Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(25)

“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 Center. 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.