Texas Outlaw (Rory Yates #2)(74)

And even if Yates and Delgado somehow make it out of the open space, there are roadblocks every conceivable way out of West Texas.

“We don’t want them arrested,” Carson reminds his son.

“Harris has at least one friendly at each roadblock. Accidents happen all the time transporting prisoners to jail.”

The holes are ready. Carson and Gareth climb down to watch as the tow trucks begin to lower the burnt corpses of the F-150s into the ground. The one with the bodies goes first. It’s Yates’s truck—they can tell by the graffiti on the door. Instead of rolling, the malformed tires slide down the angled bed. When both vehicles are finally in the hole, the backhoe uses its front bucket to push the mound of dirt onto them. In a matter of minutes, the trucks—and the bodies—are gone.

Now the plow moves toward the disturbed dirt, ready to make the area of excavation indistinguishable from the rest of the field.

Before Carson heads back to his pickup, he says to his son, “The Ranger’s star was gone. Where is it?”

Gareth, still wearing the desert camouflage he had on this morning in his sniper’s nest, reaches into a cargo pocket in his pants and pulls it out.

“Souvenir,” he says.

He also pulls out a crumpled ball cap that Carson recognizes as once belonging to Dale Peters.

Carson knows his son always takes trophies from the people he’s killed.

“Don’t worry,” Gareth says. “I’ll hide these real good. No one will find them.”

Gareth has a pleased look on his face, as if he’s brought home a football trophy to show off to his father.

“Don’t be so fucking proud of yourself,” Carson barks, his patience with today’s fiasco finally snapping. “By my count, Yates got three to your two. You think you’re better than him? Prove it.”

Gareth goes red, his anger boiling just under the surface of his skin.

Carson knew this would piss him off. But he wants his son pissed. Gareth is the most competitive person he’s ever known. Carson wants him angry and ready to destroy whatever stands in his way.

It’s time for this game to come to an end.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” Gareth says, his eyes icy in the fading light. “That Texas Ranger won’t live another twenty-four hours.”





Chapter 92



I AWAKE TO moonlight coming down through the canyon instead of sunlight. My body is stiff. I try to rise without waking Ariana, but my shifting disturbs her. We both stand and stretch and try to get our bearings.

I feel weak, my stomach in knots. We haven’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours. What I wouldn’t give to have that sack of food Jessica gave me. But it was inside my truck and must be ashes now, along with everything else. There wasn’t much of personal value in there, except for my guitar. I feel a pang of sadness knowing the source of so many good memories—especially memories with Willow—has been destroyed.

It’s silly to feel sad about a musical instrument when what was really lost today was Dale and Kyle.

I can buy a new guitar.

But Dale and Kyle are gone forever.

A flame of anger rises inside me like an ember glowing with renewed life. I feel a growing resolve to keep pushing on. Earlier today I felt completely defeated. But now I’m getting mad. I’m not going to give up. I have to make sure Dale and Kyle—not to mention Susan Snyder and Skip Barnes—didn’t die in vain.

I don’t know what our long-term plan is, but I know what our first step is.

“We need to go to the river,” I say. “There’s that stash of food I brought you. We need to eat. We need to drink. We need strength.”

We sling our rifles over our shoulders and make our way through the twisting corridors of the slot canyon. We walk to the place where the trucks burned. In the moonlight, we can see the ground is scorched, and some broken glass remains, but otherwise, there’s no real evidence of what happened. The dirt with blood on it has been shoveled up. The tanker, of course, is gone.

We hike toward the river. The air is cool, and the desert hills look blue in the moonlight. We don’t say much on the walk. My mouth is drier than I can ever remember it feeling. My muscles are sore from what I’ve put my body through in the last twelve hours. Inside my boots, my feet burn with blisters. My arms are scraped up from running through brush and cacti, and even though it hadn’t been bothering me too much lately, the rash on my right hand seems to be flaring up, particularly on my trigger finger. I probably scraped it on a rock during our escape. Or it might simply be that the act of shooting so much was comparable to me scratching my finger over and over.

Whatever the reason, the hand and finger itch irritatingly.

I have no doubt Ariana feels as bad as I do—minus the rash—but to her credit, she never complains.

We arrive at the river and find Ariana’s stash of supplies. We open cans of soup and choke them down cold. We’ve been starving all day, but now that we have access to food, neither of us feels particularly hungry. We have no appetite, but we certainly have thirst. We gulp from water bottles until our stomachs feel bloated.

Finally, when we have some energy back, Ariana says, “Rory, what the hell are we going to do?”

We’re sitting at the riverbank where we went swimming, which feels like a hundred years ago.