Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  He let his thought trail off, the intent of his words hanging there between them with more meaning than any he could have spoken.

  “I don’t know what killed your men, sir,” Steeldust Jack told him, “but it wasn’t guns.”

  “Say that again, Ranger?”

  “I checked the bodies as best I could,” the Ranger explained, his hand still hot from holding the lantern before him. “I know a bullet wound when I see one, and I didn’t see one. No, sir, not even close. And I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Rockefeller. From what I heard and seen, the men in all three rooms were attacked at pretty much the same time.”

  “What are you telling me, Ranger?”

  “That maybe this time you’re up against something you can’t beat. Maybe it’s time to leave town, and Texas too.”

  Rockefeller’s lips quivered, making his mustache seem like it was fluttering. “I don’t scare easy.”

  “I suppose not. You hired soldiers to fight in your stead in the Civil War,” the Ranger continued. “Buying out the Clark brothers positioned you to make your fortune off the backs of men like me, coming home to try and pick up our lives. You have a reputation for destroying your competition and just about anyone who gets in your way. Just ask Charles Pratt and Henry Rogers. The horse that plowed their company over was really your Standard Oil, and I believe you came to Texas intending to employ the same strategy here.”

  Rockefeller’s thin smile glinted in the flickering light. “You been checking up on me, Ranger?”

  “Local library got its share of newspapers, for any man willing to look.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read.”

  Jack Strong watched John D. Rockefeller close the distance between them, until he was close enough to smell the stale aftershave clinging to the man’s clothes, mixing with stale sweat.

  “You tell those Comanche I won’t be scared off, Ranger. You tell them if it’s a war they want over their oil, then they’ve got it.”

  Steeldust Jack cocked his gaze briefly back toward the blood-soaked rooms. “I believe they’re already aware of that, sir.”

  74

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “I assume all that jibes with your recollection,” White Eagle said, upon finishing his tale.

  “Close enough. And you know something? It doesn’t change a thing. I’m not Steeldust Jack and you’re not Isa-tai, no matter what you want to lead people to believe.”

  “People believe whatever they want. John D. Rockefeller crossed my people back then, just like Cray Rawls has crossed my people today.”

  “I don’t know. It sounds to me like Rawls and Sam Bob Jackson have bought their way onto Comanche land with the promise of scholarships and gainful employment. How’d you make out in that deal, sir?”

  White Eagle moved his gaze back to Captain Tepper. “This conversation was a waste of time,” he said. “We’ll be filing a complaint directly with the Department of Public Safety.”

  Caitlin looked him right in the eyes, which suddenly appeared clear and sharp. “Whatever you’re involved in here isn’t going to come to a good end for any of those involved, especially you.”

  “I’m too old to care about your threats. Nothing much scares me anymore, least of all the Texas Rangers.”

  “I’d rethink that, if I were you, sir.”

  * * *

  D. W. Tepper closed the door to the conference room after White Eagle and the other two men had left.

  “Could you refresh my memory as to what century this is? Because you sure talk like the nineteenth never ended at all. Aw hell, forget it. There’s someone else here you need to speak to, someone who might actually be able to serve our cause.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who’s got information he says he’ll share only with you.”

  75

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  Cray Rawls hadn’t slept much the night before. It reminded him of the nights he had spent huddled outside his mother’s room while the floorboards shook in rhythm with the bed inside. How he’d tucked his arms around his knees, trying to make himself as small as possible, even invisible, to whatever man eventually emerged from inside, smelling salty and something like the odor that hung in the air in his elementary school gymnasium.

  Accompanied by his pair of hulking bodyguards, Rawls arrived at the west Houston offices of Jackson Whole Mineral to review plans for the operation about to commence on the Comanche Indian reservation outside of Austin. An auspicious day, indeed, given the stakes and potential profits involved, but all Rawls felt was trepidation and anxiety. A little boy again, huddled against the wall in the cold, fearful of what was to come.

  It shouldn’t have been that way. Should have been smooth sailing from here, after getting the deal closed with the damn Indians. It was going to cost him additional millions, but who cared? Spending millions to make billions was the price of doing business.

  One bodyguard preceded him through the entrance of the office building where Jackson Whole Mineral was headquartered, the other trailed slightly behind. He noticed the security desk was unmanned. This wasn’t a surprise, considering the likely cost-cutting efforts, but it further jangled his already jittery nerves. He felt like an old dog sensing a thunderstorm in the offing, looking for a bed to roost under until it passed.

  Upstairs, the glass entrance to Jackson Whole Mineral was open and unguarded—contrary to the strict orders he’d given that fat-ass Sam Bob. Rawls stormed down the hall ahead of his bodyguards, canting his shoulders sideways as he entered Jackson’s office overlooking the main artery of the west Houston Energy Corridor.

  The fat man sat there, sunk into his overstuffed desk chair, his blank expression fixed straight ahead. He seemed reluctant to stop looking at whatever he was staring at.

  “What gives, Sam Bob?” Rawls demanded. “I have to wipe your ass for you now?”

  He felt a presence behind him, just before a whoosh of air signaled the door blasting closed. Cray Rawls swung around to find a rawboned man glaring at him with an expression forged in steel.

  “I’m Cort Wesley Masters, Mr. Rawls. I believe it’s time the three of us had a little talk.” He stopped when he heard the door easing back open.

  “Excuse me,” Cort Wesley corrected, as Guillermo Paz entered, dragging the limp frames of Rawls’s bodyguards behind him as if they were rag dolls. “I meant the four of us.”

  76

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  Cort Wesley had driven straight through the last of the night, once he was sure Dylan was going to be fine. He couldn’t bear waiting out the hours while the boy got the drugs and the awful encounter he’d experienced out of his system. He’d be left pacing the floors and punching holes in the walls out of feeling helpless to do anything to those who had tied his son to a tree with baling wire.

  He’d arrived in west Houston before the building even opened. No stops. The sky was beginning to brighten without him even noticing. He’d found Paz waiting outside his massive extended-cab pickup, in an area around the side, out of sight of any visible security cameras, his thoughts mirroring Cort Wesley’s.

  “Hello, outlaw.”

  “Did Caitlin send you?”

  Paz’s huge eyes looked like curved saucers wedged into his skull. “I was running a bingo game last night and called the number seventy, under the O. O for outlaw—that’s what I said, and when I knew.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “I believe I did,” Paz told him. “Now, are you ready to get to work?”

  * * *

  “Take a seat, Mr. Rawls.”

  Cort Wesley had thoroughly enjoyed Rawls’s and Sam Bob Jackson’s reactions to the sight of Guillermo Paz dropping two men with chiseled frames in heaps on the carpet. Hovering over both, on the chance either of them stirred, in the course of the meeting about to commence. The absence of the additional three guards Rawls had ordered posted no longer needed to be ex
plained.

  “Right there,” Cort Wesley continued, gesturing toward the chair set before Jackson’s desk. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  Cray Rawls did as he was told. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I think you know.”

  “If you got business with Mr. Jackson here, that’s no concern of mine. You want to get on with it, I’m glad to leave.”

  Cort Wesley glanced at the two limp frames on either side of Guillermo Paz. “What about them?”

  “I couldn’t even tell you their names.”

  “The fact is, I’ve got business with both of you,” Cort Wesley told him. “And, just for the record, it was my son you kidnapped to roust me. Well, consider me rousted.”

  Rawls glared at Jackson across the desk, then turned back to Cort Wesley. “You put a couple construction workers I was paying in the hospital during this unfortunate protest. In responding to that, Mr. Jackson here overstepped his bounds. If you’d let me make it up to you and your boy, I’d be glad to—”

  “What about my oldest son?” Cort Wesley broke in, before Rawls could finish his thought.

  “You didn’t kidnap him too, did you?” Rawls snapped toward Jackson.

  Sam Bob was in the midst of a shrug when Cort Wesley resumed. “My oldest was attacked on the grounds of that Comanche reservation last night.”

  “Why does that concern me?”

  “Because it concerns whatever you’re fixing to draw out of the land.”

  “Oil?”

  “Don’t play me for a fool, Cray.”

  “We on a first-name basis now? I still don’t even know who you are.”

  “Yes, you do. I’m sure you had me checked out after your business partner ‘overstepped his bounds,’ as you call it—though I’d prefer to call it scaring the wits out of a teenage boy.”

  “He’s not my partner.”

  “Oh no?”

  “Barely qualifies as an associate.”

  “Then we’re getting somewhere.”

  Cray Rawls straightened his shoulders and crossed his legs. “What do I have to do to make this right, Mr. Masters?”

  “Ever hear of Homeland Security?”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Okay,” Rawls relented, shaking his head. “I’ve heard of Homeland Security.”

  “Right now, you’re talking to me,” Cort Wesley picked up. “You don’t tell me what I want to know, I let the colonel there take over. He works for Homeland. Isn’t that right, Colonel?”

  Paz nodded, once.

  Rawls uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in his chair. “Wait a minute. What am I missing here? What’s Homeland Security’s interest in all this?”

  “You talk to me, Cray, maybe you never need to find out. Let’s say that Indian reservation now involves a big, fat national security issue. You keep playing coy here and you might find yourself a resident of Guantanamo with all your assets frozen.”

  This prospect didn’t seem to faze Rawls at all. “I’m not some sand jockey who tried to blow up a plane with his underwear. And I just beat a major class action beef back East.”

  “Where they let you have lawyers. No such luck when dealing with Homeland, right, Colonel?”

  Paz nodded again. Once.

  Rawls flashed a smirk that looked only partially forced. “You really think I’m buying this shit? You think a man like me can disappear, no questions asked?”

  Cort Wesley took a few steps closer to him, glaring down. “For sure. But you can spare yourself the bother of all that by just telling me what it is you’re after on that Comanche land.”

  Rawls swallowed hard, his eyes flashing like the tiny lights on a computer modem. “You in a position to offer some guarantees, Mr. Masters?”

  “Like what?”

  “What I’m after on that reservation stays mine.”

  “How about this?” Cort Wesley spoke down at him. “You get to keep your freedom.”

  “You got this all wrong, cowboy.”

  “What’d you call me?”

  “Hey, you’re from Texas. It was meant as a compliment.”

  “Sure it was.” Cort Wesley crouched just enough to be even with Cray Rawls. “Let’s try some simple yes-or-no questions. Is there oil on that land?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “So you’re after something else.”

  “I’m telling you, you’re way off on this, cowboy.”

  “Let’s go back to yes or no. Are you after something else?”

  “Yes.”

  “On that reservation?”

  “Yes.”

  Cort Wesley stood back up. “Essay question now. Describe for me what it is, exactly.”

  “Not a weapon.”

  “I didn’t ask you to say what it isn’t.”

  “It can’t hurt anyone, only help. And I mean help on a level truly beyond your comprehension.”

  Cort Wesley turned toward Paz. “You want to have a go at him, Colonel?”

  “No, wait!” Rawls pleaded, hands thrust before him, bulging eyes fixed on Guillermo Paz. “It’s about how long those Indians have lived through the generations, the contents of their medical records.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Potentially the greatest medical find in history.”

  “What else?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Depends,” Cort Wesley said, crouching down again, an instant before he heard a ping, followed by something whizzing through the air over him.

  The same instant that Sam Bob Jackson’s head exploded.

  77

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “You’re looking good, Ranger,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Pierre Beauchamp greeted Caitlin, upstairs in Captain Tepper’s office where he’d been waiting for her.

  “I wasn’t the one who got shot on the last case we worked together, Mountie,” Caitlin returned, taking his outstretched hand.

  Beauchamp shrugged humbly. “All worked out for the better. Thanks to us taking down those Hells Angels, I ended up reassigned to a Joint Terrorism Task Force dealing primarily with border issues.”

  “Big shot now, eh?” Caitlin asked him, doing her best to mimic a Canadian accent.

  “You’ve been doing pretty well for yourself, too, from what I hear.”

  “If you count being a pain in just about everybody’s ass, I suppose.”

  “You take down the Hells Angels, you can take down just about anyone.”

  “They’re nothing compared to what we’re facing now.”

  “ISIS, from what I’ve heard.”

  “You’ve heard right. And my guess is your coming all the way down here is connected to them. Something my captain said you’re only willing to share with me, I’m figuring’s, got nothing at all to do with border issues. That because of our history, Mountie?”

  “More on account of the fact that I know you’ll believe what I’ve got to say, Ranger.”

  Beauchamp laid it all out as quickly and succinctly as he could; he was a no-nonsense man, good at making his points. Except for a touch of gray at the temples, he looked exactly as Caitlin remembered him: straitlaced and by the book, from his demeanor to his dress to the way he held himself. His pants were perfectly pressed and his shirt showed nary a wrinkle, to the point that Caitlin figured he must have changed after getting off the plane. He had a boy’s plump, rosy cheeks but a gunman’s steely-eyed stare that could look both ways and straight ahead at the same time.

  Beauchamp closed Captain Tepper’s office door before launching into the tale of a Canadian fur trapper named Joe Labelle who, in 1930, happened upon an Inuit village in Nunavut, Canada, where the entire lot of residents had vanished at virtually the same time. Meals had been left uneaten, fires were untended, and big jugs of water, filled at a tributary off the nearby Lake Anjikuni, had been abandoned on the ground and left to freeze.

  “For a long time,” Bea
uchamp told her, “it was Canada’s version of your lost Roanoke Colony.”

  “Difference is, that mystery’s really never been solved,” Caitlin reminded, “while I’m guessing yours was.”

  “Not to the knowledge of many, Ranger. I knew I had to get my ass on a plane as soon as I read the situation report on what happened at that Austin restaurant. Eighteen dead, was it?”

  “Twenty-two, including the staff.”

  “That Inuit village numbered twice that.”

  “But they disappeared.”

  “Turned out, they didn’t disappear at all. Turned out, Labelle found what was left of them, after somebody had burned all the bodies.” He paused, then continued, “Near as I’ve been able to tell, the residents of the village were all struck down within minutes of each other.”

  “Sounds like quite a leap, Mountie.”

  “Not when you consider the trapper’s story, along with the on-scene reports from my predecessors. Just about the entire village was eating, or about to eat, supper at the time. And the fact that the food still on their plates told the first Mounties on the scene that whatever happened, happened fast. Just like in your restaurant.”

  “And what did those Mounties say about what killed your villagers?”

  “Nothing, because they didn’t have a clue, especially given that whatever evidence there might’ve been had gone up in smoke.”

  “What about whoever did the burning? Did this trapper Labelle mention anything about them?”

  “He didn’t. But the Mounties who responded to Labelle’s report recovered two still-whole bodies not far from where the rest of the bodies had been burned. One had his throat cut, and the other his wrists. They died sitting back to back. I believe it may have been determined they were brothers.”

  “One cut the throat of the other, then slit his own wrists,” Caitlin concluded. “Makes sense. What doesn’t is why they did it, and why they burned the bodies in the first place.”

  “The tribe was relatively primitive, having lived the same way for centuries. They were also superstitious, beholden to the spirit world for guidance. The brothers might have returned to the village and saw the mass deaths as the work of evil spirits who intended on taking over the bodies of the dead.”