Strong Cold Dead Page 7

  “I got a call Dylan Torres was involved in the protest, Captain.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I heard that too,” Tepper told her, a grim undercurrent lacing his voice. “And you should know there’s been some more trouble up at that reservation. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “Dylan again?”

  “No, Ranger, it’s his father this time.”

  16

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS

  Cort Wesley had been hanging back, in a shady spot that cloaked him from the view of both the protesters and construction workers, when he saw the trouble coming. The kind of trouble he’d learned to sense a whole bunch of years ago, when he’d served in Special Ops during the Gulf War.

  The real Gulf War, as he liked to call it now, where they’d had a plan for getting in as well as out and had executed it to perfection. Cort Wesley had been part of the team sent in early, through Kuwait, to act as spotters for the initial strafing runs and, later, close air support aimed at more strategic targets. It was the highlight of his military career, which had ended less than auspiciously and had left him in the service of the Branca crime family out of New Orleans, an enforcer for their San Antonio–based drug business. Only men with a security clearance at Jones’s level could even access the files detailing his military exploits, because, according to one especially frank Special Ops colonel way up the chain of command, “If they ever learned what we did, they’d never let us do it again.”

  Cort Wesley had come to realize that combat was an apt metaphor for pretty much everything he’d experienced since then. Raising kids might not be as dramatic, but it was every bit as challenging. You think taking down a half dozen Iraqi soldiers is tough? Try dealing with a pair of teenage boys—especially the oldest, now in college, for whom no cause was too small to make a stand. Dylan had spent his early years nursing sick animals back to health and holding actual funerals when his efforts failed. The boys’ mother—Cort Wesley’s girlfriend, Maura Torres—had sent him pictures of those rescue efforts during the early days of Cort Wesley’s four-year stretch behind bars at Huntsville’s infamous Walls penitentiary. Cort Wesley had papered the walls of his cell with them, focusing on a different shot every day, long after his oldest had outgrown the practice and the photos stopped coming.

  Right now, the picture he saw forming was of the police line starting to buckle under a concerted shove forward by the construction workers pressed up against it. Cort Wesley saw the line giving.

  Saw the protesters, led by Dylan and Ela Nocona, holding their ground.

  Saw hammers, ax handles, heavy lug wrenches, and even chains brandished by the construction workers, to be used as weapons instead of tools.

  The violence was inevitable now.

  Cort Wesley pictured flesh and bone split by wood and steel, an endless parade of rescue vehicles and ambulances that would follow. And then he was in motion, one with the air, as if he’d joined up with the breeze, that hundred feet passing in what seemed little more than the length of a breath. He cut through an opening and took a pair of workers as big as him, who were closing on Dylan and Ela, by the shirt collars, from behind, slamming the men’s heads together so hard their hard hats went flying. He kicked the legs out from under their dazed forms and jammed a boot heel into the solar plexus of each, for good measure.

  Cort Wesley would have heard them utter crackling, guttural gasps, if he could hear anything at all. Before he could record his next thought, he’d scooped up one of the discarded hard hats and used it to intercept a punch aimed straight for Dylan’s face. He felt the wielder’s hand shatter on impact. Cort Wesley slammed him in the mouth with the brim of the hard hat, the worker spitting out teeth as he collapsed to his knees.

  At that, three big men turned their attention from their assault on the protest line and toward him. Cort Wesley glimpsed a hammer, a crowbar, and an ax handle, fixing his focus on all three at once as if the world before him was divided into a trio of screens. He still had the now dented hard hat in hand and used it both to block and to retaliate, ducking, twisting, and turning away from blows launched by would-be weapons that ought to be hanging from garage hooks.

  The hand holding the hat stung from all the impacts, and Cort Wesley unleashed his free hand in concert with it. The world turned to slow motion around him while he remained at regular speed, the ease with which he moved feeling like catching a stiff wind in a sailboat, right up to the point when he swept the legs of a bearded man he recognized as the crew foreman and dropped the man at his feet with a blow from the smashed hard hat he was still holding.

  Then he was alone between the two camps, the construction workers finally backing off, while the cops advanced on him.

  “Drop it! Drop it!” one cop ordered, gun drawn.

  Cort Wesley let the now shapeless hard hat drop to the ground.

  “Stay where you are, son!” he yelled to Dylan, as the boy started to move toward him.

  Then Cort Wesley felt himself shoved to the ground, too, close enough to the busted-up hard hat to see it wobbling like a top, until another cop kicked it aside.

  “You boys are real good at keeping the peace,” he spat at them, feeling a pair of handcuffs clamped in place. “I’m feeling safer already.”

  17

  RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA

  “Another, friend?” the bartender asked Cray Rawls.

  “Sure thing,” Rawls told him. “And one for the lady here, too,” he added, gesturing toward the woman two stools down, who was futilely working her Bic to light a cigarette, in violation of the city’s nonsmoking ordinance.

  He caught his reflection in the mirrored back bar, a thin crack distorting his features and seeming to split his face in two, the halves separated by a jagged gap. His hair was brown and thick, same as it had been in high school, except Rawls brushed it straight back now. The murky lighting cast his ruddy, pockmarked features in shadows that darkened the acne scar depressions marring his complexion. The mirror’s distortion broadened his shoulders beyond even the breadth wrought by the obsessive gym training he had forgone tonight, in need of a different kind of workout. He’d broken his nose in a boxing mishap recently and, from this distance, it looked like a lump of mottled flesh stuck to his face beneath eyes that seemed to glow like a cat’s.

  Rawls slid onto the stool next to the woman and fired up his lighter, feeling the bite of arthritis that had begun to plague his fingers and knuckles. “You know that’s illegal.”

  “If that bothers you, why give me a light?”

  “Who said it bothered me?”

  The woman tilted the pack resting on the bar top his way.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Rawls said, tapping a cigarette out and firing up his lighter anew.

  The bartender refilled his glass and poured the woman a fresh one. Cheap, warm, and poured from a gaffed bottle of Johnnie Walker. Rawls had a massive collection of single malts, maybe the biggest in the country, a fact nobody in this dive bar called the Relay cared two shits about.

  And that suited Rawls just fine, as did sitting here, just a short distance from where he’d been born, without needing to impress anybody with his charm or his liquor selection. The woman seated on the stool next to him sipped her drink and then tapped her ashes onto the bar’s plank floor, for want of an ashtray.

  “That all you got to say?” she asked, puffing again.

  “I don’t recall saying anything.”

  “You must’ve forgot to ask me my name. It’s Candy.”

  Rawls took her extended hand, which felt cold and waxy, like shaking hands with a mannequin. Unlike a mannequin, though, the woman wore too much makeup and smelled of too much perfume, having maybe come here from someplace else without stopping for a shower in the middle.

  Candy seemed a fitting match for the surroundings, which weren’t made up at all. The bar’s dome lights had lost their radiance to untouched dust caked up around the bulbs. The wooden walls were sun-faded in some places and stained by cigare
tte smoke in others. All entertainment was provided by an old-fashioned jukebox in the corner, which still played three songs for a quarter. “Cat’s in the Cradle,” by Harry Chapin, was into its final bars.

  “That’s a stupid song,” Candy noted, blowing smoke out her nose.

  “You ever listen to the words?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Great meaning in them if you listen close enough. I should know.”

  “Know what?” Candy asked him, resting her face in her palm.

  “Cat’s in the Cradle” ended and “Sweet Home Alabama” started up.

  “That’s more like it,” noted Candy. “So, what is it you know?”

  “These songs. They were both released in 1974, the year I was born.”

  Candy pressed what was left of her cigarette out on the bar top. “You from around here, sweetie?”

  “Close enough. Matter of fact, you remind me of my mother, back when she was still young and pretty.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “So you in town visiting relatives, something like that?”

  “Nothing like that,” Rawls told her. “Got an important verdict coming down tomorrow morning at the Wake County courthouse.”

  “You a lawyer?” Candy asked him.

  “Defendant.”

  “What’d you do?” She smirked. “Kill somebody or something?”

  “A whole bunch of people, according to the prosecution. Dozens, even hundreds. Candy,” Rawls said, pressing out his own cigarette in the charred outline of hers, “you are looking at what some would have you believe is a genuine mass murderer.”

  “I guess I should be scared then.”

  “You’re not?”

  She shrugged a pair of shoulders that looked trim to the bone, her leatherlike pants struggling to shine in the Relay’s naked light as she laid a hand atop his. “Of a local boy? Not even one little bit.”

  “Maybe you should be.”

  Her hand left his and dropped to his leg, fingers easing up the inside of his thigh. “Why’s that? ’Cause of all those people you supposedly killed?”

  “Nope. Of that, I’m an innocent. Never even met a single one of them.”

  “Then what are you guilty of?”

  Rawls gulped down the rest of his cheap scotch, and then Candy’s as well. “Why don’t I tell you about it somewhere else?”

  * * *

  Rawls took off his sock in the bathroom of the motel room and stuffed it with all four mini soap bars, twisting the top to catch all of them snugly. Then he walked back into the room, which was lit only by the letters of the flashing marquee shining through the flimsy shades and splaying off the walls.

  Candy was naked from the waist up, seated atop the bed covers, starting to peel her pants off.

  “Don’t bother,” Rawls told her, holding his weighted, balled-up sock low by his hip, where she wouldn’t see it. “I meant what I said about you reminding me of my mother.”

  “I can be anybody you want me to be, sweetie,” she said, smiling up at him with bleached teeth.

  “Then be my mother,” he said, starting forward. “Be my mother the night I was conceived in a room a lot like this.”

  The smile slid from Candy’s face. Rawls’s frame now blocked the light of the flashing letters, so her features were lost to shadow.

  “Hey, sweetie, why don’t we—”

  Rawls hit her with the sock, not realizing his own intention until his arm was already in motion, feeling the miniature bars fracture on impact with Candy’s face. She was on the bed and then she was off it, staring up at him from the floor.

  “That’s it,” he said down to her. “Be scared, be helpless, be a worthless sack of shit, just like my mother and all the rest of them.”

  Candy held the bruised side of her face protectively, back-crawling until the wall stopped her motion.

  “You said you could be anybody, so I took you at your word. And goddammit if you didn’t deliver.”

  “Pleas-s-sh,” Candy said, through the side of her mouth that still worked.

  “Please what? Come on, tell me, because I really want to know. I really want to know what my mother was feeling, the nights she came back home the way you’re going home tonight. See, I was still too young to understand all that, when she died, and this is as close as I can come to knowing. So tell me.”

  Rawls drew the soap-stuffed sock back overhead when Candy kept whimpering, tightening herself into a protective ball. He felt the rage over her refusal to respond simmering inside him, the sock in motion again before he even realized what he was doing.

  Whop!

  It impacted with a sound like a shovel digging deep into a hard-packed pile of dirt. Cray Rawls smelled lavender from the broken pieces of the stale soap, his mind taking him back to the sweet scent of pecan trees in the summer, when he’d spend the night outside while his mother’s “regulars” paid a visit.

  “I grew up not far from here,” Rawls heard himself tell Candy. “I did my best to erase it from my memory, did my best to make some good of it. But now I’m back, my life in the hands of some pissant jury. And you know what, Candy?”

  Whop!

  He struck her again when she refused to acknowledge him, the broken soap bars splintering into smaller chunks.

  “I don’t care if they find me guilty. Let the system take its best shot, throw everything it’s got at me. ’Cause you know the ultimate power in the universe? Not giving a shit. When you don’t give a shit, nobody can scare you, nobody can hurt you. Do you give a shit, Candy?”

  When she failed to answer him, Rawls hit her again, twice. Her breathing had gone shallow and raspy, coming so fast it mostly swallowed her whimpers and sobs.

  “What’s it feel like?” he demanded, glowering over her. “Tell me, so I know. Tell me, so I can know my mother.”

  Whop!

  Rawls’s thin sock exploded on impact this time, shedding soap fragments that clacked against the nearest wall. He almost told Candy how he’d taken up boxing, only to find he had no talent for the sport other than to be everyone else’s punching bag. Which suited him just fine. He liked getting hurt, battered, pummeled into oblivion until he hit the mat and surrendered to the world, the same way sleep had come to him as a little boy, to spare him the grunts and groans coming from his mother’s bedroom. And when he couldn’t sleep, he’d scratch at his skin with a fingernail, and later a roofing nail, to make himself hurt, because somehow that deadened the real pain.

  Rawls reached down to grab hold of Candy, but he found himself crouching over her and then lowering his knees to the cheap, mite-infested rug before he could find purchase. Felt himself yanking her pants down past her hips, just enough, and then pushing himself inside her.

  Candy gasped, something that started as a scream blowing hot, moist breath up onto Rawls as he thrust himself in and out, in and out, in and out … knowing the muffled sounds that came out of her, all too well.

  The sounds of his mother, coming from the next room.

  But beneath him now.

  “What does it feel like?” Rawls heard himself demand. “Tell me what it feels like!”

  Candy didn’t, so he kept up with his thrusting, her head ping-ponging lightly against the wall with each entry. She’d gone slack, limp, resignation and shock claiming her features, making Rawls think she really was a department store mannequin that his mind had turned real. He imagined she smelled like plastic instead of musty clothes and stale perfume. Imagined taking a match to her and smelling burning plastic as she melted beneath him.

  Then Candy’s face morphed into his mother’s, and Cray Rawls kept thrusting anyway, hurting her as all those men had, the two of them sharing all that pain.

  “How does it feel?” he heard himself ask. “How does it feel?”

  Tomorrow a jury thought it would be deciding Rawls’s fate, with no idea what he had going a thousand miles away. What he’d lucked into that would make hi
m richer than all the sons of bitches whose asses he’d had to kiss, who had left him with the same feeling that getting pummeled in the ring did. Leaving their offices or private dining rooms as dazed as he was when somebody had to help him up from the mat. He welcomed that direct form of combat, as opposed to the more subtle brand practiced in the boardroom, even though he’d never left a conference table with his nose busted.

  But all that was about to change, regardless of the verdict that came down tomorrow. He was about to be the force doing the pummeling, shooting the bird to his wretched past, his mother, and everything else.

  “How does it feel?” he asked Candy again, pulling out of her for the last time.

  Rawls stood up, yanking up his pants and peeling hundred-dollar bills from the wad in his pocket.

  “Because it feels great to me.”

  18

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “That all you have to say, Cort Wesley?” Caitlin asked him.

  Cort Wesley pressed the phone against his ear, his truck’s headlights digging through the first of the night. “No, besides thanks for keeping me out of jail.”

  “You’ve got Captain Tepper to thank for that.”

  “I don’t know, maybe I should’ve let things be. Maybe getting hit by an ax handle would knock some sense into Dylan.”

  “How many of the workers you take down?”

  “I didn’t keep count. However many it was won’t be working anytime soon. Likely be filing for workman’s comp tomorrow.”

  “They’re probably not eligible.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  “What’d you break of theirs?”

  An uneasy silence settled between them, but Cort Wesley felt a smile push itself through it. He pulled a hand from the steering wheel to feel around the bruise left by one of the cops pushing his face into the ground. But he had trouble driving the truck with the hand left to that task. It was tough to close the fingers that had swelled up at the knuckles from the blows he’d struck against the workmen.