High White Sun

by J. Todd Scott

  Earl searched past the light, where he finally found the other man, Sheriff Cherry. He had some sort of sawed-down long gun aimed at him, along with a small flashlight that seemed way too bright for its size. He was looking at Earl and the waterlogged car between them.

  “I knew we needed this damn rain . . .”

  65

  Chris made sure he was loud enough to be heard over the rushing water.

  “You’re going to drop both pieces at your feet and then come on down to my deputy nice and slow. She’s going to cuff you and then we’re going to talk about who might still be in that house back behind you. Are we clear?”

  Earl laughed again, the same sound Chris had followed when he was trailing behind Amé. “Fuck me, if it ain’t one goddamn thing after another with you folks. Can you not leave me be?”

  “We never invited you here.”

  Earl nodded. “Fuck, I know, trust me, I didn’t wanna come here, either. But here we both are, and it was gonna be so simple, my little Christmas in July. I was gonna get my payday and be over there”—Earl waved the muzzle of one of his guns toward the mountains neither of them could see—“drinkin’ tequila on a beach. Beaches full of beaners, like your pretty deputy here, but I was done with all that anyway. And you people woulda been done with me.”

  “You couldn’t have hidden in Mexico, Earl. Not you, not with all those tattoos. You could have cut your hair, changed your name, but you couldn’t have changed your skin, who and what you really are. Like I said, it’s over. Put the guns down, or I put you down.”

  Earl still had one gun on Amé, but the other—the one he’d used to point toward the mountains—had come to rest between Chris’s eyes. Chris wanted to get Earl dealt with, fast, because he had no idea who was still out there roaming in the darkness—Jesse or any of the others. His gut told him Earl was alone but he couldn’t be sure.

  Wolves.

  He almost could hear Harp at his ear, whispering to him.

  And as if on cue, there was another voice: “He’s not ever going back, Sheriff. If he said it once, I guess he said it a thousand times. So we’re probably going to have to shoot him.”

  Chris searched out Danny Ford, where he was stepping into the light just past Earl, holding a badge and some sort of muddy gun Chris didn’t recognize, like he’d dug it up. Holding it and aiming it at Earl, because he wasn’t cuffed to the steering wheel of the truck anymore.

  “Danny, step back,” Chris warned.

  Earl swept up Danny with one hard look, at the deputy’s shirt he was wearing and the gun in one hand and a badge in the other. “Ain’t this a fuckin’ reunion? A goddamn cop the whole time. You’re damn good, I’ll credit you that. Nichols said he didn’t put you up to this, but I ain’t so sure. Did he send you out to spy on me?”

  “Danny,” Chris ordered, “do not talk to that man.” Everyone’s nerves were rising, like the water around them, and everyone had a goddamn gun pointed at each other.

  Danny raised the badge up, even higher than the gun. “No, this was all about me, you fucking bastard. You killed my father, Texas Ranger Robert Ford.”

  * * *

  • • •

  EARL DOESN’T DENY IT, but doesn’t admit to it, either. He looks at me and the only thing he says is, “Never even knew he had a boy, didn’t know that at all.”

  It’s not enough.

  This is how you stop a man’s heart.

  Breathe . . .

  “I want to hear you say it. I want to hear you tell me how you shot my father down in the road. I want to hear you say that and then I’m going to fucking kill you.”

  Relax . . .

  Sheriff Cherry yells something, but I don’t hear it. I can’t hear it. The last thing I’m ever going to hear is whatever comes out of John Wesley Earl’s mouth next.

  Aim . . .

  Earl says, “Fuckin’ pussy, is that all you been waitin’ for all this time?”

  Then the lights on the drowning car below us wink out.

  And right after that he’s falling backward and the night is full of gunfire . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  EARL’S HANDS WERE MOVING. The guns were moving . . .

  Or were they?

  Goddamn action versus reaction.

  Chris knew if he didn’t do something, Danny was finally going to kill Earl right there in front of him.

  He’s never going back.

  He would swear the guns were moving. The barrel of the one pointed at Amé getting bigger by the heartbeat, threatening to swallow her whole, and the one that had been pointed at him, now turning toward Danny, just a little bit.

  But just enough.

  The guns were moving.

  So when the Nissan’s lights went out and then Jesse Earl appeared out of nowhere behind both his father and Danny—silhouetted in the lone remaining halo of Chris’s SureFire beam—Harp was suddenly there, too, right at Chris’s shoulder, telling him he really had no choice but to pull the goddamn trigger.

  A lifetime’s worth of decisions in a second.

  In a heartbeat.

  It’s your goddamn job, Sheriff . . .

  Do your job.

  And Chris did.

  * * *

  • • •

  EARL FALLS, REPLACED BY JESSE, who I didn’t know was there and who comes out of the blackness behind me roaring, striking me across the face with his daddy’s gun, breaking all the bones around my left eye.

  He hits me there again and now his arms are around me and the gun is against my temple.

  It burns a hole there and I lose my grip on both my father’s badge and my gun.

  I struggle not to black out and Jesse’s shouting at Sheriff Cherry and Deputy Reynosa and telling Earl to get up, to get the fuck back up, Daddy, and I fight him with everything I have left until his gun slips off my temple to rest beneath my already damaged eye like a heavy finger, and I feel and hear the hammer of the big old revolver drop into place.

  It’s the loudest sound I will ever hear.

  I am dead.

  * * *

  • • •

  EVERYTHING HAPPENED FAST.

  The sheriff shot the older Earl, just as Jesse Earl appeared out of the night, striking Danny and grabbing him, using him as a shield, a hostage. It was hard to tell who was who in the shadowed, stray light where they grappled—life and death—with Jesse’s gun at Danny’s head and Jesse yelling at his papa to stand up, which America wasn’t sure he would ever be able to do again. She brought her rifle up but there wasn’t a clean shot.

  That didn’t mean there wasn’t a shot.

  America Reynosa would never know it, but as she looked down the barrel, relying on the AR-15’s iron sights, she used the same marksmanship techniques Danny had learned in the military.

  All she knew was that she was just doing what Harp had always taught her.

  Endless hours.

  All those paper targets, moving in the wind.

  Breathe.

  Relax.

  Aim.

  Slack.

  Jesse Earl’s face was so close to Danny’s, like lovers, the barrel of his gun beneath Danny’s eye . . .

  Squeeze. Tight.

  And that was how you stopped a man’s heart . . .

  PART FOUR

  BLOOD OUT

  Ridin’ my thumb to Mexico

  It don’t matter when or how I go

  —JOHNNY RODRIGUEZ, “RIDIN’ MY THUMB TO MEXICO”

  Goodbye stranger it’s been nice

  —SUPERTRAMP, “GOODBYE STRANGER”

  66

  TWO DAYS LATER

  I’m not dead, but not quite alive, either.

  I wake up, fall back into darkness, and do it all again. It’s like climbing out of a deep well full o
f cold water. I come to the surface for a mouthful of air before sinking beneath my own weight.

  I see only half the room and the rest is shadowed.

  There are people I don’t recognize, a few I do, and some that aren’t really there at all. Major Dyer is one of them, looking serious. There’s Deputy Reynosa leaning over me and we’re back in the desert again, stars all above us. The girl from Ballinger is across the room, sleeping. She rolls over and asks me if I’m still watching her—if I’ll always watch her—and she’s crying and her face is blue and black . . .

  Once, even John Wesley Earl is sitting next to me, smoking a cigarette.

  He says, Howdy, Danny, and puts a gun to my head.

  My dad is there and then he’s gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  “LAST TIME I WAS IN A HOSPITAL, I was laid up pretty much the way you are now,” Sheriff Cherry says. “A bunch of men ambushed me on a ranch outside of Murfee. It’s where my house sits now, and I was so damn scared, I just started shooting back, shooting wildly. I didn’t think about it and didn’t have time to, and somehow I killed three men. Not like Killing, where I had the time to think, to decide, and couldn’t even kill just one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sheriff Cherry leans back in the hospital chair. “I shot John Wesley Earl but he didn’t die. He was still breathing when it was all over, and was in this same hospital with you up until yesterday, but he’s since been moved. He’s in a bad way, bad enough he might never walk again, but he’ll likely live. Ben Harper once called it outlaw luck . . . or something like that.”

  “You should have let me shoot him. I was right there next to him.”

  Sheriff Cherry nods. He’s exhausted, haggard. He still seems waterlogged, muddy, like we never left the desert, even though his uniform shirt is clean. “You were standing next to him for a long, long time, Danny. You had your chances, but I don’t think you’re a murderer, no matter how hard you wanted to be.”

  “Did he . . . did he ever say anything about my dad?”

  “Only what we both heard. Other than that, he never said a word.”

  * * *

  • • •

  SHERIFF CHERRY TELLS ME how Deputy Reynosa shot Jesse Earl in the head and killed him, and how fortunate I was that Jesse’s gun was empty all the time. I know he put it to my face and pulled the trigger, so he must have never realized it. He showed up to a gunfight without any damn bullets, so I guess I got a little outlaw luck of my own. The sheriff says Jesse still worked me over pretty good and the damage to my eye is serious, but the doctors will tell me all about that. It will be a while before they get the bandages off and can determine if I’ll ever see out of it again.

  Sheriff Cherry looks at his hands when he says that and won’t meet the gaze of my one good eye.

  Then he tells me the rest of it . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  ALL ABOUT THE CAR with Little B’s body and the money.

  A handful of bills washed away, but when the waters rose up around it, the whole car was submerged; buried in a grave of mud and water. Somehow they got Little B out just in time, but not fast enough to save the car itself, or the rest of Earl’s money hidden in it. They’ll recover it someday just so they can crush what’s left and leave it in Murfee’s junkyard.

  * * *

  • • •

  ALL ABOUT THE RANCH HOUSE.

  An FBI Special Response Team surrounded it for three hours without any movement inside, before sending in a robot. Cole Malady, T-Bob, and Clutts were all dead from what appeared to be a massive shootout in the living room, and no one can figure out how Earl ever made it out of there; that damn outlaw luck, again. It will take a while to reconstruct exactly how things ended inside the house, but early postmortems revealed the three were shot execution style in the head as they already lay either dead or dying.

  Just to be sure.

  * * *

  • • •

  ALL ABOUT THURMAN FLOWERS AND JENNA.

  Both were bloody but very much alive when they walked up to a Border Patrol mobile checkpoint that had been hastily thrown up on 169. If Flowers’s side of the story checks out, no one is quite sure what, if anything, they’ll be able to charge him with.

  It looks like he’s going to keep on walking right out of Murfee.

  * * *

  • • •

  AND ALL ABOUT SUNNY . . .

  She was pulled over in that old Fleetwood Southwind RV on 67, trying to make the I-10, headed west to Arizona and then on to California. Deputy Till Greer stopped her and she brandished a gun at him, refusing to come out of the RV for two hours, but Sheriff Cherry wouldn’t let Till or anyone else go in after her. He didn’t want to face one more dead body, so with the FBI tied up in Killing, he took control of the scene and he talked and talked and talked some more, until he was able to convince her to come out without another shot being fired.

  She walked into his waiting arms, shaking and crying, and he took her to see the body of her dead son before he took her to jail.

  * * *

  • • •

  “AMERICA, DEPUTY REYNOSA, stopped by a couple of times to check on you.”

  “I thought I saw her . . . I don’t quite remember.” But maybe I do. Sitting quietly by the bed, giving me a gentle smile when she thought I was awake. That mysterious smile, and all it might mean . . . that’s how you truly stop a man’s heart. I wait for him to ask me about the handcuff key or the gun that I dug out from beneath the Bonneville hood behind the Killing house, but he doesn’t. Maybe he’s already had that talk with her.

  “It was an unbelievable shot she made. One in a million, and you’re probably alive because of it. Jesse might have beaten you to death with that Ruger, empty or not. You two were all tangled up, and with the dark and everything else, I could barely tell one from the other, and I was still trying to make sure Earl didn’t stand up again and shoot us all. There’s only one other person I know who would’ve pulled the trigger on that shot, and I’m not ashamed to say, it wouldn’t have been me.”

  I don’t have to ask him who that was.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I BROUGHT YOU THIS,” he says, and reaches over and hands me my father’s badge, the one I held up to Earl’s face. The one I’ve been carrying forever. He’s shined it all up and it glows in the white hospital light. “I found it out there where you dropped it. It was your father’s, right?”

  “Yes, they gave it to me at his funeral. I was nine years old. I’ve carried it with me since then, pretty much every day.”

  “You gave up your own badge but kept his? That’s a long time to hold on to it, a damn long time.”

  Then he stands, slowly, to go.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “Don’t thank me, Danny.” He hesitates, motions toward the badge. “I didn’t shoot Earl for you. I wasn’t trying to kill him for what he did to your father, or even what happened to Harp or Buck. It wasn’t revenge. At that moment, he was pointing a gun at one of my deputies. He refused to comply with my lawful commands. He was a life-threatening risk to her and to others. I stopped that risk. That’s my job, nothing more or less. If he’d surrendered . . .”

  “He was never going to surrender, Sheriff. I know that and you do, too. He was never willingly going back to jail. It ended the only way it could, the way it had to.”

  He stands silent over me for a while longer, like there’s more to say, but when he reaches for his hat, I know he’s finished. “Good luck to you, Danny Ford, I wish you the best. I really do.”

  “What happens now?” I ask.

  “You heal. You answer a lot of questions, for both Nichols and Major Dyer.” He settles his hat on his head. “And I go to some funerals . . . and then we both move on . . .”


  * * *

  • • •

  AFTER HE’S GONE, I walk myself to the bathroom, still holding my dad’s badge in my hand, where I look at myself in the mirror. My head is wrapped in bandages, a thick band of gauze covering my left eye, and there’s bruising extending out from beneath it all the way down to my jaw. It’s the color of blood, spreading over my skin, and that’s what it reminds me of—a bloodstain on pavement. My other eye, the good one, is also bull’s-eyed by a bruise, and the veins are blown out, turning it red. My hair had been starting to grow out, but some of it was shaved back down again to the raw skin for the bandages, and the damage they’re hiding. I’m unrecognizable to most people, and after the surgeries to repair my damaged face, who knows exactly what I’ll look like. Not the same, not anymore.

  This is not my face.

  But then again, it is.

  And for the first time in a long time, I see myself clearly.

  When I go to lie back down I realize that I left my dad’s badge in the sink, but I’m okay with that. I don’t go back to get it.

  It’ll always be there later, if I want it.

  67

  ONE WEEK LATER

  America stood outside the charred remains of her house, ready to be bulldozed, still wearing her uniform and the black armband from Ben Harper’s funeral. It had been held in Midland that morning—even that early, the hot sky had been the color of sand and windless as well, so all the flags had hung limp—and over three hundred current and retired officers had showed up from all over the area, as well as dozens of people from Murfee who’d driven up in a long convoy.

  He was buried in a tree-lined cemetery next to Jackie, the two graves close, almost inseparable.