The Far Empty (6 page)

CHRIS

C
hris sat in a chair that was too small, hunched over Sheriff Ross’s desk, even though the office itself was expansive—dark, hand-oiled wood and paneling except for one wall that was nothing but massive arched windows looking out over Main.

Now morning light came through those windows, muted by the old soda-lime glass in the panes. This building had existed nearly since Murfee’s founding, serving at various times as a mercantile, a saloon, and a brothel. It had once functioned as a courthouse, and you could have stood in this room, looking through the thick glass of those windows, and watched more than a few rustlers and horse thieves turn at the end of a rope.

The building had been renovated numerous times, most recently around 1996, and served now as the Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department. Downstairs were a waiting room and office space and holding
cells, all modern or nearly so, but this area up here was reserved for the sheriff alone. It was his office and a museum.

Chris had been up here a dozen times, seeing something new each and every time. The walls were covered with Murfee’s history, framed photographs and tintypes of old lawmen and bandits, Indians and Mexicans. Each picture had a weird thunder-and-lightning cast, as if drawn in charcoal and quicksilver. Buildings and ranch houses looked barely able to stand under their own weight, the buckled timbers and sagging roofs—everything slightly off-kilter—captured for all time.

There were pelts on the floor, longhorn and elk and sheep; a mountain lion, even a Mexican wolf. Their heads adorned the high cavernous walls above the old pictures, staring down with dark, dead orbs. Chris knew the sheriff liked to hunt, had property somewhere, and went several times a year.

In one corner on a stand was a full saddle, Guadalajara style, with a big horn and a high pitch, stirrups touching the floor: hand-stitched Hermann Oak leather, a half-breed of tooled smooth areas with plenty of rough out for a better grip while riding. Parts of it were picked out in silver and gold and it gleamed in the light, winking, a distant skyline.

There were guns arranged all around the walls, several beneath glass and soft lights and not meant to be touched. Others the sheriff was fond of taking down and handing around, all loaded, and he always rechecked the load and wiped them with a special cloth before placing them back. There was a whole collection of guns John Wayne had used in his films. Steve McQueen’s cutoff Mare’s Leg .44-40 from
Wanted: Dead or Alive
. The Colt Monitor 30.06 rifle allegedly used by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer to gun down Clyde Barrow and Bonnie
Parker, as well as his .44 Triple Lock Smith and a single-action Colt .45 he called “Old Lucky.” Clyde Barrow’s hat sat next to his Colt .45 and a warped and stained box of shells pulled from the car he was killed in.

A revolver belonging to outlaw Sam Bass, who robbed the Union Pacific gold train from San Francisco and was ambushed and shot by Texas Rangers and later found dying from his wounds in a pasture by a railroad worker.

Sheriff G. Cooper Wright’s .44 caliber revolver.

Bat Masterson’s .45.

Texas Ranger J. M. Brittain’s Bulldog revolver, and Bill Doolin’s derringer.

Last, and probably most expensive, a Model 1847 Colt Whitneyville-Walker revolver, once owned by Texas Ranger Sam Wilson. Only a thousand or so of these guns were produced, and for a while it was the most powerful handgun in the world. Its massive size and weight made Sam Colt himself say it’d take a Texan to shoot it.

•   •   •

The Whitneyville-Walker hung on a crimson backdrop in a special glass case right behind the sheriff’s desk, over his right shoulder. Hidden light fell on it, and it was hard to sit where Chris was now and not have his eyes drawn to it, pulled as if it were a lodestone. Chris had once thought if you could get it out from under its glass, you might still smell the original oiled steel, the faint lingering odor of powder and smoke. Chris waited, staring at all the memorabilia, as the sheriff fingered the thin paperwork he’d written on the body he’d discovered at Indian Bluffs.

“You want to send it to Austin?” Sheriff Ross asked, still not looking up from the paper.

“Yes sir. Doc Hanson is afraid he can’t work the ID. But we can send it out, let the DPS forensic lab have a try.” Hanson was the county’s sometime medical examiner, full-time pediatrician, and emergency veterinarian. What Chris didn’t say was that the identification of skeletal remains was far beyond Hanson’s capability. Chris knew from the call he’d already made to the Department of Public Safety lab that their techs might be able to pry secrets from the scarred and damaged remains he’d carefully wrapped in plastic and put in a cardboard box.

The sheriff continued to read Chris’s report, or pretended to, out of courtesy, but there wasn’t a helluva lot there.

•   •   •

The body had been stripped prior to being buried.

Dry desert conditions can slow the change in hair color after death, but the strands clinging to the skull were already red pheomelanin, a gaudy scarlet. Groundwater had seeped in from winter rains, worrying away the flesh and the hair, or at least whatever the coyote hadn’t. Even Doc Hanson had been able to distinguish what looked like tooth marks against the dirty bone.

The skull concealed two silver amalgam fillings on the back molars, like coins in a treasure chest, although the rest of the skeleton’s teeth were good. Chris knew forensic dental identification was possible, but he’d need comparisons—actual dental records—since no central dental database existed. Murfee’s current dentist, John Snowden, was willing to search for a match against his patients, including most of the current population in the town and a few outliers in Presidio and Valentine, but wasn’t thrilled about the prospect. He’d picked up almost all of Chris’s dad’s patients, and the elder Cherry had worked in Murfee for more than two decades.

That was his dad’s legacy—dozens of boxes of hand-scrawled records and old file folders and X-rays, already turning brown at the edges from chemical burn, still housed in a U-Store-It off Highway 45. Chris had moved them there himself. Snowden used digital radiography and hadn’t wanted any of Tom Cherry’s rusting films.

It’d take time, a lot of time, but if the body found out at Bulger’s place had lived in or near Murfee and had had dental work done here, Chris might be able to put a name to it. Eventually. Maybe.

Then there was the ten inches of industrial black plastic that had bound the hands of the body behind its back. It was quality stuff, not too unlike—but much better than—the plastic zip ties found all over ranches used to hold together fencing or for a thousand and one other purposes. That’s what he had thought at first when he saw it at Indian Bluffs, still wrapped around the skeletal wrists. But after he got a closer look, even snapped a few photos to puzzle over later, he knew better now.

These ties were made specifically for human hands. Double-cuff disposable restraints—something like zip cuffs or FlexiCuffs. Professional; either military or police, state or federal. Doc Hanson hadn’t been able to untie the plastic; fumbled at it with his surgical scissors. It had finally taken Chris a pair of tin snips to get it off the bone.

•   •   •

The sheriff lowered the papers, didn’t quite release them. He smiled. “Sure, Chris, sure, if that’s what we need to do, we’ll do it.” Then added, “What do you think happened out there?” He made a vague motion with the report, waving at an area past Chris’s head.

Chris looked at his boots, shuffled them. He’d known Sheriff Ross his whole life, and it still felt weird to be here, working with
him . . . for him. After he’d thrown four touchdowns against Pecos, the sheriff had come right down from the stands and walked straight and tall across the chewed-up, muddy field and shook his hand with that same high-wattage smile he had on now, bright beneath his silvered brush cut and unusual gray eyes. He’d grabbed Chris’s hand and clapped him on the back and said, “Helluva game, son, goddamn helluva game,” and then turned and smiled for the picture snapped for the
Murfee Daily
. Chris’s dad had stood to the side, waiting to congratulate him, until the sheriff was done.

The man across from Chris now looked no different from the man on that field or in that newspaper picture Chris had found in his dead father’s things—his dad nothing more than a blur in the background, out of frame and focus. Sheriff Stanford Ross seemed immune to time—impervious, impenetrable. Images of him would fade long before he would.

Like
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. As Chris and his dad had together watched Caroline Cherry wasting and dying in front of them, they’d retreated to their favorite books, and when Chris returned home he’d pulled them all out again, feeling the paper, bending back a creased corner here and there . . . remembering. It pissed Mel off to no end that those boxes of books were still stacked in the halls and the empty bedrooms, but he couldn’t quite get rid of them, didn’t have a place for them, not yet.

And Wilde’s
Dorian Gray
was one of them, his dad’s old Dell Classic, with Dorian’s ruined face on the cover. Chris was afraid if he looked too close now at all the tintypes on the walls he’d find an aged, ugly semblance of Sheriff Ross—one corrupted, wasted—standing with a rifle by the furred hump of a dead buffalo, or milling
with a crowd under a tree where a man swung in a slow arc over his own shadow and piss.

•   •   •

“To be honest, sir, I don’t know. Seems like a river killing, but more than that? I can’t say. Not yet, anyway. Too far from any main highway to be a transient thing or a dump-off, but . . . well, I’m pulling missing persons BOLOs from all over. It’s possible something will come up.” Or it won’t.

A
river killing
was Murfee shorthand for the killing of a Mexican—an undocumented worker or a drug or alien smuggler who’d crossed the Rio Grande. Still, Chris couldn’t bury that small, ugly hunch that it might be something else, something more complicated than that. It was far-fetched, but you were never going to find that empty bit of earth on Matty Bulger’s land just by passing it on the freeway on the way to Beaumont or Houston. You had to know it was there. You
needed
it to be there.

The sheriff nodded. “Take the river out of it. Do you know how many murders we’ve had in Murfee in, say, the last fifteen years? Hell, include all of Big Bend.” He tapped his finger on his desk on each of the last words for emphasis. Chris struggled, reaching back, came up empty.

The sheriff raised his fingers. “Two, Chris, two. And do you know how many of those remained unsolved? Exactly zero.” He stretched back in his chair, somehow still sitting ramrod straight. “Let’s see, the first was around 1992. Charlie Beamon got sideways with Morris Clayburg over a bit of fencing. A silly thing, the sort of thing two men ought to be able to talk out, but they didn’t. Charlie had a temper and
liked to drink and they got into it at Earlys and Charlie pulled a little .38 he’d bought off a beaner in Nathan and put two in Morris, one in the face and the other in the foot. A helluva of a shot spread.” The sheriff laughed. “It was the bullet in the face that killed Morris, by the way.” Chris laughed too, joining him; it was expected. “Anyway, Charlie walked right over and turned himself in to me. Tears in his eyes, wiping his nose on his sleeve. He put that .38 right in my hand, and it was still hot, son, still so goddamn warm from the shooting that it felt alive.” The sheriff stood, leaving Chris’s report on the desk, walked toward the big windows, and looked down at the streets.
His streets
, Chris thought.

“The second was a few years after Charlie. Duane Dupree found her out near the Comanche, on one of the side roads. A pretty Mex girl someone had taken a knife to and dumped right out there along a cattle walk. She’d been rained on for two days straight when Duane found her. Two days . . . and it still didn’t take long to figure out who she was. Her name was Adela. She worked over at the Pizza Hut, was married to Tony Gastellum, who bounced around all the ranches out here. We later found out she was only sixteen, although both she and Tony had claimed she was nineteen, twenty, depending on who you talked to, and she looked every bit of it. Tony found out Adela was keeping time with a ranch hand at the Monument and lost it. He killed her in their kitchen and tried to wash it all up with Comet and water and did nothing but make a bigger mess. There were bloody footprints all over their trailer where he’d paced back and forth smoking a cigarette while she died in front of him. He screamed at her while she lay there, spit on her, and had sex with her after her last heartbeat, although we kept that out of the
Daily
.”

The sheriff said all this without skipping a beat.

“We knew he’d done it, he knew he’d done it, but he didn’t want to man up and admit it. He sat in front of me and denied it for three hours, even as we were taking pictures of
his
bloody handprints and footprints in that kitchen. Hell, I put a picture of her in front of him, two of them—one before, one after—and he wouldn’t look at either. You know what it took for him to finally confess? A cheeseburger and cigarettes. He said if I’d get him a burger and let him smoke a few, he’d tell me everything. And he did. More than I wanted to know.”