The Far Empty (9 page)

CHRIS

L
ater no one would be able to explain exactly how it started. For every person who would talk, and there weren’t many, there was a different story. It involved a girl or a ranch job or a
fútbol
score; whatever, it didn’t matter. One thing everyone agreed upon was how it started
to end
.

With Delgado and the knife.

Aguilar was already near dead by the time Chris got to Mancha’s, with Delgado standing in a circle of people, his shirt torn off, revealing tattoos curling over his wasted stomach, like cursive writing, all the way to his throat. He was dark, darker than normal because of the blood all over him already going black; some of it was his own, but most of it was from Aguilar, who was on his back in the gravel. Aguilar kept kicking, struggling like he was trying to stand but had simply forgotten how, the memory of it lost, along with his blood, all over the ground.

Everyone around Delgado was yelling, spitting Spanish, waving at the man who kept them at bay with the knife. The lot was littered with crushed beer bottles, discarded balls of tinfoil, old condoms; jackets and cowboy hats and John Deere caps all forgotten on the hard wooden benches beneath the tin pavilions. Chris caught sight of Eddie Corazon standing in the concrete doorway of Mancha’s, smoking a cigarette, calm, picking at his teeth with dirty fingers and eyeing the mess in his parking lot. Corazon knew that when it ended, however it ended, the men shadowing the bloody gravel would want more beers, more cigarettes. They’d sit around a few more hours until the naked bulbs strung up around the parking lot turned yellow, talking over and over again about what had happened, making up stories about it. Eddie probably hadn’t made the 911 call. The fight wouldn’t hurt business.

Mancha’s was Murfee’s only bodega—part store, part restaurant—a gathering place for Mexican families and the ranch hands and laborers. It had gotten bigger, seedier if that was possible, since Chris’s teammates used to come to this side of town for cheap beer or condoms or weed. This tiny part of Murfee had a dozen unflattering names—Beantown, Beanville, Little Mexico—just like all the people who lived in it, their nearby homes wrapped by chain-link fences and patrolled by dogs.

Everyone talked about the place, everyone knew about it. Everyone always denied they came here. Fights and trouble had been common at Mancha’s even when Chris was in high school, and like so much else about Murfee, that hadn’t changed.

Chris parked hard, throwing gravel and painting the crowd with his lights. He got out and approached with his Taser at high-ready. Not his Colt, not yet; he hoped there wasn’t a need for the gun he had
never pulled in the line of duty. He just wanted everyone calmed down, and a clear line of sight to Delgado. Now, though, half the circle was watching Delgado, and the other half was yelling at
him
, pointing back and forth between the man with the knife and the man they thought had a gun.

As Chris got closer, Delgado took up howling, jabbing the knife at the air, standing over the man he’d stabbed.
Stabbed
didn’t quite do it justice—Delgado had all but scalped Aguilar, had worked the knife hard at the edges of the other man’s face. In fact, Aguilar’s hands were the only thing holding it in place, his entire visage lopsided, uneven, like a cheap Halloween mask.

Chris had never seen anything like it. Delgado didn’t look much better. He was clearly on something—skin taut, eyes weird, sunken and blinking
up/down, up/down
, like a windup toy. There was blood in his mouth, in his teeth.

Chris tried to steady his hand, tightening his grip on the Taser, waving everyone back. If anything, the circle only tightened, protective; everyone now concerned about what Chris might do to their
compadre
Delgado. Sensing this, Delgado stood taller, shouted louder, curling his knife in graceful figure eights in Chris’s direction. He hopped from one foot to the other as Aguilar’s face slipped sideways in his hands. The crowd cheered and Chris had no idea who or what they were cheering for.

Chris was bigger than almost any other man there and still felt helpless, suddenly unsure of what to do next. Wishing his Colt was in his hand, even though he couldn’t imagine how that would make the situation any better. He couldn’t shoot everyone; desperately didn’t want to shoot anyone.

Fortunately, that was when Duane Dupree came to his rescue.
Chris had been so intent on the crowd, on Delgado, he never heard Dupree pull up. Didn’t even realize the chief deputy was there until he saw it on all the other men’s faces. They fell silent, the circle widening a bit like it was alive—taking a deep, deep breath—as Chris turned just enough to see Dupree move up next to him.

Dupree leveled his Remington 11-87 shotgun roughly in Delgado’s direction, gently sweeping the crowd with it as he did so, making his point. The Remington shined as if Dupree had been cleaning it with moleskin at his desk before appearing out of thin air here at Mancha’s. The shotgun had a fourteen-inch barrel and rifle sights and Dupree’s initials etched in pearl along the stock, a gift from the sheriff for his years of service, and it was weightless in Dupree’s hands. He moved it as easily as Delgado had waved his knife; Delgado had now gone silent as well.

“Got a problem here, Chris?” Dupree spit a long cut into the gravel.

“Yeah, a bit of one.”

“You want me to get on down the road, let you handle it?”

Chris shook his head. “No, don’t think so. I think I could use the help.”

Dupree grinned, ugly, looking no better than Delgado. He winked. “Well, okay then.”

Chris waited as Dupree moved forward. He zeroed his sights on Delgado, taking one slow, steady step after another, calling over his shoulder.

“Eddie, you tell them beaner friends of yours to move back. You tell ’em
now
, or I’ll blow a hole through ’em.” Duane said it casually, as if he knew Eddie well or was just ordering a beer. Eddie Corazon wobbled his head back and forth, considering, maybe loosening up a knot in his neck. His throat looked swollen, like a snake that had
swallowed a dog. He eyed Dupree long and hard before finally saying something in Spanish.

It took a minute, but the circled crowd backed away slowly as Dupree got within ten or fifteen feet of Delgado. Dupree looked down at Aguilar. “Jesus Mother of Mary, you put a hurt on that ole boy.” Dupree sidestepped Aguilar’s slowly thrashing legs and cooling blood. “What a fuckin’ mess.”

Duane eyed Delgado. “Now, Eddie, you tell this piece of shit right here to drop that pigsticker. Tell him
rápido
. Tell him I’m about to get fucking bored, and that I’m fixin’ to open up a fucking sunroof in that thick beaner skull of his.”

Corazon made a face, said something to Delgado low and fast. Chris, still behind Dupree, couldn’t hear what it was.

Dupree raised the Remington so it was pointed directly between Delgado’s wild eyes. “Give me a reason, beaner. Any reason.” Dupree chuckled, shrugged. “Come to think on it, I don’t need a fuckin’ reason. Not a goddamn one atall.” He winked at Delgado, spoke just to him. “You wouldn’t be missed, you hear me? Not missed atall. None of you ever are.”

Eddie Corazon must have suddenly come to the same conclusion as Chris—that Duane Dupree really was going to blow Delgado’s head off right there in the parking lot—because he started speaking faster, gesturing at Delgado, begging him to put down the knife.

Maybe it was the rock-steady muzzle of the shotgun or Dupree’s eyes or the cool, detached way he had said it, but Chris had no doubt that Dupree would kill Delgado.
That he was looking forward to it.
But while Dupree had been giving Corazon orders, threatening him, he’d also kept moving forward, steady and stealthy as a man could with a hundred eyes on him, closing the distance between them
before anyone realized it. Just as Delgado loosened his grip on the knife, started to let it fall from his fingers, Dupree lashed out with the Remington—swung it like a bat and caught the other man in the face, rocking his head back and driving him to his knees. While he was down, Dupree gave him another blow to the head, then another. Wound a leg up high to kick him.

He might have done more, a lot more—he might have
done it all
—if Chris hadn’t rushed forward and put a hand on his shoulder. There was chaos and blood everywhere, but Delgado wasn’t dead, although he probably wished he was. He was already in worse shape than Aguilar.

The crowd murmured, pulled all the way back to the far corners of the lot beneath a stand of sweet acacia trees.

“Whoo boy. Goddamn. Goddamn, that was good.” Dupree laughed, slicked back his hair with his hands and clapped Chris on the back as if they had just scored the game-winning touchdown. Chris thought Dupree might have left Delgado’s blood on his shoulder.

“Get in my backseat, Cherry, get out the big medical kit. We’ll cuff ’em, bandage these two up a bit until the ambulance shows. Call it in too, will ya? I don’t wanna transport ’cause I don’t want either of ’em bleeding in my ride. Fuck, I sure don’t want ’em dying in there.” Dupree stared back at all the people watching. “You can’t get that smell out. No sirree, it’ll stay in the leather, never quite go away.” He bent down to wipe something from his shoe, something that stained his fingers. “I’ll have Eddie get us some cold pops while we wait, a candy bar too . . . hell, a beer if you want. What’ll it be, Tex? Eddie’s buyin’.”

Chris shook his head. “Nothing, I’m good.” Then he started toward Dupree’s truck as Duane called out behind him. “Suit yourself. But
next time, draw your damn gun.
Your real gun, Cherry
. Damn wetbacks don’t respond to much else.”

•   •   •

Much later, after they had wrapped everything up and headed back to Murfee, after he’d suffered through Dupree’s telling the story around the old courthouse for what seemed like a dozen times—each one broader, more slapstick—he was finally able to escape, toward new twilight, toward air.

He left the department with the sun slanting down and Dupree’s voice echoing behind him, stopping to steady himself with one hand by a lemon tree the town council had planted years ago. He needed a moment, had to pull himself together, but avoided putting his full weight against the tree, since it might snap in half. Main Street was lined with a dozen of them—stunted, barely surviving, barely hanging on, like the town itself.

He wanted to call Mel, tell her about Mancha’s, but couldn’t shake the sight of Aguilar holding his face together, all that blood so much blacker than the movies; or Dupree savagely attacking Delgado and grinning while he did it. And then, after that, casually wiping the man’s blood in his hair and on Chris’s uniform—smoking cigarettes and drinking a Dr Pepper until the ambulance came.

Most important of all, he couldn’t shake what he’d seen in Dupree’s truck . . . in the goddamn storage locker. If only that fucking medical kit had been in the extended cab like Dupree had said at first, then he’d never have gone in that flatbed locker at all. But Dupree had been wrong about that, had tossed him the keys to unlock it probably without a second thought, while he’d remained staring down at the two damaged men, casually firing up another Lucky Strike.

Dupree’s back had still been to him, talking low to Eddie Corazon, when Chris saw them—looped together in a clear plastic pouch, shoved down between flares and a rain jacket and a spare pair of boots. Not damning alone, and maybe not even the exact same as what he’d cut from the skeleton at Doc Hanson’s, but close enough—
oh fuck, so damn close
—even if you looked in squad cars all over the country and found ones that were all damn similar. Because really, sometimes your one pair of good American steel cuffs wasn’t enough. Sometimes you needed more, a lot more, like if they had been forced to arrest that entire crowd at Mancha’s. And that’s when a whole mess of dual-restraint FlexiCuffs like those in Duane’s truck locker came in handy. They were easy, expendable, portable, and cheap. One was just as good as another, and you could stick a handful of them in your pocket or keep them on your belt. You could lose one, forget it, and
not have a second thought about it
. A lot of big city departments swore by them, and issued them just like they issued Surefire lights or Sabre Red OC pepper spray.

But not the Big Bend. Not
his
department.

•   •   •

He returned a wave to Modelle Greer, who was closing up her knitting shop and had no idea Chris had just witnessed one man nearly stabbed to death and another almost beaten to the grave. Everyone in Murfee took up knitting for a while to keep Mrs. Greer’s place running. Still, there were buildings up and down that were permanently closed, just soaped-over glass and boarded doors. From a distance it all looked beautiful—a movie set, the ideal small town, with the BBC Fall Carnival banner over Main curved into a smile by the wind. A perfect smile, until you got close and saw a hint of blood on the gums—a bad tooth or two, buried deep in the back.

He’d always hated so much about this town, but here he was all the same. Willingly chose to come back. Nearly ran—fucking limped—home. He’d tried at times to imagine what his life would have been like if his knee hadn’t buckled, if he hadn’t found himself on his back staring at the yellow wash of stadium lights as blood drained from his face and the crowd fell silent like a radio suddenly turned down. The only sound first his own heartbeat, then breathing . . . ragged but not panicked, followed by swelling, rising, hurtling pain. Pain with a voice all its own, screaming at him.