The Far Empty

by J. Todd Scott

  His ex-wife’s name had just slipped out, even though Morgan didn’t have any kind of undercover backstop in that name or any other. She hadn’t been in the division long enough. Hell, she hadn’t been in Texas long enough for much of anything, including getting a state license. He should have just called her by her real name with a different set of lies, been done with it. The deputy had stared hard at her out-of-state ID even as he pretended not to, so he must have picked up on it—there was no way he missed it. But he never made an issue of it, and Darin couldn’t figure out why. No matter what side of the fence he was on, what they’d dug up on Chris Cherry suggested he wasn’t a dummy, not like this other country fuck-up they’d been watching.

  Darin remembered seeing Cherry play at Baylor. Big guy, great arm.

  If Morgan wondered why the hell he’d called her by his ex-wife’s name, she was smart enough, even for a new agent, not to raise it. You learn a lot about each other when you’re on surveillance, sitting in a car for hours together staring at someone, hoping something, anything, will happen. Right or wrong, Morgan had already learned plenty about him.

  Though it was tough to call what they were doing real surveillance: just two weeks of sitting out in some fields behind this hick Duane Dupree’s fucking shack, watching a whole lot of nothing. Darin wasn’t sure what he hated more. His ex-wife or Texas. At least they’d agreed on the latter.

  • • •

  “You know, this sort of stuff, the job, always looked more interesting on TV.” She chuckled, handing him the bag of almonds she’d been picking through. It was her joke, a favorite—she’d said it four or five times already. Before becoming an agent she had been an accountant—DEA was always on the lookout for accountants and stockbrokers, money people, because nowadays money was the blood, not the dope. You could seize dope all day and sometimes feel like it didn’t matter, like it didn’t move the needle. (Although it mattered to the bad guys, very much so; enough that some of them ended up in very small boxes or quartered into Hefty garbage bags along the freeway.) But take their money? That hurt the fuckers where it hurt the most. Darin wasn’t a money guy, never had been. He couldn’t balance his checkbook and hadn’t tried to in years; his bad guys had stored their cash in ratholes and attics. The sly ones had used the spare tire in the trunks of their fucking cars.

  Morgan was the new DEA. He’d read her academy profile, where she’d finished third in her class: shot well enough, aced the law and report-writing blocks, but exhibited indecision during practicals. He’d contacted an old buddy in training, and the real version squared pretty much with the write-up: polite and professional, very eager to learn. She hadn’t broken up any marriages and was well liked, working hard to put in the extra time to get her gun qualifications up to par. El Paso, the border, hadn’t been one of her top three assignments, but it never was, for anyone. Still, needs of the agency and all that found her shipped out here anyway. She was unmarried but had kind of a boyfriend back east. Her dad was ex-military and she’d joined DEA to push herself—make him proud and see the world and chase the excitement.

  Murfee, Texas, wasn’t what she had in mind.

  She was attractive and had a weird sense of humor and an amazing way of stealing food off your plate without even asking, and sharing sips of your morning coffee, and a younger Darin might have fallen madly in love with her. It was probably for the best that this younger guy didn’t exist anymore.

  He followed up her observation. “Sure, everything always looks more interesting on TV. Ordering a fucking pizza, going to fucking Target. Drinking fucking orange juice. Nothing is that fucking exciting.” He tossed a handful of her almonds down. Nuts, beef jerky, energy bars: the basic food groups for surveillance.

  She threw an almond at him. “Please, really, don’t try to protect my illusions.”

  “Fuck all that,” he crunched.

  “You know, you sure say fuck a lot.”

  • • •

  He wasn’t sure what they had, if anything at all. It had started and ended, and started again, with some radio and phone chatter, a handful of nonsense words bleeding between cell towers servicing both sides of the border: coded conversations bouncing between cheap radios and cellphones the narcos used to coordinate their dope moving over the river and across the desert.

  DEA had long known that the Serrano brothers and Nemesio were both working this stretch of Texas, fighting each other for routes as they handed the border back and forth like a fucking baton in a bloody race. No one had been able to make much sense of the mess until a snitch surfaced. The snitch, wanting to come in bad, real bad, promising lots of good, very good intel. Not only about Nemesio, but even better—about cops on the take.

  Darin hated crooked cops and agents most of all; all real cops did. Everyone had always been afraid the border was rotten on both sides, and here finally was a snitch claiming to know all about it. He should have. He was local, grew up in the area, and was crooked, too.

  He was a BP agent named Rodolfo Reynosa. But just like that, he disappeared. Ran away, went south. That’s what everyone figured at first—he’d played both ends and lost, or decided it was easier to spend Nemesio pesos than Uncle Sam dollars. That should have been the end of it—another snitch gone, another lost chance—and if he’d had a nickel for each of those, he could’ve retired a decade ago.

  Except for that damn chatter, still bleeding all over the airwaves, and the fact that Darin was sometimes sleeping with Stephanie Ortega, an intel analyst, whose primary job was to analyze just that sort of noise. And she kept talking about it, wouldn’t let it go, until he couldn’t, either. Steph didn’t cook worth a damn and was pretty average in bed, but worked absolute magic with her intercept data—like she had her own fucking crystal ball. She’d become convinced the narcos down here were looking for Reynosa as well, as if he’d up and vanished on them, too. She spun up some Nemesio call sheets of bad guys talking among themselves, a spiderweb in which each strand was a code word—diablo and perrito and rana—all tangled around Murfee. Steph believed one hundred percent Nemesio was out hunting, and these were very bad men to be hunted by. Half drug cartel and full-on lunatics, Nemesio wrapped themselves in witchcraft and worshipped narco saints like Jesús Malverde and dipped human skulls in gold to make fucking drinking mugs.

  If Reynosa or another yokel out here in Murfee had crossed Nemesio—or if someone in a certain sheriff’s department had gotten sideways with them—Darin might be here only to find the bodies and pick up the pieces. And if there really was a live public corruption angle, he was obligated to turn it over to the FBI anyway, or at least share it, sooner rather than later. However, since no one knew exactly what he was looking into down here, he hadn’t felt pressed to do anything . . . yet.

  He’d just wanted to come down here and poke around on his own, see what he could dig up, so had made up a bullshit excuse about another dead-end case so Garrison would sign off on the travel time and money. Of course Joe Garrison had known it was bullshit, complete bullshit right from the get-go, but let it pass anyway, because his boss also knew that Darin Braccio sometimes went a little stir-crazy if he didn’t get out of the office—out in the wild—every now and then, but more often than not came through with something whenever he did. Garrison had been feeling extra generous because he’d also ordered Darin to drag Morgan along.

  Darin wanted to say he agreed because she was new and needed the experience, but the truth was she was easy on the eyes and had a good sense of humor, and he loved the way she stole his food and drank his coffee. She also didn’t know enough to question what the hell he was doing and how he was doing it. Not too much. Darin had been married for fifteen years and an agent for over eighteen, and that worked just fucking fine for him.

  The lights went out at Dupree’s house, but they were going to give it another final twenty minutes or so before heading out. He’d already replaced the iPad in his lap wi
th two canned beers—tall boys, Budweisers. Another reason he’d been fine with Morgan coming on this little vacation—he knew she wouldn’t rat on him. He didn’t have a drinking problem, he drank just fine; just needed a few cold ones to round him out and help him sleep, and tonight he really wanted to sleep when he got back to their hotel in Valentine.

  Already eyeballing his beers, he knew she was going to offer to drive, plead with him, really. But what were the odds they would run into Deputy Cherry or another one of Murfee’s finest again? Pretty fucking slim. But she was looking out for him, and that wasn’t a bad thing.

  He was about to say as much, head off any argument before it had a chance to begin, when he stopped to look at her. Really look at her. She had her knees up, her chin in her hand, peering back out through the window as if something had caught her attention there. Her hair was free, hanging around her face, and although the car was dark, as dark as the night outside, he could see her clear. She was humming to herself, a silly song.

  He didn’t think much of his ex-wife, didn’t see her as any sort of role model for his daughters, but Morgan Emerson? His girls could do a helluva lot worse than growing into the woman sitting next to him. Next time they came out to Texas for a visit, he might take them all out for a pizza, let them get to know each other. Let Morgan steal their food for once. He was smiling at that—about to mention it and hoping it wouldn’t sound weird or awkward—when a sun flared behind him. Blinding him.

  • • •

  This time he wasn’t going to fuck around lying. He was going to badge Deputy Dawg or the rancher out there checking on his cows and tell them it was government business and be fucking done with it. He slipped the beers into the floorboard and got his badge ready and told Morgan to do the same, reminding her to keep her hands visible. He was going to make it very clear that they were armed, so whoever the hell it was out there wouldn’t freak out if they saw a gun. It was going to be real fucking awkward if it was Chris Cherry who’d slipped up on them again, but if it was anyone else, Darin figured they’d be okay. That’s what he told Morgan when she asked.

  “Are we all right?”

  “Sure, we’re okay, kiddo, no problem.” He had only about twenty seconds to realize he was wrong. He saw it, but far too late. He’d told Morgan to have her badge ready, not her gun.

  They really, really needed their guns. The man approaching with a flashlight aimed straight into their eyes wasn’t wearing a uniform. He didn’t appear to be wearing any clothes at all. And if Darin had lived, he’d have sworn that fucker’s eyes glowed.

  • • •

  The first bullet came through the window. It punched glass and metal, sucking all the warm air and breath out of the Tahoe. Others followed, trailing glass and bits of seat stuffing and jacket fabric; the interior full of falling snow. Darin had enough time for one final decision: go for his own gun or throw his body over Morgan. She’d taken one already, blood hitting the windshield, rocking her head back and forth. Darin wanted to reach out, hold her head, pull her close to him, just to make that awful motion stop. He’d taken one or two as well; it might be his blood all over the windshield, too. It was pretty fucking tough to say.

  Gun or Morgan? Morgan or gun? Darin Braccio never felt the final bullet take the top of his head off. He took it slightly under the left eye, traveling upward at an angle at 850 feet per second. That’s because he’d covered Morgan Emerson, cradling her in his arms, his head where her heart would be. A shock wave rolled through his skull, turning the frontal and parietal bones into ash, leaving everything open and exposed. Revealing everything he had ever been to the night sky. He was long dead—gone—by the time the car burned, and the flames took all that had been left behind.

  21

  CHRIS

  The morning after Darin Braccio burned, Chris was sitting at his desk when the early results on the body came in from Austin. Not a definite ID, not complete, not by a long shot.

  Chris scanned through the e-mail as the DPS lab tech walked him through it on the phone. A lot of it was complicated, medical, hard-to-follow diagrams with arrows—ossification and sagittal sutures and sternum markers and pubic symphysis and pelvic shape. DNA typing from hair strands. It was still preliminary, the final report weeks away. He still didn’t have a name, but he had something. Probably enough. A Caucasian. Most likely a Hispanic male, probably mid-twenties. A lack of bony ridges on the wrists indicated a person who never did a lot of manual work for a living, but then again, he hadn’t lived all that long to begin with. Certain shattered bones and debris pointed to the most likely cause of death as a bullet through the skull.

  After that, one or more large-fanged carnivores had worked over the extremities, the hands and the feet. One whole foot was gone, carried away. The other showed tooth marks. The dental ID Chris had hoped for? Next to impossible—all the dental work had been done south of the border. Shoddy, a couple of porcelain crowns, one of which had been blown through the lower palate by the passage of the phantom bullet. More than likely a high-velocity handgun round—a jacketed hollow-point—but they were still looking for fragments in the bones that remained. A serious bullet, but not a rare one. Not anymore. Not in Texas.

  • • •

  Long after Chris hung up, he continued to scan up and down the e-mail. He read and reread it, trying to fit the puzzle pieces together in a new way, hoping to come up with a different picture. The sky outside his window was cold and stale, the remnants of another, better day. It was the same color as all his worthless dental X-rays, scattered like fallen leaves around the house. With so little to go on—make that nothing to go on—identifying the body from Indian Bluffs was becoming an impossible mountain to climb; like the Chisos, all sheer cliffs and long drops below him. Chris had FlexiCuffs and a truck locker of suspicions, but those were damn small handholds. And no one was asking any questions, raising any concerns. Not one person was looking for the man he’d found; he was nameless, faceless, and destined maybe to stay that way. It was like he’d never existed at all. Everyone else had been right—a river killing. And to everyone else, that meant it didn’t matter. It never did.

  Just another dead Mexican in the desert, after all.

  BLOOD

  1

  AMERICA

  He hadn’t put a hand on her yet.

  Still, it took more than brushing her teeth hard, almost till her gums bled, or smoking a cigarette or some weed, or drinking three shots of tequila, to get the thought of the taste of him out of her. On more than one occasion, after getting one of his horrible pictures, she’d put her fingers down her throat and threw him up into her toilet. That was better, but not enough. Sometimes she worried she might never be rid of him. Sometimes she wanted to set herself on fire, just to burn herself clean. There was no one she could tell about Chief Deputy Dupree. How he wasn’t afraid now to come right into her bedroom. How he called her darlin’ and was always talking about taking her out to some abandoned lot or to the Comanche. How he sent her pictures of flowers and dead dogs and once the picture of a knife held to a naked throat and she didn’t know who it was. How he strutted around town with his badge and gun, un gallo roto, and threatened to take care of her mama and papa and promised he knew all about Rodolfo: where he was and what he was doing and how he’d take care of him, too. Dupree had been stalking her for a year, but the things he’d already done would stay with her forever.

  Dupree was one of those things she couldn’t completely share with Caleb, like the money Rodolfo had left her: double, even triple whatever number she’d told him, wrapped in tight little bundles with electric tape. Like the phone and, most of all, the gun. Rodolfo had given her those too, in a plastic freezer bag, the night he left.

  The last night she saw him.

  • • •

  The phone was cheap, an old flip unit, a brand she didn’t recognize. Rodolfo told her to keep it charged, to hold on to i
t, but never to make any calls. If it rang, she was only to check and see if it was him. If it wasn’t, she was to hang up. It rang—once—two weeks after he left. She’d answered the call and heard a voice, scratchy, weak; breathing from the other end of the phone.

  ¿Eres de Rana? ¿Dónde está Rana?

  It wasn’t Rodolfo, so she hung up, just as he’d told her to do. The voice had asked about a frog, or someone called Frog. She knew nothing about frogs, except they were verde, green . . . green like Rodolfo’s uniform, like the stripes on his truck. She didn’t understand and it had scared her, but not so bad she hadn’t carried that phone every day since, charged and tucked into the bottom of her bag, safe. Not so bad she didn’t flip through the recent call list looking for numbers she recognized, writing them down on the back of one of her magazine cutouts taped to her wall. All Mexican numbers, but one. Just one number—one call—from a few hours before Rodolfo had given her the phone, his last night in Murfee, the night he disappeared. The only number she recognized, because for the last year she had seen it so many times on her own phone. Darlin’.

  • • •

  The gun was much nicer, but scared her in a whole different way. She’d never seen Rodolfo with a gun—he told her it was a gift. It was silver and pearl, had the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe and etchings of Pancho Villa and Jesús Malverde. It was stamped with several calaveras, grinning their toothy grins.