Strong Cold Dead Read online

  The foreman scowled but then nodded slowly. “You’ve got your chance, Ranger. It doesn’t work, don’t blame me for what happens next.”

  Then he backpedaled, along with the rest of his men, dispersing into smaller groups to continue waiting out the situation.

  Caitlin turned back around to face Dylan. “Let’s talk.”

  * * *

  “I’m taking some time off from school,” Dylan started, after they’d moved into a shady grove off to the side of the entrance to the reservation.

  “Like a few days? A week?”

  Dylan hedged. “More like a semester.”

  “I don’t recall your dad mentioning anything about that.”

  “That’s because I didn’t tell him.”

  Caitlin gazed back toward the line of protesters.

  “Her name’s Ela Nocona,” Dylan resumed. “We met in Native American studies class back at Brown.”

  “Then I guess this would qualify as primary research.”

  “I’m trying to do something important here.”

  “Let’s hope your father sees it that way,” Caitlin told him, as Ela Nocona joined them in the grove.

  She was grinning wide enough to dapple her cheeks. “I didn’t think Dylan was telling the truth,” she said to Caitlin, clearly impressed, her tone suggesting they were old friends.

  “About what, Ela?”

  “About you. I told him I had to see it with my own eyes.” She continued to smile, seemingly in admiration. “And now I have.”

  “Peta Nocona was a great Comanche chief who fathered an even greater one in Quanah Parker. Any relation?”

  Ela Nocona tried hard not to look impressed. “I believe I’m Quanah Parker’s grandniece,” she said.

  “And you go to Brown, too.”

  “I’m a senior,” she told Caitlin. “Summa cum laude.”

  “So are you taking some time off from school too, Ela?”

  “The tribal school was short a teacher,” she said, without hesitation.

  “She works with disabled kids,” Dylan chimed in.

  “Far too many here, unfortunately. Ten times the number found among Caucasian children,” Ela explained, not bothering to elaborate.

  “A noble pursuit for sure,” Caitlin nodded, “as long as those construction workers don’t plow you over with backhoes and front loaders.”

  “I didn’t come back here to man a protest line, Ranger,” Ela said, her broad shoulders stiffening noticeably. “But this is our land. No one has a right to spoil it.”

  “Including your tribal elders, who sold off the mineral rights?”

  “That shouldn’t have been their decision. They should’ve put it to a vote.”

  “I heard they did,” Caitlin noted, “and that an overwhelming majority supported opening up these lands to drilling.”

  Ela stiffened. “That vote wasn’t legitimate. I made the elders let me address the crowd at the meeting, but they wouldn’t let me introduce all of my research on the Bakken field up in North Dakota and what oil did to the Indian lands there.”

  “Sounds like their call, to me.”

  “Dylan told me you were there when his mother was killed,” Ela said suddenly. “He said you shot it out with the man who did it.”

  “Close enough, I suppose,” Caitlin said, looking at Dylan again. “Did I mention your dad’s on the way?”

  Dylan swallowed hard. “You told him?”

  “Left him a message as soon as I got word myself, via an anonymous phone call to my cell number. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, ma’am?” she asked Ela.

  “Me?”

  “Because the caller specifically mentioned Dylan Torres being on the scene. Not something a random person would make note of. Like they were doing me a favor. Or maybe that person wanted me involved in whatever’s going on here.”

  Some of Ela Nocona’s long black hair strayed into her face and she whisked it off, only to have the breeze blow it back. “There’s a story my people tell about their first encounter with a Texas Ranger on this land.”

  “That Ranger was my great-great-grandfather,” Caitlin started. “His name was Steeldust Jack Strong, and he was also a hero in the Civil War.”

  “The stories passed down through the years speak well of him, but the truth about what happened the day he rode onto the reservation’s become muddled. Might you know it?”

  Caitlin cocked her gaze across the road to where the workmen had broken out the lunch boxes and coolers they’d intended to open at a break in their labors. That had yet to commence, though things had simmered down for now.

  “As a matter of fact,” Caitlin told Ela, as a sliver of sunlight broke through the tree line above, “I do.”

  10

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS; 1874

  Jack Strong rode straight through the center of the reservation, past the pastures and farmlands, until a trio of arrows pierced the ground directly in his path.

  Steeldust Jack dismounted stiffly, careful not to put too much weight on his bad leg, and held his hands in the air, watching a half dozen Comanche warriors, their faces streaked with traditional war paint, emerge from the nearby forest line, where a cluster of small log homes dotted a landscape shaded by sprawling maple and evergreen trees. Only a few tepees, likely for ceremonial purposes, were in evidence, placed not far from a series of large cooking pits, from which gray smoke rose in preparation for the tribe’s next meal.

  Steeldust Jack noted that the youngest Comanche warrior wasn’t wearing any war paint or carrying a bow like the others. He walked ahead of them, his muscular shoulders seeming to sway with the wind, heading straight for the Ranger as if they were the only two men here.

  “You are not welcome on this land,” the young brave said, stopping a few yards before Steeldust Jack. “You must leave.”

  Steeldust Jack shielded his eyes from the sun. “You the chief?”

  “The chief has no call to speak with the white man. I am Isa-tai, White Eagle in your language.”

  “Well, I’m Jack Strong, Texas Ranger in your language.”

  Isa-tai bristled at that. He didn’t look all that much older than Steeldust Jack’s son, William Ray, who’d just joined the Rangers himself, at seventeen, and had been assigned to the newly formed Frontier Battalion. Strange for a father to be jealous of his son, but that’s the way Jack Strong felt, and he couldn’t help it. The truth was, he’d have been much happier fighting Indians than investigating a killing that might have taken place on their land. But duty was duty.

  “You have no business here, Ranger.”

  Isa-tai had eyes so dark that the Ranger was pretty sure they were black, with hardly any white mixed in. His bronzed face was angular, with ridged cheekbones and smooth skin that was free of the scars Steeldust Jack was used to seeing on the Comanche he’d done battle with over the years. Isa-tai’s raven hair was clubbed back, the way all braves wore it, with what looked like a bone looping through it and poking out from the top.

  “And authority here, either,” Isa-tai continued.

  “Is what I heard true? That you folks here are immortal, that you’re gonna live forever?”

  “Not if the white man can help it. This land was given to us in peace and we have kept it in peace. We ask only to be left alone, and for the white man to keep to himself, just as we do.”

  “All the same, I was hoping you could help me with something.”

  “I’m a medicine man. But if you’ve come for healing, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  “I come about a man just outside your land here who’s way beyond healing.”

  “A white man?”

  “Yes, sir. Got himself killed in an especially bad way.”

  Isa-tai flirted with a smile. “There’s no bad enough way for a white man to die.”

  Steeldust Jack felt the other braves closing in on him from the rear. Their steps were too soft to discern through the breeze, but the cast of their shadows betra
yed their motion. He made sure to hang his right hand well off his Colt, so as not to spook them.

  “I was wondering if there were any bear in these parts.”

  “A bear didn’t do it. You already know that,” said Isa-tai.

  “You telling me what I know now? Are we having a language problem here?”

  The braves behind Jack Strong fanned out, enclosing him in a circle, with Isa-tai still directly before him, looking up.

  “You don’t know what you’re looking for, taibo.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Isa-tai looked about, seeming to sniff the air. “You should go. It’ll be dark before you know it.”

  “I ain’t afraid of the dark.”

  “It’s what the dark breeds that you should be afraid of.”

  “This all have anything to do with those rituals I heard about? None of my business, I know, and none of that dead fella’s business, either. But if, by some chance, he trespassed with an intent to do harm and got clipped before he could do so, that’s a case I can make on your behalf.”

  “We don’t need you to do anything on our behalf, Ranger. We do for ourselves here, in harmony with nature and the Great Spirit. If you suspect this dead man’s fate involved his trespass, I suggest you take it up with him.”

  “Maybe you could introduce me to this Great Spirit of yours. I haven’t exactly seen him about lately.

  If Isa-tai was amused at all by Steeldust Jack’s attempt at levity, he didn’t show it. “That is because you see only the world before you, not around you.”

  Steeldust Jack swept his gaze about the braves encircling him. “You trying to tell me something?”

  “A warning.”

  The Ranger’s hand edged closer to his Colt. “Don’t test me.”

  “Not from us. You have nothing to fear here, other than your own ignorance.”

  “Pretty smug talk.”

  “Heed the lesson of the taibo who lies dead.”

  Steeldust Jack resisted the temptation to get right up in Isa-tai’s face. “You want to give me that again in English I can understand?”

  “This is our land,” Isa-tai said, his spine stiffening.

  “Understood.”

  “All that lies on and beneath it belongs to us.”

  “Now you’ve lost me again.”

  “After my people lost our land to your kind. Forced to fight for what is ours, then presented with tiny patches like this, only to have it threatened, too.”

  Steeldust Jack mopped the heat from his brow with a sleeve already mired in perspiration, swabbing it under the brim of his hat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did that man whose body got chopped up like a side of beef threaten you?”

  Isa-tai’s spine relaxed. “Time for you to go.”

  “What was he doing here, in these parts?”

  “Ask him.”

  “He’s in no condition to tell me.”

  “His spirit then. And have that spirit take a message back to whoever sent him, that the same fate awaits whoever follows.” White Eagle turned his gaze on the sky. “But hurry. Night is coming.”

  And that was when Steeldust Jack heard the scream.

  11

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS

  What sounded like a gunshot ended Caitlin’s tale midthought, and the next moments unfolded in what felt like slow motion. First the police officers manning the line separating the two camps whipped out their guns. Then the construction workers mounted a fresh charge, with the young protesters not giving an inch.

  Caitlin resisted the temptation to draw her own pistol. The blast sounded more like a car or truck backfiring, in retrospect, but it was enough to push already frayed nerves over the edge. She planted herself before Dylan and Ela so they couldn’t rush back to the entrance. She spotted Cort Wesley Masters storming across the scene, heading straight for them, red-faced and breathing so hard she could see his big chest contracting under his shirt. His focus was entirely on Dylan, as if Caitlin and Ela Nocona weren’t even there.

  “When did you plan on telling me you dropped out of school, son?”

  “I didn’t drop out,” Dylan said, looking up at Cort Wesley and trying to return his glare. “I’m just taking a semester off.”

  “Well, I got a call from the registrar. Apparently, there were a bunch of forms you neglected to fill out, to the point where Brown isn’t sure you’re returning at all.”

  Cort Wesley’s face was so red it seemed sunburned, and his breath was so hot it looked like smoke when it hit the moisture-soaked air. Caitlin could see the tension in the muscles beneath his shirt, his traps so pronounced they stretched the fabric of the T-shirt she’d bought him for his last birthday. Sweat dappled the fabric in splotches, and Caitlin figured that even the truck’s air-conditioning hadn’t been able to cool him off on the drive down here from Houston, where he’d been meeting with the principal of his younger son’s school.

  Dylan slid closer to Ela Nocona. “We’re doing something important here.”

  “We,” Cort Wesley repeated, seeming to notice Ela Nocona for the first time and, no doubt, coming to the same conclusion Caitlin already had. “So is it important enough to give up your future for?”

  “Have you even heard what’s going on in North Dakota, on that Bakken oil field that straddles Indian land?” Dylan asked him.

  “No, son, I haven’t.”

  “It’s a repeat of how the nineteenth century went down for them. And now it’s happening here in Texas. Somebody’s got to do something.”

  “That somebody being you,” Cort Wesley said. “Maybe I should haul you out of here. Tie you to the bed of my truck and drive you all the way back to Providence.”

  Dylan shook his head and blew the hair from his face, then swiped at it again with a hand. Caitlin felt the air thicken between father and son. Dylan was still nearly half a foot shorter than Cort Wesley, at five foot nine, but he was not about to give an inch, no more than he did while playing running back for the Brown University football team, under famed coach Phil Estes. Caitlin let her gaze stray off them and found it fixing on an area where the press and spectators had been cordoned, toward a rail-thin figure who didn’t look much older than Dylan. Caitlin couldn’t place the kid, but something about him looked familiar enough to unsettle her in what her grandfather Earl Strong had called the “quiet parts.” She knew the kid from someplace, and wherever that was, clearly it wasn’t good, given her response to his presence.

  “So you and the rest of these kids are trying to save the tribe from itself,” she heard Cort Wesley saying to Dylan, and she turned back toward them. “Is that it?”

  “The elders are lying to them, Dad.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “But it’s mine, Mr. Torres. It’s my business,” Ela said, standing side by side with Dylan, addressing Cort Wesley respectfully. “This is a protected refuge. The oil company can’t touch any of it, except here on the reservation, since my people were deeded this part of the land. So that’s where they came, bringing promises to build new schools, new housing, new jobs. My people kept voting down a casino, but they accepted the company’s promises because the elders sold them a bill of goods. Carbon copy of North Dakota, but nobody’s paying any attention.” Ela squeezed Dylan’s arm. “Maybe this will change that.”

  “First, my name’s Masters, not Torres. Second, the only thing that’s gonna change is what happens when heads start getting busted,” Cort Wesley told her.

  Caitlin held her gaze on Ela. “Are you accusing anybody of breaking the law here?”

  “The laws of nature, of history, yes.”

  “Those aren’t the laws I was talking about.”

  Ela shrugged.

  Caitlin felt a chill run through her, and she scanned the spectators again for the tall young man, so rail thin that he seemed to have no waist at all. But she turned back toward Dylan and Ela before she could find him.

  “Tell you what I
can do. I can speak with the right folks at this minerals company to determine if their intentions are just. I can’t make any promises, but in my experience, people real good at hiding behind intentions don’t talk such a good game when you pull back the curtain.”

  Ela looked over Caitlin’s shoulder toward the congestion of construction workers milling about, just beyond the police line. Anger was squeezing their expressions taut, and they seemed ready to erupt again at any moment. Caitlin’s gaze, meanwhile, drifted yet again toward the gallery of spectators, fixing on the precise spot where the tall kid with the pants sagging past his hips had been standing. She was still trying to place how she recognized him, the answer flitting along the outskirts of her consciousness like a bad dream she couldn’t quite keep ahold of.

  “You don’t know what you’re dealing with here, Ranger, not with these people,” Ela told her.

  “Well,” said Caitlin, still trying to spot the tall kid she couldn’t chase from her mind, “they don’t know what they’re dealing with, either.”

  PART TWO

  They were … one of the most colorful, efficient, and deadly band of irregular partisans on the side of law and order the world has seen.

  —T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2000)

  12

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  “You risked compromising this mission. You risked everything.”

  Daniel Cross stretched his long legs under the table in Hoover’s Cooking and looked up from the chicken-fried steak the waitress had just set down on his place mat. “How’d I do that, just hanging around the reservation for a few minutes?” he asked the two men seated across from him in the booth.

  “You must learn to follow the rules, exercise caution,” Razin Saflin said. “There’s so much at stake here, and your presence at that Indian reservation could have harmed our plans.”