This Side of Night

by J. Todd Scott

  “Hell, babe, I might not have a career much longer.”

  “Don’t use that as an excuse. You’re still the sheriff now. And if you’re doing this because you truly believe he’s the man he says he is, let that sink in. Remind yourself what that has to mean.”

  Chris stayed silent, struggling. He had thought about it, and the weight of it was crushing him.

  “But you’re going to do this anyway . . .”

  “I’m still deciding,” he said.

  “That’s bullshit, Sheriff Cherry. Every day that goes by and he’s still here means it’s already been decided. What are you going to do, let him stay with Amé? Have Danny help her keep an eye on him?” Chris’s expression told her that’s exactly what he’d intended to do. “People will talk, Chris. Someone will find out.” She held Jack tighter. “Someone could come for him, the way they came for you.”

  Chris bent down and rubbed Rocky’s ears. The dog had moved from his spot on the floor to stand next to Chris, as if sensing their tension. “No one here knows who he is. Not yet, anyway. He’s an old man. And with that young girl . . .”

  “Don’t be foolish. He’s not just any old man, and that poor girl, whoever she is, needs to be out of the middle of this.”

  Chris started again, quieter. “So I turn him over to Garrison and the DEA, what then? What if they can’t prove he’s really Fox Uno? I have no idea what happens to him, but I have a damn good idea of what happens to Amé’s family.”

  “Yes, if he’s telling the truth. And that’s a big if. Seems to me that if he’s here looking for help, he can barely take care of himself.”

  “Danny said about the same thing. But if I believe he’s Fox Uno, I’ve got to believe all of it, everything he says. The threats, the risks. Otherwise, I am a fool. Besides, it’s not just what I believe, it’s what Amé believes.”

  “She’s not the sheriff, Chris, you are.”

  “Okay, so this isn’t about being the sheriff, it’s about . . .”

  She stopped him. “Friends, family, loyalty. I get it. And if that’s how you need to look at it, then maybe you can also convince yourself there’s no right or wrong answer, either, only what you need to do. That’s what Ben would say . . . That’s what you want to hear.”

  “Yeah, I know. Damn, I wish Ben were here.” Chris shrugged. “Sure doesn’t make me feel any better about it, though.”

  Mel tried a smile for him. “And that’s good. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. And that’s why I want to believe that whatever you decide, in the end, it was the right thing all along. The only thing.”

  Chris closed his eyes. “But I could still talk to Garrison. There is that. It’s hard to imagine, but in a lot of ways, since Ben’s death, Garrison is one of the few friends I have, if I can even use that word. He’s not one of my deputies, he doesn’t work for me, I’m not responsible for him . . .” Chris stopped, started again, his eyes now open. “Since coming back to Murfee, I’ve known him longer than anyone else. With Ben gone, he may know more about me than anyone else, other than you.”

  “He knows what you went through, Chris. Just like you know about him. Maybe it’s not a friendship, but whatever it is, I think it’s strong enough you can call him about this.”

  “Garrison said you were too good for me.” Chris moved close, leaned down and kissed her, then Jack. And she would have sworn that as he bent over them, his passage had stirred unseen smoke that had drifted in through the open window. It made her want to get up and shut it, to keep them safe inside. But instead, she grabbed him, kissed back hard, wishing with everything she had that the three of them could stay just like this for a long, long time. Forever.

  “Listen to the man, and don’t ever forget it.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY REMAINED THAT WAY, silent for a while, until Chris pulled away. She knew he’d made his decision. “It’s just a few days,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “A few damn days, and then he’s gone. We can handle that, right?”

  Mel didn’t answer him. She couldn’t. After allowing herself to convince him that she wasn’t half mad with worry and fear, she couldn’t say what was really on the tip of her tongue.

  God, I hope you’re right.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Later that night, after Fox Uno and Zita were asleep, Danny joined Amé on her tiny apartment landing, where she stood smoking a cigarette. She’d been there an hour, maybe more, leaning against the unpainted wooden railing and watching her smoke rise through the settling dark into the spreading arms of the juniper that flanked the garage. There was barely room for them both, and the night was only made warmer by her cigarette in the small space at the top of the stairs, where they’d found Zita what felt like years before.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said, standing close enough to breathe the smoke right along with her, to feel the heated tip of the Marlboro on his skin.

  “I used to, when I was younger. Far too much.”

  “When your brother was still alive. When you knew Caleb Ross, right? Sheriff Ross’s son.”

  She flicked ash. “It’s not important. It was a long time ago.”

  “No, Amé, it wasn’t. It wasn’t that long ago at all.” He wanted to tell her that Jesse Earl, who’d given him his damaged eye, or Afghanistan, where’d he been trapped in all those small villages (and maybe still was), wasn’t all that long ago, either. Not even the murder of his father on a highway in Sweetwater more than twenty years earlier was all that far away. Scars like that, inside or out, were always still there. Still fresh. All Danny had to do was close his eyes. And if that was true for him, then he had to believe that was true for Amé, too, no matter how she tried to pretend otherwise.

  Danny would never fully understand the relationship between America and Sheriff Cherry. Never know all the facts and details, but it didn’t matter. They bore too many of the same scars. It wasn’t just that their shared past wasn’t distant enough for clarity or perspective, it was that they were still far too close to help each other see.

  “You know the sheriff is doing this for you, right? Not for your mother, or the rest of your family, or that girl in there. Not because it makes sense or because it’s even close to being right. But for you. He’ll go to the ends of the earth to protect you.”

  Amé studied the fire at the end of her cigarette. “What do you want me to say to that?”

  “He’s the goddamn sheriff, Amé. You’re asking him to break the law. It’s not who he is. This goes against everything he believes in.”

  “He would not be the first sheriff in this town to break the law, or decide that the law is only what he believes it to be.” But she said it without conviction, and they both knew it. “I did not ask him for anything, Danny. I told him what was going on, and if I had not done that, you would have. You gave me no choice.”

  “Yes,” Danny conceded.

  “I promised him once before I would not keep secrets. I had to tell him.”

  “Like you told him about your mysterious gun? That’s a little too convenient.” But Danny raised his hands, surrendering the point. “I already told you what I think, so you tell me how this ends.”

  “No lo sé. No more than you do. What would you have me do?”

  “We call Agent Garrison. Tonight, now. We do it together, and then this will all be over before the sheriff commits to anything one way or another. Before it goes too far. We take back this thing we put in his hands.”

  “That I put there.” Amé watched him through her smoke, before looking away. “Do you know what my papa does, since he returned to México?”

  “No, you’ve never told me. Like a lot of things, I guess.” Danny hated himself for saying it, but if it angered Amé, she didn’t show it. She continued to look away.

  “He tends marijuana fields in a place called Búfalo, far outside Cama
rgo. Fields owned by Fox Uno or those who work for him. My papa would never tell me this, but my mama did. She is ashamed, but he needs the work. I send them money, but it’s never enough. Tell me, how do I explain that to Agent Garrison?”

  “Fuck him, you don’t have to. That’s not your fault, not your responsibility . . . no more than Rodolfo ever was. What you’re doing now sure in the hell won’t bring Rodolfo back, and it’s not going to keep your mother or your father safe.”

  Danny reached out and took Amé’s chin in his hand, turning her face toward him. “They’re dead, Amé, don’t you understand that? Your mother, your father. Everyone associated with that man in there is already dead, or soon will be.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I think that man is on the losing side of a war, and I know a goddamn lot about wars.”

  “Then what about the girl, Zita?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll figure that out. There are places . . .”

  “That girl in there is me, Danny. She could be me.”

  Danny shook his head. “No, that’s too simple, too easy. Don’t use her to justify what you’re doing, the way Fox Uno used her to help him get here.”

  She pulled away, crushing out her nearly spent cigarette on the railing. She dropped it into the gravel below them, and pulled another from a pack in her jeans. She was frustrated and furious with him, way beyond angry.

  “Did you also have those hidden away with this gun I’ve never seen?” he asked.

  She held the cigarette, didn’t light it. She broke it in half and tossed it away.

  “Why are you saying these things? Why? What are you going to do, Danny? Dime.”

  There was so little space between them already, but he moved to her. Closer. Closer. He first put a hand on her shoulder and then both of his arms all the way around her and she didn’t stop him. He could feel she wanted to but didn’t. He wasn’t sure how long she would let this last.

  “Because, like our good sheriff, I’m going to do whatever you want me to, whatever I have to do, so you’re never hurt again. I thought you knew that. Goddammit, I’ll do anything. I’ll go all the way to the end of the world.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  In St. Louis in 1999, in the backseat of a Pontiac Grand Am, with light gray snow blowing in through a rolled-down window, Joe Garrison was shot once in the chest with a .38 revolver.

  It wasn’t something he talked about anymore, and many of the agents who’d worked with him through the years had never asked about it, not directly, although they’d all heard some version of it from someone else. To Garrison, it was old history, so long ago it was a thing that might as well have happened to someone else. He was lucky he was wearing his soft vest that day (usually he didn’t), beneath a Carhartt jacket and a flannel shirt that Karen had bought him the Christmas before, and although it hurt like nothing he’d ever felt before or since—like Mark McGwire hitting him in the chest with a Rawlings Big Stick swinging for the left-field wall—and the back-face signature of the blast had left him bruised and tender for three straight months and sometimes doubled over coughing up blood, the truth of it was he still walked away. Alive. Someone even pulled the flattened slug out of his vest, and he carried it around for some years in a small plastic case that had once held Angie’s baby teeth for the tooth fairy.

  Just a reminder . . . a totem or lucky rabbit’s foot.

  He talked even less, though, about the man who didn’t walk away that day, the one he shot and killed in the backseat as they struggled over that .38. Garrison fought that gun out of Junior Worrell’s hands, and in all the chaos—ears ringing and blood on the window and a smoky haze choking and blinding him—he worked it up under Worrell’s chin and pulled the trigger, or Worrell did—one shooting investigation by the St. Louis Police and two months of trauma counseling never decided the issue—blowing the top of that man’s head all over the inside of the car. Garrison had watched Worrell’s face explode right in front of him; crawling out of that Pontiac with Worrell’s blood still thick in his eyes and his mouth . . . swallowing it.

  And really, what was there to say about that?

  How the hell did you explain that to anyone?

  In the end, it was just one of those dumb undercover deals gone bad, the sort of thing you pray never happens, but that occasionally—horribly—does. Garrison had been applauded as a hero for a few months, but struggled with it for quite a while longer. There were the nightmares and drinking and that one lost weekend in D.C., but time passed and he got over it and the nightmares finally started to dim like an old light. Karen forgave him for the things he’d said and done, and life had moved on.

  But after Darin and Morgan were shot, some of those old nightmares came flooding back—that old light turned on again, twice as bright. This time around, he was the one trapped in the Tahoe with Morgan Emerson, and it was Worrell—not Duane Dupree—shooting them in a field outside Murfee, then setting them on fire on the riverbank.

  Garrison struggling to get out of that burning car, dragging Morgan with him, his mouth full of blood again. Not Worrell’s, not even his own, but Morgan’s.

  Her blood . . . and the thick ashes from her burning skin, choking him . . .

  How the hell could he explain that to anyone?

  So he didn’t. Not to a counselor or to Karen or the other agents he worked with.

  He never talked about it, and instead spent months trying not to sleep at all.

  * * *

  —

  HE SAT IN HIS EMPTY KITCHEN, looking through the hazy window at the even emptier pool. After Karen and the girls had left, it had slowly gone down—dried up—day after day. Taking care of the house and the pool had always been Karen’s job, and he wasn’t sure who to call anymore. The last time he’d looked down into it he’d seen little more than floating bugs and branches. Some ugly, wayward feathers; a thick detritus of El Paso dust hiding the Pebble Tec bottom. It was a hazard, and he should probably just fill the damn thing in with concrete. He wasn’t likely to ever swim in it again, and neither were the girls. The last time they’d used it they’d been celebrating Megan’s birthday—her last birthday in Texas—and Karen had strung up dozens of paper lanterns around the deck, glowing green and red and blue above the clear water. It had been beautiful, and he’d had three Coronas and two pieces of cake and then he and Karen had made love by that lantern light filtering in through their bedroom windows.

  That was three weeks, maybe a month, before Darin and Morgan were shot in Murfee.

  It was about six months after that when Karen and the girls left for good.

  * * *

  —

  IT WASN’T THAT Karen couldn’t forgive him for the drinking and the anger again; it was the goddamn silence she couldn’t take the second time around. Day after day of him not saying anything at all, at least not to her. She’d begged him to get help, made the appointments for him, but when he ignored them—when he called her all those names after those long nights of drinking and had raised his hand like he was going to hit her (although he never would)—she’d packed up the girls and pretty much everything else and moved back east.

  He came home after six hours of finally talking to OPR investigators to find the house empty, to find it pretty much the way it was now—some furniture odds and ends and things like a rake or a broom out in the garage; an old Ikea bookshelf without books. Their unmade bed that still smelled like her body wash and shampoo and a couple of pillows. There wasn’t even a note, because Karen had finally run out of things to say, too.

  He didn’t blame her, and they still shared a phone call every couple of weeks. Gone, but not forgotten.

  Those calls were halting, though, filled with lots of stops and starts. A silence as thick as static, a dead radio station, since neither of them knew what or how much to say, or if there was anything left to say at all.

>   * * *

  —

  HE SWALLOWED A MOUTHFUL OF BOURBON, turning away from the kitchen window and the pool beyond it, back to the files he’d brought home with him. It was against policy to take sensitive documents out of the office, like he’d done for Sheriff Cherry, but he was long past the point of caring about that. In some ways, surviving that shooting in St. Louis in 1999, and surviving the investigation of Darin and Morgan’s shooting, had made Garrison almost bulletproof. What could they do to him that hadn’t already been done?

  What could he lose that hadn’t already been lost?

  The files in front of him contained the most current intel on Fox Uno, and they were as barren as his empty house. Garrison had given Chris everything they had about Fox Uno’s past, but this was what they had about him today . . . all the fall-out from the Librado Rivera attack. The elusive Fox Uno had all but disappeared, even with everyone from the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community and the Mexican government to every rival cartel in northern Mexico hunting for him.

  Fox Uno had become more of a ghost, if that was possible.

  Some of the intel indicated he may have died in a recent shooting in Chihuahua, but there was no clear confirmation of that and zero reliable, firsthand sourcing. Just a dozen conflicting reports, and no body. Other intelligence suggested that Fox Uno’s right-hand thug, Oso Ocho, had taken over daily operations, or that Fox Uno’s mysterious son, another ghost called Tiburón, was now running what remained of Nemesio. One brief suggested that Tiburón may have joined forces with Fox Uno’s biggest rival, the Serrano Brothers, but to Garrison that hardly made sense. The Serranos had wanted Fox Uno dead forever. They’d taken plenty of Nemesio smuggling routes and plazas. They didn’t want pieces of the kingdom, or a mere handshake with the prince. They wanted the whole crown, and the head wearing it.