Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(63)
“With his blood ending up on my medal.”
“Back to that again?”
“We never left it.”
Ela let go of Dylan’s hands. “My grandfather said there could be no more death. He said the spirits were angry, just like back in 1874, and if we didn’t make peace, the same thing would happen now that happened then.”
“What happened then?”
She looked away, the spill of the kerosene lantern light catching only one side of her face. “Ask your Texas Ranger.”
“I could be arrested, you know. I could end up getting charged.”
Ela smiled. “You have friends in high places, boy.”
“Caitlin’s not going to obstruct justice to protect me forever. Sooner or later, I’ll be called to the table.” Dylan hesitated. “Maybe you’ll be called, too.”
“Me?”
“As a witness. My alibi.”
“Even though we both passed out.” She took his hands again. “Are you sure you were wearing the medal that night? Can you really remember?”
“I wear it all the time, girl.”
“But you could have lost it earlier in the day, even the day before. If you wear it all the time, you might think it’s still there even when it isn’t, right? Doesn’t that make more sense than your girlfriend setting you up as a suspect?”
Dylan could feel his insides melting at the way she had referred to herself as his girlfriend.
“Because that would mean I had something to do with the murder,” Ela continued. “An accomplice, accessory, or something. Is that what you think?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You might as well have.”
Dylan pulled Ela in close and kissed her, as hard and as deep as he’d ever kissed anyone.
“That’s better,” she said, brushing the hair from her face when they finally separated.
“I don’t know why I did that.”
“Because I was about to, and you sensed it.”
Dylan blew the hair from his face and rolled his eyes. “Please.”
“Please what? You told me your dad talks to a ghost who steals root beer from him. You told me your Texas Ranger’s got some warrior protecting her, who’s part witch and has visions of the future. But you don’t think you knew I was going to kiss you and kissed me first?”
Dylan let himself smile. “What if I did?”
Ela smiled back. “That’s better.”
“What?”
“You, back to being you,” she said, pulling the shirt up over her head. “And me being me.”
59
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“You got something you want to say, Ranger?” Cort Wesley asked Caitlin from behind the wheel of his truck, en route back to the Balcones.
“Just trying to sort things out, that’s all.”
“You mean the part about Sam Bob Jackson ordering the Boyd brothers to scare me, through Luke?”
“A muff like Jackson doesn’t tie his shoes on his own. That means Cray Rawls is the one we really need to nail for this.”
“I haven’t met either of them yet.”
“Let me save you the trouble, Cort Wesley. Rawls is like any of a thousand rich jerks I’ve met over the years who think their money and power makes their shit taste like chocolate. I’ve learned never to put anything past men like that.”
They were headed north to the Comanche reservation to check out the caves dug out of the hills overlooking White Eagle’s patch of land, where Dylan thought he had spotted somebody lurking about, a few nights back.
Cort Wesley glanced across the seat at her. “And where’s Daniel Cross fit on the scale?”
“Come again?”
He gave her a longer look. “You need to stop beating yourself up over this.”
“Over what?”
“Not changing the kid’s ways. It was ten years ago. You did what you could.”
“Well,” she admitted, to him and finally to herself, “I should’ve done more.”
“Did Cross actually build a bomb, back then?”
“He would have.”
“You don’t know that, Ranger.”
“But I do now, don’t I?”
“Caitlin—”
“No, Cort Wesley, let me finish. I knew he was trouble from the first time I laid eyes on the kid, but I got it in my head I could change him. First I had a little talk with the kids who’d been bullying him into submission.”
“Oh, boy, here we go…”
“I let those boys have it, and their parents too. Visited the wrath of the Texas Rangers upon them to make my point.”
“Did it work?”
Caitlin shrugged. “Well, Daniel Cross never did blow up the school. But maybe if I focused my energies on him he wouldn’t be planning to blow up the whole country now, so to speak.”
“Of all people,” Cort Wesley said, shaking his head.
“Of all people what?”
“Of all people, you should know some people are just born bad. You told me this kid’s mother was a prostitute and that the couple that adopted him wasn’t anything to write home about, either. You ask me, that’s because they would’ve much preferred to have returned him, when it became clear they were raising a monster.”