The Far Empty (37 page)

THE JUDGE

H
e saw her sitting in the car, waiting for him. He could have put his hands on her then, hurt her, put the muzzle of his gun against her head, and told her to beg him to stop. He could have circled it around her eye, up and down her cheek, across her mouth, like a goddamn kiss.

Chris would have heard the shot from the office but wouldn’t have been able to do a damn thing about it, no more able to stop it than catching smoke. He would have been left stumbling and falling down the stairs, into the street, looking for her, afraid of what he’d find but knowing what it would be all the same, leaving his blood behind with every step. Always carrying the burden of what had been done to her. It wasn’t that the Judge
couldn’t
do such a thing—that even in his situation, as bad as it was, he wouldn’t contemplate making the time and then finding some small pleasure in it.

But what stopped him was the way Melissa Bristow stared back
without blinking. Working out his thoughts, not afraid of them, as something rose in her eyes like the moon over the Chisos. Not fear or worry.
Just anger
. She raised another of his own goddamn guns, held it high. Shooting through the windshield might hurt her as much as him, might send the bullet wide or leave her blind. That was a chance she was willing to take. Up in his office he wasn’t sure Chris could pull the trigger, but he had no doubt this goddamn woman would. No matter the damage, no matter the cost. No doubt at all.

•   •   •

He drove away, down Main, past the Hamilton with the broken N, like a fist had been put through it, and the Dollar General and Modelle Greer’s and Bartel’s Gas. Past the Sonic drive-in and the Radio Shack and the sign for Donnie Ray Royal, Attorney at Law, and the small U.S. post office. He sat for a bit beneath the sodium yellow lights of the Hi n Lo and then took the long curve of Appian Way past Big Bend Central and Archer-Ross Stadium. He turned circles in the stadium’s lot, round and round, as the stars above wheeled in the opposite direction.

He cruised out to Beantown, to Mancha’s, which was strangely quiet and dark, and all the small homes nearby, clustered together and painted in garish colors. He made them brighter, driving up and down the dusty alleys with his lights flashing—a blue-and-red electrical storm that brought no one to their windows. No one even looked out, no one cared. He might have been all alone in the world.

He took 67 and drove out toward the Lights as fast as the truck would go—all the windows down and the inside of the car like a captured tornado. The truck rattled and shook, and when he got to the little pavilion for the Lights he drove right on through the gravel
out onto the caliche itself, bouncing over rocks and ruts, crushing ocotillo and anything else that wouldn’t get out of his path. The only lights were his own high beams, and had there been other wraiths waiting for him, he would have chased those as far as they could take him. Instead, he turned his head lamps off and screamed at the top of his old lungs and plowed through the darkness trying to find the end of the world, to drive off it, but there was no end. The Big Bend, the Far Empty, just went on forever and ever and ever.

Dirt and rocks sprayed against his windshield like gunfire and he fought the wheel and himself and when the ground did not finally raise up to swallow him whole and drop him down a black throat, he knew he was done. He ground the truck to a halt and listened to the engine tick, as all the echoes he’d thrown slowly worked their way back to him over the desert. Even his own, still screaming.

Then he turned around and drove for home.

DUANE

H
e realized, as he searched for a Dr Pepper in the kitchen and then wandered through the rooms, that he’d never actually been in the Judge’s house. Through the years, he’d been summoned up to the porch, stood in the driveway. He’d been out back in the yard and may have made it as far as the garage, but never, ever inside its walls. The Judge liked his privacy and his safety. He often talked about a home being a
sanctuary
, and had a three-thousand-dollar alarm system to prove it. So it had been all the more strange when Duane walked up and found the door already standing open for him, waiting.
Don’t mind if I do!
He thought he saw his daddy there, holding it ajar for him, and thanked him for his help.

He wandered a bit, eventually went upstairs and searched Caleb’s room and found kid stuff. Then he went into the Judge’s room and tossed a few things around. He sidestepped the shattered mirror and found the Ruger rifle behind the door; thought the grip still felt
warm where it had recently been held, checked to make sure it was loaded. He carried it with him as he moved along.

It had been while he was out at the Comanche, watching his little Mex girl and waiting for her to work up the nerve to finally try and kill him, that Melissa’s call had come through. She’d been angry, near screaming—told him everything he already knew about the Judge, how Duane was supposed to have died right along with Chris at the Far Six. She told him Caleb had come to see Chris, and now Chris, who was still hurt—more than bad—was coming back to town to end it, once and for all. Murfee wasn’t big enough for all of them anymore. The world wasn’t big enough.

Then she’d offered Duane anything—everything—if he promised to make sure the Judge never hurt anyone else ever again.
You kill that son of a bitch, Duane Dupree, you kill him . . .

There was a woman lying in the bathtub, and he had to admit, it startled the hell out of him. He walked into the Judge’s dark bathroom and she was there, reclining in the big old dry tub, her pale skin holding its own light, like moonbeams on glass. Her eyes were closed and her dark hair was a tumble that was her only pillow. Her long, thin hands were at her side, one of them lying across a belly that he knew would be as soft and warm to the touch as anything. He followed the gentle path of her body down to her legs, to the darkness between them, and felt himself get hard in a way he hadn’t in weeks.

He recognized her even though he’d never seen her quite this way. It was Nellie Banner, who’d been dead for more years than he could quite remember. She was another ghost and her eyes were open and they were wolf’s eyes just like his, glowing and hot and angry, and her lips moved as she whispered,
Come closer,
oh, please come closer.
She had so many things to tell him, and he was welcome
to look at her while she did so.
You kill that son of a bitch, Duane Dupree, you kill him . . .

She wasn’t reflected in the bathroom mirror, but for that matter, he wasn’t, either. He was a ghost, already gone, a dead man. He knew none of it was real, just the
foco
turning the last of his sanity to dust, but he didn’t care. So he went and knelt next to Nellie, smelled water that wasn’t there and put his ear close to her dead mouth, and listened to all of her secrets.

He’d taken so much
foco
he thought his heart would explode. He could feel each individual beat, each one labored, popping a bloody sweat right off his skin. He’d already thought about taking his old buck knife, his daddy’s Model 110, and cutting his skin off. He didn’t need the skin now—it was too tight and too hot and it squeezed him something terrible—so earlier he
had
cut himself a little before heading out to the Comanche, just to test the thought: a slice across his arms, across his belly, and even with a fair amount of his very real blood, he’d known it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t the blood or the pain that finally stopped him. In fact he didn’t really feel any of the hurt, and the knife edge proved no different from picking at his skin with his own nails. Later, if he survived any of this, he was going to start in earnest at his face and work down, shedding it all. Revealing once and for all the wolf underneath. He’d stopped only because he had a few other things to attend to first—things that definitely needed human hands.

He was curled in the Judge’s bed, naked and bloody, when the door opened downstairs, the one he’d closed and locked behind him. He was grinning when he popped up and went to the hall, the Ruger out in front of him, his shotgun slung over his back. He’d left the lights off, just like he found them, but it didn’t matter because it seemed to
him that everything glowed green, clean and clear and visible. He came to the top of the stairs and saw the crown of the Judge’s head passing below him, moving toward the kitchen. The fridge opened, and light bloomed bright. He had to blink back tears, it was so hard to see through. When his vision cleared, he came down the stairs slow, cautious, and backed into the family room, gun pointed at the open arch where he knew the Judge would appear.

The Judge nearly walked into the open mouth of his gun. In the gloom his eyes went wide, caught their own startled light. He had a Lone Star in his hand, and he let it slip from his fingers. It hit the ground between them, rolled in a tight circle, bleeding beer in its wake. His hand moved toward the gun at his hip, his Colt XSE—a gun that had been given to him as a present by the Sheriffs Association of Texas—but Duane shook the Ruger at him to let him know he was serious. Dead serious.

“Just slip the hand back, Judge. Sorry you had to waste a cold one. Guess I got the drop on you.”

The Judge gaped at him, unbelieving. “Dupree, get some fucking clothes on and get that fucking gun out of my face. You hear me? Or I will whip the dog shit out of you.” The Judge looked closer. “Fuck, are you bleeding?” His voice had a tightness that Duane had never heard. If he didn’t know better, it sounded like goddamn fear.

The Judge finally raised a hand, just one, not his gun hand, though. “Look, don’t make this worse, right? I saw Cherry just now. He’s out for both of us. That’s our problem.”

“Naw, he’s really out for just you, Judge,
just you
. You can’t slip out of that noose. Now comes the
reckoning
.”

“Goddammit, Duane, you’re not the first person to point a gun at me today, but by God, you will be the last.”

Duane laughed. “You might take that as a hint, Judge.”

The Judge spoke slowly, carefully. “If you don’t stop now, you’re not walking out of here. I can’t allow it. You know that.”

“Oh, I know it. Don’t care. Not really atall.” Duane loosened his shoulders, relaxed and breathed and took better aim at the Judge’s face. As jittery and wired as he’d been for months, he was suddenly calm, cool, like he’d been standing still for hours in the cold desert night. And then Chava was standing in the hallway behind the Judge, his gold tooth grinning in the dark—a skull. Chava waved at him, urging him on, empty eye sockets and face curtained with blood. Duane waved back. Next to Chava was Rudy Ray, screaming silently.

“You eat your own, Judge, that’s what you do. You eat your own.” Chava was gone now, replaced by the girl he’d set on fire. She glowed and smoldered in the dark, ash drifting from the hand she pointed at him. She smeared the air, like a dirty fingerprint on glass. “Everything I ever did was on your word. ’Cause of you.”

“Now
that
is horseshit, Duane.”

“I see their faces and they have holes where their eyes should be. All the things you did, and it’s
me
they’re comin’ for . . . I’m haunted, Judge, so haunted. And they’ve been waiting for this for a long time.” The air between them was charged, moving on its own, as if they had an audience. “I even talked to Nellie upstairs in the tub. Goddamn, she was a beautiful woman. They’re here right now. They’re holding breath they don’t even have and they’re waiting to clap their dead hands after I blow your head off.”

“It’s okay, son. I understand. I really do.”

Duane sighted down the rifle at the Judge’s empty, open mouth. “There’s no way you can.”

“No, Duane, no, goddammit.” The Judge pointed at him. “You’re sick, dying . . . a goddamn dead man.”

Duane saw all the rest of the dead staring at him, and spit blood at the Judge’s boot.

“We all are.”

The Judge went for the Colt.

The room lit up with muzzle flashes, everything so loud. Duane fired round after round, standing stock-still, bracing himself with his legs, leaning into the rifle’s kick. It was smooth as oil, greased like lightning, the finest gun he’d ever shot. Someone had taken real good care of it, for just this moment. A window blew out and stuffing from the couch floated in the air. He thought he might be hit, but couldn’t quite feel it and couldn’t have cared less. It was possible the Judge’s head came off in a powerful spray, so hard and fast that it hit the ceiling. There was a lot of blood, he knew that—so much blood, like Eddie Corazon’s—and all of it everywhere and on everything. A real goddamn reckoning right here in the living room.

He knew it was all over when he heard the ghosts clapping.