“Gil?” she says. “You really think. Is this going to work?”
There was no way to see all the way to the far side.
The water was fast, the current strong.
The car lights were out; rain heavy against the windshield. I turned the Toyota out from the tree line. Edged out—onto the disappearing strip.
Black water welled at both sides. But we were in it.
No turning back.
CHAPTER 28
ATF Field Division, Houston.
The alarm clock sounds on a cell phone. An asphalt car park, Sam Houston Parkway.
Whicher opens his eyes to the upholstered ceiling of his Silverado. Outside, on the beltway, north of the city of Houston, cars fly along a steel and concrete ramp beyond the window of his truck.
Eight-thirty a.m. His arms are numb. He lifts a big hand to his face, rubs his eyes, grabs the cell. And turns off the alarm.
A four-hour ride through the night from Kerrville. James and Labrea long gone.
Some guy staying at a veteran's hostel reports getting jumped in a restaurant lot, his car getting stolen. Whicher saw it happen—somehow it took the guy half the night to report anything. They'd knocked him down, he was confused; he'd had to walk back to his hostel. Police checked the last known location, it was down near a ford on the river—nobody covering. Writing on the wall.
Whicher'd driven to Houston. Then caught a fitful half-sleep in the truck. Seat cranked, like a bum.
In front of the truck is a five-story office building. Cream stone, smoke-effect glass. Two hundred thousand square feet of modern office block. Landscaped ground. Lake and fountain out front.
Whicher elbows the door of the truck open. Reaches for his tan Resistol hat.
The parking lot's already starting to fill up as he grabs the jacket of his suit, and slips it on.
He clips across the tarmac, boots heavy on his feet.
He enters the building, reaches reception and pulls out his badge. More creases in his suit pants than there ought to be. The frosty looking sixty-year-old in a button-down and sweater looks him over.
“John Whicher. US Deputy Marshal. I have an appointment. Special Agent Cornell.”
The reception clerk takes his badge. Checks it over. “ATF Field Division is on the third floor, Marshal.”
“Cornell here?”
“He arrived at eight o clock sharp, sir. You'll find the elevator at the end of the lobby.”
Whicher tips a finger to his hat. He crosses the polished, tiled floor.
The elevator's open. He marches in, hits three, leans back as the doors close. He thinks of Gilman James in the dead-air space. Of looking at him, not once, but twice down the barrel of his Ruger. He listens to the whine of gears in the elevator shaft.
Third floor, the doors slide open. Into a lobby, lit with floor-to-ceiling windows.
Standing in the doorway of an office is Cornell. Freshly shaved. Sunglasses in the pocket of a leisure shirt. “Marshal. You look like shit.”
Whicher gives him a mean-eyed stare.
“Seriously.” Cornell steps aside, into the room.
Whicher follows the ATF agent into a bright office, a view of the beltway, and the brand new sub-division, beyond.
“Take a seat, Marshal. Watch your spurs on the wall sockets.”
“Hey, Cornell?”
The ATF agent looks at him.
“Too early for that.”
Cornell sits on the side of a wood-veneered desk. He clicks open a file on his computer monitor. “So, I got your message on my phone last night.”
Whicher pulls out a chrome and black office chair.
“You had 'em in Kerrville and you let 'em get away.”
Cornell watches the marshal staring blank out of the window. Big frame awkward in the office chair.
“We both work for the DOJ.”
“So?” says Cornell.
“There's no conflict sharing evidence...”
“What do you want?”
“The suicide. Nathaniel Childress. Everything ATF have on it.”
“I could have sent you the file.”
“Tell me something? This business at Jackson Fork...”
“I looked it up,” says Cornell. “That auction site—the bank that foreclosed the Childress farm own half—the Dallas agri-business that swallowed 'em up own the other.”
Whicher shakes his head. He leans forward, propped on his elbows. “They robbed Jackson Fork in revenge...”
“Well put it another way,” Cornell looks at him, “does it sound like a coincidence?”
He lets a moment pass, rolls a shoulder.
“Something bothering you, Marshal?"
“Yeah. If you want to know. Yesterday, after that damn robbery, a local news crew showed up.”
“So what?”
“I want this wrapped. Before they turn it into a story.”
Whicher stands. Walks to the window, stares down at the traffic on the freeway. Beyond it, mile after mile of new-built houses, the kind of place, the kind of residential area a man might lose his soul. And call it a blessing.
He lets out a long breath. “Childress shot himself with his own military side-arm.”
“Correct.”
“How come his kid brother ends up with it?”
Cornell doesn't answer.
“This suicide inquest still ongoing? State's evidence, ain't it? How's his kid brother get a hold of it?”
Cornell picks up a pen from the desk. “I spoke to that friend of mine. At division. Covering the suicide. The family put in a request to have it. The investigating officer agreed.”
“Alright,” Whicher says.
“It was on compassionate grounds, the guy being a Vet, and a Purple Heart.”
Whicher nods.
“The Childress family had moved, by the time of the suicide. They'd already lost the farm, they'd moved south to Rocksprings. It's out in Edwards County, some one-horse place.”
“Then why go back to the farm at Jackson Fork?”
Cornell spreads his hands. “For some reason he got in his truck, drove a hundred miles to the farm. And blew his brains out. You tell me.”
Whicher pulls at the collar of his shirt. “Damn television stick their nose in, before y'all know, they spin it into something every network across the country can run.”
“Like what?”
“Like; how come they're doing what they're doing?”
The marshal watches the queue of cars crawling off the freeway ramps.
“None of them had any previous criminal history. Gilman James was nominated for the Navy Cross.”
“Muddy the story,” says Cornell. “If it comes to it. What about the girl?”
“She's got a violent-ex. She's trying to protect her daughter. She's from a community that sees itself as ignored and discriminated against...” Whicher looks at Cornell. “What?”
“You put it like that...”
The marshal blows the air from his cheeks.
Outside, white clouds sail across the sweep of hard, flat land. Every soldier didn't claim an excuse. Every girl that married a bastard like Leon Varela. Third Armored Cavalry reunion nights it wasn't all stories of who made the latest trip to Huntsville. And Beaumont. And being owed.
“Twice, I had 'em. Looking down a gun barrel.”
“Why didn't you shoot?”
“There were civilians...”
“Yeah,” says Cornell, studying him. “But that's not it.”
“I want to know what's going to happen next.”
“Maybe there won't be any next. What did you really want from me, Marshal?”
Whicher stands with his shoulder to the window. He taps a finger on the cool glass. “I'm looking to keep the lid on tight. No press. No feeds.”
“I'm not getting on the wrong side of those people. Any chance they get to beat up on the Bureau...”
“I'm not asking you to lie.”
“Look,” says Cornell. “Don't get hung up on this. Who knows why he shot himself? Or why he shot himself on a farm?”
Whicher smooths the nap on the Resistol. He pushes it back on his head, settling it into place.
“This afternoon, I got to be back up there. Jackson Fork. To meet with the sheriff of Tom Green County.”
“You came all this way just to get me to keep my mouth shut?”
Whicher looks at Cornell. “Before I head up there, I have to go in to Brooke AMC, in San Antonio.”
“Brooke? What for?”
“Unit CO wants to see me.”
Cornell looks doubtful. “Their unit CO?”
“I talked to him already. Thursday. He wants to see me again. Left a message.”
Cornell gathers together the papers on his desk. He turns to his office printer; “Let me run off a couple things before you go.”
Whicher crosses his arms. He studies the bare walls; Cornell's work space detached, depersonalized—floating glass and concrete, a sixty mile view to the horizon. Nothing in it worth seeing, nothing outside, nothing within. He studies its numb anonymity. His own reluctance to leave it.
Graveyard Mountain, Rocksprings.
I lay on the caliche watching the sun inch across the hill to the east. Thinking on the fire. Fire that rolled down the hood of Michael's Humvee—blood orange; like the sun at the mountain. I never would've made it. Neither Nate nor me. If not for Michael.
A split second. All it took was a split second. An RPG hit him, leading the column down that Fallujah street.
When the smoke cleared, the turret was gone. Weld mounts sticking from the roof, the gunner vanished as if he never existed.
Fire. Rolling over that hood. A ball of flame turning against the windshield.
Five up-armored Humvees. A column. M2 machine guns, tearing up the left and right of the street. Michael leading. Fast, hard.
Nate would've died there. He never would've made it back to Orla. None of us would've lived.
I lay in the early light, heart quickening. Remembering the panic; heaving at the door of Michael's Humvee. Six hundred pounds weight, trying to get it open.
I blinked my eyes shut. Opened them. Sat and leaned against the wing of the stolen Camry.
Tennille was laying by the rear wheel, arms wrapped around her body, hunter's jacket pulled tight. The sun streaked along the seam of her jeans, knees drawn up. In the fall of her neck, her beating pulse.
Black smoke.
I could still remember the smell of it, the fear. Front end roiling. Michael, still alive, my gloves burning, smoke breaking in through the chassis.
He was breathing it, burning up his lungs.
I got the door of the Humvee open, pulled him out, dragged him on my knees. Down the rubble filled street. Four M2 heavy machine guns trying to cover us. A rifleman running out.
The first round hit my kevlar vest, right rib. The sweat turned to ice. I dragged Michael. With every ounce left.
If I closed my eyes, I could still see the blood on his vest, soaking the coyote brown.
A second round hit the center of my back, it knocked me forward, face down in the dirt, winded. Mind racing. Waiting for the whip of pain.
Nothing. Only moments stay clear in my mind.
Humvees, backing up towards us. Three Marines, grabbing at Michael, at me. Things that must've happened are wiped away. I remember cover, the walled garden of a derelict house, everybody running in.
Minutes later; it must have been—I was throwing things out of the Humvees; med bags, ammo, a fire extinguisher—desperate to clear more space. Fifteen casualties. Seven of them dead. Michael beside the body of Nate's lead scout—shot in the face. The blood in Nate's ears already dried to black.
I put Nate and Michael in last. They'd be first out.
We took ammo, as much as we could carry. I ordered the Humvees out. They'd be trapped in the narrow streets, picked off with RPGs, like Michael. We'd get out on foot, we couldn't all fit.
I organized the remains of both squads. It was house to house, building by building on raw exhaustion, after that. A frenzy. Sick and sweet. Trying to keep ourselves alive.
The sun edged up another inch.
Across the ground, Tennille lay sleeping. Was Orla sleeping, like her?
Or thinking. On two kids to feed. Was she lying awake?
How many mornings would come in—sleepless, hollowed out. Jesse must've felt it, the same. What had changed, in a hundred years? Bare mountain, a sun with no warmth, an endless ride, no peace inside.
I watched Tennille sleeping. Soon she would be awake.
Everything she'd dragged from yesterday, and all the days in her life, a thousand moments of broken up fragments would fill her mind in a rush of memory. Tide of weight.
If only we could stand, and not be carried by it.
Soon we would both be gone.
We left the car half a mile outside the town of Rocksprings. West central Texas. Flat savanna, under a July sun.
We walked together, both of us carrying a flight case. Michael's 250 SIG in my jacket.
Rocksprings; maybe a thousand strong. The town stretched out ahead among thin oak and mesquite. Sparse housing on bone hard plots.
Inside the flight cases, the money was divided between us in equal halves. We'd counted it in the headlights of the Camry, eighty miles east of Kerrville, river water dripping from the engine bay.
Four hundred thousand. Money destined for a nameless account. Faceless owners of a dead man's farm. No more.
Tennille had called Connie.
Close on two in the morning she'd gotten hold of her.
She told her she'd pay her ten thousand dollars to find Joe, put him in her Chevy Tahoe, get Michael with him—and have the pair of them drive up to Rocksprings.
Connie told her no; the pair of 'em might be stopped.
Tennille said she could tell the cops they stole the car. It wouldn't happen; Joe knew the back routes, if any one could drive up, and not be seen, it was him.
I doubted Michael was strong enough to make it; two days sacked out on a drip.
Connie decided she wanted in after all—ten grand for letting Joe have her car keys; looking the other way. Joe'd drive up, take Tennille back down with him. She'd get Maria, cross the border with her, find her father in Mexico.
We walked along the highway into town, me and Tennille. Some twist of feeling between us, neither one speaking, just walking in the morning sun.