Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(96)
“He believes he’s found the cure for cancer on that reservation, Captain.”
“And what’s that got to do with whatever ISIS is after?” Tepper asked her, finally lighting his cigarette.
“I think they’re one and the same. What survived the fire back in Steeldust Jack’s time? What was it the Comanche needed to preserve?”
“Their corn.”
“Not just the corn,” Caitlin told him. “Something that was growing on it. Something that lengthened the life span of the Comanche, just like it lengthened the lives of the giant bats that attacked us the other night.”
“You can explain how that pertains to ISIS on the way,” Jones said, stepping back into the office and leaving the door open behind him. “I’ve got choppers prepping now. We need to get a move on.”
“Choppers, plural?”
“Looks like we’re going to war up in Dallas,” Jones said, turning all his focus on Caitlin. “Speaking of which, where’s your boyfriend?”
Tepper dropped the cigarette to the floor and crushed it with his boot. “I must’ve forgot to mention that apparently he’s left the building with Elvis. Your friend King Kong says he got a text message and tore off.”
“A text message from who?”
“I’ll give you two guesses, Ranger.”
92
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
Dylan was still alive.
That was something, anyway, Cort Wesley figured. He clutched his cell phone in his grasp as he drove, to make sure he’d feel the buzz of his son’s next text message coming through. He hadn’t recognized the phone number, then saw DYLAN in the first text and knew his son must be using a burner phone and, against everything that made any sense at all, had returned to the Comanche reservation where he could easily have died the night before.
HURRY! the next message had pleaded, after explaining where he was, and that’s what Cort Wesley had been doing ever since, driving into the sun until it burned his eyes. For some reason, he didn’t put on his sunglasses or lower the visor, maybe to make it so he couldn’t see things clearly, since, when it came to Dylan, he might as well be seeing nothing.
“Well, bubba,” Leroy Epps started, from the passenger seat.
“I don’t want to hear it, champ.”
“You ain’t even got a notion of what I was gonna say.”
“Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Never had kids of my own,” the ghost said, settling back in the seat. “Never going to now, circumstances being what they is.” Epps regarded Cort Wesley closer. “That makes yours as close as I’m gonna come, but I’m in no particular rush to see one of them on my side instead of yours.”
“That makes two of us.”
For some reason, he had the sense that Dylan had uncovered whatever Daniel Cross had found on the Comanche reservation while working for Sam Bob Jackson, whatever it was he’d used to kill two dozen people in an Austin diner and now intended to hand over to ISIS.
It was a beautiful day, the afternoon heat beginning to build outside his truck, just making its presence felt inside the cab. Cort Wesley realized he was sweating up a storm and that he’d neglected to turn on the air-conditioning after closing the truck’s windows. He slid them open again, needing to feel the real air and hear the sounds of the outside.
“’ Bout time, bubba,” the ghost of Leroy Epps told him. “I didn’t think I could sweat no more, but at two hundred degrees, I guess anything’s possible.”
“Why don’t you hitch a ride with somebody else, then?”
“And miss out on such wonderful company and conversation? You out of your mind?”
“I’m talking to a goddamn ghost.”
Cort Wesley could have sworn he heard the leather crackle as old Leroy leaned back in his seat and stuck his right hand out the window. “Your boy’s always one to finish what he starts, bubba.”
“The problem being, champ, maybe this is the time it finishes him instead.”
93
DALLAS, TEXAS
Jones had arranged for a pair of Black Hawk UH-60 helicopters out of Martindale, a Texas Army National Guard airfield in eastern San Antonio, ten miles from Texas Ranger Company F headquarters. Guillermo Paz’s seven men, along with their weapons, were squeezed into the trailing Black Hawk, while Jones’s chopper was running in the lead.
Caitlin had never ridden in a Black Hawk before, but her unhinged nerves settled a few minutes after takeoff. Across from her, Young Roger looked much the worse for wear, doing his best to compose himself with deep breath after deep breath. Guillermo Paz sat on the other side of her, with Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Pierre Beauchamp seated next to Young Roger. Captain Tepper was along for the ride, too, just as Cort Wesley should have been, if he weren’t off somewhere else, not answering her calls.
Dylan …
Caitlin didn’t need Cort Wesley to call to tell her that much. The boy had an uncanny nose for trouble, but this time he may have finally found a Goliath he couldn’t drop with a slingshot. Something was going on for sure on that Indian reservation, and Dylan was right in the middle of all of it. Apple of his father’s eye, sticking that nose of his where it didn’t belong.