The Far Empty (15 page)

DARIN

H
is name really was Darin; that part was true and always had been. Just not Darin
Braddock
. He was born Darin Braccio in Howard Beach, New York, where his ex-wife Sara and their two girls now lived. She divorced him and returned there after she couldn’t take Texas or him or both anymore.

“I never knew Texas could be this cold,” Morgan said, shifting in the Tahoe’s seat.

“Yep, my mother used to say ‘cold as a witch’s tit.’ Ever fucking heard that?”

“Um, no.” She laughed, peering through her dark window. Chief Deputy Duane Allen Dupree’s house was a couple of miles distant, the security lights visible, windows aglow, everything around it black and empty and endless. Darin knew that’s the way she wrote his name in the notes she was keeping—the whole thing, every letter of it.

“He doesn’t really, you know, do much, does he?” she asked.

Darin glanced up from the issued iPad in his lap. He was playing solitaire. If Dupree had lived,
you know
, like anywhere near civilization, they could have put a camera up on his house, piped the feed to the iPad or even back to the office. But the redneck deputy lived so far out, even for Murfee, that a video feed was tough, and the tech request would have tipped his hand anyway to Garrison about his real interest out here, forcing them instead to do it the old-fashioned way—actually following Dupree around, the other deputies too, even Sheriff Stanford Ross, whom Darin had heard speak at a Texas Narcotics Officers Association conference.
Lifestyle surveillance
was damn hard work anywhere, and damn near impossible in the middle of nowhere. He and Morgan had been in and out of Murfee for two weeks, staying at a hotel in Valentine, and hadn’t seen a goddamn thing.

Not counting the night Dupree had cranked off a handful of rounds into the dark. Now, that had been exciting. Darin was almost to the point of conceding that he was barking up the wrong tree, even as his instincts, honed over all of the years, whispered otherwise. He might be a lousy husband and a marginal father, but Darin Braccio was a damn good agent.

•   •   •

For the life of him he couldn’t figure out why he used that name,
her name
, when Deputy Cherry pulled them over. They were coming back from this exact spot, on the heels of a full night of watching Dupree’s house after that silly carnival, when he’d been caught by complete surprise by the blue and red lights ablaze in his rearview. He even thought about making a run for it, but Morgan insisted they pull over and bullshit their way through the late-night traffic stop. Basically lie, because she didn’t want some local deputy to flip his
prowler, crashing trying to catch them. She had a weirdly honed sense of honesty.

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 with 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.