Strong Cold Dead

by Jon Land

  “How about all the women you beat up, Mr. Rawls, like Brandy Darnell? What do they smell like? Having wrong done to you doesn’t entitle you to do it to others.”

  “Don’t preach to me, you bi—”

  Rawls just managed to stop himself in time.

  “I’d rather shoot you, but I won’t,” Caitlin said. “Better get back to this cure for cancer, before you give me reason to change my mind.”

  “You going to let her talk to me like that?” Rawls said to Jones.

  “Like what?” Jones asked him.

  Rawls forced himself to look back at Caitlin. “It’s like I said.”

  “What did you say?”

  “No one paid attention to the fact that those damn Indians almost never get cancer. Not just an improbability, a virtual impossibility.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I asked myself why. I asked myself how. See, the medicinal applications of plant life are hardly new. As I’m sure you’re well aware, many valuable drugs of today, like atropine, ephedrine, tubocurarine, digoxin, and reserpine, came into use through the study of indigenous remedies. And chemists continue to use plant-derived drugs such as morphine, Taxol, physostigmine, quinidine, and emetine as prototypes in their attempts to develop more-effective and less-toxic medicinals.”

  “Something was different on that rez, I’m guessing.”

  “It sure was, Ranger. Those other examples I mentioned don’t necessarily have any effect on the people indigenous to those lands. What’s different on the Comanche land is that the cancer anomaly could only be the result of something the Indians ate or drank.”

  “Native Americans,” Caitlin corrected. “They’re called Native Americans.”

  Rawls pursed his lips and frowned. “Sure. Whatever you say. The point is, these Native Americans weren’t getting cancer, as a direct result of something they were ingesting.”

  “The water?” Caitlin asked him, thinking of how they’d found Daniel Cross’s candy wrapper near the stream running through the cave overlooking White Eagle’s patch of land.

  “That was my first thought, too. I spent months having the water tested, over a year, spent millions before I gave up. Figured I had everything wrong, that I was delusional.”

  “Yeah, greed’ll do that to you.”

  This time Rawls ignored her insult, checking his watch as if wondering what had become of his lawyer—who was currently en route to Houston. “I don’t give up so easy, Ranger. Since you’re so well acquainted with my background, I assume you know that. The water didn’t test magical, but some of the samples didn’t test normal, either. Something was definitely going on, likely spurred by cracks deep underground, from fault lines on which the reservation is located. The water was contaminated with something, which I came to believe might be working its magic in other ways.”

  “The crops,” Caitlin realized. “Something the Comanche were growing.”

  Rawls settled back in his chair. “I’ve said enough.”

  “You ever test any of the animals on that rez, sir?”

  “Animals?”

  “Like the bats that live in the cave formations.”

  Rawls looked genuinely curious. “Why?”

  “Because I did, after a colony of them attacked me. Turns out they’re a species of Mexican free-tailed bats, common to the area, known for nesting under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin. What’s not common is that the ones in that cave were maybe ten times bigger than the ones found under the bridge. And here’s the kicker: the average life expectancy for Mexican free-tailed bats is between four and six years, but by all accounts, the one we tested from the rez was at least fifty.”

  That got Rawls’s attention. “Fifty years?”

  “Could be a hundred. The testing’s not finished yet.” Caitlin paused again, to let that sink in, before continuing. “So, if you weren’t drilling for oil, what exactly are those workmen supposed to do, now that the protesting’s over?”

  “Whatever’s growing on that land is being affected by the chemical composition of the groundwater leaching up from an aquifer we can’t reach through normal means. And to properly recreate the conditions, I’m going to need an oil well’s worth of that magic water.”

  “And if you’re right, I imagine a barrel of that water will be worth a thousand times more than a barrel of oil.”

  “Closer to ten thousand times, Ranger.”

  “So here’s where we’re at, Mr. Rawls.” Caitlin nodded. “Your cat’s out of the bag, as far as the government goes. Keep obstructing us and you’ll end up a coconspirator with whoever we nail in connection with ISIS. You want to tell him how things go from here, Jones?”

  She stepped aside so Jones could take her place, looking down at Cray Rawls, but he took a seat on the edge of the desk instead, showcasing the cowboy boots he figured made him a genuine Texan.

  “Who you think you’re talking to here, hoss?” he said, the slightest Texas twang evident in his cadence. “I’m Homeland Security, and you won’t find a Miranda warning card anywhere on my person. I snap my fingers and—poof!—you disappear. We’ll seize your assets, freeze your accounts, turn every employee you’ve got into a person of interest, to make their lives a living hell, too. See, there’s no gray area with Homeland, and we never have to defend ourselves in court. You’re in or you’re out. So which is it?”

  Rawls fixed his gaze back on Caitlin. “If I tell you what you want to know—”

  “No deals, Mr. Rawls,” she interrupted. “The only thing I can promise you for sure, in return for your cooperation, is not to go public with the fact that your son might be directly aiding and abetting the biggest terrorist attack by far in American history. I can’t take anything else off the table.”

  Rawls shook his head, moved his eyes from Caitlin to Jones and then back again. “When did this stop being the United States of America?”

  Jones answered before Caitlin could. “When ISIS decided to use a weapon of mass destruction they found on land you currently control.”

  “A man like you never gives everything up until his back hits the wall, Mr. Rawls,” Caitlin picked up. “That’s where you’re at right now, and you’ve got one more chance to come clean about what else you’re after on that rez besides water.”

  Rawls’s expression tightened into one familiar to Caitlin from the Houston boxing gym where they’d first met: exhaustion, after he’d punched himself out and could barely raise his arms. “Just one question, Ranger. How much do you know about corn?”

  Before he could continue, a knock preceded the office door opening, and Captain Tepper poked his head in.

  “We got a lead on these bastards,” was all Tepper said.

  86

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS

  Dylan parked his truck off the rez, in a grove set well back from the entrance, near a trail through the woods that Ela had shown him. During the drive north, he’d noticed a tear in the tan cloth upholstery, down the middle of the passenger seat.

  That made him think of the day he’d bought his beloved Chevy S-10, after his freshman year at Brown, without telling his dad, and how it had conked out almost as soon as he’d gotten it home. Instead of being pissed, his father had taught him how to change the starter, then the alternator, and finally, the battery. Never criticizing him for the purchase or preaching something like “What’d you expect for five hundred bucks?”

  Dylan had bought the truck because it was the same age as him, and something felt right about that. Having a vehicle under him that had grown up on the same track, with lots of secrets and stories to share. He’d put in a new radio, sound system, tires, shocks, and custom bed liner, and had waxed, polished, and rubbed until the finish looked showroom new and rain fled from the paint before it could even bead up. But he’d never done anything, not a damn thing, about the upholstery, and now there was a tear down the center of the passenger seat, leaving him to wonder what he could and should have done differently.


  Kind of like what was bringing him back to the reservation now. He was glad he had the truck to think about during the drive, because it spared him too much further contemplation of what Ela and the Lost Boys were up to. She had been playing him the whole time, ever since they’d first met, in Providence. Had almost surely set him up as a suspect in the murder of that construction foreman.

  Then why rescue me, clipping the baling wire with a cutter she just happened to bring along? Why drive all the way to Shavano Park to face my father and Caitlin?

  Dylan slid through the woods, past waist-high concrete pillars marking the beginning of Comanche land, his dad’s Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter scratching at his skin. His iPhone was probably back in Ela’s root cellar, so he’d bought one of those cheap phones at a drugstore on his way up to the rez, just in case he needed it.

  His route brought him back to White Eagle’s property, where he could finish checking out that shed, or maybe confront the old man about whatever he was really up to. He heard the flutter and then lapping sounds of the waterfall next to White Eagle’s home, and he clung to the cover of the trees the rest of the way. Dylan stopped there and pressed out a text, starting with, IT’S DYLAN, since his father wouldn’t recognize the throwaway phone’s number. He kept it short and sweet, his mind having cleared enough to realize he was in over his head here and needed his dad to dig him out.

  No one was in sight when Dylan reached the edge of the clearing—no sign of Ela, White Eagle, or any of the Lost Boys. The door leading into the shed he’d inspected was open, blown by the wind against the frame, where it rattled on impact with the hasp. Walking out into the clearing under cover of night was one thing. Doing it now, with light streaming everywhere, presented an entirely different challenge.

  His dad had warned him not to find a false sense of security in a gun, to never do anything with one in his possession that he wouldn’t do without one. But Dylan couldn’t help but feel emboldened by the steel of the nine-millimeter heating up against his skin. Like a flashlight cutting through the dark, its presence propelled him out into the clearing, where he clung as much as possible to the shadows that shook and trembled in cadence with the wind rustling through the trees that cast them.

  He reached the shed and pressed himself against its back side, closest to the woods, safe from being seen by anyone who might be about. When no new sounds came to signal such a presence, Dylan sidestepped around the shed’s perimeter to the unlocked door. Peering inside through the crack between door and frame, he saw that the shed appeared to be unchanged from the previous night. Then the wind caught the door and widened the gap just enough to let a shaft of light pour past Dylan.

  It illuminated the dark gravel floor. Only, a central square of it looked even darker.

  The gravel had been shoveled aside, revealing a hatch that was now propped up to provide access to some secret underground chamber. Impossible to tell how long it had been here, though the scent of freshly dug earth suggested maybe not too long. Maybe.

  Perhaps again reassured by the Smith & Wesson, Dylan slid all the way inside the shed, just before the door clanged against the hasp once more. The shaft of light had been reduced to a sliver, but it still was enough for him to see a ladder descending into the darkness, maybe going all the way down to Dante’s nine circles of hell, which he knew well from another of his classes at Brown.

  Who said football players couldn’t be smart?

  He’d played lacrosse in high school, too, after squandering years on youth soccer. Sports had always come easy to him, in large part because of a fearless nature on the playing field, which belied his modest size. He took after his mother in that respect, instead of his father. And it was that same nature that led Dylan to position himself in place over the ladder, grasping its top-mounted handles as he lowered his feet several rungs down. If he’d known for sure that the Lost Boys were down there, maybe he would have just closed the hatch and sealed it, trapping them, as apt payback for what they’d done to him the night before. Ela, though, could be down there too, and beyond that, Dylan reminded himself, there was a greater mission here: to get to the bottom of whatever was going on and why it had led her to use him the way she clearly had.

  Dylan descended slowly and cautiously, careful to keep his boots from clacking against the wooden rungs. Whatever light he’d been using was pretty much gone at around what looked to be the halfway point. But shortly after that he glimpsed the naked spray of lantern light and thought he caught the faint smell of kerosene in the cooling air.

  Just like the kerosene lantern Ela had used to light the root cellar where they’d made love and gotten zonked out of their minds on peyote.

  Dylan stepped off the lower rungs of the ladder, onto a cushion of soft, moist dirt pitted with pools of standing water. The lantern-lit, winding tunnel before him didn’t look man-made so much as it seemed like an underground extension of the caves that were dug out of the hillside overlooking White Eagle’s property. It was like some kind of beehive, combined with a maze that twisted and turned this way and that.

  Dylan started to reach for his dad’s pistol, then stopped. He hadn’t bothered to turn off the ringtone of the ancient-looking flip phone forming a bulge in the front pocket of his jeans, because nobody had the number he’d made himself memorize. He could take it out right now and call his father, or Caitlin, and tell them what he’d uncovered. But something pushed him on instead, gun left tucked in place until he was sure he needed it.

  Drawing deeper down the labyrinthine path, he was struck by a rising odor on the air, something rotten and spoiled. Not a carrion or death smell, though, nor a scent resembling excrement of any kind. This was a different smell, foreign and yet vaguely familiar, as if the far reaches of his mind held some notion of it. The stronger and more acrid the stench grew, the less familiar it became, until Dylan began to consider the original thought an illusion.

  Only he couldn’t, not totally, because he was sure it held some meaning for him, some memory he couldn’t quite grasp.

  A bit farther along, the path canted upward, toward a smell of freshly dug earth that was strong enough to break the persistent oily, stale stench, at least for a moment. The path seemed to widen where it forked to the left, seeming narrower to the right. Then Dylan realized that the right path actually led to an evenly carved, door-size breach leading to a passageway forged by man and not nature.

  The acrid stench seemed to peak, and Dylan saw he’d entered some kind of chamber. But it was too far from the spill of lantern light to discern anything more, until he noticed a matching pair of lanterns on either side of the dug-out entryway and turned one of them up.

  A chamber all right—a storage chamber, encased by limestone walls.

  He spotted what looked like tarpaulins thrown over uneven heaps and piles of something that seemed to hold the source of the stink, overpowering in the tight confines. Breathing through his mouth, Dylan peeled back the edge of one of the tarps as unobtrusively as he could, pulling—stupidly maybe—a clump of whatever was concealed beneath it free and up to his nose.

  Its powerfully sour scent almost made him retch, and it was all Dylan could do to steady his stomach. He recalled the same scent emanating from the patch of fungus on the mold-riddled ear of corn that he’d made himself eat after Ela had called it a delicacy.

  It’s a secret my people have kept for centuries, our greatest secret.

  Dylan moved deeper into the chamber, into the shaft of light illuminating almost all of it.

  And that’s when he saw the bodies.

  87

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  “A blessed target,” Hatim Abd al-Aziz proclaimed, seated at the picnic table across from Razin Saflin, Ghazi Zurif, and Daniel Cross in Klyde Warren Park. “How many do you think are here now who could be dead tomorrow by the grace of God?”

  Al-Aziz said that in a way that sent a chill up Cross’s spine, reminding him of how close he’d come to a moment like this a decade ago, o
f the lives he had wanted to take in his crowded school cafeteria. And that made him wonder whether Caitlin Strong had noticed him the other day outside the Comanche reservation. A decade ago, she’d done her best to convince him he was worth something, but the feeling had only lasted until the other kids started up on him again. Caitlin Strong might have talked him out of pulling a Columbine, but he knew his day was going to come. Now that it finally had, he found himself fearing her disapproval.

  Why’d she have to be at that damn reservation?

  “I only wish I could be here to see it,” al-Aziz continued, smiling so placidly at the prospect that it utterly unnerved Daniel Cross.

  Klyde Warren Park was a pristine, tree-lined, eco-friendly stretch of land erected on a mothballed overpass of the eight-lane Woodall Rodgers Freeway. A public and private partnership initiative to combat urban sprawl and create a sprawling green space on the site of a former crumbling concrete blight between Pearl and St. Paul streets, where uptown and downtown Dallas meet. An urban oasis set in the shadows cast by skyscrapers lining the site’s east and west peripheries.

  The park was normally dominated by a large, open grassy stretch lined with lawn chairs, food vendors, and ice cream trucks, adjoining a botanical garden, walking trails, and an assortment of pavilions. But an old-fashioned traveling carnival had set up shop on the grounds in recent days. The bulk of the rides and attractions—including the House of Horrors, the Buggy Whip, the mini Flume, various kiddie rides, and a family-friendly roller coaster that swept over the expanse of the entire carnival, erected from Pearl Street, across the great lawn crossing Hart Boulevard. Food booths and game attractions forming a makeshift midway rimmed the perimeter on the eastbound side of Woodall Rodgers Freeway, across from the Dallas Museum of Art.