by Jon Land
“I’d rather work behind the counter at McDonald’s than work the streets again on your behalf.”
“Who said anything about the streets? What I’m here about today is different. Bigger, maybe the biggest thing we’ve ever done. Calls for a man of your skills and expertise.”
“Those skills and expertise are usually good for nothing but landing men in jail, Junior.”
Branca bristled at the use of the nickname he loathed, but this time he didn’t correct Cort Wesley on it. “You hear about that billionaire digging for water in the Tunga County desert? Man named Hollis Tyree invested millions in developing new technology to find and bring it up. Enough, he claims, to irrigate all the land in the Southwest that’s drying up and a good portion of southern California and the plains too.”
“What’s that got to do with the Branca family, Junior?”
This time Branca didn’t bristle at all. “Because, Masters, water wasn’t the only thing Tyree found.”
35
ALBION, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
“You sure about this?” Sheriff Huffard asked her.
“We got a wounded cop in there and who knows how many civilians.”
“You go in, we could end up with a bloodbath on our hands, Ranger.”
“I’d say you got one of those already.”
Sheriff Huffard and his deputy took up positions on either side of Caitlin in front of the rear loading dock’s bay door. The plan was for them to hoist it up enough for her to slide through once she gave the signal. Caitlin palmed her SIG and dropped down in a crouch. Then she nodded to Huffard and his deputy who tucked their hands into the slight groove between the bottom of the bay door and loading dock surface.
The deputy, though, hoisted too hard, drawing a grimace from Huffard and a grinding squeak certain to give Caitlin’s presence away to anyone near the storage area. She tucked herself through anyway, ready to shoot at the first motion she saw. Once inside, Caitlin was immediately relieved by the clanking hum of refrigeration units that would have dulled the sound of the door being jerked upward, at least to anyone inside the H.E.B. itself.
Caitlin heard nothing as she reclaimed her feet and started forward, and only a few hushed whimpers when she closed on a swinging door that led into the store proper. She pressed herself to the side of that door, easing up to its window plate to peer outward. The perspective, limited to one whole aisle and part of another, revealed four hostages huddled at various points against a frozen food container, dry goods display, and refrigerated milk and juices.
“This is Sheriff Tate Huffard,” boomed the sheriff’s voice over a megaphone from the parking lot beyond, fulfilling another part of the plan to draw the captor’s attention away from the rear of the store. “Whoever you are in there, we just want to talk. Nobody else needs to get hurt now.”
Charging into the store without better knowledge of the gunman’s position was a fool’s errand, especially until she was certain it was just one gunman and not more. The closest hostage to Caitlin’s line of sight was a woman pressed up against a shelf crammed with an assortment of crackers, chips, and jars of salsa. Twenty feet away on a straight diagonal line.
Caitlin lifted her SIG and rapped it ever so lightly on the glass, the pinging much louder to her than it would have sounded beyond the door. She tried a second series of raps, slightly harder, before the woman finally turned her way. The shock of acknowledgment spread over the woman’s features, her eyes quickly squinting to make out the Texas Ranger badge Caitlin had pressed against the glass. Whether or not the woman could distinguish that or not, Caitlin couldn’t be sure, but the look on her face had turned from terrified to desperately hopeful.
Caitlin pinned her badge back into place and held one finger up against the glass, then two, and finally three. She had to repeat the process several more times before the woman in the snack aisle grasped her unspoken question and raised a single finger in the air, holding it there for Caitlin to see.
One gunman, then. Sheriff Huffard’s deputies had been right about that much anyway.
Caitlin waited for the sheriff’s next call over the megaphone before emerging.
“Whoever’s in there, this is Sheriff Huffard again. If you got a cell phone on you, dial nine-one-one and they’ll patch you straight through to me.”
The woman’s eyes clung to her, as Caitlin eased the swinging door open and slid her boots across the tile floor into the air-conditioned cool of the H.E.B. She slithered to the head of the snack aisle and pressed a finger on her free hand against her mouth to keep the woman silent. Then she crept out to the head of the aisle, trying to tune out the hushed whimpers and sobs to better place the lone gunman’s position in a store that suddenly seemed cavernous, its aisles like vast gulleys between hills laden with all manner of food products.
She caught the coppery scent of blood in the air; someone was dead here—Caitlin sensed more than smelled that, though she couldn’t say exactly how.
“I want my mommy,” a young, cracking voice uttered two aisles up.
“Shhhhhhhhhhhh,” came the response, enough of the sound audible to picture an adult male behind it.
Caitlin readied her SIG in both hands, dragging her boots across the tile now to avoid detection. She stopped and pressed her back up against a display of kitchen cleaners at the head of the next aisle. The overhead lighting was radiant and bright, not about to give up any shadows that might have further helped her pin down the gunman’s precise position.
“This is Sheriff Tate Huffard again. . . .”
Caitlin used the distraction to peel out from the head of the aisle, edging toward the next one.
“Everyone out here, all of us, want to resolve this peacefully without any further harm to anyone. . . .”
Caitlin stepped over a slick of blood spreading from beneath a man’s body, the sound of a young girl’s soft sobbing growing louder. She passed a shot-out meat display case, shards of glass looking like tiny pieces of ice atop the sirloin, chuck, and tenderloin.
“That includes you and you got my word on it. . . .”
She reached the head of the deli, prepared foods, and produce aisle, the last one down, SIG ready as Sheriff Huffard’s voice echoed through the supermarket.
“So now get out your phone, dial nine-one-one, and let’s sort our way through this.”
Caitlin spun out, pistol raised and ready.
36
ALBION, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
Caitlin’s mind raced to process the scene before her:
A bearded, hairy shape of a man holding a young girl who looked seven or eight years old tight against him with a cannon of a revolver pressed against her head. The girl’s position blocking any kill shot she could try. The man uttering high-pitched, pained whimpers that made Caitlin wonder whose sounds she’d actually been hearing from aisles over.
The bearded man started to twist toward her, exposing a bit more of himself for a shot, but not enough. Such decisions, her grandfather had once told her, might feel slow in coming but were actually made within a half second or less. The brain recording all evidence and rendering a verdict in the gap between breaths.
Caitlin lowered her gun to control the situation with calm. Not much of a sacrifice, considering she could jerk the pistol up and fire from her hip with only a millisecond’s difference in lag.
“I’m just here to talk, sir,” she heard herself say.
“Spiders,” the man muttered between trembling lips and Caitlin discerned the neat outline of the pistol’s bore drawn into the little girl’s temple, as he jammed the gun against her cheek, bending the skin inward. “Gotta get the spiders outta this one like I did the others.”
Caitlin thought of the blood slick that had nearly tripped her up. She kept her SIG angled down, far from comfortable with a shot that could cause the gunman to blow the little girl’s head off on reflex.
“What spiders?” Caitlin asked, able to think of nothing else.
Drool leaked d
own both sides of the man’s mouth. “Can’t you see them? They’re everywhere! Crawling out of the cereal boxes and the meat case.”
She thought of the shot-up glass in front of the meat case. “Coming down from the ceiling on their goddamn webs!” the man continued, his gaze turning upward.
For a moment, just a moment, Caitlin thought she might have a shot. Then it was gone again.
“I can help the girl,” Caitlin told him.
“You can?”
“Can help you too. I’m here to kill the spiders. Need your help first, though.”
“Been helping already. Shooting them where they stand. Bang, bang, bang!”
“Send the girl over to me,” Caitlin tried.
The man’s features reddened with rage, fury replacing consternation on his expression. “Can’t! They breed inside us while we sleep and pour out when the time’s right. This little one’s a breeding ground, I tell you, a breeding ground! I take this gun off her for a second, just a second, and out they’ll come and neither one of us can get them all. This is the way it’s gotta be!”
Caitlin saw the little girl’s cheek depress farther and thought the man was going to shoot her for sure right then. “When’d you first notice them?”
“What?”
“The spiders. When you first notice them?”
“At my house, crawling all over the walls. First noticed them last week; just a few, though, like an advance team scouting the enemy. ’Cause what we got here, we got ourselves a war. Us versus them. Last species standing.”
“That’s why they sent me.”
“You?”
“Texas Rangers been put on alert all across the state. War’s on and you’re a genuine hero for saving your town.”
The man seemed to take some solace in that. “Started pouring out of my kids just this morning. I knew then the war was on, what I had to do and I done it. Bang, bang, bang!”
Caitlin shuddered, chanced a side step to better her shooting angle.
“Whatcha doing?” the man barked.
Caitlin froze. “Thought I saw one climbing up on your arm. Just wanted to be sure.”
The rage returned to his face, aimed at his young hostage this time. “Spiders be pouring out of her any time now, I don’t finish this before they do!”
Caitlin could see his finger start to curl across the trigger. “Let me.”
“No!”
“I got a full mag here,” Caitlin said, flashing her SIG at him casually. “How many you got left in that hand cannon of yours?”
“I don’t . . .”
“Only takes six. How many you fire so far? When you have the chance to reload?”
The man glanced down at his gun, fear overrunning his features.
“You fire your last bullet, they’ll take you for sure. Can’t afford to lose any more soldiers in this war. That’s why you’ve got to let me do this one. So move aside real slow, before the spiders start spouting from her mouth.”
The man swung his glance upon her. “They don’t come through the mouth. It’s through the skin they come.”
His grasp on the girl was so tight, Caitlin could see he’d squeezed the blood from his hand. No way she could risk a shot with so little clearance.
“Know what?” Caitlin said, easing closer to the man as she crouched to lay her pistol on the floor. “You should take mine.”
She slid the SIG across the shiny linoleum, bright from the fluorescent lights burning overhead. The man dropped the magnum to his lap and started to reach for it.
Caitlin was on him before his finger even got close to the trigger, moving as the man’s attention remained riveted on the SIG. She felt his face mash inward at impact with the heel of her hoot, the kick coming up and from the side. The man’s head rocked backward and slammed into neatly stacked jars of spaghetti sauce, scattering them downward as Caitlin jerked the girl from his grasp. She saw his eyes roll upward dazedly as she snatched her SIG back up and steadied it on the man’s now unconscious frame.
“Easy there,” Caitlin said, trying to soothe the little girl in her arms. “Everything’s gonna be all right now.”
Even as something told her that was as far from the truth as it got.
37
TUNGA COUNTY; THE PRESENT
Hollis Tyree III lifted the pickax again and slammed it down into the patch of half-dug earth, his teeth rattling as the edge chipped into more of the ledge before slipping free. His shirt was hung from the remnants of an old, stubborn fence post that had managed to weather the years. His upper body muscles ached and he felt the beginning of sunburn across his shoulders.
Tyree caught a family of prairie dogs scuttling about the brush off in the distance, stuck the pickax in the ground, and yanked the old Springfield 1911 model .45 from his belt. He deliberately kept both eyes open, sighted down its stainless-steel barrel, and fired off all eight shots in rapid succession. Blood bursts sprang from three of the varmints, one thrown six feet through the air on impact. Tyree watched the rest of them scamper desperately away, wondering if he had time to snap in a fresh magazine and start firing anew. Instead he simply stuck the gun back in his belt and rubbed his ears as if that might relieve the fluttering the percussion had left behind.
Tyree glimpsed Meeks standing behind him, jacket on in spite of the heat to conceal the pistol holstered to his belt. Only man Tyree had ever known who didn’t seem to sweat under the sandblasting Texas sun.
“Care to join me, Meeks?” Tyree asked him, leaning on the shaft of the pickax and mopping his brow with his sleeve. “Pound some ledge.” Only then did he notice that Meeks was holding a sack, weighted down at the bottom. “What have you got there?”
“Dead prairie dogs, a half dozen.”
“Good.”
“Maybe not, Mr. Tyree, because we don’t know what killed them. One of my men found them in the southeast quadrant when he started his rounds this morning.”
“Southeast quadrant,” Tyree repeated, turning his gaze in the direction where Professor Lamb had taken the bulk of his soil and ground water samples. “Any idea why I’m out here pounding ledge, Meeks?”
“No, sir.”
“Truth is I wanted to see if I could still do it. This is pretty much how I started in the business as a boy. My dad paid me five dollars a week. He didn’t believe in an allowance. Made me work for every penny from the time I was seven years old. He didn’t want anything coming easy for me. He bought this land forty years ago and swore his head off when he couldn’t find oil on it anywhere.”
Tyree started to hoist the pickax once more, then thought better of it. “He was truly a visionary, Meeks, but even he couldn’t see that twenty-five years from now, maybe less, it’s not oil people will be desperate for, it’s water. That’s why we’re here, that’s what that billion dollars is for. To make sure nobody has to fill a glass in the morning and make it last all day and make sure everybody always finds produce when they go shopping. You got any idea how many gallons it takes to irrigate a southern California orange grove or Arizona orchard? The day they go dry is the day this country stops being the country we know. That’s why we can’t stop, no matter what.”
“Still no word from Dr. Lamb, sir. I’ve got a man waiting at his house.”
Tyree dropped his gaze to the sack clutched tight in Meeks’s grasp. Dark sodden patches had begun to soak through the bottom and, just for an instant, he thought he glimpsed something moving within, as if scratching to get out.
“Lamb lied to me about those test results, Meeks. That’s why I came out here. Pound some ledge and try to figure out why. Lab says they never even received the samples he claimed he sent.”
Meeks’s cell phone beeped, signaling an incoming text. “Excuse me.” He cupped a hand over the screen to read the message, looking up somberly at Tyree when he was finished.
“What is it, Meeks?”
“Albion again, Mr. Tyree.”
38
SHAVANO PARK; THE PRESENT
He wasn’t at all sure what he was supposed to do or say at this point. The older Dylan got, the more he reminded Cort Wesley of himself in too many of the ways that mattered. Same bullheaded fearlessness and willingness to take on all comers. Cort Wesley didn’t know how most fifteen-year-old boys would have responded to a Mexican runaway fleeing a human monster of a man, but he had a pretty good idea no other one would have spirited her off to safety.
While Dylan may have matched him in temperament, resolve, and intensely brooding stare, the boy was saddled with his mother’s lithe frame that couldn’t even hold his jeans to his hips. Dylan had balance and agility that made him a magician with the skateboard, but lacked the capacity to back up his words and intentions with the kind of physical attributes that made intimidation and the very preemption of violence possible. When violence came, Cort Wesley was sure the boy wouldn’t back down, but was substantially less confident in how that would play out.
He hated the worry that came with being a real father. Cort Wesley couldn’t figure how parents coped with normal issues, never mind protecting their kids from a serial killer. What was it Caitlin Strong had said after he’d first moved into the house he’d purchased years before with Branca family money for Maura Torres?
“You’ve got to trust him, Cort Wesley.”
“I don’t even know him.”
“One leads to the other.”
“Maura’s got a sister in Scottsdale. Maybe the boys be better off with her.”
“You really believed that, they’d already be there.”
“So what’s it mean to trust him?”
“Giving him the freedom to make his own mistakes and backing him up when he does.”