Texas Ranger

by James Patterson

  “Glen,” I say. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Not long enough,” he says, and grins.

  Glen is wearing a grease-stained blue work shirt with a patch that says his name. He has a plug of snuff inside his bottom lip and a plastic bottle of Pepsi in one hand. The bottle doesn’t have soda in it—it’s full of his oily tobacco spit.

  The shop smells of oil and grease and gasoline. A boom box is tuned to a classic rock radio station. There are a few cars in various states of disassembly, and there are four employees, who, by the look of them, have either been to jail or probably will go there soon enough. They are tinkering around with the vehicles, but I can tell no one’s really working.

  This is why I’ve always suspected that the garage is a front for a drug-dealing and money-laundering business. I’m sure there is a stash of drugs hidden here somewhere. Maybe it’s concealed in a stack of tires, encased in a plastic bag and sunk into a vat of old motor oil, or something like that.

  “What brings a famous Texas lawman like yourself to my humble, law-abiding business?” Glen asks me.

  “I want to know where Cal Richards is,” I tell him.

  He laughs. “You law dogs are pretty desperate, ain’t ya?”

  “Why’s that?”

  “First of all,” he says, “there ain’t no way Cal killed those women. Not your ex-wife and not the other one. So y’all’s barking up the wrong tree.”

  He spits into his bottle. A black spiderweb connects his lip to the bottle before breaking off.

  “Second,” he says, licking the remnants of spit off his lips. “Not only are you looking for the wrong guy, you’re looking in the wrong place. Hell, Cal ain’t talked to me in years.”

  I squint at him, trying to see if he’s telling the truth and, at the same time, trying to intimidate him with my glare. Neither seems to be working.

  “Hard for me to believe you haven’t seen or heard from him in years,” I drawl. “You and Cal were always tight.”

  Now, when I say “tight,” I mean that when I arrested Cal for selling marijuana, we gave him the choice to get off with probation or have the charges dropped altogether if he’d just rat out Glen. But Cal went to jail out of loyalty to Glen.

  Glen takes a deep breath and his posture seems to change.

  “Look,” he says. “Cal’s a different person than he used to be. As much as I hate to slander my own environment, Cal’s too good for us now.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You don’t have to believe me,” Glen says. “But once he and Anne got serious, he didn’t like this kind of work anymore.”

  He gestures to the garage, but I know he doesn’t mean fixing cars.

  “He liked keeping his hands clean, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” I say. “I just don’t know if I believe it.”

  Glen smirks.

  “Yates,” he says, “I know you’ve always had a hard-on for busting Cal. Even before he was shacking up with your ex-wife. But take it from me: he was never cut out for this line of work. He’s a good kid. And Anne changed him for the better. I think jail might’ve changed him, too. In a way, you changed him. You helped reform him.

  “But he ain’t never killed your ex-wife.”

  Chapter 51

  A HALF DOZEN semis are parked at Armadillo Shipping, backed onto the docks. A handful of forklifts roam the lot, loading the semis with cargo.

  Cal’s truck isn’t one of them.

  I walk out onto the pavement and flag down a forklift.

  “I’m looking for whoever’s in charge here,” I say to the driver.

  He points to a set of offices at the far end of the warehouse. My boots echo off the concrete.

  When I find the manager, I ask if Cal Richards works for him. He waves me into his office and explains that Cal’s on the road.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “I know where he’s supposed to be,” he says. “But he ain’t answering his phone.”

  The manager, a plump, mustached man named Eli, says that Cal is an independent contractor, not one of the drivers on the payroll. Therefore, they aren’t able to keep track of him the way they are their own drivers.

  “We got these Qualcomm units,” Eli says, picking up an object that looks like a computer keyboard from a shelf full of junk. “In the old days, drivers kept written logs. But nowadays, they use these.”

  He explains that the GPS in the unit can pinpoint a driver’s location within a couple blocks.

  “We can send messages back and forth,” he says, “while this keeps track of all their delivery and pickup times. Without it, drivers can fudge their books. This device here keeps them honest.”

  “And Cal doesn’t have one?”

  “Nope,” Eli says. “He’s an owner-operator. He works for himself. We just hire him on a case-by-case basis.”

  The manager explains that they offered Cal a full-time position in the past, but he turned it down.

  “Some drivers don’t like us keeping track of them.” He shrugs.

  Sounds suspicious, I think.

  The manager seems to read my thoughts because he adds, “Drivers have lots of reasons for not wanting us to know where they are. If they want to stop and take a nap, it gives them the freedom to feel like they can, knowing they’ll make up time later. Stuff like that.”

  I ask him to map out Cal’s route.

  He explains that Cal should be in Amarillo. He’s dropping off a load and picking another up. Then he’ll be heading to Detroit and New Jersey before coming back home.

  “It’s a run he makes about every two weeks for us.”

  I ask about the date of Anne’s murder.

  “He was on that run,” Eli says.

  “In Amarillo?” I ask.

  “That’s where he was,” Eli says. “He should have left there that morning and been farther north. I guess he stayed an extra day in Amarillo for some reason. See what I mean about the Qualcomm? He couldn’t do that if he was one of our full-time drivers. But because we don’t keep track of him, he can make up some time and do a little doctoring to his logbooks later.”

  I think for a minute, and then Eli says, “I already told all this to the detective. Are you just following up on some things?”

  “Something like that,” I say.

  On my way to my truck, I pull out my cell phone. The sun is hot, and the air smells of diesel fumes.

  When Freddy picks up, I say, “Tell me what you know, and don’t give me any of this I’m-not-supposed-to-talk shit.”

  “Nice to hear your voice, too,” he says sarcastically, but there’s a laugh in his.

  Quickly, Freddy tells me that the bullets recovered from Patty’s murder match the bullets from Anne’s. Same caliber. Same striations.

  And same MO: six bullets shot into various parts of her body. The last one in her face.

  Plus, he says, the trajectory angles are more or less the same.

  “I’m more convinced now than ever that the shooter was under six feet tall.”

  “Fingerprints?” I ask.

  Cal’s fingerprints were on the front door handle, but not inside the house.

  “What about her phone records?” I say. “Was she getting threatening calls, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Freddy says.

  “Can you find out?”

  “I’ll try.”

  I ask if Purvis has questioned Cal.

  “He can’t get ahold of him,” Freddy says. “He’s not returning DeAndre’s calls.”

  Freddy says that Cal made a drop-off and pickup this morning in Amarillo, just as he was supposed to. Purvis called the place too late to catch him. He put a call in to Cal’s next stop to tell him that Cal needed to contact him. But that wouldn’t be for another day or so: the delivery location is in Detroit.

  “I’m surprised Purvis hasn’t put out an APB for his arrest,” I say.

  “He doesn’t think Cal did it.”

&nbs
p; I shake my head in frustration. “There’s a video of Patty getting into his truck the night she was killed. That’s enough to arrest him and try to get a confession out of him.”

  “Purvis’s theory is that he took her home, walked her to her door, and maybe even unlocked the door for her because she was drunk,” Freddy says. “But then he thinks Patty went inside without him. That’s why Cal’s prints are on the door handle but nowhere else.”

  “So the killer just happened to show up right after that?” I say.

  “Or he was already inside, waiting for her.”

  Chapter 52

  CAL’S TRUCK RUMBLES down I-44 east through Oklahoma, with the sun setting behind him and casting the flat plains in an orange hue. He isn’t listening to the music on his iPhone. He can’t chance Garth Brooks’s song coming on and turning his thoughts into a downward spiral of grief and guilt. In fact, he turned his phone off entirely and tossed it in the back, on his mattress. He was tired of seeing missed calls from his boss, DeAndre Purvis, and various friends who were checking on him.

  But without the music, he needs a new distraction.

  He thinks he might see one.

  Up ahead on the shoulder of the highway is a pedestrian with his thumb out.

  Cal starts to slow as he passes the man, and then eases into the breakdown lane and hits his flashers. He watches the man jog up.

  The man comes to the driver’s side and looks up at Cal.

  “Where you headed?” Cal says.

  “Saint Louis,” the man says.

  “Climb in,” Cal tells him. “I’m heading through there.”

  The man thanks him and runs around the front of the truck. He introduces himself as Randy.

  Randy is young, probably in his midtwenties, with short blond hair and sandy stubble. He’s wearing a military-style jacket with desert camouflage.

  “You in the military?” Cal asks.

  “I was,” Randy says.

  They are quiet for a few minutes, and Cal’s mind keeps wandering to Anne, so he asks the kid where he’s from and where he’s headed. Randy says he’s trying to find work. He had an interview in Tulsa today for a security job. He took the bus there but didn’t have enough for the return trip.

  “Did you get the job?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Cal can’t understand why not. The kid seems charismatic. He would make a good impression in an interview.

  “They make you take a psych test,” Randy says, his face flush from his honesty. “I’m a little messed up from the things I’ve seen. You know, over there.”

  Cal tries to put the kid at ease. “Kid, I’d fail one of those psych tests myself. No doubt about it.”

  The sun sets and hours pass. The traffic on the highway begins to thin, and Cal and the kid are alone with the truck’s big headlights spraying light out into the darkness. Randy tells Cal a little bit about his tour in Afghanistan, but he is vague about most of the details, focusing on trivial subjects like the heat or how sand got into everything. Randy says he has a wife in Saint Louis and a two-year-old who was born when he was overseas.

  “I see these pictures, man, from when she was a baby,” Randy says. “I can’t believe I missed all that. She was practically walking before I saw her in person for the first time.”

  Randy pulls out his phone and swipes through the photographs. He finds one and holds out the device for Cal to see. Cal takes his eyes off the road for a few seconds to look at the image.

  It’s a photo of the wife and daughter. The woman is pretty, with black hair and an enthusiastic smile, and the girl seems genuinely thrilled to be having her picture taken. She is beaming and her eyes are lit up as if it’s Christmas morning.

  Cal can’t help but think about the conversations he and Anne would have about children. She wanted them. Cal did, too. But he knew he’d be a terrible father, so he always fought her on the issue.

  She deserved to have children. She would have been so great with them. Whether the kids were Cal’s or not, she deserved to be a mother.

  Now she would never get that chance.

  “You okay?” Randy asks.

  Cal realizes he’s crying.

  “Sorry,” he says, and then he’s not sure why but he adds, “My girlfriend died recently.”

  “Oh shit, man. I’m sorry. How did she die?”

  “She was murdered,” Cal says.

  The kid goes quiet.

  Finally, Randy says, “Did they catch who did it?”

  “No,” Cal says. “I doubt they ever will.”

  Cal explains to Randy that, when Anne was murdered, he was driving this very route, not quite as far along, when he got a call from the police telling him Anne had been shot to death.

  But Cal leaves out one significant detail about that trip.

  Chapter 53

  RANDY SAYS OVER and over how sorry he is for Cal.

  “I appreciate it,” Cal says. “The worst part is that she and I had broken up. We had a huge fight. The last time I saw her, I was yelling at her, and she was yelling at me.”

  “Why’d you break up?” Randy asks. He pauses and looks at Cal’s face and then qualifies his question. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay.”

  “I never thought I was good enough for her. I thought she deserved better.”

  “Oh man,” Randy says. “When that happens, you have to hang on and do the best you can to make them happy. I know my wife deserves better than me. And my little girl, too. But that doesn’t stop me from trying to be the person they deserve, because for some crazy reason, I’m the person she wants.”

  Cal lets out a sound that’s a laugh mixed with a cry.

  “Randy,” he says, “you are wise beyond your years. If only you’d given me that advice a couple weeks ago.”

  Cal changes the subject and asks the kid if he’s ever thought about a career driving a truck. Randy says that he thinks it would be too hard to spend that much time away from his wife and daughter.

  “I’ve missed so much of their lives,” he says. “I don’t want to miss any more if I can help it.”

  They drive for a while longer, and the glow of the Saint Louis lights appears on the horizon.

  “Hey,” Cal says, thinking of something. “You should be able to appreciate this.”

  He reaches into the cubby above his head and brings out the knife.

  “Wow. Is that the real thing?”

  Randy takes the knife and pulls it from its leather sheath. He holds it up, looks at the blade. The interior of the truck is dark, but there’s some light coming in through the windshield. From where he’s sitting, Cal can hardly see the blade. The nonreflective surface is doing its job.

  Randy laughs. “What is this for? To cut your bagels in the morning?”

  “I keep it for protection,” Cal says.

  “As long as the other guy don’t have a howitzer,” Randy says, “I’d say you’re in pretty good shape.”

  He hands the knife back to Cal.

  “Holding that thing gives me the heebie-jeebies,” Randy says. “I saw someone get killed with one of those.”

  They’re quiet for a minute.

  “It sure is a messed-up world, ain’t it?” Cal says.

  “You got that right.”

  When they approach the exit Randy needs Cal to take, he tells Cal he can drop him off at the top of the ramp. Cal says he doesn’t mind taking him home—that is, of course, if Randy lives on a street that Cal’s eighteen-wheeler can get down.

  He does.

  Cal stops the big truck in front of a run-down duplex. Before Randy gets out, Cal tells him to wait.

  He reaches into the cubby above his head.

  Randy has one hand on the door, is ready to jump out.

  Cal’s fingers brush against the knife.

  Then he pulls his hand down, holding the wallet. He hands Randy a stack of twenties.

  “I can’t take this,” Randy says.

  “Buy a
bus ticket next time,” Cal says. “Maybe next time you hitchhike and climb into somebody’s truck, he’ll have a knife that he uses for more than just self-defense. The world’s full of crazies.”

  Randy flips through the bills.

  “There’s a hell of a lot more here than bus fare,” he says.

  Cal shrugs. “Use the rest to take your wife out to dinner,” he says. “Have a good night. Trust me: you never know when the last time you see her is going to be.”

  Chapter 54

  AFTER I SIT with Dad in the hospital for a few hours, I pull into the parking lot at the Pale Horse; it’s after midnight. Willow’s voice comes through the wall like the harmony of a church choir.

  The moment I walk into the one-room building, I can see that the crowd has thinned, due to the hour. Willow is singing a series of slow country ballads. She smiles at me from the stage, as the few remaining people on the dance floor couple up and move slowly to the rhythm of her voice.

  I don’t see anyone I know well. Darren isn’t even working tonight. But I’m glad I’m among strangers. I don’t have to socialize. I can just listen to Willow’s voice.

  When she finishes singing, she comes and sits next to me at my table.

  “How are you holding up?” she says.

  I tell her that my dad is in the hospital with cancer, and after that, it’s like the floodgates open. I tell her how my father made me promise to keep it a secret from the rest of my family, and how they’re all mad at me now because I didn’t keep them in the loop.

  She listens quietly, holding my hand the whole time. And when there’s nothing else for me to tell, she says she’s sorry and asks me to pass along her well-wishes.

  “After you left us at the shooting range,” she says, “your dad and I had a good long talk about you.”

  “You did?”

  “He’s really worried about you.”

  “I wish everyone would stop worrying about me and worry about themselves for a change.”

  “They love you,” Willow says. “It’s a good thing if they worry about you.”

  Then she describes how proud my father is of me. He thinks I am a good cop and a good man, and knows he can always count on me to do the right thing. But he’s noticed that the job—the career I chose—has taken a heavy toll on me.