by Jon Land
“Boy’s place in all this is what I’m still trying to figure.”
“Please don’t.”
“Why?”
“Arno’s got no bone to pick with you, it’s me he’s after. I’m the reason he sent LaChance to San Luis Patosí to pick up Dylan.”
“Boy boasted to the assholes who snatched him who his dad was and the hell they’d pay for doing it.”
“And Arno made the connection. He made it pretty plain up in his office that he’s been following my life ever since that day in the parking lot.”
“What the hell he care about me and the boys?”
“People I care about, a way he can hurt me. Information’s on the Internet, Cort Wesley. The rumors, anyway.”
“Price that comes with being famous, I suppose.”
“I never wanted that.”
“You got it all the same. Symbol of the new West, which is pretty much identical to the old, except we don’t have the luxury of just calling a man out when the circumstances call for it.”
“That didn’t happen as much as everyone thinks. Neither did gunfights, and the ones that did usually ended with neither shooter hitting a goddamn thing.”
“Unless the shooter was a Texas Ranger, of course.”
She braked hard and veered the SUV onto the shoulder, tires skidding over gravel and the sensors locking their shoulder harnesses into place. “You wanna go back now and have this out with Arno, say the word. We can shoot him down just like you shot the drug dealer who killed Maria Lopez and her family.”
Cort Wesley said nothing, his brow and cheeks shiny with a thin layer of perspiration and his nose looking like it was sunburned.
“You want to play things that way, I’ll stand by your side, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin continued. “Kill as many of the Patriot Sun soldiers as we can toward no good reason, since their guns’ll get us before we even get close to Dylan. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“Beats rotting in a Mexican jail,” he sighed.
“No,” Caitlin said, harsher than she’d meant to. “We do this a surer way that gets you your boy back.”
“What’s that?”
“Take something away from Arno he cares about even more.”
84
SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT
“I can’t authorize that, Ranger,” D. W. Tepper told Caitlin through the cloud of cigarette smoke between them, after hearing everything she had to tell him about her trip to visit Malcolm Arno at the Patriot Sun.
“What happened to this being an ongoing investigation?”
“You leave out the part about it being connected to a task force that wanted me to drop your ass in a meat grinder?”
“LaChance brothers are the key, Captain.”
“You want the Rangers to take on the Hells Angels now too?”
“Wouldn’t be the first time. You already admitted as much.”
“That was over crystal meth and normally with plenty of backup.”
“Normally?”
“We may have deviated once or twice.”
Caitlin’s stare scolded Tepper and he stamped out his Marlboro in an old Alamo ashtray he’d found somewhere that was cracked down the center. “I never felt better since I took up smoking again. Explain that to me.”
“I can’t.”
“Just like I can’t see enough of a connection to send you back to the Great White North.”
“Not quite that far,” Caitlin had told him. “I ran the timeline of the missing cash from Iraq against the surge in drug smuggling across the Canadian border into the U.S.”
“Oh boy…”
“Arno funneled his money into the best cash crop available, a sure thing investment-wise, not to mention washing all that cash through the mob moving the shit.”
“He does this when Mexico’s a stone’s throw away?”
“The cartels aren’t in the market for investors, Captain. They’re looking for ways to unload their cash, not bring in more. Arno moved his money north because that’s where the opportunity was, the alternative being that this spike in trafficking across that Indian Reservation was just a coincidence.”
“You’re gonna have to do better than that, Ranger.”
“Okay, truck tires.”
“Come again?”
“Frank Gage, the DEA man running the task force, took me out onto the ice and gave me the VIP tour of the Res. I noticed a pattern of tire tracks that diverted from the MO he was describing. Big freight haulers riding with chains wrapped around their rubber. Patriot Sun had two trucks in the parking lot with chain impressions in their treads. How’s that?”
“Oh boy,” Tepper said again, expression mashed so tight some of the furrows in his face seemed to be joining up. “We had water in our radiator, gas in our engine, and bullets in our .45s, your dad and I were good to go. You didn’t need to do much thinking against a man who left his belt back in the bedroom of the woman he’d tried to rape.”
“That really happen?”
“We made the suspect ’cause his pants were falling down. He started to reach for his gun and your dad fired a warning shot that went right under his privates. No word of a lie.”
“I do that to Malcolm Arno, there won’t be a warning shot. Authorize me to head north, Captain.”
Tepper traced a finger from one cheek across his nose to the other cheek as if he were connecting some unseen dots. Then he retrieved his Marlboro from the Alamo ashtray, but thought better of relighting it. “Toward what purpose exactly, Ranger?”
“Those biker shacks you and my dad busted up in the search for crystal meth dispensaries … you inform your captain of your intentions?”
“Not entirely, no,” Tepper conceded.
“What’d you tell him?”
“That we were gathering intelligence, maybe working to turn an informant.”
“There you have it.”
“Have what?”
“My intentions up north, Captain,” Caitlin told him. “Put some intelligence together. Meet with potential informants.”
Tepper popped out a fresh cigarette and lit it with a match struck against his boot heel. “Suppose you’ll be bringing Cort Wesley Masters along for the ride.”
“You suppose correctly. And it might be the only way to stop him from storming the Patriot Sun grounds himself.”
“Him heading north while his son’s a hostage down here doesn’t seem likely.”
“He knows it’s the best way to get Dylan back.”
“On account of what the two of you are gonna do once you’re back in that ice world.”
Caitlin remained silent.
Tepper thought on that as he puffed away. “Things have changed plenty since your dad and I were busting heads. You do this, it’s all aboveboard, an official assignment.”
“If that’s the way it’s gotta be.”
“And one other condition: when this is over, you make sure Masters comes in even if you have to drag his ass here yourself.”
Caitlin stared into Tepper’s narrowed eyes.
“We got us a deal, Ranger?”
Caitlin nodded.
PART NINE
Now with three Rangers backing him up, Captain A. Y. Allee shouted to the prisoners [who’d seized the jail on April 3, 1969] that they had until the count of ten to surrender.
“One,” he began. “Two … three … four.” Then he started shooting.
“Captain, you didn’t get to ten,” [Ranger Joaquin] Jackson pointed out.
“Those sumbitches can’t count anyway,” the captain snorted.
—Mike Cox, Time of the Rangers
85
MOHAWK INDIAN RESERVATION; THE PRESENT
Cort Wesley kept checking his cell phone as they traipsed over the snow-encrusted land of the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation toward the frozen St. Lawrence River that cut through it.
“You expecting a call?” Caitlin finally asked him.
“I keep hoping there’ll be a message from Dylan,” he said, fin
ally sticking it back in his pocket. “A text or something—that’s how he communicates. Maybe you should check your phone. You might have better service up here than me.”
A pair of tribal policemen had stopped them once on Reservation land just past a sign that read:
YES “TERRORISTS” COME THRU AKWESASNE
THEY ARE N.Y.S.P. BORDER PATROL
A.T.F. F.B.I. I.R.S. ECT., ECT.!!!
The tribal cops inquired as to the purpose of their trespass to which Caitlin flashed her Ranger badge and leftover drug task force credentials that fortunately weren’t dated. The tribal cops acquiesced grudgingly, warning their safety couldn’t be guaranteed after nightfall.
Once they reached the ice-covered section of the St. Lawrence that sliced through the Reservation on both sides of the border, Caitlin noticed a figure sitting out on the ice over a freshly carved hole, his folding chair placed to hold the sun on him until afternoon bled into dusk. Caitlin recognized him even with his floppy hat and long coat as the ancient tribal policeman Frank Gage had pointed out when he’d introduced her to the primary drug smuggling route used to ferry drugs from Canada into the United States. She could see no vehicle nearby and wondered how a man Gage had said was near a hundred years old could have negotiated such a large traverse of the ice to reach a point square in the middle, at least a hundred yards from shore.
“Who’d you say this guy was?” Cort Wesley asked, following her out onto the frozen river and nearly losing his balance, his boots like skates on the dull surface.
“Old tribal cop and as tough a man as there is in these parts.”
“Old doesn’t begin to tell it. I don’t think he’s moving. You sure he’s not dead?”
“Why don’t we ask him?”
They continued walking across the ice toward the Indian who had yet to acknowledge their presence.
“Tell me more about the old guy there.”
“His name’s Charlie Charles. For a time, he was the only law on the Reservation. Carried a tomahawk and a bunch of knives, but no gun until it was mandated by the federal government. The Mohawk lived in fear of a knock from him at the door. Crime was almost nonexistent back in those days. Task force chief told me he’s been involved in more car chases than any cop on record, has been shot a dozen times, and was clinically dead twice—three times if you include a heart attack five years ago.”
Cort Wesley continued to study the old Indian for movement. He was holding a hand-knotted line in the water between a pair of homemade gloves made of deerskin and bear fur.
“Any idea what he’s doing out here exactly, besides fishing?”
“Same thing he was doing last time I saw him, I suspect.”
They walked into the stream of sunlight shining onto the old Indian, Caitlin waiting until she and Cort Wesley were directly in his line of sight before calling out to him.
“Officer Charles.”
He paid them no heed whatsoever, not even acknowledging their presence.
“Officer Charles?”
Still nothing.
“I told you he was dead,” said Cort Wesley.
Which drew a gaze from Charlie Charles, his eyes angling upward from beneath his hat. “Get out of my sun.”
Both Caitlin and Cort Wesley stepped aside to remove the shadows from his face.
“And I don’t go by that name anymore. I haven’t for longer than I can remember, maybe longer than I’ve been alive.”
“What name do you go by?” Cort Wesley asked him.
“Okwaho. Means wolf in Mohawk. It’s what the braves called me when I was a young man before I glimpsed the spirit world for the first time. But the women called me something else: Yakohsa. Means horse. Like to know why?” he asked with a grin that ended when his dentures shifted, forcing him to readjust them by massaging his jaws. “Never mind. It was many years ago when I was a much younger man than I am today. Still, both names were well earned. Guess you can call me Charlie.”
Caitlin thought of her grandfather Earl Strong living until almost ninety and never seeming nearly as old as Charlie Charles. The Indian’s face looked more like leather than skin, as if someone had stitched it over the bone. It was the tawny color of raw fabric and the many scars that crisscrossed it looked more like seams holding the various patches together. A mane of white hair flowed out from under the confines of his old hat, looking thin and stringy in the breeze. He sat so his spine was curved, disguising his true height, regarding them with one dark eye as bright as a boy’s and a second crusted over by a milk-colored cataract. His nose was ridged and too big for his face, angled to the right as if the old Indian had broken it on more than one occasion and never had it set properly.
“I was here a little over a month ago,” Caitlin told him.
“I remember your gun,” Charlie Charles said, eyeing her SIG. “It’s easier to remember a person by their weapon than their face, and in these parts one is as plentiful as the other. But I know your kind.” Then, with his eye shifting to Cort Wesley, “Both of you.”
“And what kind is that, sir?”
“Gunmen. The real ones, not the masqueraders who think the gun makes them tough.” He shook his head. “It’s the toughness that makes the gun.”
“I heard you never carried one yourself,” said Caitlin.
“Not until the New York Tribal Council took my knives away. Called them weapons of violence.”
“What are you doing out here, Mr. Charles?”
“Same thing you are, I believe.”
86
UPSTATE NEW YORK; THE PRESENT
“How old are you exactly?” Cort Wesley asked him.
“Well, my mother once met President Lincoln and my father was a scout during the Civil War. Does that answer your question?”
Caitlin wasn’t sure whether to smile in response or not.
“You’re wearing a star,” Charlie Charles said, noticing the badge pinned to her shirt. “That tells me the law brought you back here. Your eyes tell me something else.”
“Just like you’re not really here to fish, Charlie,” said Caitlin.
“Oh no?”
“I don’t see an ice container to store your catch in.”
“That’s because I let them go after I catch them. All creatures have a right to live out their times.”
“Even the drug dealers who use the frozen river on this land as their own private highway?”
“Would’ve put a stop to it myself before they took my badge away. But you still got yours, ’long with your gun … Ranger.”
“That’s why we’re here, Charlie.”
“Then I ought to get out of the way before the bullets start flying.”
“We’ve got something else in mind,” Cort Wesley told him.
The old man shifted his gaze and held it on him longer this time. “You’re no lawman.”
“Nope.”
“Got the look of a man who would’ve drove me to drink back in the old times if I wasn’t there already.”
“Guess I’ve done that for plenty of others.”
“You can’t stop them, Charlie,” Caitlin said suddenly.
The old man regarded her with both his eyes, the bright as well cataract-covered one.
“That’s what you’re fixing to do every day when you come out here to fish.”
The old man coughed up some cold-reared mucus and swallowed it back down. “I think about what I’d do if I were still Okwaho. But I’m not, not Yakohsa anymore either. But when I come out here like this it’s easier to pretend, even though the cold hurts my bones.”
Cort Wesley took a step closer to him, making sure to leave the sun a lane to the old man’s face. “We don’t have to pretend.”
Charlie Charles nodded slowly, rotating his gaze between the two of them. He leaned back in his chair, so far and so quick that Caitlin feared it might topple over. Then his eyes left her and Cort Wesley for a place far beyond them.
“The Mohawk have a legend about a young boy who g
rew into the first eagle to soar in the skies. The Elders must have known he was different and special from his birth because after three moons, the name they gave him from the spirit world was Ka Bay she go e sayd, or He Who Walks a Different Path. He became Ka Bay she go e sayd because he was more comfortable with animals than people, as if he were too good for folks or existed on a higher spiritual plane. And instead of growing into a man, he grew into an eagle.
“In the midst of his transformation, the Creator Himself appeared to the boy and told him, ‘As my view of what happens in this World is different from where I live in the Spirit World, you will spend most of your time in the realm of Father Sky, and view the world below in a different way. As My Vision is unique and different, your eyesight will be keener than any other bird that inhabits the skies.’”
The old tribal cop’s good eye sharpened and sought out Caitlin and Cort Wesley once more. “I believe the two of you view the world a different way too. I believe your eyesight is also keener than any other bird that inhabits the skies.” His gaze narrowed on Caitlin, the way a gunman does when he’s zeroing in on a target. “You ask me why I come out here every day to fish, watch, and wait for something I can no longer change. Maybe it’s because I’m waiting for someone who can. Maybe they’ve finally showed up.”
87
MOHAWK INDIAN RESERVATION; THE PRESENT
Chief Dan Tails, duly elected head Elder of the St. Regis Mohawk nation, lived in a ten-thousand-square-foot, two-story log home built on a man-made lake and surrounded by woods. Winter here was an eight- or nine-month ordeal made palatable by the sweet smell of hickory logs filling his home and spilling from the chimney. During the day his home was drenched in sunlight pouring in through the spacious windows. If it weren’t for his girlfriend and the children she’d born him, Tails wouldn’t have even bothered with shading them from the moon at night, since no one was close enough to peer at anything through the glass anyway. But he maintained a rule that those shades were never to be closed in his study or the den, Tails’s way in modern times of communing with nature that included a pristine view of his lake.