Texas Outlaw

by James Patterson

  As the ravine narrows into a slot canyon that might provide an escape route, I risk a look back. Through the chaos, I spot two of the men using fire extinguishers on the flames. These guys are fearless, getting right up on the vehicles, determined to get the fires out before the gas tanks explode. I’m not sure where the extinguishers came from. Maybe the cab of the tanker. Another might have come off the ATV.

  A wildfire would bring a whole army of firefighters to this area, something McCormack definitely doesn’t want. His men know they need to get the fires out as badly as they need to catch us. And it looks like they’re doing a good job. The initial exposed gasoline has burned off, and neither vehicle ever became fully engulfed. The vehicles are still smoking terribly, though, which I’m thankful for. We need the cover.

  While the two men fight the fires, they’ve sent one man ahead to keep pursuing us. I spot him at the mouth of the ravine, walking on foot through a thin veil of smoke and scanning the brush with his AR-15 shouldered and ready.

  I recognize our pursuer immediately.

  It’s Mr. Broken Nose.

  Chapter 89

  ARIANA AND I slip farther into the slot canyon. The sides aren’t high at first, but quickly they rise around us until we’re standing in a canyon that’s twenty feet deep but only three or four feet wide. The sandstone walls narrow at points where we have to squeeze through sideways. I’m over six feet tall and this kind of passageway wasn’t built for someone my size. Our rifles make it even harder to maneuver through the tight passages.

  Fortunately, Mr. Broken Nose is even bigger—not taller, but more muscular—and he’ll have a hard time getting through. That he’s coming, I have no doubt. He’ll see the entrance to the canyon and know where we went.

  Part of me thinks I should send Ariana ahead while I wait in hiding, ready to take him out. But a gunshot—even just one—will alert everyone else to where we are.

  Our best bet is to make it out of the canyon and into some kind of hiding spot.

  When the canyon widens, Ariana and I hurry as fast as we can. The silt-covered ground is loose and difficult to move through, like running on sand dunes. Rays of sunlight shine down from the opening above. Dirt clouds float in the beams.

  The passage forks from time to time, but we stick to the largest corridor. The smaller forks might narrow to a point where we can’t get through.

  I let Ariana lead the way, as I spend most of my time looking behind us, with my gun at the ready. I expect Mr. Broken Nose to come around a corner at any moment, spraying bullets.

  “Shit,” Ariana says, her voice barely more than a whisper.

  I turn to see what the problem is. The passage we’re in narrows to a point where the gap is no more than four to six inches. Not even Ariana can fit through it.

  We’re stuck at a dead end. The only way out is to go back the way we came or to look for another route through the labyrinth. Either option will bring us face-to-face with our pursuer.

  I put my finger to my lips, and Ariana and I wait in silence. We can hear Mr. Broken Nose’s footsteps, not far away. He’s moving in spurts, which tells me that at each curve he’s hiding and then bursting from cover with his gun ready, like a soldier clearing an abandoned building.

  I aim my pistol at the curve he’ll come from. It’s only ten feet away. Close quarters. I’ll have a split second to kill him before he pulls the trigger and fills the whole cavern with ricocheting lead.

  Down here in the canyon, the temperature is ten degrees cooler than out in the sun. The silence is overwhelming. I can hear my own heart, my own breathing.

  Distance is hard to judge in the canyon, but it sounds like the footsteps are on the other side of the curve. I need to fire at the perfect moment. Too soon and I’ll alert him. Too late and he’ll open fire first.

  In a blur, he bursts from cover, his rifle aimed directly at us. I lock my sight on his face.

  I hesitate.

  So does he.

  He and I are frozen, each with the other in his sights. If he squeezes the trigger, maybe I can get a shot off. If I fire, all he has to do is tense his finger and Ariana and I are both dead.

  But neither of us shoots.

  “Hey, McQueen,” a voice calls from far away, maybe the entrance of the slot canyon. “Any sign?”

  Without taking his gun off me, Mr. Broken Nose shouts back, “No. It’s a dead end in here. They must’ve gone another way.”

  “Get your ass back here, then. We need to report to Mr. McCormack.”

  “Be there on the double.”

  With that, Mr. Broken Nose—or McQueen—lowers his rifle.

  I lower my pistol.

  We stare at each other and have a moment of understanding. He knows I could have shot him on the hillside. So he’s letting me live now.

  He owed me one.

  But now we’re even.

  I have no doubt that if he has me in his sights again, he won’t hesitate to kill me.

  I nod as a way of saying thank you. He turns and disappears into the canyon.

  As we hear his footsteps retreating, Ariana and I collapse onto the canyon floor, exhausted and in shock. My limbs are suddenly jelly as the adrenaline empties out of me. I feel faint. The sandstone walls spin. Ariana throws her arms around me and sobs, and I hug her back like I’ve never held anyone in my life.

  Holding on to her is the only way I can believe that we’re still alive.

  Chapter 90

  WE DECIDE TO hide in the slot canyon until nightfall before moving.

  We have nowhere to go.

  No plan.

  No good options.

  But we can hear what’s happening outside. More ATVs have arrived, and they seem to be crisscrossing the hillsides, looking for us. We hear the engine of the tanker truck start up and the sound of it pulling away. More trucks arrive, which, by the sound of them, are tow trucks picking up the two destroyed F-150s.

  “They’re trying to get rid of all the evidence,” I say.

  What I don’t say is that they’re certainly picking up all the bodies, too, including Dale and Kyle. It makes my heart hurt to know that these men—both of whom died trying to do the right thing—might never get a proper burial.

  Which reminds me how close I came to being with them.

  “You saved my life,” I say to Ariana. “Thank you.”

  She nods. She seems shell-shocked, crouched in the shadows with her arms wrapped around her legs. I move to sit next to her, my back against the sandstone wall, and try to offer some comfort.

  “You did good today,” I say. “You handled yourself under incredible pressure. You’d make a good Texas Ranger.”

  “If we survive,” she says, “I’ll give it some thought.”

  Her tone is cynical, but her lips curl into the hint of a smile. She may be accepting my compliment or realizing her own strength. The crucible we faced today was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced and should have dispelled any doubt Ariana had about how she would handle herself in the line of fire.

  As the sun moves across the sky, the beams of light coming from the top of the canyon move to new angles, changing the hue of the sandstone walls. The surface of the rock looks like brushstrokes of a painting, a mixture of orange and brown and, as sunset approaches, a bloodlike crimson. In our hideout, there isn’t much to do but sit in the shadows and think. What happened keeps playing through my mind in blurry, confused images. The chain of events seems fuzzy now—everything happened so damn fast—but I get flashes of thoughts that tie everything together.

  Dale’s mouth exploding with blood.

  My hat lying in the dirt with a hole through it.

  The look on Kyle’s face right before the bullet knocked him down.

  Neither of us have eaten anything since having a few slices of cold pizza last night. We’re hungry and thirsty. We were both soaked with sweat from the gunfight, and now we feel dehydrated. I smell of gunpowder, and I’m filthy from head to toe. Having discarded my
long-sleeved shirt, the remaining T-shirt is sweat stained and grubby. I’ve got a dull headache spreading from the back of my skull to my temples, and my face feels hot. I probably have a thermal burn from being too close to Kyle’s truck when it went up in flames.

  Ariana leans her body into mine, and I put my arm around her shoulders. She rests her head against my chest. A few minutes later, I can feel her body loosen, and I can tell she’s fallen asleep.

  I’m sure there’s no way I will sleep, but I’m wrong. I try to think of what our next steps should be. But exhaustion worms its way through my body, and before I know it, I’m diving into the black cavern of sleep, too.

  Chapter 91

  THE SUN HANGS low on the horizon as Carson McCormack drives his pickup along the dirt road leading through his property. He arrives at the main tank yard, full of metal buildings and valve stations, and turns onto a field that abuts the mini village of structures. Ordinarily, the field is empty except for maybe a few horses allowed to graze there. Today, the field is erupting with activity.

  A plow is running up and down the field, churning dirt beneath its blades. Meanwhile, a backhoe is digging a school-bus-sized hole in the soil at the edge of the field. Two tow trucks stand idling, their raised beds holding the burnt, bullet-riddled remains of the Texas Rangers’ pickup trucks. Tendrils of smoke still radiate from the melted tires.

  Dale Peters’s tanker truck is nearby, with a crew of men unloading it. Despite being at the center of a firefight, the tanker looks okay. Some of the paint on one side blistered a little from the heat, but Gareth and the boys were careful not to put any bullet holes in it.

  Carson parks and steps out. His son, who is overseeing all of the work, waves for his father to come over to the tow trucks. As Carson approaches, Gareth climbs up onto one of the flatbeds and extends a hand down to help his father up. The trucks reek of burnt metal.

  Once Carson is on the flatbed with his son, he can see inside the bed of the truck. There’s a pile of bodies. They’ve been tossed in, not laid neatly, and it’s hard at first to count them. Carson notices there are two Stetsons in the pile, but only one of the Rangers they belonged to.

  “I’m not happy,” Carson says, stating the obvious to his son.

  Gareth was supposed to take the men out this morning, using the tracker hidden on the tanker truck, and ambush Yates. If they could have hauled the bodies of Yates and Ariana Delgado back to the police station, they would have been heroes—catching the fugitive and her Texas Ranger accomplice.

  Instead, Yates and Delgado are still alive, and Gareth ended up killing the new Texas Ranger instead, which could bring all kinds of attention to Rio Lobo.

  “It’s all under control, Dad,” Gareth says, speaking loudly to be heard over the backhoe and plow. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  “Like hell,” Carson says. “I just got off the phone with Harris. You’re lucky he was able to stop the fire department from investigating the smoke. They were halfway out there before he was able to call them back.”

  Gareth says that as soon as they drop the trucks into the hole, they’ll cover them over and plow the whole field as a way to camouflage the new excavations.

  “We’ve got corn,” Gareth says. “We’ll go ahead and plant a new crop. Everything will look normal.”

  “It’s awful late in the season for planting,” Carson says.

  Gareth shrugs. “Late, but not too late. It’s a good disguise. Who gives a shit if the crop is worth a damn.”

  “Someone’s going to come looking for that missing Texas Ranger, Son. It doesn’t matter how well we hide the trucks. There’s other stuff on this property we don’t want anyone to find.”

  Carson has always been a careful businessman, a planner who thinks ahead. That’s why he’s been so successful. He takes risks—transporting drugs throughout the Southwest is a risk—but they’ve always been controlled risks. He’s never reckless.

  They’ve buried bodies on the property before but never whole trucks.

  “What if they bring in a plane and use infrared to find the buried trucks?” Carson asks. “They can do that, you know.”

  Gareth says that once the field is plowed, they’ll park some equipment over the spots where the trucks are buried. To the naked eye, it will just look like a couple of pieces of heavy machinery are parked at the edge of a newly planted cornfield. To an infrared camera, the equipment will distort any images of whatever is under the ground.

  “There’s still a problem,” Carson says. “Yates and Delgado are out there.”

  Gareth explains that once they’re dead, then Harris can make up any story he wants. Pin the missing Texas Ranger on them.

  “People already think she’s a murderer,” Gareth says. “And they think Yates is helping her.”

  Gareth explains that every dirt road from the open space is blocked with their men. At first light tomorrow, they’ll redouble their efforts to search the open space. Half the team has been preoccupied today with cleaning up the mess. Tomorrow they’ll be able to do a proper search.

  And even if Yates and Delgado somehow make it out of the open space, there are roadblocks every conceivable way out of West Texas.

  “We don’t want them arrested,” Carson reminds his son.

  “Harris has at least one friendly at each roadblock. Accidents happen all the time transporting prisoners to jail.”

  The holes are ready. Carson and Gareth climb down to watch as the tow trucks begin to lower the burnt corpses of the F-150s into the ground. The one with the bodies goes first. It’s Yates’s truck—they can tell by the graffiti on the door. Instead of rolling, the malformed tires slide down the angled bed. When both vehicles are finally in the hole, the backhoe uses its front bucket to push the mound of dirt onto them. In a matter of minutes, the trucks—and the bodies—are gone.

  Now the plow moves toward the disturbed dirt, ready to make the area of excavation indistinguishable from the rest of the field.

  Before Carson heads back to his pickup, he says to his son, “The Ranger’s star was gone. Where is it?”

  Gareth, still wearing the desert camouflage he had on this morning in his sniper’s nest, reaches into a cargo pocket in his pants and pulls it out.

  “Souvenir,” he says.

  He also pulls out a crumpled ball cap that Carson recognizes as once belonging to Dale Peters.

  Carson knows his son always takes trophies from the people he’s killed.

  “Don’t worry,” Gareth says. “I’ll hide these real good. No one will find them.”

  Gareth has a pleased look on his face, as if he’s brought home a football trophy to show off to his father.

  “Don’t be so fucking proud of yourself,” Carson barks, his patience with today’s fiasco finally snapping. “By my count, Yates got three to your two. You think you’re better than him? Prove it.”

  Gareth goes red, his anger boiling just under the surface of his skin.

  Carson knew this would piss him off. But he wants his son pissed. Gareth is the most competitive person he’s ever known. Carson wants him angry and ready to destroy whatever stands in his way.

  It’s time for this game to come to an end.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” Gareth says, his eyes icy in the fading light. “That Texas Ranger won’t live another twenty-four hours.”

  Chapter 92

  I AWAKE TO moonlight coming down through the canyon instead of sunlight. My body is stiff. I try to rise without waking Ariana, but my shifting disturbs her. We both stand and stretch and try to get our bearings.

  I feel weak, my stomach in knots. We haven’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours. What I wouldn’t give to have that sack of food Jessica gave me. But it was inside my truck and must be ashes now, along with everything else. There wasn’t much of personal value in there, except for my guitar. I feel a pang of sadness knowing the source of so many good memories—especially memories with Willow—has been destroyed.

  It’s si
lly to feel sad about a musical instrument when what was really lost today was Dale and Kyle.

  I can buy a new guitar.

  But Dale and Kyle are gone forever.

  A flame of anger rises inside me like an ember glowing with renewed life. I feel a growing resolve to keep pushing on. Earlier today I felt completely defeated. But now I’m getting mad. I’m not going to give up. I have to make sure Dale and Kyle—not to mention Susan Snyder and Skip Barnes—didn’t die in vain.

  I don’t know what our long-term plan is, but I know what our first step is.

  “We need to go to the river,” I say. “There’s that stash of food I brought you. We need to eat. We need to drink. We need strength.”

  We sling our rifles over our shoulders and make our way through the twisting corridors of the slot canyon. We walk to the place where the trucks burned. In the moonlight, we can see the ground is scorched, and some broken glass remains, but otherwise, there’s no real evidence of what happened. The dirt with blood on it has been shoveled up. The tanker, of course, is gone.

  We hike toward the river. The air is cool, and the desert hills look blue in the moonlight. We don’t say much on the walk. My mouth is drier than I can ever remember it feeling. My muscles are sore from what I’ve put my body through in the last twelve hours. Inside my boots, my feet burn with blisters. My arms are scraped up from running through brush and cacti, and even though it hadn’t been bothering me too much lately, the rash on my right hand seems to be flaring up, particularly on my trigger finger. I probably scraped it on a rock during our escape. Or it might simply be that the act of shooting so much was comparable to me scratching my finger over and over.

  Whatever the reason, the hand and finger itch irritatingly.

  I have no doubt Ariana feels as bad as I do—minus the rash—but to her credit, she never complains.

  We arrive at the river and find Ariana’s stash of supplies. We open cans of soup and choke them down cold. We’ve been starving all day, but now that we have access to food, neither of us feels particularly hungry. We have no appetite, but we certainly have thirst. We gulp from water bottles until our stomachs feel bloated.