Page 1 of Never Stay Gone
Chapter One
Beyond the Pecos River,out in the bitter reaches of far West Texas, the ground held more blood than water.
Sickled jawbones and femurs and curved ribs poked out of the sun-bleached, rust-hewn desert, scattered like desiccated branches spread by the sun-scorched wind. Cracked longhorn skulls wider than a man’s shoulders lay as grave markers in the arid wastes, proclaiming far and wide that the land was harsh, and deadly, and brought nothing but trouble.
Trouble haunted Big Bend County’s history. Big Bend was twelve thousand square miles of bitter, snakebit land, the refuge of outlaws for as long as humanity had shuffled through the region’s dust. Native legends decried the Big Bend as the Creator’s junk-heap afterthought to the earth’s grandeur. Pictograms still burned into the sides of towering mesas guided ancient peoples away, out of the place. Tierra despoblada, the Spanish had called the land when they staggered through the broken desert and collapsed on the brackish banks of the Pecos River. They gave Big Bend more bones to scatter and bleach white under the unforgiving West Texas sun.
West of the Pecos, the old saying went, there is no law. West of that, there is no God.
Shane wasn’t so sure. Maybe God abandoned the world before He reached Big Bend.
The Big Bend was exactly what its name said: the southern thrust of the Rockies pushed into the northern Chihuahuan Desert, making the Rio Grande curve north and east into Texas before flowing south again, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. To Shane, it felt like the river must connect to another planet, like the mud-churned waters gurgling through all that waste couldn’t possibly end up in the tropics. Maybe that desolation was why the river seemed to be in such a hurry. Like everything else in the God-forgotten place, it wanted to get gone. Fast.
Shane could understand that.
Big Bend County, larger than the state of Connecticut, had only twelve thousand residents, scattered in far-flung towns and sprawling ranches and even holed up in old ghost villages, the last souls occupying places history had forgotten. The region was a patchwork of ranchland and arroyos and wild draws. Ancient mesas, the remains of prehistoric reefs formed in long-dead salt seas, plunged into dark, dreary canyons shadowed by the Chisos and Chinati Mountains.
Some tourists found their way south, heading to the United States’ least visited and most remote national park. The hardy souls who made the monstrous trek across Texas—an eight-hour drive from the nearest metropolitan airport—found views that were awe-inspiring. Life-changing. Poets and painters extolled the majesty of the region, the unparalleled beauty that spread from horizon to horizon in barren, bitter reaches.
They extolled that beauty from far away. Embraced their joy and awe from air-conditioned studios on the other side of the state or the country.
Emptiness as deep and wide as a man’s lonely soul spread across the Big Bend. Not a lot of life to break up all that desolation. In the dust, creosote and mesquite warred for scant drops of water. Thin spindles of ocotillo branches wove and waved in the burning wind. Even the plants in the Big Bend were isolated, hardscrabble, and mean, covered with spines and thorns and ready to draw blood. Prickly pear cactus would rather kill you than share the water it hoarded for years.
It was a hard, sharp, raw land, like taking a shot of rotgut straight on an empty stomach. Old cowhide, the rust edging on creaking windmills, and windswept limestone were the dominant colors, with tired wisps of prairie-gold grass clinging to the edges, as if the last bits of life were one big gust away from giving up the ghost as well.
A ragged tumbleweed danced across the desert, skittering between the craggy arms of a mesquite. Shane thought the tumbleweed would catch on a thorny branch, but it whipped free and blew right past the open grave. It didn’t even slow as it rolled over the six tangled, decaying bodies.
Shane knelt at the edge of the grave, his gaze tracing the line of exposed bone poking out of the hard earth. It was a yellowed and sticky, not like the other bones he’d found in the desert, or like Halloween decorations. There was a reason for that color, if only he could remember. Something about the timeline of decay, bones going from living to dead things.
Most times, when Shane found bones out in the desert, they were easily identifiable as animal bones. Cattle, usually a heifer or her calf, or sometimes a mustang. Elk, or deer, or pronghorn. There were more animals than people in their godforsaken corner of the world, and everything died hard in Big Bend.
The first time he’d found a human skeleton, it was lying facedown in the desert, the bones of one hand still curled around the delicate child-sized skull lying under it. The rest of the child’s skeleton was gone. A rattlesnake had made a home out of the adult’s skull.
He’d thrown up behind his Big Bend sheriff’s truck, emptying his whole breakfast behind the tires. He’d stayed bent over for a long, long time, the acrid tang of stale coffee and runny eggs filling his nose and mouth.
One positive of being in such an empty place: most times, Shane was alone, and that suited him just fine. Especially then, when he needed to gather the parts of his soul that had bled right out of him at the sight of that curled hand, the delicate metacarpals still held together by dried and fraying ligaments and resting on top of a skull that could have fit inside the hollow of his palm.
He’d found Mexican pesos and an empty water bottle beneath the bodies. They were fifteen miles from the border.He and the sheriff had buried the adult’s skeleton and the child’s skull together in a pauper’s grave, alongside the other unclaimed, unknown bones and bodies found throughout the county.
These bodies were nothing like those had been.
First, they were buried, albeit not well. A coyote had dug up the corner of a grave and gnawed a decaying foot free from one of the six corpses, and the sight of the animal dashing across the road with a human foot dangling from its jaws made Old Wally slam on his brakes and lock up his truck, nearly rolling ass over head down Farm Road 169. He’d still been white as a sheet when Shane had pulled up to the side of the road where Wally had said he’d be waiting. Wally had ground the heel of his boot into the dust as he pointed into the desert where the coyote had come from. Even for a hardened rancher, a dismembered, half-gone lady’s foot, red polish still visible on the toenails, had been too much.
Shane had spent two hours backtracking the coyote on foot before he found the disturbed earth and the raw end of a woman’s lower leg tugged free from a shallow grave.
Sheriff Heath Reed arrived within an hour of Shane’s call-in, screaming from one deserted end of the county all the way down to the forgotten spit of land Shane was guarding. In the interim, Shane had jogged back to his truck and pulled it up closer, parking thirty yards away from the grave so as not to disturb evidence. In the emptiness, Shane heard Heath’s sirens a full forty minutes before he saw the flashing red and blue lights winding south on 169, in and out of the mesas’ shadows on the valley floor.
To cover all of Big Bend County, Heath had himself and seven deputies. A year earlier, the county had been given a nice lump-sum check from the Texas state government to buy night-vision equipment and high-tech drones, supposedly to help protect the border, but night vision and drones didn’t do anything to address chronic understaffing. Or help with unearthing dead bodies, or process crime scenes, or enforce the speed limit on the handful of paved highways, which everyone treated like rocket testing grounds. Sure, the equipment was nice, but it didn’t make a dent in the real law enforcement work they had to do.
Shane and Heath did what they could with what they had. They photographed the disturbed patch of dirt from every angle they could think of, even setting up one of the state-provided cameras on a tripod to record their work on video. Then Heath brought out the shovels, and they spent the rest of the afternoon digging up the grave, making a pile of dirt that they tried to cover with a tarp in case they needed to sift through the already-windswept dust for evidence.
They worked hard, and silently. Heath was a quiet man under any circumstances. Long-boned, with wiry muscles like most native Texans had and a hard-earned, manual-labor strength. Sweat soaked his khaki uniform shirt, but he never complained about bending the shovel to the earth or turning pile after pile over as they worked one, two, then three feet into the rust-colored ground. Heath wore the same pinched, wary expression he always seemed to, as if he’d seen enough of the world to understand all humanity’s faults and foibles and was always prepared to be disappointed.
They’d expected one body, not several, and Shane saw uncharacteristic shock color Heath’s face when they uncovered three, then four, then five sets of remains, all in different states of decay. Putrefying bodies lay beside cracked and weatherworn bone. Twin twists of delicate arms, the thin spindles of ulna and radius. A pile of metacarpals, hand bones, like salt scattered on the earth. Another arm lying across a half-clothed, distended stomach, the rest of the purple fabric rotted away. The arm was decayed to the bone in places, muscles and tendons withering, the flesh rotten and ragged and stringy, like something had gotten its teeth into the limb and yanked.
And then there washer.
Her death-pale face stared directly at them once they’d fingered the soil off the planes of her cheeks and the hollows of her open eyes, like an abandoned doll with dirt kicked over her.
