Strong Cold Dead (17 page)

The gun was shaking in Jimmy's hand now, and he promised himself he'd never take another drink, not even one. Not when it left him sick to his stomach and the world too wobbly to shoot.

“He just got in tonight,” Jimmy said finally.

“Who?”

“The man we work for. I guess, anyway. I didn't meet him, didn't even see him. Just heard his name.”

“And what would that be?”

“Rockafella. Something like that.”

*   *   *

Jack Strong was having breakfast in the hotel restaurant when Curly Bill Brocius entered ahead of the men the Ranger recalled from the Comanche reservation, and a few more he didn't. Nine in total, ten including Jimmy Miller, who clung sheepishly behind some of the brutes whose smell reached the Ranger long before their presence.

Steeldust Jack sipped his coffee and went back to work on his plate, which was piled with scrambled eggs, bacon, grits, and biscuits swimming in gravy. He pretended not to notice the presence of the ten gunmen until a well-dressed, mustachioed man who looked younger than his years slid through the makeshift tunnel they formed. He was thinner and shorter than Steeldust Jack had expected of someone with his notoriety and growing power.

The Ranger hitched back the long coat he hadn't shed, to make sure the handle of his Colt was in easy range, never missing a beat with his eggs. He glimpsed John D. Rockefeller coming his way, the gunmen falling into step behind him.

“My associates tell me there was some trouble on an Indian reservation yesterday that's claimed my interest, Ranger.”

Steeldust Jack looked up, waited to swallow his mouthful before responding. “Your associates tell you they were the cause of it?”

“On the contrary, they informed me one of their number was found murdered and they were merely trying to ascertain more about his killing.”

“They tell you the man's body was found outside the reservation proper and, in the wake of ascertaining this, they trespassed on sovereign land?”

“They didn't have to. I'm well aware of the law.” Rockefeller pulled back the chair across from Jack Strong. “You mind if I sit down?”

Steeldust Jack gestured for him to take the chair, snatching a bite of a biscuit and stuffing another forkful of eggs into his mouth.

“I have great respect for your organization and the entire state of Texas,” Rockefeller said, pushing his chair back under the table and signaling for a cup of coffee. “And I apologize if any man in my service treated you or the Texas Rangers with any modicum of disrespect.”

“Small amount,” Jack Strong said, laying his own coffee back down.

“Pardon me?”

“Definition of the word
modicum
. It means ‘small amount.'”

“You must be a well-read man.”

“I do my share, Mr. Rockefeller. Know a bit about history, too. Like how you used your riches and family name to avoid service in the Civil War.”

Rockefeller bristled, not noticing as the barman set a steaming mug of coffee down before him. “My shipping business was the sole means of support for my mother and younger siblings. My joining the army would have doomed it and them.”

“Lots of men buried off battlefields were the sole means of support for their families, too. How do you suppose those families are getting by now? But that's not the point, Mr. Rockefeller. The point is you didn't just sit out the war, you profited off it, when shipping down the Mississippi became one of the war's first casualties. All of a sudden, the shipment of Midwestern crops was pushed eastward—through Cleveland, sir, where you just happened to be based. At the same time, there was a load of government contracts for food, clothes, and guns, and I hear told pretty much all of it went through that port up in those parts you pretty much controlled.”

Rockefeller pushed back his suit coat and tucked his thumbs in the pockets of his vest, his face framed by the steam rising off his coffee, which made him look as much like a ghost as a man.

“You accusing me of being a good and fortunate businessman, Ranger?” he asked.

Steeldust Jack wiped his mouth with a napkin. “No, sir. I'm accusing you of getting rich off the blood spilled by other men. You packed your warehouses with salt, clover seed, pork, and other supplies to support the war efforts. Then you created artificial shortages and delays to drive up prices while men starved to death before a bullet could take them.”

Unruffled, Rockefeller lifted his mug and sipped his coffee, studying Steeldust Jack through the curtain of steam. “Know what I did with all those profits, Ranger?”

“No, sir, I do not, though I suspect you got richer still.”

“I did indeed. As luck would have it, headquartering my operation in Cleveland put me a hundred miles from one of the most revolutionary developments in human history: the discovery of oil in the town of Titusville. A risky venture, for sure, but where else was I going to put all that cash? There've been times in my life where I've been short on money, but I've never been short on vision.”

Steeldust Jack still had plenty of food on his plate, but he'd lost his appetite. While looking straight across the table at John D. Rockefeller, he also followed the hands of each and every gunman flirting with their holstered pistols. All but the kid Jimmy Miller, that is.

“And what did that vision show that brought you to Texas, Mr. Rockefeller?”

“Same thing that brought me to Titusville, Ranger: ambition. My company, Standard Oil, has been digging wells wherever we have a notion oil is located. And I'm here to tell you that your state is sitting on an ocean of it.” Rockefeller kicked his chair back enough to cross his legs, holding court, steaming coffee cup in hand. “My scouts tell me that Indian reservation has stores of oil so vast that it actually leaks up to the surface when there's enough storm runoff.”

“Well, sir, that's all well and good,” Steeldust Jack told him. “Except for one little problem.”

“What's that, Ranger?”

“You don't own the land, and unless the Comanche tribe in question so permits, you can't so much as touch it.”

John D. Rockefeller pushed his chair in as far as it would go. Something changed in his expression. Jack Strong recognized it from the faces of the most violent and dangerous men he'd ever encountered. Rockefeller's skin reddened, the flesh of his face seeming pumped up with air, to the point that it all but swallowed his mustache.

“You and me,” Rockefeller said, his voice sounding like the words had scraped over icicles, “we're talking about Indians here. The heathen masses the Texas Rangers have done more to eradicate from these parts than any other force.” Rockefeller sat straight up in his chair. “And maybe you're forgetting about the man in my employ who was murdered. You should be arresting the lot of those savages instead of wasting your time here. Because I think your governor, and your legislature, know that what I bring is in the best interests of your state and that riling me isn't in the best interests of anyone.”

“I'll keep that in mind, sir.”

“You do that, Ranger. You do that,” Rockefeller said, the hesitation in his tone rooted in the uncertainty about whether he'd made his point at all. “Progress stops for no man.”

“Neither does a bullet, Mr. Rockefeller.”

 

36

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“John D. Rockefeller?” Whatley asked, shaking his head when Caitlin had finished. “Are you serious, Ranger?”

“I'm surprised you never heard the story.”

“Well, I suppose I wouldn't believe half of what I've heard about you, if I didn't know it to be true myself.”

“Runs in the family, Doc.”

“That's an understatement, if ever I heard one. God's honest truth, I didn't know oil drilling, even in this state, went back that far.”

“It did for sure,” Caitlin told him, recalling pictures her grandfather had showed her to supplement the tale. Grainy black-and-white photographs from that era featured landscape images of raw wood, angular steel, and legions of grimy, exhausted men staring blankly into the camera. Heavily laden wagons threaded for miles along rutted roadways, hauling pipe and supplies. Other pictures of the early oil fields showed scars, scrapes, roads, trenches, and blast holes in the land, which looked more like the refuse of the Civil War. Right from the start, during those post–Civil War years, the boomtowns filled with men who worked, slept, ate, drank. Then they celebrated, waited for mail, prayed with oil field preachers, and occasionally resorted to crime and violence that it took the Texas Rangers to put a clamp on.

Whatley looked at Caitlin for a time, as if reading her mind. Then he drew in a deep breath and turned his gaze briefly out the window.

“There's something else about that body, Ranger. Two things, actually.” He turned his eyes back toward her. “I was involved in a similar case before myself, way back at the beginning of my career. Guess I've done my best to put it out of my mind.”

“Why's that, Doc?”

“Because it didn't make any more sense then than this killing does now.” He started to take another deep breath but got only halfway through. “How well do you know the city of Weatherford?”

“I know it's near Fort Worth and is the county seat for Parker County. Beyond that, not much.”

“They got an old legend up there about something called the Weatherford Monster.”

“I've heard about that, too, but chose not to mention it.”

“With good reason, I'm sure. I was called to the area back when I was doing my residency in pathology. A young couple had been found murdered, their wounds a decent match for the condition of the body lying on my slab right now. Unprecedented amount of blood and tissue loss, with little even left to identify them as having been human. Initial thinking was animals had gotten to them after they were already dead, but my examination revealed otherwise. They'd decided to camp at the foot of some hills rich with caves, in spite of the warning signs and rumored sightings in the past.”

“Sightings?”

“Kind of stuff better fit for supermarket tabloids. The reason I'm telling you this is that these stories all originated with the Native Americans who roamed the area we now call Parker County. A story was passed down through generations, about a fire-breathing bull that walked on its hind legs and ventured out of the hills—especially in winter, when the game grew scarce. I took some footprint impressions from the scene and sent them for analysis, but what was left of them had degraded too much for anybody to take a stab at a proper identification. This morning, I'm kind of embarrassed to say, I looked through my records to see if I could dig those impressions up. But that was back in the Stone Age, before computers ruled the world, so I suppose they're gone forever.

“And I'll tell you something else, Ranger,” Whatley resumed, after Caitlin had figured he was done. “There've been other reported sightings across the state, sometimes associated with unexplained disappearances, and always near Indian land.”

“Nature takes care of its own,” Caitlin muttered, repeating White Eagle's own words, which suddenly seemed oddly appropriate.

“What was that?”

“Nothing, Doc.”

“Anyway, Ranger, what I can conjure from memory tells me the conditions those victims were found in pretty much mirrors that of the one found outside that reservation. That's the first thing I wanted to tell you about the body, which I left out of my report.”

“What's the second?”

“Something I found in the general area of the remains,” Whatley said, reaching into his top desk drawer to produce an item tucked into a plastic evidence pouch. “Nobody knows about this yet besides you and me,” he continued, handing the pouch across his desk. “I figure since the Rangers are running lead on this, you'd know what to do with it.”

Caitlin inspected the object through the plastic, felt her breath seize up in her throat.

“I'm going to assume you recognize that,” Whatley was saying.

She traced the outline of the object, as if hoping her eyes had it wrong. A strange buzzing filled her ears, making her wonder if her thoughts were coming so quickly they were spilling out her ears.

“I'll need that back, Ranger,” Whatley said.

Caitlin hadn't realized she was still holding it, nor did she remember returning the evidence bag to him, until she watched him stow it back in his drawer.

“For safekeeping,” he resumed.

She realized the buzzing she'd heard was coming from her cell phone. She eased it from her pocket, forcing her hand steady. “I'm here, Captain.”

“Not for long, Ranger. You ever hear of a restaurant called Hoover's Cooking, up in Austin?”

“I think so.”

“Ranger chopper's waiting to take you there right now. I figured I'd give you the word before Jones.”

Caitlin felt her phone vibrate again and checked the new incoming call. “That's Jones now, D.W. What's he going to tell me?”

“That a storm even bigger than the gale force of Hurricane Caitlin has made a direct hit on Texas, and that's just for starters.”

“Starters?”

“Chopper's waiting, Ranger. You'd best get a move on.”

 

37

H
OUSTON,
T
EXAS

“I'd like to see my son, ma'am,” Cort Wesley Masters told Julia De Cantis, principal of the Village School.

He'd driven the whole way here with the air-conditioning blowing as hard as he could take it, still arriving at his son Luke's school with his blood simmering and sweat soaking through his shirt. It was enough to make him feel like dropping into a pool full of ice cubes, though he suspected that wouldn't have cooled him off.

“I thought it best we talk first, Mr. Masters,” De Cantis said, chair pushed as far back from her desk as the wall would allow. “To update you on everything we know about the incident.”