by Jon Land
Jim sucked in some breath. “Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.”
“It was thirty-five degrees, and I had no coat and no wheels—yeah, I can see the humor there. Problem being, who does someone like me go to when they’ve been ripped off? Try putting a crew together to take on these Russians, who sleep in their bulletproof vests.” The sneer vanished, replaced by an expression so flat it seemed to swallow the wrinkles that too much time in the sun had dug into Masters’s brow and cheeks. “That’s why I’m sitting here beside you right now. Since I can’t get them, helping you is the next best thing.”
“Get back to this new guy.”
“What about him? He showed up just before they jacked my warehouse.”
“I was going to ask you why he showed up, not when.”
“I know when. Can’t tell you why, except to say Stinko didn’t seem too happy about it.”
Jim didn’t seem to hear him; too busy working with the binoculars again.
“When exactly do you plan on telling me what this is really about, Ranger?”
“You asked me that already.”
“I must not have gotten an answer worth remembering.”
Jim Strong moved the binoculars slightly, staying on Stanko’s gang as they moved into the shade from the sun. “It started with an alert.”
“What kind of alert?”
“One that tells law enforcement bodies that the Soviets may have sent KGB agents here in the guise of mobsters. Kind of a last stand, since they realized the Cold War was a lost cause.”
“Stanko?”
Jim lowered the binoculars. “How long’s he been here?”
“I was fencing merchandise through him for over a year before he ripped off my warehouse.”
“That would square with the timing mentioned in the alert,” Jim said and raised the binoculars again.
Achoo!
“Gesundheit,” Jim said across the cab.
“Wasn’t me, Ranger.”
Jim laid the binoculars down on the bench seat between him and Masters and threw open the driver’s door, shaking his head. “Well, shit…”
He stepped out of the truck, the sun heating up his skin on contact. He moved to the pickup’s bed and yanked back the tarpaulin that should’ve been covering a toolbox and bag of old clothes he’d forgotten to drop at the Goodwill.
It was covering his six-year-old daughter, Caitlin, instead.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said, biting her lip.
“What you doing back there, little girl?”
“Figured you could use some help. ‘Backup,’ Grandpa calls it.”
Jim nodded. “He know you came along?”
“Nope. I snuck past him when he was taking his morning nap.” She lowered her voice and leaned closer to him. “Don’t tell him I told you, but Grandpa’s old.”
Jim Strong hoisted his daughter from the bed and placed her down before him.
“I forgot my Colt,” she continued, referring to the old Peacemaker Earl Strong was using to teach her how to shoot. “Hit the target with every shot at the range the other day, a couple in the bird’s-eye.”
“That’s bull’s-eye.”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
“You can’t be doing this, Caitlin.”
“What?”
“Coming to work with me.”
Caitlin looked up toward the shape of Boone Masters, who had the binoculars pressed against his eyes now. “Is that man working with you?”
“I suppose.”
“He got any kids?”
“One son, I believe.”
“Does he shoot?”
“I’m sure he does, little girl.”
“Bet he’s not as good as me,” Caitlin said, her upper lip stiffening.
And that’s when the shooting started on the plaza below.
* * *
Jim Strong pushed Caitlin against the truck frame for safety. “Stay right there and don’t move, not even an inch!”
He had his .45 out it the next instant, sweeping around the length of the truck as the distinctive clack of gunfire continue to pour up from the plaza. Jim first saw the bystanders scattering in all directions, having abandoned their picnic-style lunches and looking ridiculously small from this distance. The gunfire ratcheted into a staccato barrage and Jim got a bead on the gunmen as a pair of them was opening up with automatic weapons, assault rifles, blasting away at Stanko and his gang, who were twisting and turning like some crazed dance step before finally crumpling or falling backwards. The gunmen were all wearing ski masks, darting away in opposite directions before the last member of Stanko’s crew had hit the plaza ground.
Jim wished he could leap from the top of the parking garage to the ground like Superman and chase the bastards down. As it was, he’d have to charge down six flights, only to emerge back into the day with the stench of urine from the parking garage stairwell stuck to his nostrils—for no good reason now. The shooters would be long gone by the time he got his breath back, and following that plan meant leaving Caitlin in the company of Boone Masters.
So he climbed back into his truck, leaving the door open as he grabbed the radio mike from its stand and called up Houston police. Not that he needed to; sirens were already wailing in the distance, and Jim tossed the mike down in frustration.
“I warned you about these Russians,” Boone Masters smirked.
“Yeah? Well, from my angle, Stanko and his boys just got turned into Swiss cheese. It would seem our association has come to an end.”
Masters shook his head. “No, it hasn’t.”
“Come again?”
“That new Russian I told you about, that I gave my jacket to? One of the gunmen we just watched do the shooting down there looked awful familiar to me, because he was wearing that jacket.”
32
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS
Caitlin smiled whimsically. “That was your father in the front seat of my dad’s truck that day? I never got a good look at him. My dad made me ride home under the tarp, even though it started to rain to punish me.”
“You ever stow away like that again?”
“Oh yeah, a couple times, anyway.”
Cort Wesley flashed a smile slighter than hers. “So you met my father long before you met me.”
“We weren’t exactly introduced. How’d you know?”
“It was one of the last things my dad and I ever talked about. He got a kick out of telling the story. He was doped up on painkillers in the hospital at the time, so I wasn’t even sure it was true. Until we actually met, that is. Then I knew it had to be.”
Caitlin smiled slightly. “Jim Strong would’ve liked the boys, Cort Wesley.”
“Boone Masters would’ve, too—would’ve likely seen them as extra hands on the cheap to take on a job, just like he saw me.”
“Seems a different man than the one you’ve told me about often enough.”
“That’s because I was never sure any of the story about him and your dad teaming up was real, until Captain Tepper confirmed it.”
Caitlin realized only then that the swing was rocking and likely had been through the whole of the story Cort Wesley had just finished. Her stomach felt a little unsettled—more from the memories, though, than the swaying. Most of the time she liked holding them in her mind, but tonight, for some reason, was different.
“Get back to what you were talking about before,” she said across the swing, which was slowing now.
“Before what?”
“Before you changed the subject from our friend Jones, the man whose checks you’ve been cashing to pay for your kids’ educations.”
“I told you—”
“Right, Homeland Security’s using direct deposit now.”
“I’m not sure he’s even Homeland Security anymore,” Cort Wesley told her.
“Then what is he?”
“I’d say kind of acting in a freelance capacity, off the books.”
“In other words,” Caitin advanced, “
free to use men like you and Paz without making any accounts.”
“As long as it pays the bills, that works for me.”
“You mentioned something about Russians too.”
“Yeah, specifically the owner of a strip club off Harry Hines Boulevard, just north of Dallas. I planted an old-fashioned bug in his office. Looked mobbed up to me.”
“Why would Jones be interested in him?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Since when does Homeland Security, or its various offshoots, care about a Russian mobster? Or the Russian mob in general?” Caitlin stood up, needing to stretch her legs but also made suddenly uneasy by the whole conversation. “Jones is up to something.”
“Jones is always up to something, Ranger. That’s his business.”
“Not if it involves Texas. And if something about this mobster caught his eye, that’s something I need to be seeing, too.”
Cort Wesley joined her on his feet. “So call him.”
“Can’t. I programmed my phone to blow up if I ever press out his number again.”
“Okay, so tell me what you and Luke talked about upstairs.”
“I already told you that he was asleep.”
A taxi pulled up to the curb, Dylan lunging out of the backseat before it had even come to a complete halt. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and jogged toward them across the front yard. He bounded up the porch in two bounds and surged straight past Caitlin and Cort Wesley as they moved to greet him.
“I can’t believe you people,” he said, shouldering his way through the front door.
Cort Wesley and Caitlin were just looking at each other when her cell phone rang, “Captain Tepper” lighting up in her caller ID.
“You get any sleep, Ranger?” he asked for a greeting.
“Not yet. Why?”
“Because you’re not going to. Dallas authorities got a suspect in the disappearance of those kids.”
PART FOUR
While the gunfight [between Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and two men named McMeans and Phillips] was in progress there was a Nolan County grand jury in session. The jury paused from their deliberation to watch the entire street battle from upstairs windows across the street. In a supreme example of the swiftness of Texas justice, while Frank was being treated by the doctor for his wounds, the grand jury convened in the matter of the death of McMeans. In minutes it returned a no bill, ruling Frank Hamer’s killing of McMeans was an act of self-defense.
—Dan Marcou, “Frank Hamer, Texas Ranger: Legendary LEO Was a Hard Man to Kill,” Policeone.com
33
MIDLAND, TEXAS
“What do you hear from your contacts in New York?” Calum Dane asked Pulsipher, who was walking alongside him through one of several oil fields Dane owned in the Permian Basin.
“The situation has been contained,” Pulsipher reported. “We’ve dealt with the security camera footage showing Brandon McCabe returning to the hotel, and right now it’s being treated as a missing persons case.”
“And the room?”
“I’ve used these particular cleaners before, sir,” Pulsipher said, leaving it there. “You have no concerns on that front.”
“But I do on another front, don’t I?”
They’d come straight from Midland International Air and Space Port to the first oil field Dane had ever staked, on the grounds of what had been a potter’s field graveyard where he’d buried his own father. On a beautiful, clear morning like this, it was easy to forget the land’s original roots before the pumpjacks had moved in with their steady clanking. He surveyed the scene, recalling the endless rows of graves marked only with wooden crosses and trying to recall the location of his father’s.
“Know the day I got rich, S.?” he asked suddenly, sun blistering his eyes now as it had back then.
“Sir?”
Dane remained facing away from him, gaze fixed toward nothing in particular. “It was the day I buried my father here. It was skin cancer that got him, from too much time spent working the fields right here in Glasscock County. But me getting rich had nothing to do with cotton and everything do with oil.”
To this day, Dane still remembered being transfixed, as a small boy, by the steady chugging of the pumpjack rigs that lined the barren land, sometimes as far as the eye could see. He remembered them so clearly because they’d terrified him at first, sentencing Dane to a week of nightmares the first time he glimpsed a scattered track of them from the back of a pickup truck. His imagination conjured them uprooting themselves from their moorings and waging war on humans the way Martian machines had in some movie whose title he couldn’t remember. And, like another horror movie Dane recalled, about giant ants emerging out of the New Mexican desert, you’d know the metallic monsters were coming thanks to their smell. A corrosive, sulfurlike odor that reminded him of smoldering matchsticks.
“The ground was soft and muddy the day they lowered my dad’s coffin into a grave already pooling with water at the bottom,” Dane resumed. “I’m standing there at my father’s grave site and all of a sudden I catch the faint sulfuric aroma and think to myself, There’s oil here; maybe lots of it. By then, much of the Permian Basin was thought to have gone dry, at least insofar as the limits of current pumping technology went. It had been mostly abandoned by the biggest oil exploration and drilling companies in favor of richer finds easier to plum for their riches. But what I couldn’t get out of my head was the irony of a father who’d never done shit for me while alive coming through big-time now that he was dead and in the ground.”
Dane started to wonder how he compared as a parent, then pushed the thoughts aside because he hated where they took him. A son dead in Afghanistan, then the divorce …
“I guess it was fate, S.,” he said, to distract himself as much as anything.
“Sir?”
“Smelling that oil coming from my father’s grave.”
Dane had worked for a year solid, seven days a week, holidays included, living like a pauper in order to put aside every available penny he could. He finished a year of hardscrabble labor, after lying his way into a job on an offshore oil rig, with just the ten thousand dollars he needed to buy up a few small acres in the area around the potter’s field—available in large part because nobody wanted anything to do with land packed to the hilt with graves and small wooden crosses rising out of the ground.
“That smell was H-two-S, or hydrogen sulfide,” Dane resumed. “Some oil fields, I learned, have sweet crude that contains very little sulfur, while others, like West Texas in particular, have sour crude that contains high amounts of sulfur. And I was particularly sensitive to the scent after hearing stories about people dying in their sleep occasionally, when an oil company accidentally released a gas compound that turned out to be H-two-S. But, officially anyway, they were covered up, with something else being pegged with the blame, at the behest of oil interests that fueled the entire Texas economy. Can’t say I blame them; can you?”
Pulsipher didn’t say whether he did or not.
Dane had leased the mineral rights to the land he’d sold—not to the highest bidder but to a decently high one that included a percentage of the profits. And those profits created the basis for his entire fortune today.
The problem, to some degree, was that Dane had never lost his thirst for adventure, for being the boy again smelling oil rising from his father’s grave. That had produced Dane Corp’s expansion into high technology, petrochemical development, and agriculture. He’d started off buying excess farmland about the Permian Basin. Rolling cotton fields mostly, made especially cheap by the fact that he had his own way of getting the price down.
Dane finally turned and locked Pulsipher in his gaze, his eyes tearing up from the sun. “It turned out that besides being buried in oil-rich ground, my father had done me another favor by teaching me how to battle the pesky varmints that preyed on cotton crops. Boll weevils, mostly; insects that appropriately enough entered the United States in the late ninet
eenth century by crossing the Rio Grande into Brownsville. My father said that some years up to half the state’s cotton-producing land was infested. And, in the worst years, the decline of the crop yield had a direct effect on how much food we could put on the table.
“Now, farmers had employed all kinds of strategies to battle the loathsome bugs, from burning their nesting grounds to laying traps to digging moats filled with a combination of water and gasoline to drown them. But it was my dumb-as-a-stump father with a third-grade education who won the war instead of just a battle.
“My family had been farmworkers and sharecroppers since before the Civil War and had passed down a formula mixing a crude form of turpentine made of simple pine resin with powdered tar. Mixed with dirt, the compound worked because the taste of it was like candy to the bugs that devoured it voraciously, poisoning themselves and left to be crushed underfoot by additional advancing hordes. These boll weevils would then consume the remains, while the ground grew rich with the stench rising from the corpses flattened to a pastelike consistency, which snared further hordes in their tracks. Instead of the cotton, thanks to my father, the bugs ended up eating each other.”
Dane had never forgotten that, or the fact his father could’ve gotten rich off his invention but lacked both the initiative and the smarts to do so. Quite the opposite of his son. And that experience had engrained in Calum Dane an appreciation for the additional revenue that could be coaxed from land kept reasonably free of boll weevils and less-pervasive pests. So, once he expanded his interests into petrochemicals, he invested a fortune in synthesizing the turpentine and powdered tar compound into a chemically enhanced pesticide capable of raising cotton crop yields between twenty-five and fifty percent. That pesticide had enjoyed a spectacular debut, distributed all across the state of Texas, until the cancer shit started, on the eve of its national rollout a few years back.
This had been followed, more recently, by something much, much worse, which was the source of Dane’s biggest set of problems right now, stemming from a goddamn high school field trip to some goddamn nature preserve.