“But definitely the last. A hard way to end,” the sheriff said, now looking past the river, farther south and east to the Chisos Mountains, where they carved the horizon. “I sometimes wonder why our remote corner of Texas is the last thing so many people see. I don’t understand that. It seems wrong to me. Seems like it should be too safe, too removed . . . hell, too beautiful, for all this ugliness.”

America shrugged again. She’d gotten used to the sheriff and his ideas, sus esperanzas—his hopes. She admired him and the way he tried to hold on to them, for himself and his novia and his new bebé, maybe for her, too. For all his deputies, although he knew better, like she did. Ben Harper had admired that in him, too, even as he’d warned the sheriff right up until the day he died that there was the world the sheriff wanted to believe in, and the world as it truly was—el mundo real. Ben had made her promise that she’d never let either of them forget that.

“This place can be beautiful, but it’s no different than anywhere else.”

“I know,” he conceded, without much strength, as if agreeing with her made it all true. He was still watching the mountains, like he was searching for something better in the shadows and sun there.

“El mundo es peligroso,” she said. The world is dangerous. “You can die badly anywhere.”

—

SHE WAS ABOUT TO WALK DOWN to the river to check on Marco and Dale when the sheriff held her back. He still had his phone in his hand.

“I was just on a call with Joe Garrison, that DEA agent out of El Paso,” he said.

She thought he’d been checking on Melissa and the bebé, or Danny back in Murfee. She wasn’t sure what it meant that he was talking to the DEA so soon.

“He’s heard about this?” she asked, shaking her head. “Or did you call to tell him?” The sheriff’s long-standing relationship with the DEA agent was difficult, hard to explain, and the sheriff had admitted to her before that she and her familia were the reason, though her own relationship with them was just as difficult and just as hard to explain. Rodolfo, her hermano, had been both a member of the Nemesio cartel and a federal informant, and either truth alone would have been enough for Agent Garrison to distrust her. Worse, Rodolfo’s involvement with Nemesio and former Sheriff Ross and Duane Dupree had ended not only with his own death, but with the death of one of Agent Garrison’s agents, and Garrison could never forgive or forget that. And he either couldn’t or wouldn’t let the sheriff forget that, or that one of America’s tíos—her mama’s own hermano, a man she knew only as Fox Uno—still had ties to Nemesio.