Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  Al-Aziz’s eyes widened as he smiled, freezing Daniel Cross’s breath and his insides anew.

  “Mashallah,” said the military commander of ISIS. “As Allah wills.”

  72

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Company F headquarters was already frantic with activity by the time Caitlin arrived the next morning. Captain Tepper looked like a traffic cop, directing Caitlin toward the conference room as soon as he spotted her. She spotted White Eagle seated at one end of the table, flanked on either side by men with graying ponytails and clothes better fit for the nineteenth century.

  “Glad you stopped by, Ranger,” Tepper said, before they entered. His expression was tight and pained, as if talking was aggravating a toothache. “White Eagle was just getting ready to press charges against you.”

  “For what, exactly?”

  “Criminal trespass, mostly, since Rangers have no authority to operate on the rez—a fact that seems to have slipped your mind. Speaking of which, I just heard from Doc Whatley. That candy wrapper you found in the cave matched the DNA from identical wrappers recovered from Daniel Cross’s apartment. He also said he needs to talk to you about the other ‘sample’ you left with him. That’s what he called it.”

  “Guess the trespassing paid off, then, Captain.”

  “Not until you tell me what the hell all this has to do with ISIS and those deaths in Austin.”

  “Maybe White Eagle can tell us,” she said, as Tepper finally thrust open the door to the conference room.

  * * *

  Caitlin looked the old man in his milky eyes the whole time introductions were exchanged. She figured the men flanking the old Comanche were tribal elders, chiefs, lawyers, or maybe some combination of all three.

  “You mind taking a seat, Ranger?” Captain Tepper said, his words more than just a suggestion.

  Caitlin sat down four chairs from White Eagle, unable to keep her eyes off him. His skin looked like the top layer peeling off of sun-ravaged shingles, his eyes encased in flesh so mottled it looked like meat left too long on a grill.

  “All right, Chief,” Tepper said to White Eagle, “I’m doing you the courtesy of seeing if we can deal with all this like the men we are, before the horse gets too far out of the barn.”

  “I’m not a chief,” White Eagle told him. “Never was. And there’s nothing to deal with. Your officer trespassed on Comanche land last night and I want her prosecuted for that to the fullest extent of the law.”

  “She’s not an officer, sir, she’s a Texas Ranger.”

  “My apologies, Captain.”

  Tepper looked toward Caitlin. “You mind addressing the man’s charges?”

  “They’re false and baseless.”

  “Beyond that, I mean.”

  “I was investigating the presence of a person on the reservation, wanted in connection to the potential terrorist attack in Austin two days ago, in my capacity working adjunct for Homeland Security. Specifically, Daniel Cross was spotted in the vicinity the day before that attack. I tracked him to a cave on the river that cuts through the length of the preserve and straddles the rez.”

  “So you’re admitting the trespass,” one of the tribal leaders or lawyers said, leaning forward so fast he came half out of his chair.

  “Not at all,” Caitlin told him. “I’ve been over the old maps. The start of the river has always been a natural demarcation point that divides reservation land from the nature preserve. As such, the cave where I recovered vital evidence last night is off the reservation. How is that a trespass?”

  “So you deny being on White Eagle’s property,” the man advanced, “disturbing his peace, and entering a storage shed?”

  “I do indeed,” Caitlin said, thinking of Dylan’s misadventure the previous night, which had left him tied to a tree with baling wire. “And I’ll tell you something else,” she continued, her words aimed at the old man now. “I believe your client, or fellow tribesman at least, is a liar, a con man, an original snake oil salesman for the books. He tells quite a story, about being a century and a half old, how he met my great-great-granddad and all, when his birth certificate, registered with the state of Texas, lists him born in the year 1937. Near as I can tell, he’s not even related to his namesake, and he was picked up by Austin police and the county sheriff more than a dozen times for running games on folks off the rez when he was a younger man. Tell me, ‘White Eagle,’ have I got all that right?”

  “You have nothing right,” the old man said, the smugness of both his voice and his expression surprising her, “and neither did your great-great-grandfather. He was a fool, just like you are. Sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, believing it was to see justice done.”

  “As I recall, he stood up against John D. Rockefeller on your behalf.”

  The old man suddenly looked twenty years younger; even the white film seemed to slide off his eyes. “We didn’t need his help then and we don’t need your help now. And you have things all wrong, then and now, as well.”

  “How’s that, sir? If you’ve got a story to tell, let’s hear it.”

  73

  AUSTIN, TEXAS; 1874

  According to Sheriff Abner Denbow, the bodies of the three young braves had been found dragged to death across the rocky ground. The rope burns were still evident on the insides of their wrists, indicating they’d been dragged facedown, which accounted for the unrecognizable condition of their features. Their faces looked like somebody had peeled the flesh off in random patches. One boy was missing a big chunk of his nose, two might have died from blood loss after somebody took a bowie knife to their testicles, and all three had been scalped. No one had known the young braves were missing until their bodies were discovered propped against a tree just outside the reservation, not far from where the body of the gunman had been found. Each was clutching a piece of John D. Rockefeller’s letterhead stationery.

  Denbow had gotten word about the bodies from a farmer driving his crop-filled wagon down the road. By the time he’d ridden out there the Comanche had started removing the bodies and, having no particular desire to venture onto the reservation himself, Denbow summoned Jack Strong to the scene. Steeldust Jack had been certain he’d be returning to the rez before long, though he hadn’t expected it would be this soon, or under these circumstances.

  “I’d like to see the bodies,” he told Isa-tai, outside his shack on the edge of the Comanche land, which was set against a brook fed by the backflow from a nearby river.

  “They aren’t your concern, Ranger.”

  “I’d prefer you let me be the judge of that, all the same.”

  “Matters are under control,” Isa-tai assured him.

  “Is that what you call having three boys strung from horses and dragged to death?”

  “They were only boys in age. Their spirits have already been reborn many times in our history, and now they will be reborn again.”

  “What about the need to hold their funerals first, or doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “Everything is under control,” Isa-tai said, as quiet and sure as the first time. “We take care of our own. And when you cross us, you cross nature itself.”

  “Like you took care of those boys, you mean. Rockefeller’s hired guns must’ve been laying in wait when they ventured out to fish, or hunt maybe. This has got ambush and cold-blooded murder written all over it. Why don’t you just cooperate and help me take this John D. Rockefeller down?”

  Isa-tai looked into the sun without squinting. Braves, their faces colored with war paint, flanked him on both sides like statues. The only trace of movement was the wind whipping their long, coal-black hair about. Steeldust Jack didn’t think they were blinking.

  “They’ll be back,” Steeldust Jack told Isa-tai. “This won’t stop ’til Rockefeller gets what he wants. Right now, that’s the oil on your land, and he’s not about to back off until his pumps are lifting it out of the ground.”

  “So we should make a deal with him, Ra
nger? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “I could go to him on your behalf, see if we can come to terms, to be secured by the Texas Rangers. He’s a businessman, and a fight like this is bad for business.”

  Isa-tai held his eyes closed for a long moment, then opened them again, the cadence of his breathing unchanged. “They must’ve gone fishing before the sun. I heard their screams, felt their pain, in my sleep. I’ve been feeling it ever since. Only one thing can stop me from feeling it.”

  “You don’t wanna do this, son.”

  “Do what?”

  “Rockefeller isn’t a man you cross, unless you got an army backing you up.”

  “We don’t need an army. We have the land.”

  “What the hell does that mean?’

  “He would violate nature. So I will call upon nature to be our army.”

  “You mean, like you did for that gunman who was found torn apart?”

  “Nature takes care of its own, Ranger,” Isa-tai droned, the words sounding as flat as memorized stage lines. “And we are its own.”

  “I might still be able to make this right,” Jack Strong told him, “’fore anybody else gets hurt.”

  “Ride off, Ranger. You don’t want to be here for what’s coming next.”

  Which, Steeldust would later reflect, turned out to be ever so true.

  * * *

  He found John D. Rockefeller again in the Metropolitan Hotel, which he’d pretty much appropriated for his own use, including a back portion where he’d based his offices. Twenty years earlier, a man named George J. Durham had shot William Cleveland to death right outside the entrance, after the younger man had attacked him with a walking stick, in a case later ruled by a judge to be justifiable homicide. Steeldust Jack didn’t think it a coincidence that the Northerner had headquartered there, being of the firm belief that places soured by violence tended to attract men with a penchant for it themselves.

  Rockefeller greeted his presence with a wide grin, pulling at his mustache, first one side and then the other. “You know what it means to walk into a lion’s den, Ranger?”

  “Mr. Rockefeller, I spent time in the Civil War getting shot at from as little as five feet away,” Jack Strong told him. “Compared to that, a lion’s den is a church picnic.”

  “I don’t think that’s the case at all,” Rockefeller said, sizing up Steeldust Jack as if he were an animal in a cage. “I hear you fancy yourself a hero, a gunfighter. Maybe you are. But did you really think that little stunt of yours would make me pull up stakes and run?”

  “Well, I was hoping it might make you come to your senses about sitting down with the Comanche instead of trampling on their sovereign land.”

  “Negotiate with them, you mean. And what do you expect the result of that would’ve been?”

  “I imagine they would’ve told you to stuff hot tar up your rear. Which doesn’t change the fact it’s their land.”

  “So it is, and so it will stay. But, unless you’ve forgotten about that letter from the governor, duly authorized by the United States Congress, you know that I have the rights to mine the oil beneath their land.”

  “I don’t believe I follow you, sir.”

  John D. Rockefeller got the look of a gunman who knows he’s got his target centered. “The Comanche were deeded that land all right, but they don’t control what’s beneath it. Call it a technicality.”

  “I call it bullshit.”

  “All the same, Ranger, neither you nor anyone else has the authority to stand between me and that oil—or to come in here accusing me of being complicit in the tragic murder of three Indians when the Texas Rangers have killed thousands.”

  Steeldust Jack took a step closer to Rockefeller, invading his space, unperturbed by the bodyguards who were coming just short of unholstering their pistols. “So you’re telling me you weren’t sending a message by leaving a piece of your stationery in the hands of all three Comanche who were found dragged to death?”

  “I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Then try this: those Indians may have no claim to what’s beneath their land, but once the oil breaks the surface it becomes Indian property, to do with what they please, doesn’t it? Maybe you should ask Governor Coke to weigh in on that one.”

  Rockefeller moved his mouth to the left, the right, and back again. Around him, nondescript men were busy at desks, working ledger books and studying detailed maps. In Jack Strong’s mind, they were either tallying up the profits from one venture or looking for the best sites for the next one. Whoever was either inconvenienced or displaced was considered meaningless.

  “Progress stands aside for no man, Ranger,” he said, his voice scratchy and genuine.

  “The victims who got dragged to death were boys, sir. How does that fit into your equation?”

  * * *

  That night, Steeldust Jack set himself up in a chair down the street from the Metropolitan Hotel, off the plank walk and in the cover of a mercantile exchange, so he couldn’t be seen. Prior to sitting down with a twelve-gauge shotgun laid across his lap, he’d fastened a lock through an old hasp on a rear door that formed the only other entrance to the building, leaving this as the only access point.

  Activity in the area had increased significantly since John D. Rockefeller’s arrival. Each day the noon train seemed to bring more of his security men and sycophants, their dress and demeanor distinguishing them from one another, though their loyalties were the same. That, coupled with Rockefeller having taken over pretty much all of the hotel for his use, indicated he intended to be here for a while, perhaps as a base for his entire Texas operation. This surely accounted for the endless parade of town officials into the Metropolitan to kiss his proverbial ring, and the governor bending over backwards to do his bidding.

  For his part, Steeldust Jack’s concern lay in what he saw as inevitable retaliation on the part of the Comanche. In times not long past, they would storm the street on horseback, firing at anything that moved, using Winchester lever-action rifles stolen off trains they’d raided or soldiers they’d killed. But he wasn’t expecting that here. It didn’t seem to fit this particular tribe’s style, although Isa-tai’s surly and confident manner suggested that the Comanche had no intention of taking this lying down.

  Nature takes care of its own, Ranger, and we are its own.

  Isa-tai’s words made no more sense now than they had when he’d spoken them earlier, but their memory held more than enough portent to keep Steeldust Jack mostly awake and alert through the night. He caught himself snoozing a couple times. Once, he was actually roused by his own snoring, a fact that set him to smiling—just before the gunfire began.

  * * *

  It was wild and unfocused, crackling through window glass and thudding squarely into walls bracketed by heavy studs. Steeldust Jack had his shotgun ready as he sprinted down the street, which was wet with mud from a heavy storm that had blackened the sky briefly, back when day still shined. He burst through the doors of the Metropolitan to find men in various stages of dress rushing about, clambering up and down the stairs that led up the whole of the building’s four stories. A number of men, the last of the residents not associated with Rockefeller’s dealings presumably, blew past him, desperate to escape what seemed like an all-out attack sure to claim its share of bystanders.

  More gunfire echoed, a cascade of it that seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air, now rich with the odor of gun smoke, hanging over the second-floor landing like a cloud. Steeldust Jack pushed past men struggling with boots or suspenders, to the third floor, where the first window glass had blown out. Rounding the stairs up there, he recognized Curly Bill Brocius and another gunman from the original group, their pistols aimed at the last three doors down the hall, which from this angle looked to be torn from their hinges.

  Jack Strong advanced ahead, paying them no heed, his nose sucking in the thick odor of sulfur and the coppery scent that could only be blood, likely lots of
it. Even during the war, in the worst battles in which he’d been embroiled, he’d never smelled it this strong, and the sight of the inside of the first room showed him why.

  From what he could tell, a pair of men had been bedded down in matching beds. The scent of their sweat and boot odor was light on the air in comparison to the smell of blood and, this close, their shredded entrails. Because what was left of them was scattered about the twisted bedcovers and the floor, with portions strewn across the walls. It looked and smelled like a slaughterhouse, only the room’s darkness sparing him closer consideration. The splashed blood and gore looked black in the glow of the moonlight sifting through the window and the spill of the lanterns coming from the hall.

  Nature takes care of its own, Ranger, and we are its own.

  Isa-tai’s words flashed through his mind again. But this wasn’t the work of nature, at least not any nature Steeldust Jack was familiar with.

  The other two rooms were the same—two men in one of them, three in another, for a total of seven men slaughtered and mutilated, inside of a minute by all accounts. Steeldust Jack reconstituted the sounds and sights that had roused him in the street, ultimately figuring that the occupants of all three rooms had been struck within seconds of one another.

  When his stomach settled, the Ranger made it a point to check the pools of blood for residual footprints, but he found none. Neither did he find any trace whatsoever in the hallway. Bullet holes stitched the walls of all three rooms in jagged designs, indicative of wild shooting absent of aim. A few of those holes, more like chasms dug out of wood, wallpaper, and plaster, looked to be made by shotgun shells, which were unlikely to miss anything they’d been pointed at from so close a distance.

  None of it made a damn bit of sense.

  Just after Steeldust Jack’s cursory inspection of the rooms was complete, John D. Rockefeller came striding down the hall, within a protective circle of gunmen armed to the teeth.

  “I didn’t want this to go to guns, Ranger,” Rockefeller told him, his voice groggy and his gaze uncertain. “I truly didn’t. But now that it has…”