Strong Cold Dead (7 page)

“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 betrayed 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

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

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.”

 

P
ART
T
WO

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

A
USTIN,
T
EXAS

“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.”

The two men on the other side of the booth were uniformly flat faced, their gazes caustic. Both were average looking, nondescript, just like him, except they had neatly trimmed beards and he barely needed to shave at all. Cross was tall and thin, with a waist that hadn't changed much since middle school and still struggled to hold pants up, even with a belt. His brown, stringy hair was almost as oily as it had been back then, his skin, too, and his acne was just as bad—lately to the point that he had to go back to using the medication that made him smell like antiseptic.

“What do you think you were achieving?” the second man, Ghazi Zurif, asked him, gazing about the restaurant again.

Cross tried to smirk, to be the guy in control, which was what they'd made him feel like, until now. It was what he'd enjoyed most about this whole experience: being the one in charge, calling the shots for a change. Now it seemed like he was back to being no different from “Diaper Dan,” the nickname given to him in second grade, when he'd wet himself in class after the teacher refused to let him go to the lav. The nickname had stuck all the way through high school.

“Nothing,” Cross told the two men who'd made him feel like Diaper Dan again. “I was just hanging around, watching. What's the big deal?”

“You were warned to be careful in your movements,” said Saflin, who had a drooping eye. “
That's
the big deal.”

“And you weren't supposed to leave the apartment without informing us,” Zurif added.

“Am I supposed to ask permission before I take a shit, too?”

Saflin shot a hand across the table, brushing against Cross's iced tea and nearly spilling it. The hand clamped onto the hand in which Cross was holding the steak knife and squeezed the wrist so hard that Cross felt his fingers go numb, the nerve held in a way that sent pain shooting up his forearm, all the way to his elbow. The steak knife slipped from his grasp and rattled against the floor.

“You think this is a game?” Daniel Cross felt Saflin's hot breath blow into him like air from a sauna, his droopy eye bulging wide now, the angle of his glare making one side of his beard look longer than the other. “What did you think was going to happen when you left those posts all over social media, enough to command even the attention of Allah?”

“You are performing His will,” said Zurif. “Today you risked the plan He has set into motion.”

“Come on, man,” Cross rasped, the agony knifelike now, until Saflin let go. Cross tried to shake the life back into his hand. “I thought we were in this together.”

“You're in it with us,” Saflin corrected. “But not together.”

“I'm not a Muslim,” Cross reminded. “I just hate this damn country, want to see it get what it deserves.”

“Muslim or not, you are following the will of Allah, as we were when we answered your call.”

“We've been granted operational authority,” Zurif added.

Cross was about to poke fun at the term, then thought better of it. “What's that mean?”

“It means you need to prove yourself before us,” Saflin explained, “this theory of yours, so Allah may bless the plan.”

“It's not just a theory,” Cross said, rotating his gaze between the two of them. “You want to kill a whole lot of people at once. I've come up with the weapon that can do it.”