Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(21)

“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.