The Far Empty (16 page)

“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.

CHRIS

T
he 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.

AMERICA

H
e 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 it, 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.

Rodolfo told her once about visiting the ranch across the river, that secret place where the gun had been given to him. All about the zoo they kept there, with real lions and tigers and peacocks; where he’d met a
brujo
who cast a spell on him to always protect him from harm. He brought her a peacock feather, or what he’d said was one, anyway, long and green and purple and shining like metal. There were other things he saw at that place he wouldn’t tell her about, things that had made his lips quiver and his eyes go distant when he thought about them. He told her there was so much
potencia
at the ranch, so much power in those people, they glowed like the sun. They burned everything.

•   •   •

America loved her brother but had long ago accepted there was a weakness in him, a softness that drove her papa more than once to try and beat it out, to toughen him up and harden his skin. Her papa had wanted him callused, the way his own hands were cracked and bruised from hard work and the sun. But Rodolfo was pretty, like a girl, with a good singing voice. He liked his fancy food and cologne
and both American and Tejano music and never roughhoused. To Rodolfo, it was better to make friends than fight. Better still to run away.

If their papa thought the Border Patrol would toughen him up, he’d been wrong about that, too. Rodolfo had looked good in his green uniform, shined shoes, and ironed shirt, but he worked just hard enough to stay cool in his truck, napping in the cab to music, with the dirty river rolling by, baking in the sun. For a few dollars here, a few more there, he let families slip across the border to look for work. Their stories, their troubles, moved him. America had loved her brother for that, but understood his flaws—flaws that had left her holding his money, a phone, and a gun. Left her worrying about where he’d gone and when he’d come home.
Better still to run away.

•   •   •

Caleb had some of that same softness. He loved her, or thought he did, but she knew it was as much to hurt his own papa as anything else, even if Caleb didn’t yet know it himself. They both lived in Murfee, but the river always lay between them. She was a Mex, a beaner, a wetback, and he was the son of El Juez. Caleb was too afraid to throw her straight into his father’s face, but the time they spent together made its way back all the same. It was a foolish game,
juego peligroso
.

Foolish as allowing it to continue, but she was selfish in her own ways, because where there was softness, there was sweetness as well. Caleb had never tried to put his hands beneath her shirt or push against her,
pene
throbbing, asking her to
touch it a little
,
just look at it
.

He took her to Las Luces where they searched for
fantasmas
together, and he talked about the books he read and the journals he kept, and always, always, about leaving Murfee and taking her with him. Rodolfo used to say the same thing, so part of her knew those
thoughts were all foolish too, but let him keep them anyway. Because she also had silly dreams of her own, things she’d never shared with Rodolfo, could never share with Caleb. Like how everything might have been different if
she
, rather than Rodolfo, had been wearing a green uniform and watching the river. Or how things might be after she finished school—moving away and changing her name, her hair; becoming someone and something else altogether. A doctor, a lawyer, maybe even
a deputy
herself in some other town. Carrying a badge and gun all her own.

So she liked hearing about all the places she guessed she’d never go while they lay on their backs in the bed of his truck at Las Luces, sharing cigarettes. As he talked and talked, she could see those places in the smoke above their heads: cities with tall glass buildings; beaches on a blue ocean with waves crashing and boats with colored sails. Caleb made those places more real than TV; he was a
brujo
and didn’t know it. Casting spells she liked with his words.

•   •   •

According to Pilar, her mama’s friend, her mama used to know
magia
—could weave small
hechizos
from hair and nails and drops of
sangre
and certain flowers. That is how she got America’s papa to love her, and though America questioned the choice, she couldn’t question the result. Her papa, old and battered and rough and quick to raise his hand to both her and Rodolfo, had never once done so to his
rosa.
He still sang songs to her, old ones that America did not know, and every Sunday he brought her dusty flowers he’d picked from someone else’s yard. Her mama always kept them in the same green jar until their petals dropped. America had asked her mama to teach her these things, but she’d waved America away, said Pilar was
loca
.
It was all so much nonsense now. She’d lost her
magia
and all of her belief in it after crossing the river. Left it all behind in
el mundo viejo
, the small village in which she was raised.
Perdemos mucho.

That’s what had happened to Rodolfo. The spells cast on him in Ojinaga had lost their power here, leaving him no longer protected, no longer safe. Still, America longed for that kind of
magia
. For revenge, and Dupree’s eyes bleeding and his
pene
turning black, exploding in his hands. For
lobos
sitting at his door to tear out his throat when he tried to run,
fantasmas
haunting him as he’d haunted her.

Dupree finally burning and that horrible smile catching fire.

Because even if there was no real
magia
in the world anymore, that didn’t mean
those
things still couldn’t come true; so much more real and possible than any of Caleb’s stories or her own silly dreams of a different life. Her
magia
was Rodolfo’s phone—the one he’d left behind and that she kept so close. He’d said they
glowed like the sun . . . they burned everything
. She didn’t know who they were, had no idea what sorts of things might hold the other end of that phone or if they would even help her—
¿Dónde está Rana?
—but she knew where they were. At the ranch, with the peacocks and their metal feathers. Just across the river.