by Attica Locke
There was no way his mother would speak to the district attorney, right? It made no sense, not in the mind of Bell Callis, anyway. It would rob her of the very thing she’d always wanted, the attention of one of the Mathews men, her son at her feet. Without Darren, who would do her yard work and check on the plumbing line? If he went to prison, who would stock her fridge and pay her cable bill? Surely his mother wouldn’t intentionally ruin her only son. Right?
Lightnin’ had his own take on it.
You got love just like a hydrant . . . you know that turns it off and on.
The pick of his guitar was like a finger poking Darren’s wounds.
Lisa didn’t know about the money.
She didn’t know the whole story; no one did.
Who could he tell, really? Heavy-lidded, he looked at the men sitting on the porch with him and Patricia in the lawn chair with her bare feet on the wooden railing, all of them deep in their cups. It would be so easy to say it right now, to halt the gossip and work talk with a confession: Y’all, I’m in trouble. But it seemed rude to burden them with the information, knowledge they’d have to reveal under oath if it ever came to that. Same with Greg Heglund, who was one of his best friends but also a federal agent. Darren’s uncle Clayton, a former criminal defense attorney and a constitutional law professor, would understand the impulse to shelter Mack, an elderly black man who’d been accused of murdering a racist piece of shit, but he would insist that Darren get an attorney, and Darren didn’t trust that that news wouldn’t get back to his lieutenant in Houston. How many cops did Darren know who assumed a man was guilty as sin just because he lawyered up, a constitutional right made to sound dirty, like an act of deceit?
He suddenly realized how lonely he was with no one to talk to about the mess he’d made, the secret he’d been carrying around for months, the fact that he didn’t know his mother well enough to predict what she might do in this situation. Lisa either, if he told her. They’d just gotten back to a good place. If she found out he’d put his freedom and their life together in jeopardy for Rutherford McMillan, would she understand or be through with him for good? He honestly didn’t know. Both of the women in his life were ciphers. Loose with whiskey, his mind lazed to another soul completely. Randie Winston. The woman whose late husband’s murder he’d solved in Lark back in October. He thought of the night they’d spent at that juke joint in Garrison, just over the county line from Lark, talking over bourbon and cheap vodka—his marriage, hers—how close he’d come to laying his whole life bare. He remembered Randie had almost taken his hand at the table. He still believed he could have confessed anything that night.
She’d reached out to him since then.
Just a message left on his voice mail a while back to say she’d taken his advice and buried her husband’s remains in the East Texas town where he was born. You were right. It had moved him then, as it did now, to think of her journey from hating Texas to recognizing the part it had played in making the man she’d loved, realizing that it mattered to honor that for her husband, Michael, but also for herself. Drunk as he was, the whole thing made him misty. It was one of his proudest moments as a Ranger. He laughed at some story Buddy was telling even though he hadn’t heard half of it. And then he told himself he knew what he had to do. Tonight.
He waited until they were passed out or sleeping, Patricia in Darren’s childhood bedroom and the others sprawled across various pieces of furniture throughout the living room, their grease-soaked paper plates and beer bottles littering the hardwood floor. It was nearly two in the morning when he walked to his Chevy truck parked on the grass out front of the house. This late—or early, depending on which side of midnight you felt at home—the air was thin and chilly in Camilla, sweet with dew, and it cooled his heated state of mind to ride with the windows down. He was careful, going ten under the speed limit the whole way and cutting his headlights off as soon as he started down the twin tire ruts behind Bell’s landlord’s house that led to her trailer.
Though he’d been prepared for a confrontation if one was necessary, Bell’s ’92 Chevette was not in front of her home, nor were there any lights on in the trailer. A couple of nights a week, she and Fisher, her boyfriend, stayed in one of the empty cabins by Lake Livingston where she worked as a cleaner; he guessed he’d gotten lucky tonight. By the low light of a pocket Maglite, he searched every inch of the one-bedroom trailer, performing the task with the methodical care in which he’d been trained. He started in the kitchen and worked his way from one end of the tin-can house to the other. He went through every cabinet, every drawer, and every countertop canister; he searched the refrigerator and the freezer, taking the time to put a thick, grayish block of ice in the sink and run hot water over it. It was brisket, easily three years old.
The gun wasn’t in the kitchen.
The living room either.
He took everything out of the TV cabinet, lifted every cushion on the bench couch attached to the back wall. The bathroom turned up nothing either. As he tore apart her bedroom, a certainty started to take hold. The .38 wasn’t under the mattress. It wasn’t in the bureau by the door, nor was it under the carpet Darren ripped from the floor with his bare hands, staples tearing at his skin. It wasn’t in any of the battered shoeboxes she kept in her closet, though he did find pictures of his father he’d never seen before, faded photographs of Darren “Duke” Mathews when he was still in high school. He pocketed the Polaroids without thinking, his heart hammering away in his chest.
The gun was gone.
He remembered the space under the house and felt a shot of hope. She’d once hidden a case of toilet paper she’d stolen from her job beneath the floorboards. He should check behind the cheap latticework that ringed the underside of the trailer, the two and a half feet of crawl space between Bell’s home and the cold hard ground. He turned for the front door just as the beams from a pair of headlights swung through the trailer’s front window, throwing shadows against the back wall. He quickly leaped out of sight, pressing himself against the side of the wall and peering out of the window at an angle, expecting to see the boxy silhouette of his mother’s car. But no; it was the outline of a police squad car.
Darren’s first impulse was to make sure he didn’t get shot.
He came out with his badge in his left hand, his Maglite in his right, and his hands not so much up in the air as thrust out in front of him in total submission. He got all the way to the bottom of the steps before he could see the officer’s face. He was a sheriff’s deputy, one of the youngest Darren had ever seen, and though Darren’s badge was clearly visible, the deputy’s hand hovered over his service weapon. Darren stood firm in front of his mother’s trailer and gave his name and title. The deputy, a white kid with spiky black hair, said, “I know who you are.” And yet his hand was still inches from his pistol.
Darren played it calm, as if the two had bumped into each other at the post office instead of at the site of a potential B and E. “I know most of the men and women in the sheriff’s department up here. My family’s owned a place in Camilla for over a hundred years,” he said, making clear his local pedigree. “Guess you must be new.”
The kid didn’t smile, and his hand didn’t come off that gun either.
He was twitchy, a little unsure of himself in this situation he’d stumbled on in the dead of night. He told Darren to drop the flashlight.
Darren obliged, watching the Maglite fall in the dirt and roll a good two feet between the men.
“You here on official business, Ranger?” the kid said.
“I might ask you the same, Deputy.”
“Got a call from the property owner up the way saying his tenant’s son was out here fussing around when his mama wasn’t home, said she wouldn’t like it none.” Darren had just enough whiskey sluicing through his veins to wonder if this was a lie, to entertain paranoid thoughts that Frank Vaughn had had him followed. “You have the tenant’s permission to be on the property, sir?”
“I must have if she gave me a key.”
The words were out before Darren could remember if he’d visibly damaged the front door when he’d jimmied the lock. He kept talking, tried to keep the deputy’s eyes on his face and away from the door. He said the first thing that came to mind. “She asked me to feed her cat while she was out.”
He was almost pleased with himself, with the simplicity of the lie.
“Cat?” The deputy’s shoulders relaxed, and for the first time he took his hand away from his holster. It was dark out here, but Darren thought he saw the flicker of a smile finally. The kid was relieved. This would all be over soon. “And the cat’s inside right now?” he said, craning his head around to see the front door.
Darren blocked his view and said, “That’s my exact problem. The thing got outside, and I can’t find it.”
“Did you look under the house? Let me give you a hand,” the deputy said.
He started for his squad car; his belief that this all boiled down to a missing cat had so lifted his mood that there was a light bounce in his step, an eagerness now to do this Texas Ranger a favor. “Let me back up and aim my headlights under the trailer. You’ll see anything that’s hiding down there.”
The back of Darren’s neck went hot. He shook his head and told the deputy it was hardly necessary. “I’ve got my truck,” he said, speaking more emphatically than was wise.
“Naw, that sits up too high. You not gon’ see much of nothing that way.”
The deputy slid into the front seat of his squad car and turned over the engine, then repositioned his bulky vehicle so that the underside of Bell’s trailer was awash with light. The deputy shot one leg out of the car, preparing to stand, and asked Darren, “You want me to try to get up under there too?”
Darren shook his head, still thinking of a way to stop this. But it would seem odd now, suspicious even, if Darren didn’t try to look for the cat. Cat. He swallowed a bitter chuckle. What he was looking for under his mother’s trailer would ruin him if it was discovered under the watchful eye of a cop, a member of the very law enforcement agency that would be investigating Darren should Frank Vaughn convene another grand jury to look into the murder of Ronnie Malvo. The deputy watching, Darren ripped back a large corner of the latticework beneath the trailer, got down on his hands and knees, and slithered in the dirt from one end of the structure to the other, clawing at the earth, picking through every mound of soil. He didn’t know if it was relief he felt or a choking dread when he didn’t find a damn thing. There was absolutely no telling what she’d done with it. That gun could be anywhere.
3.
DARREN GOT called in to see his lieutenant first thing Monday morning, a surprise request that had him on edge soon as he walked into the office. Fred Wilson had been diagnosed with an ulcer two weeks after the election despite the fact that he’d voted for the incoming president, or so Darren presumed—though he was basing this hunch on nothing more than the man’s hat and cowboy boots, an ostrich pair of which were on Darren’s own feet right now. Maybe no man wore his heart on his sleeve—or in his boots, for that matter. Judge not and all that.
Wilson had a growing menagerie of home remedies lined up on his desk sandwiched between two towering stacks of files. Like any good Texan, his wife of twenty-five years claimed she was one-eighth Cherokee and insisted that Fred supplement whatever his HMO doctor prescribed with something that grew up out of the ground. These days he was constantly nibbling on boiled cabbage or raw carrots or sipping watery concoctions his wife blended for him. On a good day, his belches smelled of coconut water and banana. Today, it was garlic. There wasn’t a single window in the building that opened, and the air in Wilson’s office smelled canned and sour.
Darren sat in the chair across from Wilson and rested his gray Stetson on his knee. He was in dark blue slacks, which he’d woken at dawn to iron, a white button-down, and a thin burgundy tie. He’d driven in from Camilla this morning, and he hoped the details of his run-in with the sheriff’s department had stayed in San Jacinto County. Wilson had a file sitting on the desk in front of him, a folder thin enough for Darren’s restless imagination to think it resembled his personnel file.
Wilson scratched at a patch of stubble he’d missed shaving this morning as he said that Darren had settled back in to work in the Houston office smoothly. After Darren’s successful arrests in Lark in the fall, Wilson had been proud to welcome him back. He had found Darren a new place on the Texas Rangers joint task force, a partnership with the ATF, DEA, and FBI, that was working to secure a massive indictment of key members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas on charges of drug running and illegal gun sales and various other felonious conspiracies. From behind his desk in Houston, Darren had been providing invaluable research support, Wilson said, by combing through thousands of pages of cell phone records and highlighting with a yellow marker anything the feds could use against the Brotherhood. That he’d almost gone cross-eyed from boredom, Darren kept to himself. Hands folded across his lap, he listened as Wilson told him, “Up to this point, I’ve been happy to have you back here in Houston.”
Darren wasn’t sure where this was headed, but it didn’t sound good.
“How are things at home, Ranger?”
“Fine,” Darren said, though the word caught a little in his throat.
“Heard you were out in San Jacinto County this weekend.”
Here we go, Darren thought.
Wilson reached for a bottle of off-brand antacid. He shook a few into his left hand, which was the size and texture of a child’s baseball mitt. “Look, I ain’t one to get in a man’s family business long as it don’t affect what we’re doing here.”
“I can explain.”
“No need. Whatever you was doing at your mama’s house is between you and her. I’m asking more about why you were out in Camilla in the first place.”
Then Wilson asked Darren point-blank about his marriage.
“You and Lisa in a good place again? I mean, you think she could let go of you for a few days? I know you said you wanted to stay put here in Houston and all. I wouldn’t ask if the feds hadn’t made a special request.”
Darren ran his finger along the felt crown of his hat. He felt he’d missed something. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It was then that Wilson opened the file, though he never so much as glanced at it. He knew the contents by heart. “We got a missing kid up near Jefferson—Caddo Lake, really—in Marion County.”
“That’s Company B territory.”
“I know it,” Wilson said, sighing. He slapped the antacids into his mouth, and Darren watched him chew for a few moments of awkward silence. “But this deal needs special consideration. A lot of parts in this spell trouble.”
“Like what?”
“The kid, Levi King—”
“How old?”
“Nine.”
Darren got an image of himself at nine, teeth indeed bucked halfway to Dallas, no matter the tall tale his mother told about nursing his dental health, about having been a part of his upbringing in any meaningful way. When Darren was nine years old, the men who were raising him—his uncles William and Clayton Mathews—were his whole world.
Wilson nodded and let out a soft belch. He chased the chalky antacids with a swig of Coke, which was most certainly not on his wife’s list of approved tonics. “Well, the thing is, the kid’s connected. That’s why the feds want a careful hand in this.”
“Connected?”
“The kid’s people are Brotherhood.”
Darren made a face. He didn’t even realize it till Wilson said, “Not the kid’s fault.”
“Of course not,” Darren said quickly. He wasn’t proud of the millisecond in which his disgust of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas got out past his sympathies for the kid. But neither could he shake a lingering antipathy—or apathy, really—for the woes of a Brotherhood family. He covered it by pointing out the obvious mistake that had
been made. “The feds asked for me?”
“They asked for a Ranger from the task force. I volunteered you.”
“Thank you,” Darren said. It came out more like a question than a statement, and he hoped he didn’t sound like he was making light of the situation or like he didn’t appreciate being called to serve. Still, the timing wasn’t right. There was no way around that. He couldn’t go back into the field now. Not when things with Lisa were stable. And not when the situation with his mother had slipped out of his control. He hadn’t talked to her since he’d discovered the gun was not in or underneath her trailer. She had not returned any of his calls. He’d spent a good five hours Sunday with his butt parked on the steps of her trailer, waiting for her to come home and explain herself; he had even driven by the Starfish Resort Cabins and RV Hookup looking for her Chevette or any sign of his mother in her fraying blue smock, swaying drunkenly as she walked between the cabins.
Darren shifted in his seat, his long legs as stiff as kindling.
Through the wall of Wilson’s office, he heard the constant purr of phones ringing and Rangers talking in the hall, their boots tromping across the thin industrial carpet. He had a stack of phone records sitting on his desk right now next to hundreds of pages of intercepted prison correspondence to and from members of the Brotherhood. He’d imagined he would spend the day looking for patterns and connections, cracking codes that ordered hits or sold kilos of meth or moved cash money through legit businesses selling everything from tires to beauty supplies to linoleum flooring in small towns all across the state. Since Darren’s return to work, this had been his sole contribution to the task force that had been after the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas for years.
But now Darren was being called off the bench.
