Strong Cold Dead (27 page)

“You are one stubborn son of a bitch, Cort Wesley.”

He lapsed into silence, the moments dragging. “I realized something, when I was waiting to see the principal of Luke's school the other day.”

“What's that?”

“Red-tailed hawks supposedly returned to Texas with a flourish, after being endangered for a long stretch of time. But I haven't seen a single one in years, and I don't know anybody who has.”

“What's your point?”

Cort Wesley looked over at her, across the wide seat. “That I've learned to only believe what I see, and right now I see Sam Bob Jackson and Cray Rawls party to something that's going to get a whole lot of people killed, unless we find out what's really happening on that Indian reservation.”

He eased his truck off the road to where it would be concealed by brush while they checked out the caves overlooking the stretch of land White Eagle had claimed for himself. His lights flashed over a huge figure standing by a truck that looked almost as big as the front loader Cort Wesley had driven through Bobby Ray's showroom.

“Is that…?”

“You bet, Cort Wesley.”

“Guess I shouldn't be surprised.”

*   *   *

“I miss you mentioning that you called him?” Cort Wesley asked, as the two of them approached Guillermo Paz.

“Hello, Colonel,” Caitlin greeted him, instead of answering Cort Wesley's question.

“There's something wrong here, Ranger,” Paz told her, standing so still in the night air that he didn't even seem to be breathing. “I can feel it rising off the land. Much blood has been spilled. More is about to be.”

“As long as it's not ours,” said Cort Wesley.

 

63

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

Dylan slinked through the woods, looping around through the darkest reaches, where the bramble bushes grew so thick that the edges caught on his jeans and nearly ripped through his shirt.

He had waited until he was sure Ela was asleep before easing her off of him. She had drunk the peyote-laced tea again, after Dylan had dumped his out. She had kissed him once with some of it still in her mouth, Dylan letting that small amount dribble down his throat. Enough to throw his mind for a loop, but nothing like the last time.

Still, the sex they'd had earlier could best be described as an amusement park ride, a roller coaster traveling upside down. It seemed as if air was swirling about, catching them in a harsh wind as they rotated positions in a prism of lights flashing everywhere, turning the single kerosene lantern into a spotlight.

The effects of the peyote wore off when Ela was still squeezing him so tight he thought his ribs might crack. She seemed trapped in some kind of nightmare and kept muttering something in Comanche while clinging to him. Only when she quieted and her breathing returned to normal did Dylan slip out from beneath her and pull his jeans and boots back on.

Even the small bit of peyote he'd ingested had been enough to steal his intentions from him while they made love, but those intentions returned full bore as he eased himself up out of the root cellar into the still air of the humid night. Something was going on here that felt all wrong. Dylan had forced himself to look the other way, until the matter of his Miraculous Medal showing up as evidence in a murder case, covered in blood, made his perspective do a one-eighty. He wanted to believe Ela had nothing to do with setting him up. Even more, he wanted to believe that nothing had happened, during those dark hours of lost time, that really did connect him to the killing.

He had hoped his mind might clear a bit by now, but everything from that night remained shrouded in fog. If anything, his memory had turned to even more of a muddle. All Dylan could find in his grasp was a leftover nightmare of rushing through a field someplace, being chased by vast winged creatures that swooped down on their prey like osprey in the Gulf. Except they were human, at least humanoid, and the wings were attached to their backs with hammocks of tight, dried-out-looking flesh. They had claws for feet, teeth that protruded over their lower lips, and tawny flesh that looked like a combination of burlap and leather.

Dylan half expected the creatures to swoop down on him between the trees as he made his way to White Eagle's land. Ever since Ela had taken him to meet her grandfather, Dylan hadn't been able to get out of his mind the sounds he was sure he had heard coming from inside that shack. He'd taken it for an old-fashioned outhouse at first, but its size and design were more consistent with a storage shed of some kind, built without windows and constructed of logs heavy and thick enough to withstand a hurricane.

Dylan continued along the circuitous route through the brambles and brush to White Eagle's patch of land, set against the sparkling waterfall that drained into the pristine stream. The last thing he wanted was to alert the old man to his presence. The shack-like structure was located close enough to the woods for Dylan to investigate and be gone before White Eagle was any the wiser.

The problem was that the night, coupled with the lingering effects of the slight dose of peyote he'd ingested, had stolen his bearings. The woods were suddenly a deep, dark place swimming with branches that looked like tentacles and tree roots that slithered about the ground like snakes.

Dylan passed it all off as his imagination, until he heard the crackle of a branch crunching underfoot behind him. Then he wasn't so sure anymore.

 

64

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

At night, Caitlin realized, the waters of the stream dividing the Comanche reservation from the rest of the nature preserve looked green. A slight mist hung over the surface, seeming to vibrate in rhythm with the endless flow of the waterfall draining downward. When those waters had run stronger and deeper, their currents had forged a winding path that now snaked along the hillside.

Guillermo Paz steered ahead of her and Cort Wesley as they drew closer to the mouth of the cave formations, which were dug out of the hillside along the narrow path. “These openings look man-made, used for shelter probably hundreds—even thousands—of years ago,” he said, as the three of them readied their flashlights and tested the beams.

True to his impression, the six caves they examined, as they wound their way down the path from the higher reaches of the hillside, were small, with nothing of note in particular. More likely, Caitlin reasoned, Native Americans of old had cleared existing breaches to take advantage of natural shelters, explaining why archaeologists had been uncovering great finds in caves like this for decades. She figured there were probably plenty of similar finds in these as well, likely buried under layers and centuries of earth, stone, and sediment.

The next and most jagged of the cave mouths opened into more of a passageway, which followed the flow of the stream waters, along a trench that wound its way farther underground. The walls glowed in dappled fashion with some sort of phosphorus extract the color of moss. In patches, it looked as if it was growing out of the walls, almost like tumors, or blights, on the landscape by the spill of their flashlight beams.

“I recognize the smell from when we paid that visit to White Eagle,” Cort Wesley noted. “Air's full of it. I also smelled it at the rez entrance, strong when the wind was blowing right.”

The waters looked greener as they drew deeper into the cave. The widening path was taking them along a winding route that descended so gradually they didn't even realize they were now venturing underground. The greenish water had lost its sheen; it was cloudy and murky toward the top, with patches of a dark, goo-like residue splotching the surface.

“Looks like John D. Rockefeller was right, Ranger,” Cort Wesley noted. “That's oil seep, from reserves flowing all the way up from the earth's core, for all we know, dragging some methane with it for good measure.”

“What about the deposits on the wall?”

“That, I can't explain,” Cort Wesley said, sweeping his gaze about the cave, “and I've never seen anything like it before.”

“We're missing something here,” Caitlin said suddenly, frustration getting the better of her.

“Like what?”

“Like this, maybe,” Paz called from ahead of them.

Caitlin and Cort Wesley caught up to find the colonel pinning a Hershey's bar wrapper to the ground under his boot.

“A candy wrapper?”

Both of them could see his eyes glowing like a cat's.

“A Hershey bar,” said Paz. “Daniel Cross's apartment was covered in wrappers just like it.”

“They were his favorite when he was a kid, too,” Caitlin said, as she tucked the candy wrapper inside the plastic evidence pouch she carried with her at all times. The partially crumpled foil was smeared with melted chocolate, reminding her of how Cross always needed to wipe his mouth with a towel after eating one, ten years ago. She'd forgotten how much time she'd actually devoted to the effort to redeem him, apparently having accomplished absolutely nothing. “So maybe it was Cross that Dylan saw lurking about the night before last, the night before Hoover's Cooking.”

“Let me see if I've got this straight,” Cort Wesley said, standing a bit back from her and Guillermo Paz. “You're thinking whatever links Cross to ISIS is somewhere in this cave?”

“You got a better explanation for how this got here?” Caitlin asked, holding the clear plastic evidence pouch out for him to see.

“That's assuming it belongs to him. Hershey wouldn't be doing much business in these parts if Daniel Cross was the only one buying their candy bars.”

“It's him,” Paz said, staring farther into the cave. Its darkness was broken by splotchy pockets of translucence emanating from the green patches that grew out of the walls. “And there's something down there. Straight ahead.”

“All I see is a wall, Colonel,” said Caitlin, shining her flashlight straight ahead.

Paz started forward warily, his spine stiff. “Sometimes our eyes deceive us, Ranger.”

 

65

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

There was no one behind him—at least, no one Dylan could see. He thought maybe just the small bit of peyote he'd ingested had had a more pronounced effect on him than he realized. Had he imagined the sound of something being crunched underfoot? Had his drifting mind led him off his intended route, leaving him lost amid thousands of acres of protected deep woods?

Dylan felt fear and panic reaching for him and barely avoided their grasp. He'd started out charting his direction by the stars, but those had quickly vanished under an onslaught of storm clouds that swallowed their twinkling guidance and drew a curtain before the direction in which he was headed. In that moment, this was the last place in the world he wanted to be. His damn father was right; he should be back at school in Providence, Rhode Island, where spring football practice was in full swing, instead of throwing his whole future into jeopardy.

What the hell was I thinking?

He hadn't been, that was the problem. Maybe he was never going to learn to stop acting on impulse and feeling he had to adopt every stray who crossed his path—girls now, instead of lost animals. He had a sour taste in his mouth, which felt as if he'd just chewed some tree bark, and he flirted with the idea of turning around.

But just then he heard the soft spray of the waterfall flowing down over White Eagle's land, and he caught a glimpse of the stream, which glowed emerald green under the moon's return from behind the clouds. The shedlike structure was closer to White Eagle's cabin than Dylan had remembered. But there was no firelight to give away his presence, and no sign of stirring through the cabin's windows.

Dylan emerged from the tree cover, clinging as best he could to the darkest ribbons of the night to help shield his route to the shed. Sure enough, a lock hung from a heavy hasp secured across the shed's frame. Closer inspection revealed that the logs forming the shed had been reinforced crossways, the way similar structures had been erected in World War II Japanese prison camps. Like those, this structure had been built with no spacing at all, no seams visible, even where the sides met and the peaked roof joined up with the shed's frame.

Dylan was trying to figure how to get the door open, but then a slight jostling of the old padlock revealed it wasn't fastened. As quietly as he could manage, Dylan plucked the lock free and eased the door open wide enough to enter, then quickly sealed the door behind him.

He switched on the small flashlight he'd brought along, aware of the rich pine smell, even though the structure was at least decades, if not generations, old. In that moment, Dylan became aware of a second scent, a musty, stale odor, like rancid clothes left sweaty in a gym bag for too long. It was almost enough to make him gag, and he reminded himself to breathe through his mouth. He swept the small flashlight's thin beam about the shed walls, holding it on something that glinted slightly in the spill.

“Holy shit,” he heard himself mutter, stuff falling into place faster than he could process it.

He needed to get off this reservation now, needed to call Caitlin and his father. He swung around, feeling for the phone tucked into his pocket.

And saw a face, streaked like a checkerboard, even with his own, as a hand that smelled like rancid mud closed over his mouth.

 

66

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

“What do you see, Ranger?” Paz asked Caitlin, when they reached the rear of the cave.

Caitlin and Cort Wesley both shined their flashlights across the jagged rock formation. “Rocks.”

“So do I. But the rocks I see are more weathered than those forming the other walls. More weathered and also lighter, from exposure to the sun.”