEN TEN, fifteen minutes ago, and in all those passing minutes, Buck had sat quiet and still in his darkened truck just like the sheriff had ordered, even while listening to Till yelling about gunfire on the radio and Dale trying to raise Harp or Amé on the air as he raced toward the Lights. Everyone was doing something, while he was doing nothing, just hiding. Goddamn hiding. With the Earls, who he’d bet all of his paycheck had hurt his friends and then set fire to Beantown, only yards away. He didn’t know why they were in the lot and was surprised when they hadn’t gone on to the bank, but his best guess was that it had something to do with the car that had run Tommy down, the same car Harp and Amé had been messing with earlier, even if he couldn’t draw a straight line between that Mexican kid and the Earls. It didn’t matter, anyway—they were over there right now, but probably not for much longer. He had no idea how far off the sheriff still was, and was afraid it was going to prove to be too far no matter what.

  So he’d end up just sitting here, watching the Earls drive away.

  He imagined later holding down a stool in Earlys, being ashamed to tell that story; trying to explain to his brother Birch that he’d only been following orders. He remembered Chief Deputy Harper talking on and on about action and reaction and knew that sitting in his truck he was doing neither. He was worse: a bystander, a damn witness.

  He might as well be a ghost or not even be here at all.

  He unholstered his Colt and slid back upright in his truck, staring down the street at the last place he’d seen the van disappear into the lot.

  He and Birch had hunted about every sort of animal you could in Texas. Exotics like Aoudad sheep in the Glass Mountains and Nilgai antelope on the H. Yturria ranches. Mule deer and whitetail over on the Sierra Escalera, even alligators at the Red Run ranch in Caney. Just last year, they’d taken a big mountain lion down in the Solitario, which wasn’t quite legal, but it had cut down some sheep at Dave Wilcher’s place and left the half-eaten carcasses to rot. Birch had found the tracks, but it was Buck who’d spotted it first, near invisible in a thick bunch of Hinckley oak, and it was Buck who’d taken the shot, clean as a whistle, at forty or fifty yards.

  He was a lot less than that now from the impound lot, and would be even closer, if he just got out of his damn truck and did something.

  Before he opened the door, he turned off his truck radio and made sure his cell phone was muted. He gave it an extra minute anyway, not because he was scared, but just in case the sheriff did come rolling up. But when the streets stayed dark, he took a deep breath and got out.

  He told himself it was just like hunting.

  54

  Jimmying the lock and getting the Nissan Maxima started hadn’t been a problem. Kasper had done that model car or one like it at least a dozen times before, so it had gone just as quick as he’d told Little B it would. What was slowing them down like fucking quicksand was swapping out the tires, using the ones from Clutts’s car they’d hauled up from Killing to replace the ones shredded and blown out on the Maxima. The holdup was the lugs, which although more or less the same—5 lug, 4.5-inch offset—weren’t factory-perfect matches. Mr. Earl had asked him about that when they’d stood together and shared a beer and he’d brought up needing Kasper’s help, and Kasper had checked the Nissan’s measurements (because for reasons of his own, Mr. Earl hadn’t wanted to go to Murfee to buy four brand-new tires if he absolutely didn’t have to) only to find there were close enough replacements sitting right outside the front door.

  Mr. Earl had set his empty beer can on its hood.

  Close, but not identical. So T-Bob, who was drunk and stinking to high heaven, was still fumbling around with the last tire. Little B was trying to help him, aiming a flashlight at the old man’s shaking hands as he worked, but Kasper could feel the minutes ticking away with each slow-ass turn of T-Bob’s wrench. Mr. Earl had bet the fire on the other side of town would buy them plenty of time, so even if they did set off an alarm cutting into the lot, no one would pay much attention to it with half the town burning, and so far that bet had paid off, as the streets around them stayed quiet. But Kasper had been stealing cars for years, and both speed and invisibility were critical. They were losing the first swapping out the tires like molasses, and they didn’t even have the second: they were too exposed, too naked. Although there weren’t many lights in the lot, just two big security lamps on opposite corner poles—wires exposed and metal hoods rusted—there weren’t a lot of cars cluttering up the place, either. To anyone who bothered to look, they appeared to be exactly what they were—three men trying damn hard to steal a car.

  And not doing it fast enough.

  A successful boost also came down to good timing and a little luck, and the longer the whole fucking thing took, the less of those they had as well.

  “Goddamn, let me do that,” he finally said, grabbing the wrench away from T-Bob. “T-Bob, please take that light from Little B and hold it steady so I can see what the fuck I’m doing. Little B, maybe you could walk out to the gate, keep an eye out, just in case. Or even better, pull the van up a bit, it might hide us while I finish this up.”

  Little B mumbled something to his uncle, but gave the flashlight to him. Then he stood over Kasper, looking down. “You runnin’ this thing now, Kaz? You got balls now? This your plan all of a sudden?”

  And for all the world he sounded just like his daddy or his big brother.

  Kasper spun a bolt, tried to spit on the metal to speed it up, but he was so scared it took him a few seconds just to work up anything in his dry mouth. “Goddamn, no, this isn’t my plan or my idea or nothing. I’m just trying to get this done so we all don’t go to jail. Your daddy is the one who wants this car, that’s all.”

  “I know, I know,” Little B said. “And I been wonderin’ about that. Thought I might take a look-see, see what the five-alarm fire is all about.” He laughed at his own joke. “I’m guessin’ there’s money enough in there somewhere for everyone.”

  For everyone.

  But Kasper didn’t believe that at all anymore. Whatever was in the car was for Mr. Earl and Mr. Earl alone. “It’s not going to matter if we don’t get this thing moving. Please, B, just help me out here.” Little B was about to slip in behind the wheel of the Nissan, maybe even crawl into the backseat and look around, but changed his mind.

  He rolled his eyes. “Fuck you, Kaz, you sound like a little bitch, like goddamn Jenna. But I’ll move the van closer if that’s gonna get this shit to go faster.” Little B punched his uncle in the shoulder to make him stand straighter, because T-Bob was somehow slouching lower by the second, even while standing still—the flashlight beam sliding past Kasper’s hands and getting lost underneath the car—and then he walked back toward the van and got in.

  And you sound like someone trying to be something you’re not.

  Kasper said, “T-Bob, just keep her steady, please . . . I swear we’re almost done . . . there’s just not enough light . . .” But he never got to finish the sentence, because someone called out to them from the gate.

  “Put your goddamn hands up where I can see ’em and walk back to me nice and slow . . .”

  Good timing and a little luck.

  Another couple of minutes more, that’s all they’d needed.

  * * *

  • • •r />
  KASPER STOOD AND T-BOB TURNED at the same time, both of them finding a big deputy standing by the front gate, his gun drawn, pointed at them. Kasper could make out the badge on his belt, a real gold star, even though there wasn’t much light to reflect off it.

  Kasper dropped the wrench into the dirt.

  Thank God this is over. I’m gonna go home and I’m gonna call my mom and I’m gonna . . .

  T-Bob raised his hands, showed they were empty, and the deputy took a step forward. “You two walk toward me, slow.” The deputy kept looking toward the van, but didn’t have an angle to see into the cab. He was cautious all the same.

  “Anyone else in there?” he asked, trying to keep the two of them in front of him as he moved forward inch by inch, focusing on the front of the van; the passenger-side door and window. He’d already cleared the van’s tailgate and was staying wide, listening hard for any movement from inside. Kasper was about to say Hell yes, when T-Bob spoke up for the first time in what seemed like hours.

  “No siree, it’s just the two of us, I think.”

  Kasper turned toward T-Bob, as the deputy repeated “You think” out loud, with an odd, not-understanding look on his face, when Little B popped out of the rear of the van with the Remington 12-gauge. He kicked open the swing-out doors—still unlocked from where they’d rolled out the tires—and was only ten feet from the deputy, who turned at the sound with his gun raised. Little B’s first shot went wide, blasting apart the windshield of an old taxi, and the deputy dropped to a knee to return fire, several of his rounds striking true. But Little B’s second shot found its mark, too, knocking the deputy’s legs out from under him and throwing him facedown to the ground in a mess of his own blood. Little B was then falling, also, backward into the van, searching for his balance and shooting all the way down, while the deputy lying on the ground was trying to do the same.

  Kasper knew he was watching two men die right in front of him and had never seen anything like it. The deputy and Little B were yelling at each other, and even with all the echoing gunshots and his hands over his ears, they were the loudest goddamn noises Kasper had ever heard.

  Hell, maybe he was yelling, too, calling out for Little B or his mom’s name like he was a little kid again, as the muzzle flashes and the heat from it all burned so bright around him.

  Twice as hot and fast as the fires they’d started across town.

  55

  It was all over by the time Chris got there.

  He knew that when he drove past Buck’s empty truck.

  Actually, he’d known it before that, when he hadn’t been able to raise his deputy on the radio for the last twenty minutes. It was a long twenty minutes, calling out Buck’s name again and again, getting nothing back but heavy silence. The silence was deafening. It was an old saying, a goddamn cliché, but he’d learned during those grave, quiet minutes that didn’t make it any less true.

  He couldn’t even hear his heartbeat, his own breathing. He’d searched that emptiness for any hint of Buck answering him back, but there was nothing.

  He’d already turned off his emergency lights and his headlights, pulling up to the open gate guided only by the impound lot’s security lamps. Even in that weak light, he could tell the chain had been cut and, beyond that, could see a mess of stains going blacker by the second all over the ground. They’d been smeared and whorled around like finger paints, and it took Chris a second to figure out what he was looking at. But when he finally saw Buck spread-eagled in the middle of it, all that spray spiraling out in wider and wider circles from his dead deputy, he knew.

  They’d driven fucking through Buck’s blood to escape; over him, dragging him across the concrete. The van Buck had been following was still there, bullet holes stitched across the open rear cargo doors, so his attackers must have bolted in another car, and even though Chris knew he shouldn’t assume they were really gone—he needed to clear that van—he couldn’t take his eyes off Buck’s ruined body. He tried to make sense of it and tried to put all of those odd, unrecognizable pieces back together and make Buck whole; make him stand again.

  He prayed Buck was already dead when they drove over his head.

  He got out of his truck with his A5 leading the way, keeping it aimed on the open van doors. He moved slowly, listening. A moment ago he couldn’t stop looking at Buck, now getting closer; he wanted to look anywhere else. He was careful where he stepped, avoiding the other man’s blood, and made out the tire tread stained in it. Checking the lot, counting the remaining cars, he guessed it was Azahel Avalos’s Nissan they’d taken, and it wasn’t lost on him that Buck was the second of his deputies who’d bled because of that particular vehicle.

  When he found it, and he promised himself he would, he’d pull it apart to the fucking bolts. No one was ever going to drive it again.

  There was a noise by the van and he nearly jumped out of his skin, before catching movement and a pair of raised hands rising from the dark. He had a moment when he could have pulled the Browning’s trigger and no one would have said a damn thing; no one who later saw Buck’s bloody body would have ever questioned him or thought twice about it, but he willed his finger off the trigger. It moved so slow, though, goddamn slow, like it had a mind of its own. He took a deep breath and settled himself, staring down at the man he’d almost shot.

  The kid he’d almost shot, pale and shaking, walking slowly out of the van’s shadows.

  “Please don’t shoot me . . . please.”

  “Get on the ground, now. Don’t take another step.” The kid did as he was told, grabbing as much ground as he could, trying to avoid Buck’s blood as Chris had. His face was still down there, though, inches from it, and the boy squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Anyone else here?”

  The boy shook his head. “No, they’re gone, drove off. Just the one, though, the other’s dead.”

  Chris looked around for another body and didn’t see it. Maybe it was in the van.

  “Just the three of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who were the others?”

  The boy swallowed hard, trying not to cry. “T-Bob Earl, and his nephew, Little B . . . He’s dead, shot down by the deputy. I heard him die, he was making noises and goddamn it was like nothing I ever heard and—”

  “That’s enough, son. Enough.” Chris walked over to him, shouldered the A5, and cuffed him. He got him upright, leaned him against the van, and searched him but came up empty. Blue and red emergency lights were spinning a few streets away, coming toward him, and now, for the first time, he could smell smoke from the fires burning on the west side of town. He needed to check with Till and find out if they were getting that under control. As dry as it had been, that whole neighborhood could burn if they didn’t get a handle on it. They might get some help, though, if they could hold on; if the storm coming up from the south didn’t die out before it reached them.

  The kid was saying something more, but Chris told him to stop, to just be quiet. This close to the van, Chris could almost taste spilled gas on the metal, and the sulfur in the night air from the shotgun blasts stung his eyes.

  “The fires, you and the others started those, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, we did. That was Mr. Earl’s idea. He told us to do that.”

  “John Wesley Earl?”

  The kid nodded, went to wipe his face but his hands were still cuffed.

  “All this tonight was because of John Wesley Earl?”

  “Something else happened earlier, too. Jesse and Joker and Lee Malady hightailed it after Danny . . . he was going somewhere. I don’t know where.”

  Earlier. That must have been what Amé had been trying to tell him. She and Harp had somehow tangled with Jesse over something to do with Danny. And now, here, Buck had shot Earl’s other son. Maybe both of Earl’s boys were dead in one night, and although Chris knew the old outlaw didn’
t give a damn about them, it still gave him a reason, at least two of them, to hold Chris and his deputies accountable.

  Whatever was going on was not going to stop with Earl burning Murfee.

  He might just be getting started.

  The kid was still talking, only to himself. “We were gonna start a band . . . a band . . . and I think I loved him . . .”

  And for what? What the hell was Earl doing?

  He was still wondering that when Dale Holt drove into the lot with his lights and sirens going.

  * * *

  • • •

  AMÉ GOT OUT FIRST, and then Danny Ford. They were both covered in so much dust and blood it was hard for Chris to tell how much of it was their own or someone else’s. Danny was definitely limping, almost doubled over, but that wasn’t what caught and held Chris’s attention.

  It was the man still lying in the back of the truck, the man not moving.

  The man as still and cold as Buck Emmett on the nearby pavement.

  Goddamn, not Harp. Please not Ben.

  But it was.

  56

  T-Bob drove into the coming storm in the stolen car with his dead nephew in the back.

  There was no doubt about that . . . about Little B being dead. His heart had stopped pumping his thick blood all over the backseat, but T-Bob could still smell how it filled the car, making everything coppery, like he had a roll of pennies in his mouth. He’d propped Little B upright at first, but he’d fallen over since then, slipping down in his own blood (and probably some shit and piss) and was now a jumble in the backseat, looking upward at the ceiling and the back of T-Bob’s head. Yes, he was plum dead, but that didn’t stop T-Bob from keeping his eyes locked forward, waiting for the rain to hit, refusing to glance back at his nephew. He was afraid those dead glass eyes might blink a bit, or Little B’s tongue might dart out and wet his cold corpse lips, or worst of all, he might sit up and slide a bloody, gun-blasted arm around T-Bob and say something smart-ass . . . or something truly fucking horrible.