Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(88)

“What data?” Caitlin managed to ask, the air seeming to thicken even more, to the point that she wondered if that was thunder she heard in her suddenly throbbing head.

“About this particular tribe of Comanche, dating all the way back to your great-great-grandfather’s time. They’ve got so many other health issues of note—alcoholism, liver failure, malnutrition, breathing problems from smoking, drugs, diabetes, heart disease—that nobody paid attention to the fact that the tribe enjoys a cancer occurrence on the order of a thousand times less than the overall population.”

“Keep talking.” Caitlin nodded.

“I get this data, the question I ask myself is why.”

“What made you look in the first place?”

“The belief that the truest medical miracles can be found in nature.”

“Most valuable, you mean.”

“That too, yes, Ranger. I admit it. I’m a greedy son of a bitch who looks back on his youth like somebody took a sandblaster to it. What do you think I’m thinking of when I’m hitting the heavy bag, like you saw me doing? I’m thinking about all those nights my mother brought men home. When I hid in the corner, in the dark, until they left. You know what? I can’t remember what a single one of them looked like, but they all smelled the same. And that’s what I smell when I’m pounding the bag, and I keep pounding until the smell goes away.”

“How about all the women you beat up, Mr. Rawls, like Brandy Darnell? What do they smell like? Having wrong done to you doesn’t entitle you to do it to others.”

“Don’t preach to me, you bi—”

Rawls just managed to stop himself in time.

“I’d rather shoot you, but I won’t,” Caitlin said. “Better get back to this cure for cancer, before you give me reason to change my mind.”

“You going to let her talk to me like that?” Rawls said to Jones.

“Like what?” Jones asked him.

Rawls forced himself to look back at Caitlin. “It’s like I said.”

“What did you say?”

“No one paid attention to the fact that those damn Indians almost never get cancer. Not just an improbability, a virtual impossibility.”

“So what’d you do?”

“I asked myself why. I asked myself how. See, the medicinal applications of plant life are hardly new. As I’m sure you’re well aware, many valuable drugs of today, like atropine, ephedrine, tubocurarine, digoxin, and reserpine, came into use through the study of indigenous remedies. And chemists continue to use plant-derived drugs such as morphine, Taxol, physostigmine, quinidine, and emetine as prototypes in their attempts to develop more-effective and less-toxic medicinals.”

“Something was different on that rez, I’m guessing.”

“It sure was, Ranger. Those other examples I mentioned don’t necessarily have any effect on the people indigenous to those lands. What’s different on the Comanche land is that the cancer anomaly could only be the result of something the Indians ate or drank.”

“Native Americans,” Caitlin corrected. “They’re called Native Americans.”

Rawls pursed his lips and frowned. “Sure. Whatever you say. The point is, these Native Americans weren’t getting cancer, as a direct result of something they were ingesting.”

“The water?” Caitlin asked him, thinking of how they’d found Daniel Cross’s candy wrapper near the stream running through the cave overlooking White Eagle’s patch of land.

“That was my first thought, too. I spent months having the water tested, over a year, spent millions before I gave up. Figured I had everything wrong, that I was delusional.”

“Yeah, greed’ll do that to you.”

This time Rawls ignored her insult, checking his watch as if wondering what had become of his lawyer—who was currently en route to Houston. “I don’t give up so easy, Ranger. Since you’re so well acquainted with my background, I assume you know that. The water didn’t test magical, but some of the samples didn’t test normal, either. Something was definitely going on, likely spurred by cracks deep underground, from fault lines on which the reservation is located. The water was contaminated with something, which I came to believe might be working its magic in other ways.”

“The crops,” Caitlin realized. “Something the Comanche were growing.”

Rawls settled back in his chair. “I’ve said enough.”

“You ever test any of the animals on that rez, sir?”

“Animals?”

“Like the bats that live in the cave formations.”

Rawls looked genuinely curious. “Why?”

“Because I did, after a colony of them attacked me. Turns out they’re a species of Mexican free-tailed bats, common to the area, known for nesting under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin. What’s not common is that the ones in that cave were maybe ten times bigger than the ones found under the bridge. And here’s the kicker: the average life expectancy for Mexican free-tailed bats is between four and six years, but by all accounts, the one we tested from the rez was at least fifty.”

That got Rawls’s attention. “Fifty years?”

“Could be a hundred. The testing’s not finished yet.” Caitlin paused again, to let that sink in, before continuing. “So, if you weren’t drilling for oil, what exactly are those workmen supposed to do, now that the protesting’s over?”