Strong Cold Dead (31 page)

Nature takes care of its own, Ranger, and we are its own.

Isa-tai's words made no more sense now than they had when he'd spoken them earlier, but their memory held more than enough portent to keep Steeldust Jack mostly awake and alert through the night. He caught himself snoozing a couple times. Once, he was actually roused by his own snoring, a fact that set him to smiling—just before the gunfire began.

*   *   *

It was wild and unfocused, crackling through window glass and thudding squarely into walls bracketed by heavy studs. Steeldust Jack had his shotgun ready as he sprinted down the street, which was wet with mud from a heavy storm that had blackened the sky briefly, back when day still shined. He burst through the doors of the Metropolitan to find men in various stages of dress rushing about, clambering up and down the stairs that led up the whole of the building's four stories. A number of men, the last of the residents not associated with Rockefeller's dealings presumably, blew past him, desperate to escape what seemed like an all-out attack sure to claim its share of bystanders.

More gunfire echoed, a cascade of it that seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air, now rich with the odor of gun smoke, hanging over the second-floor landing like a cloud. Steeldust Jack pushed past men struggling with boots or suspenders, to the third floor, where the first window glass had blown out. Rounding the stairs up there, he recognized Curly Bill Brocius and another gunman from the original group, their pistols aimed at the last three doors down the hall, which from this angle looked to be torn from their hinges.

Jack Strong advanced ahead, paying them no heed, his nose sucking in the thick odor of sulfur and the coppery scent that could only be blood, likely lots of it. Even during the war, in the worst battles in which he'd been embroiled, he'd never smelled it this strong, and the sight of the inside of the first room showed him why.

From what he could tell, a pair of men had been bedded down in matching beds. The scent of their sweat and boot odor was light on the air in comparison to the smell of blood and, this close, their shredded entrails. Because what was left of them was scattered about the twisted bedcovers and the floor, with portions strewn across the walls. It looked and smelled like a slaughterhouse, only the room's darkness sparing him closer consideration. The splashed blood and gore looked black in the glow of the moonlight sifting through the window and the spill of the lanterns coming from the hall.

Nature takes care of its own, Ranger, and we are its own.

Isa-tai's words flashed through his mind again. But this wasn't the work of nature, at least not any nature Steeldust Jack was familiar with.

The other two rooms were the same—two men in one of them, three in another, for a total of seven men slaughtered and mutilated, inside of a minute by all accounts. Steeldust Jack reconstituted the sounds and sights that had roused him in the street, ultimately figuring that the occupants of all three rooms had been struck within seconds of one another.

When his stomach settled, the Ranger made it a point to check the pools of blood for residual footprints, but he found none. Neither did he find any trace whatsoever in the hallway. Bullet holes stitched the walls of all three rooms in jagged designs, indicative of wild shooting absent of aim. A few of those holes, more like chasms dug out of wood, wallpaper, and plaster, looked to be made by shotgun shells, which were unlikely to miss anything they'd been pointed at from so close a distance.

None of it made a damn bit of sense.

Just after Steeldust Jack's cursory inspection of the rooms was complete, John D. Rockefeller came striding down the hall, within a protective circle of gunmen armed to the teeth.

“I didn't want this to go to guns, Ranger,” Rockefeller told him, his voice groggy and his gaze uncertain. “I truly didn't. But now that it has…”

He let his thought trail off, the intent of his words hanging there between them with more meaning than any he could have spoken.

“I don't know what killed your men, sir,” Steeldust Jack told him, “but it wasn't guns.”

“Say that again, Ranger?”

“I checked the bodies as best I could,” the Ranger explained, his hand still hot from holding the lantern before him. “I know a bullet wound when I see one, and I didn't see one. No, sir, not even close. And I'll tell you something else, Mr. Rockefeller. From what I heard and seen, the men in all three rooms were attacked at pretty much the same time.”

“What are you telling me, Ranger?”

“That maybe this time you're up against something you can't beat. Maybe it's time to leave town, and Texas too.”

Rockefeller's lips quivered, making his mustache seem like it was fluttering. “I don't scare easy.”

“I suppose not. You hired soldiers to fight in your stead in the Civil War,” the Ranger continued. “Buying out the Clark brothers positioned you to make your fortune off the backs of men like me, coming home to try and pick up our lives. You have a reputation for destroying your competition and just about anyone who gets in your way. Just ask Charles Pratt and Henry Rogers. The horse that plowed their company over was really your Standard Oil, and I believe you came to Texas intending to employ the same strategy here.”

Rockefeller's thin smile glinted in the flickering light. “You been checking up on me, Ranger?”

“Local library got its share of newspapers, for any man willing to look.”

“Don't believe everything you read.”

Jack Strong watched John D. Rockefeller close the distance between them, until he was close enough to smell the stale aftershave clinging to the man's clothes, mixing with stale sweat.

“You tell those Comanche I won't be scared off, Ranger. You tell them if it's a war they want over their oil, then they've got it.”

Steeldust Jack cocked his gaze briefly back toward the blood-soaked rooms. “I believe they're already aware of that, sir.”

 

74

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“I assume all that jibes with your recollection,” White Eagle said, upon finishing his tale.

“Close enough. And you know something? It doesn't change a thing. I'm not Steeldust Jack and you're not Isa-tai, no matter what you want to lead people to believe.”

“People believe whatever they want. John D. Rockefeller crossed my people back then, just like Cray Rawls has crossed my people today.”

“I don't know. It sounds to me like Rawls and Sam Bob Jackson have bought their way onto Comanche land with the promise of scholarships and gainful employment. How'd you make out in that deal, sir?”

White Eagle moved his gaze back to Captain Tepper. “This conversation was a waste of time,” he said. “We'll be filing a complaint directly with the Department of Public Safety.”

Caitlin looked him right in the eyes, which suddenly appeared clear and sharp. “Whatever you're involved in here isn't going to come to a good end for any of those involved, especially you.”

“I'm too old to care about your threats. Nothing much scares me anymore, least of all the Texas Rangers.”

“I'd rethink that, if I were you, sir.”

*   *   *

D. W. Tepper closed the door to the conference room after White Eagle and the other two men had left.

“Could you refresh my memory as to what century this is? Because you sure talk like the nineteenth never ended at all. Aw hell, forget it. There's someone else here you need to speak to, someone who might actually be able to serve our cause.”

“Who's that?”

“A Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who's got information he says he'll share only with you.”

 

75

H
OUSTON,
T
EXAS

Cray Rawls hadn't slept much the night before. It reminded him of the nights he had spent huddled outside his mother's room while the floorboards shook in rhythm with the bed inside. How he'd tucked his arms around his knees, trying to make himself as small as possible, even invisible, to whatever man eventually emerged from inside, smelling salty and something like the odor that hung in the air in his elementary school gymnasium.

Accompanied by his pair of hulking bodyguards, Rawls arrived at the west Houston offices of Jackson Whole Mineral to review plans for the operation about to commence on the Comanche Indian reservation outside of Austin. An auspicious day, indeed, given the stakes and potential profits involved, but all Rawls felt was trepidation and anxiety. A little boy again, huddled against the wall in the cold, fearful of what was to come.

It shouldn't have been that way. Should have been smooth sailing from here, after getting the deal closed with the damn Indians. It was going to cost him additional millions, but who cared? Spending millions to make billions was the price of doing business.

One bodyguard preceded him through the entrance of the office building where Jackson Whole Mineral was headquartered, the other trailed slightly behind. He noticed the security desk was unmanned. This wasn't a surprise, considering the likely cost-cutting efforts, but it further jangled his already jittery nerves. He felt like an old dog sensing a thunderstorm in the offing, looking for a bed to roost under until it passed.

Upstairs, the glass entrance to Jackson Whole Mineral was open and unguarded—contrary to the strict orders he'd given that fat-ass Sam Bob. Rawls stormed down the hall ahead of his bodyguards, canting his shoulders sideways as he entered Jackson's office overlooking the main artery of the west Houston Energy Corridor.

The fat man sat there, sunk into his overstuffed desk chair, his blank expression fixed straight ahead. He seemed reluctant to stop looking at whatever he was staring at.

“What gives, Sam Bob?” Rawls demanded. “I have to wipe your ass for you now?”

He felt a presence behind him, just before a whoosh of air signaled the door blasting closed. Cray Rawls swung around to find a rawboned man glaring at him with an expression forged in steel.

“I'm Cort Wesley Masters, Mr. Rawls. I believe it's time the three of us had a little talk.” He stopped when he heard the door easing back open.

“Excuse me,” Cort Wesley corrected, as Guillermo Paz entered, dragging the limp frames of Rawls's bodyguards behind him as if they were rag dolls. “I meant the four of us.”

 

76

H
OUSTON,
T
EXAS

Cort Wesley had driven straight through the last of the night, once he was sure Dylan was going to be fine. He couldn't bear waiting out the hours while the boy got the drugs and the awful encounter he'd experienced out of his system. He'd be left pacing the floors and punching holes in the walls out of feeling helpless to do anything to those who had tied his son to a tree with baling wire.

He'd arrived in west Houston before the building even opened. No stops. The sky was beginning to brighten without him even noticing. He'd found Paz waiting outside his massive extended-cab pickup, in an area around the side, out of sight of any visible security cameras, his thoughts mirroring Cort Wesley's.

“Hello, outlaw.”

“Did Caitlin send you?”

Paz's huge eyes looked like curved saucers wedged into his skull. “I was running a bingo game last night and called the number seventy, under the
O
.
O
for
outlaw
—that's what I said, and when I knew.”

“You haven't answered my question.”

“I believe I did,” Paz told him. “Now, are you ready to get to work?”

*   *   *

“Take a seat, Mr. Rawls.”

Cort Wesley had thoroughly enjoyed Rawls's and Sam Bob Jackson's reactions to the sight of Guillermo Paz dropping two men with chiseled frames in heaps on the carpet. Hovering over both, on the chance either of them stirred, in the course of the meeting about to commence. The absence of the additional three guards Rawls had ordered posted no longer needed to be explained.

“Right there,” Cort Wesley continued, gesturing toward the chair set before Jackson's desk. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Cray Rawls did as he was told. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I think you know.”

“If you got business with Mr. Jackson here, that's no concern of mine. You want to get on with it, I'm glad to leave.”

Cort Wesley glanced at the two limp frames on either side of Guillermo Paz. “What about them?”

“I couldn't even tell you their names.”

“The fact is, I've got business with both of you,” Cort Wesley told him. “And, just for the record, it was my son you kidnapped to roust me. Well, consider me rousted.”

Rawls glared at Jackson across the desk, then turned back to Cort Wesley. “You put a couple construction workers I was paying in the hospital during this unfortunate protest. In responding to that, Mr. Jackson here overstepped his bounds. If you'd let me make it up to you and your boy, I'd be glad to—”

“What about my oldest son?” Cort Wesley broke in, before Rawls could finish his thought.

“You didn't kidnap him too, did you?” Rawls snapped toward Jackson.

Sam Bob was in the midst of a shrug when Cort Wesley resumed. “My oldest was attacked on the grounds of that Comanche reservation last night.”

“Why does that concern me?”

“Because it concerns whatever you're fixing to draw out of the land.”

“Oil?”

“Don't play me for a fool, Cray.”

“We on a first-name basis now? I still don't even know who you are.”

“Yes, you do. I'm sure you had me checked out after your business partner ‘overstepped his bounds,' as you call it—though I'd prefer to call it scaring the wits out of a teenage boy.”

“He's not my partner.”