Strong Cold Dead Read online

  “The attack was planned, Ranger, not random. Like those construction workers got word from somebody to take the offensive.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Cort Wesley started to take a deep breath but stopped. “What time did your meeting wrap up in Houston?”

  “Five o’clock. What makes you ask?”

  “Because fifteen minutes later, the trouble here all started. You think that was a coincidence, Ranger, or somebody sending a message?”

  * * *

  Cort Wesley wished he had some ice to wrap around his swollen hand. Funny how he never remembered them hurting after he got into scrapes years back; they probably did, just not as much—or maybe he was just too young and stupid to pay attention. Like his sons, who were young and not stupid at all, although you wouldn’t know it sometimes.

  Looks like I’m not going to win father of the year …

  Not with Luke ready to quit his fancy prep school because he couldn’t room with his ex-boyfriend, while Dylan had dropped out of Brown University to protest oil drilling on his Indian girlfriend’s reservation.

  “That’s ‘Native American’ these days, bubba,” the spectral shape of Leroy Epps said from the passenger seat, tipping the neck of a root beer bottle back against his lips.

  19

  BOERNE, TEXAS

  “Was I talking to you, champ?”

  “Think, talk—same thing from where I be. I heard you thinking that, just like I heard you wishing you could ice your sore hand.” Leroy flashed the root beer bottle. Cort Wesley was able to see through him in parts, as clear as through the glass. “Guess you forgot about your cooler. Hope you don’t mind me taking your last one.”

  “I’ve developed a taste for the stuff, thanks to you.”

  “Notice you only buy real Hires, flavored with genuine sarsaparilla. I’d take my hat off to you if I wore one.” The ghost of his old friend watched Cort Wesley trying to flex the life back into his swollen fingers. “In my day, we had to box once a month instead of a year. Know how I’d heal my hands fast? Go out and catch as many bees as I could hold and squeeze until they stung me.”

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  “Don’t crack wise with me, bubba.”

  Cort Wesley found himself thinking about old Leroy’s funeral, which prison officials had let Cort attend, in a potter’s field for inmates who didn’t have any relatives left to claim the body. He’d been the only one standing at the graveside, besides the prison chaplain, when Mexican laborers had lowered the plank coffin into the ground. Cort Wesley tried to remember what he’d been thinking that day, but it was hard because he’d done his best to erase those years not just from his memory but also from his very being. One thing he did remember was that the service was the first time he’d smelled the talcum powder Leroy Epps had used to hide the stench of the festering sores caused by the diabetes that ultimately killed him.

  Cort Wesley looked back toward the passenger seat, half expecting Leroy to be gone. But he was still there, sipping from the bottle of root beer clasped in a thin, liver-spotted hand. His lips were pale pink and crinkled with dryness. The thin light radiating from the truck’s dashboard cast his brown skin in a yellowish tint. The diabetes that had planted him in the ground had turned Leroy’s eyes bloodshot and had numbed his limbs years before the sores and infections set in. As a boxer, Leroy had fought for the middleweight crown on three different occasions. He’d been knocked out once and had the belt stolen from him through paid-off judges’ scorecards two other times. He’d been busted for killing a white man in self-defense and had died three years into Cort Wesley’s four-year incarceration, but ever since he always seemed to show up when he was needed the most. Whether a ghostly specter or a figment of Cort Wesley’s imagination, Cort Wesley had given up trying to figure out. He just accepted the fact of Leroy’s presence and was grateful that Leroy kept coming around to help him out of one scrape after another.

  “As I was saying,” old Leroy resumed, “you sure know how to pick ’em.”

  “As in…”

  “Fights, bubba. I don’t know what was more fun, watching you mix it up with that principal lady at your youngest’s school or frying the grits of those side busters fixing to turn your oldest into mashed potatoes.”

  “You sure have a way with words, champ.”

  “What do you expect, you being the only live person I’m on a speaking basis with and all? No different now than it was back in the Walls, I suppose, the thing being a man’s gotta know when it’s time to choose his words carefully.”

  “There a message in there somewhere meant for me?”

  Cort Wesley watched old Leroy swirl the remnants of his root beer about the bottom of the bottle, wanting to savor the last sips. “Not of my making, bubba. But now that you mention it…”

  “Oh boy…”

  “I find myself agreeing with you.”

  “About what?”

  “What you told the Ranger lady, about something spurring those workmen to action when it did. Men like that don’t do nothing unless somebody’s telling them to do it.”

  “Any more pearls of wisdom to cover the price of the Hires, champ?”

  “I apologize for drinking your last one, bubba,” Epps said, swirling the last of the root beer about the bottle again as he fixed his gaze out the windshield. “Always darkest where the road bends, like it’s hiding what’s around the next curve. What do you think it’d be like for a man if he could see around those curves instead of just straight ahead?”

  “I imagine he’d be prepared for anything.”

  “’Cepting that goes against the grain of nature on both sides of the plane, bubba. See, I can tell you where it’s darkest, but I can’t see through the paint no better than you can.”

  “Is there a point in there somewhere?”

  “Just this: what happens when you shine your high beams into a Texas fog bank?”

  “The light bounces back at you.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “You’ve got to make do with whatever path your headlights can carve.”

  “There you go, then.”

  “I do?”

  Leroy Epps drained the rest of the Hires and blew air into the bottle to make a wind sound. “You wanna know what’s coming, when the best you can do is slow down and be ready when it gets here.”

  “You talking about my boys, champ?”

  “We travel a winding road, bubba, not a straightaway,” he resumed. “Best we can do is keep those we love from straying onto the pavement and getting turned into roadkill.”

  Cort Wesley took his eyes off the ghost to refocus on the road. When he looked back, Leroy was gone.

  Cort Wesley realized that watching his old friend enjoying his root beer had worked up his own thirst. He reached behind him to the backseat floor, popped open his cooler, and felt about for the third of the root beer bottles he thought he’d stored for the ride up to Houston and the Village School. His fingers came up empty.

  “Damn,” Cort Wesley uttered, shaking his head. “Son of a bitch really did drink my last one.”

  20

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS

  “Who’d you say we’re meeting?” Dylan asked Ela Nocona, as they made their way to the back end of the Comanche reservation, nestled against the edge of the nature preserve, where the flatter lands gave way to sloping hills.

  “My grandfather. Sort of,” she told him.

  “What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

  “Long story.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  “What?”

  “‘Long story.’ Give me the short version. Either he’s your grandfather or he’s not.”

  She flashed Dylan the look she used when she was playing around, soft and tough at the same time. It set something deep inside him fluttering and briefly stole his breath. Brought him back to the first time he’d seen her, when she squeezed by and took the seat next to him in Brown University’s Salomon Ce
nter. Her hair smelled like jasmine and the rest of her like the outdoors itself.

  “It’s what I call him,” Ela said finally, hoping that would be the end of it.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “He claims he’s my father’s grandfather—great-grandfather, actually. How’s that?”

  “Besides the fact it would make him, like, over a hundred and fifty years old?”

  Ela shrugged. “Everyone calls him White Eagle, Isa-tai in our language. You want to know if I believe he’s really that old somehow? He’s supposed to be a shaman, and they’re only born once a century.”

  “What happened to whoever was supposed to replace him in the twentieth century?”

  “That would be my real grandfather. The bottle got him. I’ll show you his grave sometime. Guess fulfilling the tradition was too much for him.”

  “Yeah, living forever takes its toll.”

  Ela gave him that look again. “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Who’s next in line?” Dylan asked, instead of responding. “As in, in the twenty-first century.”

  “You’re looking at her.”

  * * *

  Ela’s grandfather, as she called him, lived on a ridge up a steep slope near the reservation’s northwest boundary, where it joined the bulk of the protected wildlife refuge. The Comanche had been deeded their parcel of land long before anyone had thought of these lands that way. Back then, people tended to take the land for granted, unspoiled by the specters of oil and gas rigs pluming the ground. If Dylan had his bearings right, continuing for a brief stretch along one of the nature paths he spotted cut through the woods would have taken them to the challenging switchbacks off the refuge’s Rimrock trail. But the clearing up ahead pushed aside thoughts of that or anything else.

  The first thing he saw was a waterfall, its suds sweeping down a mansion-sized husk of jagged stone that looked like an appendage of the land. The waterfall flowed into a pond lapped with light currents that glistened in the moonlight. It was a true Texas moment for him, one of those times when he happened upon something that reminded him of the state’s prehistoric beauty. It was what he missed most about going to college in the big, bad Northeast, where normally the only sights were people, and no journey to another destination brought any surprises with it. Dylan knew people around his age who were proud of the fact that they’d never left Texas, and moments like this made him wonder if they had things right.

  White Eagle’s room-sized log cabin sat perched at the edge of the pond. Outside, in an elegant circular assemblage of stones and rocks, he’d built a fire, which was crackling and sending embers wafting off into the night. The breeze carried those embers out over the pond, where they cut slivers out of the moonlight’s shine for a moment, until the surface of the still water claimed them.

  Dylan felt Ela take his hand, more a practical gesture than a romantic one, since the ridge trail was uneven and strewn with loose stone that could cause a bad misstep in the darkness. She tried to let go when the spray of the firelight reached them, but Dylan held on because he liked the feel of her grip, as soft as it was strong. He knew both Caitlin and his dad had their doubts about her, but they’d never seen her working with the kids born autistic or learning disabled, thanks to fetal alcohol syndrome. They didn’t appreciate the fact that a girl this close to graduating and getting to live her own life would put it all on hold because those kids needed somebody to give them the same chance Ela herself had gotten.

  Dylan squeezed her hand tighter, spotted what looked like a cave high up in the rock face, just out of the waterfall’s reach, a doorway-sized opening accessible by a ledge wide enough to accommodate a man willing to walk with the stone face bracing his shoulder. He thought he spied a flickering, shadowy shape inside the mouth of one of the caves, until the moon slipped behind a cloud and it was gone.

  Then a second structure in the clearing claimed his attention. He took it for an old-fashioned outhouse, except it was built of logs heavier and thicker than those forming the cabin. He spied what looked like a door latch brightening in view in the firelight, making him think it was more likely a storage shed. Except he thought he heard something clanging inside it, followed by the muffled exchange of voices. Before he could discern any words, a shape stepped out before Ela and him, seeming to take its form the night.

  “Welcome, Granddaughter,” greeted White Eagle.

  Judging by his face, maybe he really had been born in the nineteenth century. It was not skin so much as a dried patchwork assemblage of wrinkles and furrows, crisscrossing each other in a battle for space across his parchment-like flesh. His coarse, gray-white hair was clubbed back in a ponytail. He stood eye to eye with Dylan, his hunched spine and bent knees having stolen at least six inches from the height of his youth. He smelled of mesquite and pine smoke from the fire and boasted the whitest teeth Dylan had ever seen in a man.

  “And this would be the young man you’ve spoken of to me,” White Eagle said, staring more through Dylan than at him. “You told me he was white.” The old man worked a finger through the night, in front of Dylan, as if he were tracing Dylan’s face in the firelit air. “You look Comanche. You have any Comanche blood?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “You look Comanche, because you have the warrior’s glow about you. No stranger to death already, are you?”

  “I’ve seen my share of it,” Dylan admitted.

  “Your mother?”

  “How’d you know?”

  The old man did that thing with his finger in the air again. “It’s written on your face, plain as day for those who can read it. Looks clear as the words in a book to my old eyes.”

  “We need your advice, Grandfather,” Ela broke in.

  White Eagle turned his whole head toward her. “I’ve been watching you stand against the posah-tai-vo,” he said, looking briefly back at Dylan. “Means ‘crazy white man.’ Warrior’s blood runs through you as well, Granddaughter. The spirits have chosen well for my successor.”

  “We can’t beat them, Grandfather. Everyone’s against us, even my father. He says our people deserve to enjoy the spoils of our land, that we made a mistake not building a casino or making cigarettes, like other tribes, when we had the opportunity. He says this may be our last chance to right this wrong.”

  “And you don’t agree with him, Granddaughter?”

  “I’ve studied what such deals have done to other tribes. Made them richer, but not better, while poisoning their land. The White man’s money is the devil, but the elders don’t see it that way. The elders believe we’ve suffered long enough.”

  Dylan watched the old man nodding along with Ela, as if her words were a recording he’d heard already.

  “This happened once before, you know,” White Eagle told them both.

  “We heard a little about that today,” said Dylan.

  White Eagle started forward, his feet sheathed in ancient moccasins shuffling atop the ground. “Then let us sit by the fire so I can tell you some more.”

  21

  BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS; 1874

  When Steeldust Jack rode to where the scream had come from, with White Eagle and the other braves just behind him, he found a man holding a Comanche girl by the hair. She struggled against the man, and he yanked her head farther back until her eyes were facing the sky.

  “Whatcha all think?” he said to five other men, who had their pistols out by then. “Should I scalp her or what?”

  The man grinned and held his bowie knife up to catch the sun. Dismounting, Steeldust Jack’s mind worked fast, matching the clothes and holsters of these men to that of the body found just outside the reservation. And matching their demeanors to the kind of gunmen placed in long supply by the destruction wrought by the Civil War, bitter and hardened men turned into nomads. Many had become bushwhackers and criminals, offering their well-seasoned and practiced gun hands to anyone who had need and could pay.

  But there was s
omething different and unsettling about this lot, starting with the quality of their clothes and the fact that their Colts were shiny and new—practiced with on the range rather than in the genuine battles they’d left behind in their pasts, but not their souls.

  Steeldust Jack took a step forward, careful not to place much weight on his bad leg, and peeled his coat back to reveal his own more weathered Colt, making no move to draw it yet. “You can let the girl go now,” he said calmly, feeling the braves take up position behind him, holding in place reluctantly with bows and arrows held at the ready which didn’t seem to bother the gunmen at all.

  The head gunman yanked the young Comanche woman in closer. “Who says?”

  “The Texas Rangers.”

  “Oh, so you’re a lawman.”

  “Nope. Told ya, I’m a Texas Ranger.”

  “What’s the difference?” another of the gunmen asked, a trail of tobacco juice following the words out of his mouth.

  Steeldust Jack rotated his gaze among all six of them. The way they held their pistols already cocked told him they were hardened gunmen, no stranger to triggers, with the exception of one who looked no more than fifteen. Steeldust Jack’s biggest fear at that point was that the Comanche behind him would let loose with their arrows, thereby catching him in the certain crossfire to follow.

  “Well, a lawman, by nature, is answerable to the law. A Ranger’s answerable only to Texas. But this ain’t Texas here. Not really.”

  “Coulda fooled us,” said the second speaker. “Then what is it?”

  “Indian land by the law, as provided by the United States government.”

  “Thought you weren’t answerable to the law, Ranger.”

  “I’m not. But I am answerable to the government of both the country and the state. And the word of both says you’ve got no place upon the land on which you’re currently standing.”