Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  “Their only solution being to burn them.” Caitlin nodded.

  “Exactly. Knowing the whole time they’d have to die too, to stop the spirits in their tracks.”

  “And this is what that trapper stumbled his way into.”

  Beauchamp moved to the window and opened the blinds all the way, as Captain Tepper was normally loath to do. He wrinkled his nose at the stale scent of cigarettes that hung in the air like a stubborn cloud, and opened the window all the way, in the hope of vanquishing it.

  “Labelle’s trapping trails had likely brought him to the village before. He probably knew some of the residents.”

  “But not what killed them.”

  “No. The trapper lit out through the cold and snow for civilization and ended up at a ranger station with a telegraph, ranting that whatever killed all the villagers was following him.”

  “What,” Caitlin repeated, “as opposed to who.”

  “The cold had turned him delirious. He passed out after the wire was sent, and he thought the whole thing had been a bad dream, when he finally woke up.”

  “What else did the Mounties find when they got to the village, Pierre? You wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t something.”

  Something changed in the Mountie’s expression. His cheeks paled, and the flatness of his face suddenly seemed to lengthen it. “There was, Ranger, and this is the part only you are going to believe.”

  78

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  The echo of the broken glass and hiss of the bullet were still cutting through Cort Wesley’s skull when he yanked Cray Rawls off the chair and dragged him to the floor, where Guillermo Paz was already lying, safe from the angle at which the shooter was firing.

  “There’s a taller building, three hundred yards to the west,” Paz noted. “That’s where the shot was fired from.”

  “Three hundred yards,” Cort Wesley calculated, running the distance through his mind. “Shooter’s no rank amateur.”

  But that same mind had already moved in another direction altogether, the puzzle pieces starting to link together. Somebody was covering their tracks, somebody who didn’t want anyone else to learn what Sam Bob Jackson and Cray Rawls knew: the truth about what was on that Indian reservation.

  Not oil.

  Something else.

  Clear enough.

  “I’ll move on the building,” Paz was saying, “as soon as we’re outside.”

  “Got to get there, first.” With that, Cort Wesley pushed closer to Rawls, across the rug, positioning himself right next to the man’s ear to make sure Rawls heard what he said. “We’re going for the door, into the hall. Don’t raise even a hair on your neck. You hear me? Nod if you do.”

  Rawls managed what passed for a nod, fingers stretching out to pull himself through the nap in the carpet.

  Cort Wesley drew his gun; Paz had his in hand already. The sniper would know he’d missed at least one of his primary targets, along with the two men whose presence he couldn’t have anticipated. In point of fact, Rawls was only alive now because Cort Wesley had yanked him to the floor ahead of the inevitable second shot, which as a result had never come. That meant a backup team would be left to finish the job. They were either en route to this office now or were lying in wait downstairs.

  Pfft, pfft, pfft.

  More gunshots showered flecks of glass through freshly bored holes. Those had been fired in desperation. The shooter was hoping to panic his intended victims, make them launch into a desperate rise. Cray Rawls started to do just that, but Cort Wesley pushed him back down before he got anywhere.

  Pfft, pfft, pfft.

  Still pulling himself across the carpet, Cort Wesley couldn’t chase from his nostrils the scent of blood and gore from Sam Bob Jackson’s ruptured skull. Paz was in the hallway by then, reaching back inside to drag Rawls the rest of the way. He kept his gaze fixed toward the office entrance, in case the backup team elected to storm the premises.

  The moment his upper body crossed through the door frame, Cort Wesley was thinking origins, and only one possibility came to mind: ISIS.

  The two men Homeland had managed to identify from an Austin patrolman’s body cam … Cort Wesley couldn’t remember their names, but clearly their cell had gone active. They wanted whatever was on that land belonging to the Comanche, and they didn’t want anyone to know that they were after it.

  Back on his feet, finally, out of view of any windows, Cort Wesley jerked Rawls upright and held him against the wall to the side of the door.

  “What’s on that land, you son of a bitch? What are you hiding?”

  Rawls’s features had calmed, his eyes suddenly as steely as they were evasive. “Get me out of here and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

  Cort Wesley pulled him on again, drawing almost even with Paz, once they reached the reception area.

  “No one’s coming,” the colonel reported, eyes and gun focused on the bank of elevators immediately beyond the office’s glass front wall.

  “Downstairs, then.”

  “Dressed as first responders, police or medical.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do you think, outlaw?” Paz said to him, leaving it there.

  “Right,” Cort Wesley said, stretching a hand out toward the paneled wall, where it met the glass. “Just what I was thinking.”

  And with that, he pulled the fire alarm.

  79

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “You won’t find this village or the tributary off Lake Anjikuni on any map,” Pierre Beauchamp continued. “In the spring of 1931 the remains of the village were bulldozed, buried under tons of earth and ice, all trace of anything that had ever been there wiped clean.”

  Caitlin continued to regard him from the other side of Captain Tepper’s desk, the two of them standing and facing each other across it.

  “And the villages for maybe fifty square miles were emptied,” he continued, “their residents resettled elsewhere, on orders of the government, without explanation. It wasn’t hard to cover things up in 1931.”

  “But what were they covering up, besides old Inuit folklore?”

  “We caught the Russians sniffing around the area a few years back.”

  Caitlin nodded. “I had my own run-in with them not too long ago.”

  “So I heard. I’d say Texas seems to attract this kind of stuff, but as I recall, you dragged it with you to Canada and got me shot.”

  “I didn’t drag anything with me, Mountie; the Hells Angels were waiting when I got there. Get back to those Russians.”

  “It was close to being a diplomatic fiasco, and we didn’t get a thing out of them before the powers that be arranged for their safe passage home.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Wish I was. That’s what put the now missing village and Joe Labelle on my radar.” Beauchamp stopped, as if to study Caitlin across the desk, but it was more to steady his thinking. “Something killed those Inuits as they ate, sat, or stood, and I think that same thing is responsible for the victims found in that Austin diner. And, whatever it is, what’s left of ISIS has come out of their desert to claim it for themselves.”

  Caitlin was about to respond, then realized that her silenced phone was buzzing up a storm in her pocket. She yanked it out, saw CORT WESLEY running down the center maybe a dozen times, a single text message grabbing her attention.

  “Looks like ISIS isn’t coming, Mountie,” Caitlin told Beauchamp. “They’re already here.”

  PART EIGHT

  Retired Ranger Captain Frank Hamer (who brought down Bonnie and Clyde) wrote a letter to King George V of England offering the services of 49 retired Rangers to help defend England against German invasion. Although FDR vetoed the idea, Germany got wind of the offer and panicked. In a radio address, Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels assured the German nation that the mighty Texas Rangers were not invading. (September 16, 1939)

  —Bullock Texas State History Mu
seum, “The Story of Texas”

  80

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  Cort Wesley and Paz reached the lobby with Cray Rawls in tow, just as the evacuation of the building was peaking. The fire alarm continued to blare while building security made a concerted but calm effort to evacuate according to plan. There was no panic in evidence anywhere as the two men escorted Cray Rawls, between them, across the floor.

  Cort Wesley’s gaze was primed for anyone probing or scanning the crowd. They’d likely come in the guise of first responders, so their actions wouldn’t particularly stand out. They would look like part of a larger operation connected to the sniper firing from a neighboring building. It was the way such things were done, the way he’d do it.

  But there was nothing that set Cort Wesley’s defenses screaming—no glimpse of any figures out of place or moving against the grain, no one studying the building occupants as they emerged into the sunlight. That suggested that the sniper had been the operation rather than just a part of it. Even the best shooter couldn’t be expected to bring down four men from such a distance. That told him that the presence of Cort Wesley and Paz likely had nothing to do with Sam Bob Jackson’s brains getting plastered against the walls, with Cray Rawls’s sure to have followed, had Cort Wesley not intervened.

  Cort Wesley watched Paz moving as if he expected—even hoped for—something to happen. But, with Rawls tucked between them, they exited into the harsh light and thick, still air without encountering any resistance at all. The fact that the building from which the sniper had fired looked down on the back of this building but not the front allowed them to skirt through the milling crowd unhindered and without slowing. Paz’s truck was parked closer than Cort Wesley’s, so they headed toward its position, a half block down, the sun just beginning to encroach on the shade in which Paz had parked it.

  “Deal’s a deal,” Cort Wesley said to Rawls, when they were in the backseat of Paz’s massive truck. “We got you out of there. Now talk, starting with the truth about what you’re after on that Indian reservation.”

  Rawls had his phone pressed against his ear before Cort Wesley even realized he was holding it. “Think I’ll just call my lawyer first.”

  Cort Wesley snapped out a hand, clamping it on the man’s wrist. “You might want to rethink that, partner.”

  Rawls winced from the pain in his wrist, but clung to his cell phone. “I’m not your partner, cowboy. My partner just got his brains splattered back up in that office.”

  “I thought he was just your associate.”

  Rawls tried to smirk through the bolts of pain shooting up toward his elbow. “If you’re really working with Homeland Security, I’m sure we can work something out, once I get my lawyer on the horn here. Now, take your hand off me.”

  Instead, Cort Wesley squeezed his hand harder, picturing his fist reducing the man’s nose to mincemeat and wiping the smirk from his face.

  “You were raised here in Texas, have I got that right, Mr. Rawls?” he asked, his breath heating up as he posed the question.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I’m just curious why you left. Heard you may have had a beef with the law.”

  Rawls stiffened, the smirk wiped from his expression. “You heard wrong.”

  “Something about hurting a woman.”

  “People make up stories, Mr. Masters. I’ve got lots of enemies.”

  “Then you don’t need another, do you?”

  “Could we get to the point?”

  “I believe I already did,” Cort Wesley said. “Reason your partner’s brains are painting his office walls is what you found on that Indian reservation. Problem is, somebody else found it too, and we haven’t got time for phone calls.”

  “How do I know you’re not intending to steal it? How do I know that sniper wasn’t working with you and this isn’t all some kind of setup?”

  Cort Wesley let go of Rawls’s hand and watched it flop into his lap, still holding the smartphone. “Make the call, partner. Tell your lawyer to meet us at the Texas Ranger barracks in San Antonio.”

  81

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  Dylan knew the combination to the safe that held his father’s guns, because his father had given it to him. It was a kind of ritualistic rite of passage, especially in Texas. Passing down the responsibility of guarding the house when his dad wasn’t around. He’d been fourteen at the time, not long after Cort Wesley Masters had moved into the spare bedroom, following the murder of Cort Wesley’s girlfriend, and Dylan’s mother, Maura Torres.

  “So next time you’ll be ready,” his father had said, after teaching him to shoot on a nearby range.

  Cort Wesley Masters wanted his oldest son never to feel helpless again, but Dylan felt helpless now. His memory of what he’d seen in the shed on White Eagle’s property had been foggy, a result of being forced to ingest more peyote, but it had been sharpening again in the past few minutes.

  Hanging from hooks all over the walls of the shed were things like iron lawn tools, which looked lifted from some cheap horror movie. At first he had mistaken them for work gloves, but then he recognized one tool, fashioned in black steel, as a cultivator—a hoe-like assemblage with two curved prongs set over a third. He touched a fingertip to one of the prongs, then jerked it away when the slight motion was enough to prick his skin. Somebody had sharpened it to a razor’s edge. It was nine inches long, with a wooden handle half that size sewn inside a work glove.

  At first glance, it might have seemed that the jerry-rigging was intended to make the tool more convenient to use. But a second glance revealed something else entirely: the tool would make a deadly weapon, as would all the other tools dangling from the walls, like the one he recognized as a loop hoe. Impossible to determine how old they were or how long they’d been hanging there. The only clear thing was that they’d been fashioned for one purpose and one purpose only: killing, up close and personal, in the most violent style imaginable.

  Like the work foreman whose mutilated body had been found within reach of the Miraculous Medal that had belonged to Dylan’s mother. The apparent victim of an attack by an animal bigger and stronger than a bear.

  Or by a person, or persons, trying to give that impression.

  Ela knew all about that, and more—Ela and her Lost Boys. Neither his dad nor Caitlin was answering their phone, and Dylan wasn’t about to wait around for them to get home to tell them what he’d finally recalled from last night.

  You don’t pull a gun unless you intend to use it.

  Something else his father had taught him. So, was that what he intended to do now, to head back to the reservation and gun down Ela’s cousins, the Lost Boys? Was that just punishment for how they’d humiliated him the night before?

  He’d been spared only by Ela’s intervention—which made no sense, considering everything else. If she was setting him up, why save him? Why the second thoughts?

  It made only slightly more sense than the Lost Boys leaving him tied to that tree with baling wire. They were out to make more than just a point. It was like they were leaving him there for something, sacrificing him, the way the ancient Greeks chained virgins to rocks for monsters to have their way with, so the monsters would leave them alone.

  Was Ela supposed to finish him, the way she or someone else had gutted the work foreman with something like a cultivator or loop hoe, probably zonked out on peyote at the time?

  What do you think you’re doing here, exactly?

  Whenever Dylan got it into his mind to do something stupid, he’d hear Caitlin’s voice in his head. The more cocksure he felt, the more softly it reached him. He heard it now as a whisper, because who was she to talk, anyway? How many bad guys had she shot?

  The safe snapped open.

  From within, Dylan removed a stainless steel Smith & Wesson model M&P9 nine-millimeter with striker fire action, a seventeen-round magazine, and a reasonably compact 4.25-inch barrel. Wedging it into the back of his
jeans, however, left his dad’s voice humming in his ear instead of Caitlin’s: I warned you about those skinny jeans, son, didn’t I?

  Dylan would leave his shirt untucked, bring a jacket along for the ride. Ela had been playing him this whole time. Time to turn the tables. Get to the reservation and get Ela to help him smoke out the assholes who’d tied him to that tree. He couldn’t let it go, just couldn’t. Beyond that, he didn’t have much of a plan.

  The doubt set in when he clambered down the stairs and headed for the garage, where the 1996 Chevrolet S-10 pickup that he’d bought with his own money sat mostly unused. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d started it up, and he couldn’t be sure his dad had been keeping up with things, either. So, with doubt making its presence felt and second thoughts creeping in, Dylan made a deal with himself: If the old truck started, he was heading to the rez. If it didn’t, he wasn’t.

  He hit the garage door opener and welcomed the sunlight, looking forward to feeling it burn into him the whole time he was driving north toward Austin. Maybe.

  Dylan climbed behind the wheel, got himself settled in the old seat, worked the key. The engine sputtered, coughed, almost stalled.

  Then started.

  82

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Why don’t you have a go at this guy?” Caitlin said to Jones, after Cort Wesley had escorted Cray Rawls into a third-floor office that Captain Tepper had emptied out, intended as a replacement for her desk downstairs.

  “Am I hearing you right?” Jones asked her, disbelief crinkling the hard features of his face, which made it look like someone had soldered the skin into place.

  “Man’s already called his lawyer. I don’t believe that matters much to Homeland Security.”

  “No, Ranger, it doesn’t.”

  “We got maybe twenty minutes before the lawyer gets here.”