Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(89)
“Whatever’s growing on that land is being affected by the chemical composition of the groundwater leaching up from an aquifer we can’t reach through normal means. And to properly recreate the conditions, I’m going to need an oil well’s worth of that magic water.”
“And if you’re right, I imagine a barrel of that water will be worth a thousand times more than a barrel of oil.”
“Closer to ten thousand times, Ranger.”
“So here’s where we’re at, Mr. Rawls.” Caitlin nodded. “Your cat’s out of the bag, as far as the government goes. Keep obstructing us and you’ll end up a coconspirator with whoever we nail in connection with ISIS. You want to tell him how things go from here, Jones?”
She stepped aside so Jones could take her place, looking down at Cray Rawls, but he took a seat on the edge of the desk instead, showcasing the cowboy boots he figured made him a genuine Texan.
“Who you think you’re talking to here, hoss?” he said, the slightest Texas twang evident in his cadence. “I’m Homeland Security, and you won’t find a Miranda warning card anywhere on my person. I snap my fingers and—poof!—you disappear. We’ll seize your assets, freeze your accounts, turn every employee you’ve got into a person of interest, to make their lives a living hell, too. See, there’s no gray area with Homeland, and we never have to defend ourselves in court. You’re in or you’re out. So which is it?”
Rawls fixed his gaze back on Caitlin. “If I tell you what you want to know—”
“No deals, Mr. Rawls,” she interrupted. “The only thing I can promise you for sure, in return for your cooperation, is not to go public with the fact that your son might be directly aiding and abetting the biggest terrorist attack by far in American history. I can’t take anything else off the table.”
Rawls shook his head, moved his eyes from Caitlin to Jones and then back again. “When did this stop being the United States of America?”
Jones answered before Caitlin could. “When ISIS decided to use a weapon of mass destruction they found on land you currently control.”
“A man like you never gives everything up until his back hits the wall, Mr. Rawls,” Caitlin picked up. “That’s where you’re at right now, and you’ve got one more chance to come clean about what else you’re after on that rez besides water.”
Rawls’s expression tightened into one familiar to Caitlin from the Houston boxing gym where they’d first met: exhaustion, after he’d punched himself out and could barely raise his arms. “Just one question, Ranger. How much do you know about corn?”
Before he could continue, a knock preceded the office door opening, and Captain Tepper poked his head in.
“We got a lead on these bastards,” was all Tepper said.
86
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
Dylan parked his truck off the rez, in a grove set well back from the entrance, near a trail through the woods that Ela had shown him. During the drive north, he’d noticed a tear in the tan cloth upholstery, down the middle of the passenger seat.
That made him think of the day he’d bought his beloved Chevy S-10, after his freshman year at Brown, without telling his dad, and how it had conked out almost as soon as he’d gotten it home. Instead of being pissed, his father had taught him how to change the starter, then the alternator, and finally, the battery. Never criticizing him for the purchase or preaching something like “What’d you expect for five hundred bucks?”
Dylan had bought the truck because it was the same age as him, and something felt right about that. Having a vehicle under him that had grown up on the same track, with lots of secrets and stories to share. He’d put in a new radio, sound system, tires, shocks, and custom bed liner, and had waxed, polished, and rubbed until the finish looked showroom new and rain fled from the paint before it could even bead up. But he’d never done anything, not a damn thing, about the upholstery, and now there was a tear down the center of the passenger seat, leaving him to wonder what he could and should have done differently.
Kind of like what was bringing him back to the reservation now. He was glad he had the truck to think about during the drive, because it spared him too much further contemplation of what Ela and the Lost Boys were up to. She had been playing him the whole time, ever since they’d first met, in Providence. Had almost surely set him up as a suspect in the murder of that construction foreman.
Then why rescue me, clipping the baling wire with a cutter she just happened to bring along? Why drive all the way to Shavano Park to face my father and Caitlin?
Dylan slid through the woods, past waist-high concrete pillars marking the beginning of Comanche land, his dad’s Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter scratching at his skin. His iPhone was probably back in Ela’s root cellar, so he’d bought one of those cheap phones at a drugstore on his way up to the rez, just in case he needed it.
His route brought him back to White Eagle’s property, where he could finish checking out that shed, or maybe confront the old man about whatever he was really up to. He heard the flutter and then lapping sounds of the waterfall next to White Eagle’s home, and he clung to the cover of the trees the rest of the way. Dylan stopped there and pressed out a text, starting with, IT’S DYLAN, since his father wouldn’t recognize the throwaway phone’s number. He kept it short and sweet, his mind having cleared enough to realize he was in over his head here and needed his dad to dig him out.