Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Bob Gleason Editor, friend, and the smartest man I know

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Before we start, it’s time to give some much deserved shout-outs to those who make it possible for me to do what I do, as well as do it better.

  Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but let’s start at the top with my publisher, Tom Doherty, and Forge’s associate publisher Linda Quinton, dear friends who publish books “the way they should be published,” to quote my late agent, the legendary Toni Mendez. The great Bob Gleason (see the dedication page), Karen Lovell, Elayne Becker, Phyllis Azar, Patty Garcia, Ryan Meese, my copyeditor Jessica Manzo, and especially Natalia Aponte are there for me at every turn. Natalia’s a brilliant editor and friend who never ceases to amaze me with her sensitivity and genius. Editing may be a lost art, but not here thanks to both Natalia and Bob Gleason, and I think you’ll enjoy all of my books, including this one, much more as a result.

  My friend Mike Blakely, a terrific writer and musician, taught me Texas first-hand and helped me think like a native of that great state. And Larry Thompson, a terrific writer in his own right, has joined the team as well to make sure I do justice to his home state along now with his son-in-law, a state trooper who would make a great Texas Ranger himself, who suggested the Balcones Canyonlands as the setting for my fictional Indian reservation in these pages. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Jack Briggs, the real “Steeldust Jack,” for letting me borrow his nickname.

  Check back at www.jonlandbooks.com for updates or to drop me a line, and please follow me on Twitter @jondland. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank all of you who’ve already written, Tweeted, or e-mailed me your thoughts on any or all of the first seven tales in the Caitlin Strong series. And if this happens to be your first visit to the world of Caitlin, welcome and get ready for a wild ride that begins as soon as you turn the page.

  P.S. For those interested in more information about the history of the Texas Rangers, I recommend The Texas Rangers and Time of the Rangers, a pair of superb books by Mike Cox, also published by Forge.

  No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.

  —MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

  PROLOGUE

  The framers of [the Ordinance Establishing a Provisional Government] clearly envisioned the Rangers as an irregular force, distinct from traditional military units or volunteer citizen soldiers. The corps would consist of three or more companies of fifty-six men each, rangers serving one-year enlistments. Rangers would furnish their own horse and tack, weapons, and powder and shot for one hundred rounds. Each company would be headed by a captain, backed up by a first and second lieutenant. The captains reported to a major. The major answered to the commander in chief of the regular army.

  —Mike Cox, The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso 1821–1900 (New York: Forge, 2008)

  1

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS; 1874

  “What ’xactly you make of this, Ranger?”

  Texas Ranger Steeldust Jack Strong looked up from the body he was crouched alongside of—or what was left of it. “Well, he’s dead all right.”

  The male victim’s suit coat had been shredded, much of the skin beneath it hanging off the bone. He’d worn his holster low on his hip, gunfighter style, and his pearl-handled Samuel Walker Colt was the latest model, updated from the one Jack Strong had used since joining the Texas Rangers after the Civil War.

  Steeldust Jack checked what was left of the man’s shirt for a darker patch where a badge, removed after he’d been killed, would have blocked out the sun, but he found none. So this was no Texas lawman, for sure, but a gunman of some sort all the same, who’d managed to get himself torn apart just outside a stretch of land set aside for the Comanche Indian reservation a half day’s ride out of Austin.

  Steeldust Jack rose awkwardly on his gimpy leg until he was eye to eye with Abner Denbow, the county sheriff who’d sent a rider to the state capital to bring back a Texas Ranger from the company headquartered there.

  “Fought plenty of Indians myself over the years,” Denbow told him. “I believe that makes me the wrong man to venture onto that land the government gave them for no good call I could see.”

  “It was Sam Houston who gave this patch to the Comanche originally,” Steeldust Jack reminded.

  “Yeah, well even the great ones make mistakes, I suppose.”

  The recently signed Medicine Lodge Treaty had deeded this parcel to the Comanche, dividing them from their brethren who were settled, along with the Apache, in southwestern Indian territory, between the Washita and Red rivers. A treaty was supposed to mean peace. With the exception of the peaceful sect that had settled on this reservation, though, the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa continued to make war, conducting raids on civilians and cavalry officers alike. It was that fact, along with the general lawlessness along Texas’s increasingly populace frontier, that had led to the Rangers being officially reconstituted just a few months before.

  For the first time in the state’s history, Texas had a permanent Ranger force. But the ruin of his leg by Civil War shrapnel kept Steeldust Jack from joining up with the Frontier Battalion for which his gunslinging skills made him a better fit. Instead, he was assigned to one of the newly chartered Ranger companies responsible for patrolling various parts of the state to keep the law. And today keeping the law meant figuring out what the body of a well-dressed gunman was doing within spitting distance of an Indian reservation.

  “Any indication there of who he might be?” Denbow asked Steeldust Jack.

  “I can’t find a wallet on him, Sheriff. But the boots this man’s wearing are practically new, and the wear on his trousers tells me they’re pretty much new too. Given there ain’t much left of his face, I don’t suspect anybody’ll be recognizing the man anytime soon.”

  Denbow took off his hat and scratched at his scalp, which was marred by scaly, reddened skin. “Looks like the work of a bear to me. That was my first thought.”

  “You ever seen a bear kill, Sheriff?”

  “No, sir, I have not.”

  “People normally run and the bear gets them from behind. So that’s where you find the initial wounds. Only this man’s got no wounds at all on his back. He also doesn’t have any wounds on his hands and arms consistent with trying to ward the animal off.”

  “You’re the Ranger who made a name for himself in the war,” Denbow said suddenly, his cheeks looking plump and rosy in the harsh, hot light of the afternoon. I recognize you from the limp.”

  Steeldust Jack looked at him, without changing expression. “You know how I made that name for myself?”

  “Not exactly.”<
br />
  “I came home.”

  Which was true enough in Jack Strong’s mind. He’d proudly served the Confederacy as an infantry officer with the Texas Brigade, under General John Bell Hood. The brigade distinguished itself during the Seven Days Battles, where it routed Northern forces at Gaines’s Mill, captured a battery of guns, and repulsed a cavalry counterattack. Its status was further strengthened when it spearheaded a devastating assault at the battle of Second Manassas, overrunning two Union regiments and capturing a battery of guns.

  The Texas Brigade’s reputation for fighting was sealed at the Battle of Sharpsburg, when it closed a gap in the Confederate line and drove back the two attacking Union corps. Of the 854 that went into battle at Sharpsburg, 550 members of the Texas Brigade were killed or wounded. Being one of the survivors allowed Steeldust Jack to fight in the Battle of Gettysburg.

  “You took Devil’s Den with a bullet still lodged in your leg,” Denbow said.

  “Lots of men took Devil’s Den, and lots more died in the process. But there weren’t enough of us left to take Little Round Top, and you know the rest. Anyway, unlike most that day, I made it home.”

  The bullet was gone now, but too much shrapnel remained in his leg to risk removal. The field docs had wanted to take his whole leg instead of bothering, but Steeldust Jack was hearing none of that. He’d earned that nickname for shooting so fast and reloading so quick that it seemed a cloud of steel dust from the bullet residue hung in the air over him. The nickname had stuck and had accompanied him back to Texas, where still having both legs allowed him to ride and fish with his boy, William Ray, who’d recently followed his father into the service of the Texas Rangers.

  All the same, the wound’s lingering effects made it hard to stand too long on his gangly legs. Any quick step stretched a grimace across his expression, tightening the sinewy band of muscles stitched across his arms, chest, and shoulders.

  “So it wasn’t a bear,” Denbow was saying, eyes back on the well-dressed stranger’s body.

  “It wasn’t a bear.”

  “Then what was it?”

  Steeldust Jack turned his gaze in the direction of the Comanche reservation. “Think I’ll see if somebody there can tell me.”

  Denbow scratched at his scalp again, deepening the red patches, which looked like spilled paint. “You might want to reconsider those intentions.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’ve heard stories, that’s all.”

  “Stories?”

  “About the Comanche living on this here reservation. A strange lot, for sure, gone back to living the old ways, since way back before they ever even saw a white man. I heard some of them been alive at least that long, that they got some deal with their gods that lets ’em live forever.”

  “Stories,” Steeldust Jack repeated.

  “They never leave the reservation, Ranger. Live off whatever they can fish or farm, and make do with the rest of whatever’s around them. At night, when the wind’s right, you can hear ’em performing all these rituals about God knows what.”

  “Anything else?”

  “They’re a dangerous lot for sure, that’s all.”

  Steeldust Jack didn’t look convinced. He lumbered all the way back upright, grimacing until he was standing straight again.

  “Tell you what’s dangerous, Sheriff,” he said, his gaze tilted low toward the body of the unidentified man. “Whatever did this. ’Cause I got a feeling it’s not finished yet.”

  2

  NUNAVUT, CANADA; NOVEMBER 1930

  Joe Labelle was dying, the freezing cold having pushed itself through his clothes and skin to numb him right to the bone. He could feel the blood slogging through his veins, turning his movements sluggish to the point that the thick snow waylaid him more with each step. All that kept him going was the certainty that an Inuit village lay ahead amid the ice mist that made him feel as if he were walking through air choked with glass fragments. Seemed much thicker than fog, and trying to breathe hurt all the way down to his lungs. Every time he came close to giving up, though, the image of one of his boys appeared before him, urging Labelle on. Their mother being lost to tuberculosis proved more than enough motivation to make him push through the numbness and avoid the temptation to stop awhile to find his breath.

  I just need to rest for a few minutes. Then I’ll be fine.

  Winter’s harshness had come early this year to Canada’s Lake Anjikuni region. It would’ve been reasonably tolerable if the sun shined more than six hours per day, so that Labelle didn’t have to keep trekking through snow mounds as high as his waist in the darkness. But he had visited this area before and he knew it to contain a bustling village perched on the lake, where gentle currents dappled the shoreline. Formed of tents, primitive huts, and ramshackle shanty structures visible under the bright spray of the full moon, sure to be inhabited by friendly locals proud of the fact that theirs was one of the few outposts in the great frontier. Labelle felt a tremor of hope pulse through him, his heart pounding anew, his skin suddenly resilient against the frigid, prickly air.

  The hope faded as quickly as it came.

  Labelle could see those ramshackle structures silhouetted under the full moon, but he saw no people about, nor barking sled dogs, nor any other signs of life. Labelle also noted with a chill that not a single chimney had smoke coming out of it. Then he spied a fire crackling in the narrowing distance, evidence of some life, anyway.

  Labelle, his heart hammering so hard against his rib cage that his chest actually hurt, picked up his pace and headed toward the glowing embers of the dying fire in the distance, eager to find some trace of humanity. The ice crystals lacing the air felt like flecks of sand scratching at his mouth and throat, dissipating the closer the trapper drew to the flames. He was greeted there not by a friendly face but by a charred stew that had bafflingly been left to blacken above the embers.

  Labelle had spent his life negotiating shadowy and inaccessible lands, no stranger to the dark legends of lore in places that could steal a man’s mind. Right then and there, he wondered if this whole thing was some illusion, a twisted dream or mirage built out of snow instead of sand. What else could account for a village being abandoned in such a manner?

  Maybe I’m dead, he thought as he walked past derelict, wave-battered kayaks, into the heart of the ghost village. Either he was lying in the snow somewhere back a ways, imagining all this, or the village had … had …

  Had what?

  Labelle methodically pulled back the caribou-skin flaps and checked all of the shacks, hoping to find telltale signs of a mass exodus, but much to his chagrin he discovered that all of the huts were stocked with the kinds of foodstuff and weapons that never would have been abandoned by their owners. In one shelter he found a pot of stewed caribou that had grown moldy, and a child’s half-mended sealskin coat, discarded on a bunk with a bone needle still embedded in it, as if someone had deserted their effort midstitch.

  He even inspected the fish storehouse and noticed that its supplies had not been depleted. Nowhere were there any signs of a struggle or pandemonium, and Labelle knew all too well that deserting a perfectly habitable community, without rifles, food, or parkas, would be utterly unthinkable, no matter what circumstances might have forced the tribe to spontaneously flee.

  Labelle scanned the borders of the village, hoping to ascertain in which direction the Inuit might’ve gone. Even though the villagers’ exit seemed to have been relatively recent, and hasty enough to leave food on the flames, he could find no trace of a single snowshoe or boot track marking their flight, no matter how hard he searched under the spill of the bright moon.

  But then the wind shifted and his nose caught a scent that froze him to the bone, even through the chill he was already feeling. A smoky, carrion stench that reminded him of coming upon the body of a trapper who’d frozen to death in winter and whose body didn’t begin to thaw until spring.

  Labelle followed a narrow, choppy path through the
thick snow, into an overgrowth of brush and dead trees entombed in white. He saw smoke wafting up from what looked like some sort of natural depression in the ground. The smoke rose straight out of that shallow slice of ground, rooted in smoldering clumps that the fire hadn’t finished with yet.

  Smoldering clumps …

  Labelle got no farther. His legs gave out and he sank into a bank of snow thick enough to reach his neck. He wasn’t sure he’d ever move again, wasn’t sure he wanted to, until he heard a shuffling sound coming from the thickest part of the grove. Labelle knew the sound of feet crunching over hardpack when he heard it, though the wind and crackling flames disguised just how many sets were coming.

  Labelle didn’t wait to find out. He pulled himself through the drifts, finally reclaiming his feet and dragging himself along.

  The trapper quickly lost track of how long or how far he walked from there. He knew only that, as he made the trek, he was the whole time fearful of looking back to see what might have been coming in his wake.

  He stumbled upon a remote outpost not long after dawn, sure to be rewarded for his persistence with food, warmth, and shelter.

  “What are you exactly?” a ranger greeted him after responding to Labelle’s pounding on the door. He ran his eyes up and down the trapper’s ice-encrusted clothes and hair, then his face which was sheathed in a thin layer of it as well. “Please say a man.”

  “I am that,” Labelle said, exhausted and picking at the ice frozen to his beard. “But what’s coming might not be.”

  “What’s coming?” the ranger repeated, gazing over Labelle’s shoulder. “What say we get you warmed up inside?”

  Labelle followed the ranger through the door, the blast of warm air hitting him like a surge from a steam oven. He could feel the ice crystals attached to his skin, hair, and beard turning to water, the flow from his clothes leaving thin puddles in his wake as he made his way to the fire.