by Jon Land
“When was the last time you finished a piece of chicken with your hands?”
“Last week sometime, at KFC. Why?”
“Because that’s what you call picking something to the bone. Point being that you still leave something, even plenty, behind. Those cattle looked shaved of everything except their skeletons. And Doc Whatley can’t find a shred of evidence indicating that any of the animals reacted to what was happening. That suggests they were all attacked and done in at once, by something covering the whole of the half-acre the herd was scattered across.”
“Sounds like you’re describing some dinosaur.”
“I raised that point. The problem is even a T. rex leaves something behind. What did this left absolutely nothing other than bones.”
It seemed to have grown cooler since Caitlin began telling the story, and she wondered if it was more a product of rehashing the tale again, with all its mystery and portent, than the weather.
“So let’s hear your theory,” Cort Wesley asked her.
“Haven’t got one. Sorry.”
He narrowed his gaze. “You’ve always got one.”
Caitlin shook her head. “Not this time. Maybe you can ask Leroy Epps,” she added half-jokingly, in reference to the ghostly specter Cort Wesley sometimes spoke with—or at least thought he did. “If anybody can tell us what’s happening here, it’s your friend Leroy.”
Cort Wesley’s gaze pulled off Caitlin a bit, as if trying to judge the level of sarcasm in her voice, ultimately deciding that her last comment had been uttered in frustration instead. “Leroy seems to prefer looking out instead of in. This kind of stuff isn’t up his alley.”
“And what alley is that?”
“The future, Ranger. That thing that starts every morning you wake up.”
Caitlin pushed herself up off the swing. “Think I’ll go inside and check on Luke.”
28
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS
As soon as Caitlin had disappeared inside the house, Cort Wesley caught the sweet smell of talcum powder and turned toward the porch rail where he spotted the silhouette of a gaunt figure, the moonlight seeming to pass straight through it.
“Things ain’t never boring for you, are they, Bubba?” said Leroy Epps.
* * *
They’d let Cort Wesley attend Leroy’s funeral, in a potter’s field not far from Huntsville’s infamous Walls Unit, for inmates who didn’t have any relatives left to claim the body. He’d been the only one standing at the graveside, besides the prison chaplain, when the forklift had lowered the plank coffin into the ground. Cort Wesley tried to remember what he’d been thinking that day, but it was hard, since he’d done his best to erase those years not just from his memory but from his very being. One thing he did remember was that the service was the first time he’d smelled the talcum powder Leroy Epps had used to hide the stench from the festering sores spawned by the diabetes that was killing him.
Just like now, his dead cellmate standing right there at the porch railing. Epps held a bottle of root beer in a thin, liver-spotted hand. His lips were pale pink and crinkled with dryness. The moonlight cast his brown skin in a yellowish tint. The diabetes that had ultimately planted him in the ground had turned Leroy’s eyes bloodshot and numbed his limbs years before the sores and infections set in.
As a boxer, he’d fought for the middleweight crown on three different occasions, knocked out once, and had the belt stolen from him on paid-off judges’ scorecards two other times. He’d been busted for killing a white man in self-defense and had died three years into Cort Wesley’s four-year incarceration. But ever since, he always seemed to show up when needed the most. Whether Epps was a ghostly specter or a figment of his imagination, Cort Wesley had given up trying to figure out. Just accepted the fact of his presence and was grateful that Leroy kept coming around to help him out of one scrape after another.
“How’s the view from where you sit?” the ghost asked him. “Imagine it’s the same as over here.”
“What is it you’re looking at, champ?”
“Your youngest for starters. Boy’s wound tighter than my granddad’s watch. I ever show that to you?”
“Not that I recall. Get back to Luke.”
“Ask the Ranger.”
“Ask Caitlin what?”
“She’s upstairs hearing it told now. Not for me to say.”
“The boy’s been through a lot.”
“You’re not hearing what I’m saying, Bubba.”
“That’s because you’re making less sense than usual.”
Old Leroy drained the rest of his root beer and laid the empty bottle down atop the porch railing. “I’m making the same as I always do. Maybe it’s your hearing that’s off.”
“I hate when you talk like this.”
“Thought you’d be used it by now.”
“Get back to Luke.”
“Can’t.”
“Why?”
Leroy reached for the root beer bottle, as if forgetting it was empty. Cort Wesley thought he could actually see through his spectral hand, as if it, too, were made of glass.
“Not for me to say, Bubba. I never thought one man could have so much mystery in his life. Tell you this, though. Things ain’t as different on this side as you think; it’s the view that’s different. You ever climb one of those skyscrapers and drop a quarter into one of those cheap telescope things?”
“Sure, when I was a kid.”
“Where I be is like looking at the world through one of those all the time without needing no change at all. It’s not that I always understand what I’m looking at, just that I can see a whole lot more and a whole lot farther.”
“What’s this have to do with Luke, champ?”
“Got a quarter?”
“Sure.”
“Then pretend you’re using it to see what the world looks like up close from a distance. Whole new perspective that’ll show you what you’re missing.”
“What am I missing?”
Epps brought the empty root beer bottle back to his mouth and blew into it across the top, creating a whistling sound that jibed with the harmonic twang sprayed by the wind chimes hanging from the porch eave. “Know what else I can see about the world from where I stand? How damn much all this shit is connected. You have no idea.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“You know I can’t do that, Bubba. I can’t tell you what to see, only where to look.” Epps cast his gaze upward. “Your boy’s safe and sound, and you’re fine leaving it at that instead of asking the questions you should be. But you gotta watch something else right now, that being your back.”
“So what else is new?”
“Know the biggest assholes I ever knew on the inside? Wasn’t MS-13 or them racist pigs of the Aryan Nation. Know who it was? Russians. They’re an altogether different breed, like their clocks wind through less hours of the day or something. I swear, they hated life so much they didn’t care about dying, and that made them more dangerous than any others I ever come across.”
Cort Wesley felt something cold grip his insides. “You talking about the ones I messed with outside Dallas today?”
“I’m talking in general, but those’ll do for starters.”
“Meaning I haven’t seen the last of them?”
“Not sure on that account, Bubba. I might need no change to peer through that rooftop telescope, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see nothing but dark through it sometimes, and this is one of those times. I just don’t like the sound of what I see. I don’t like it none at all.” Leroy set the root beer bottle back down atop the railing, a sudden gust of wind jiggling it a bit, and gazed upward again. “Just remember what I said about those connections.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I said all you needed to hear if you was listening, Bubba. And I’ve outstayed my welcome. You don’t mind, I need to be off, find myself another root beer. Leave you to your thoughts.”
“Anything el
se on your mind, champ?” Cort Wesley asked Leroy Epps, his insides still twisted into chain mail.
“Ask the Ranger,” was all he said, his tired eyes sad, peering out into the night toward something Cort Wesley had no hope of seeing.
29
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS
Caitlin stopped at Dylan’s room first, poking her head in to find Zach sitting on the edge of the bed, face lost in his hands.
“You okay?” she asked him. “You need anything?”
“No,” he said, clearing his throat. “I’m good.”
“You try your parents again?”
Zach flashed his phone, his hair swimming past his shoulders. “Voice mail.”
“What about your real dad? Think you should call him?”
The boy started to look down, then stopped. “No. That’s the last thing I want to do.”
Caitlin didn’t press him on that. “You’re a hell of a soccer player.”
“I guess,” he shrugged.
“You made all-district as a freshman.”
“Second team.”
“Only freshman who did, though.”
Zach narrowed his gaze on her, looking glad that Caitlin knew that.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked him.
“Sure.”
“You see those same lights Luke did? Off to the left of where you were in the woods?”
“I think so. I don’t remember for sure now.”
“Well, anything you do remember, make sure you tell me, no matter how small. Don’t hesitate, okay?”
Zach nodded. “Ms. Strong?” he said, after she’d turned back for the door.
Caitlin swung round again. “It’s Ranger. But you can call me Caitlin.”
Zach took a deep breath. “There’s something I need to tell you, something you need to know. That joint? It was mine.”
“What joint?” Caitlin asked him.
* * *
Luke was sitting on his bed, reading by a single lamp’s light. “Couldn’t sleep,” he said, before she could knock on the jam of his open door.
“Still scared?”
“You think Dylan’ll be pissed?”
“Why would he?”
“For letting somebody sleep in his bed.” Luke looked down and then up again, legs tucked beneath the covers and wearing a T-shirt that read “I Heart Texas.” “He’s on his way home, right?”
“You spoke to him before me or your dad.”
“Maybe we should wake Zach up and move him somewhere else before Dylan gets here.”
Caitlin took a few steps into the room and stopped. “You ready to talk about last night?”
“You mean about those lights I told you I saw?”
“I mean about anything.”
“I can’t tell you anything about those missing kids. I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of something I haven’t thought of before. A sound, maybe, or a glimpse I caught of something without realizing.”
“I’m not talking about those missing kids, Luke. I’m talking about you.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” the boy snapped, an edge creeping into his voice. “I’m not missing.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
“Ready to do what?” Defensively now.
Caitlin thought she saw Luke’s shirt rippling, in rhythm maybe with his heart suddenly hammering against his rib cage. “Whatever it is you’ve got to tell me,” she said, meeting his eyes, which were having trouble meeting hers, “I’ll be ready to listen as soon as you’re ready to talk.”
Caitlin started to turn for the door, then stopped. She watched Luke look down for a time and then look up again, as if expecting to see Caitlin gone, but relieved when she wasn’t.
“If you’ve got a few minutes,” he started, “maybe I’m ready now.…”
30
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS
“Well?” Cort Wesley posed when she stepped back out onto the porch.
“Luke was asleep.”
“Took you a long time to figure that out.”
“I just wanted to make sure.” She stopped, choosing her next words carefully. “I heard you talking to someone from inside.”
“I’ll whisper next time.”
“Leroy?”
“What do you think?” Cort Wesley asked, and then he started again before Caitlin could answer. “Sometimes I think I’ve gone fully around the bend.” He looked toward the porch railing, expecting the empty root beer bottle to still be there, but it was gone. “Only two people in this world who make any sense to me, and one of them’s not in this world at all.”
“Speaking of sense…”
“What were you and Luke talking about?”
“I told you—”
“I know what you told me. Now tell me what you talked about.”
Caitlin came up close to the porch swing but stopped short of taking her seat back. “It’s been a long day, Cort Wesley.”
He rolled his eyes. “You sound like Leroy.”
“Maybe you should listen to him more.”
He shook his head. “I swear the two of you have joined forces. Maybe it was him you were talking to upstairs, not Luke.”
Caitlin remained standing. “Except he was down here talking to you.”
“It’s been a long day, Ranger.” Cort Wesley cracked a smile that seemed to rise out of nowhere. “Wonder if our dads argued like this that time they worked together.
“We’ll have to ask Captain Tepper what happened next, after the night of that famous bar fight.”
“No, we don’t, Ranger,” he told her, “because I know a part of the story too.”
31
HOUSTON, TEXAS; 1983
“Russian guy I’ve been dealing with, the one who ripped me off, goes by the name of Stanko,” Boone Masters explained from the passenger seat of Jim Strong’s pickup truck. “I call him Stinko.”
Jim lowered the binoculars from his eyes. “Bet that pissed him off.”
“Well, he pissed me off first, and that was even before he ripped off my warehouse.”
“Full of those appliances you ripped off from others.”
“You saying that made what he did okay?”
“Stealing from a crook? I don’t believe that would get him any sympathy from a court; you neither, Mr. Masters.”
They were baking in the August sun on the rooftop level of a parking garage directly across the street from a gleaming downtown building that served as the international headquarters for a company called MacArthur-Rain that Jim had never heard of. The building stood out from the other skyscrapers around it, not only for its ultramodern, sleek look but also for the courtyardlike grounds that adorned a private landscaped plaza where any number of employees were currently eating a picnic-style lunch. Not bad work, if you could get it, Jim supposed, as the song “She Works Hard for the Money,” by Donna Summer, continued playing over the truck’s radio.
Down in the plaza, the man Boone Masters had called Stanko was huddled among three other men who were even bigger and broader than he was. The leaders of the Russian gang Masters claimed had ripped off his warehouse seemed to be competing for which man could hold the most smoke in his lungs. They were chain-smoking their lunch, grinning up a storm, and seeming to eye every pretty woman that passed by, in unison, making just enough of a scene to make those women feel uncomfortable. Casting the kind of leering, lurid glares that were enough to make their visual targets eat lunch at their desks for the rest of the week. Their uniformly dark suits worn over light shirts and black ties made them look more like caricatures lifted from an artist’s imagination than the real-life violent thugs they were.
“Why do you do that?” Masters asked suddenly.
“Do what?”
“Call me ‘mister.’ I’d be obliged if you stopped showing me false respect. You figure that, by addressing me that way, it creates some kind of bond between us. I’m here it to tell you t
hat it hasn’t and won’t.”
“You finished?” Jim asked Boone Masters.
“Huh?”
“Waving your dick in the air, trying to claim the upper hand when, so long as I got that unsigned warrant on my desk for your boy’s arrest, you might as well use that hand to diddle yourself. Now, what else can you tell me about Stanko’s gang?”
“They smell like potatoes and piss vodka. I don’t know the names of the other three, never exchanged a word with them. What I can tell you is they have no regard for us at all.”
“Us as in Texans?”
“No, as Americans. They only want to be doctored by a Russian, have their house painted by a Russian, their broken window fixed by a Russian. You don’t speak the language and come from a place I can’t pronounce, you’re just passing through until they have no use for you anymore.”
“You describing yourself in that regard?”
Masters frowned, then let the look dissolve into a sneer. The first bars of “Every Breath You Take” by the Police started playing and he switched off the radio. “Never figured you for a Top Forty man, Ranger. Figured you more for the country music type, or maybe news radio.”
“Well, as long as my daughter, Caitlin, likes that kind of music, that’s what I listen to. Michael Jackson’s her favorite right now. He ever plays a concert in these parts, I’ll have to put in to work the security detail so I can take her.”
Masters gnashed his teeth, his jaws working like he was chewing a nonexistent piece of gum. “That a reference to our relative merits as parents?”
“I never took my kid on a job with me, Mr. Masters. You can do the math on that as good as me. Now, get back to the Russians.”
Before resuming, Boone Masters turned the radio back on and spun the dial to a country station playing “You’re Gonna Ruin My Bad Reputation” by Ronnie McDowell, the song seeming oddly appropriate enough to leave him easing back a bit on his throttle.
“I thought I was a different,” he told Jim Strong. “Guess all the others they ripped off thought the same thing. They come at you real friendly. New guy who showed up recently said he liked my jacket, so I gave it to him. Gesture of goodwill, right? I come outside from the meeting and it turns out his crew had stolen the mag wheels off my truck while he was thanking me. Hey, stop laughing.”