Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(59)

“You K-Bar?” he said to one, producing a dazed headshake. “Then nice to meet you, Terry,” he greeted him. “You too, K-Bar,” he said to the other. “I’m the guy whose son you pulled out of that McDonald’s the other day, in Houston. Sound familiar? You were trying to scare me off. Thought I’d give you boys the opportunity to do it in person.”

“Fuck you!” Terry managed in nasally fashion. He was pinching his nose closed in a futile attempt to stanch the blood that Cort Wesley’s blow had unleashed.

Cort Wesley let them see him grin, ignoring Terry Boyd’s failed show of bravado. “You boys crossed a line here, and the only reason you’re not under the big wheels of that John Deere now is I need to know who put you up to it.”

The Boyd brothers heard the screech of police sirens picking up cadence in the distance, their expressions flashing hope that their assailant would surely flee. Clearly, they were uneducated on the damage a man like Cort Wesley could do to them in his remaining minute or so.

“You give me a name and you get a pass. Call it your Get Out of Hell for Free card.” Cort Wesley glanced at the blood running from Terry’s nose, between his fingers, and the lump the size of a baseball that had already formed on K-Bar’s skull. “Well, not quite for free, but close enough as things go.”

“We ain’t gonna give you nothing!” K-Bar ranted, his words stringing into each other. “You wanna kill us, go right ahead.”

His bravado, inspired by the increasingly loud police sirens, was ignored by Cort Wesley, who snatched up a pristine fan belt, once displayed on a partition wall that now had fallen to the Deere. The sign had said something about the belt coming from the Mustang the great Steve McQueen had driven in Bullitt, but Cort Wesley had his doubts.

“Okay,” he said, wrapping the fan belt around K-Bar’s neck and tightening it until K-Bar’s breath choked off and his face began to purple.

“What the fuck, man?” Terry Boyd ranted, his voice whiny. “What the fuck?”

Terry’s brother was starting to gurgle now, his cheeks so pumped with air they looked as if they were ready to explode.

“A name, Terry. Give me a name.”





56

HOUSTON, TEXAS

“What’s that pounding sound?” Sam Bob Jackson asked Cray Rawls. “I can hardly hear you.”

“That pounding is me smacking a heavy bag, because if I stop now, I might drive back there and pound you instead, you fucking moron.”

“Cray, I didn’t catch what you just—”

Rawls stopped his punching long enough to adjust the Bluetooth device riding his ear. “Never mind. Nice talk I just had with that cunt of a Texas Ranger you sent my way.”

“She wasn’t taking no for an answer.”

“Your job, while you still have one, is to run interference. That means keep the attention off me.”

“She’s a determined gal, with a reputation like an Old West gunfighter’s.”

“A cunt gunfighter?”

“Pistols don’t come in genders, Cray.”

“And you’re scared shitless of her.”

“This is the Texas Rangers we’re talking about.”

Rawls started hitting the bag again. “I’m glad you made that point for me, you fat tub of lard. I did some checking into Cort Wesley Masters. Remember him? The man you tried to scare off after he made that scene at the reservation?”

“I told you—”

“I know what you told me. Now let me tell you something. Before Masters did a stretch in Huntsville, before he worked as an enforcer for the Branca crime family, he was Army Special Forces.”

“What?”

Through the Bluetooth device, which had loosened up again, Rawls could almost hear the air going out of the fat shit. “That’s right, Sam Bob. You picked a fight with a genuine Green Beret. And that’s not all, not even close. Would you care to hazard a guess who his girlfriend is?”

“Oh, shit…”

“Match made in heaven, wouldn’t you say? So your dumb ass has gotten us two for the price of one. You better hope the boatload of cash I had to dump to get those damn Indians to drop their protest alleviates things, because my next step is to drop you down an abandoned oil well. It’s sure to be nice and slimy down there, so you’ll feel right at home. By the way, that money I had to leave on the table at that reservation? It’s coming out of your end.”

Rawls heard Sam Bob Jackson gulp down some air. “What does the Ranger know?”

“She’s getting close, lard-ass.”

“But what we’re doing, it’s not a crime. Mineral rights we purchased plainly state ‘oil and gas reserves, along with anything else of monetary value discovered along the way.’”

“Oh, really? And does that absolve you from kidnapping charges, too, or how about from being an embarrassment to your mother’s loins?”

“This coming from the son of a prostitute.”

Rawls started hitting the heavy bag so hard his hands throbbed inside his gloves. “I’m going to do you a favor and forget you said that, Sam Bob. What I’m not going to forget is, thanks to you, I’ve got a Texas Ranger and a Green Beret crawling up my ass. I don’t know why I let you fly back here with me on the company Gulfstream. Given it to do all over again, I’d rather you hitchhiked, maybe shed a few pounds on the way.”