Dylan felt about her jeans, which were darkened by blood, until he found a folded piece of paper, similarly stained around the edges.
“What is this?” he asked, unfolding it to find a schematic of some kind, with a bunch of red Xs at what looked like equidistant points.
“Houston. Our plan. The one I stopped.”
“What plan?”
Her eyes faded again, fluttered, closed.
“Ela, what plan?”
She was trying to hold her eyes open, leaving Dylan to picture a bunch of killers who spoke Arabic carrying backpacks filled with some weapon the Comanche had been safeguarding for generations.
“What do the Xs mean?” he asked, regarding the schematic again.
Ela’s breathing came in fits and starts, but her eyes suddenly sprang to life. “Targets,” was all she said, before her eyes closed again.
Dylan eased her head into his lap, cradling it with one hand while the other hand felt for his cheap flip phone to text his dad again.
PART NINE
A lot of the old-time Rangers were not happy when they had to start reading Miranda warnings to suspects. They thought the world had ended. They couldn’t figure out why on earth you would spend months investigating a case and hunting down a suspect, and then once you’ve got him, the first thing you have to say is “You have the right not to talk to me.”
—Ranger Doyle Holdridge, in Tracking the Texas Rangers: The Twentieth Century, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss, Jr. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013)
89
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“Footage off a traffic camera shows all three of our targets entering Klyde Warren Park in Dallas less than an hour ago,” Tepper explained to Caitlin and Jones, after Cray Rawls had been escorted from the room.
“They wouldn’t be there unless it was to meet someone,” said Caitlin.
Jones started for the door. “I’m going to move every drone we’ve got up to the area over that park, see if we can figure out who exactly that is.”
“How many drones we talking about exactly?” Caitlin asked him.
“Hopefully enough to avert an ISIS attack on the homeland, Ranger,” Jones told her. “Is that good enough for you?”
Jones left the room to work the retasking and make the arrangements to get the team to Dallas. In the meantime, if Zurif, Saflin, and Daniel Cross left Klyde Warren Park before they arrived, the drones would pick them up again immediately.
“I ever tell you I once played the rodeo circuit?” Captain Tepper asked Caitlin, the two of them now alone in the office, which still held the smell of Cray Rawls’s cologne.
“No, D.W., definitely not.”
“Well, I did. Your dad and granddad got a real hoot out of it, especially old Earl. Once, when I was riding some country festival, he shot his gun into the air just as they were lifting the gate. Turned that bucking bronco into a goddamn stegosaurus, I swear, snorting so hard I could feel his breath. Anyway, I lasted seven point three seconds. Made it my last ride ever. I mention that ’cause that’s what all this resembles. Like we’re on the back of a bucking bronc, hanging on for dear life.”
“But it’s happened before, hasn’t it? Back when Jack Strong went up against John D. Rockefeller.”
“You comparing Standard Oil to ISIS, Ranger?” Tepper asked, a note of sarcasm clear in his voice.
“How was it Standard Oil never made inroads in Texas until years later, D.W.? Something happened back then, on the same Indian reservation we’re dealing with now, that scared off one of the most powerful men in American history.”
Tepper’s eyes widened. “Old Earl never told you that part of the story?”
“Not that I recall. Then again, he often left out the real bloody parts from his bedtime tales.”
“Well, Ranger, that certainly qualifies here…”
90
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS; 1874
“What’d you do to those men?” Jack Strong asked Isa-tai.
“You mean the dead ones in the hotel?”
“I never said nothing about dead men in a hotel.”
“Word travels fast, Ranger.”
“So does the smell of shit, Chief.”
“I’ve told you, I’m not our chief.”
“No, but you’re running the show all the same, sure as I’m standing here and sure as you having something to do with some of Rockefeller’s men getting torn apart.”
“Nature takes care of its own.”
“You said that before, Chief.”
“Because it’s true. Then, now, forever.”
“I believe you’ve told me that, too. So let me tell you something. Whatever you’re up to may have chased off other men, but this Rockefeller ain’t one of them. He won’t stop until he’s staked his full claim to the oil on this land, and he’ll call up as many men as he needs to do the job.”
“Let him.”