But could he shoot a kid no older than him, no older than Ela? And could he really be sure—like, a hundred percent?
That thought formed just as the kid was maneuvering the phone in his grasp, getting his thumb into position. A single tap of a key was all it would take to trigger the explosives.
Dylan fired the Smith & Wesson, and kept firing. Not at the kid but above him. Into the big-ass sprinkler head, cream-colored to render it all but indistinguishable from the ceiling dotted with recessed fixtures spilling dim light downward. The sprinkler featured a closed head, with water in the pipe held back by a fusible link that would be triggered at maybe 150 or so degrees.
The bullets ruptured the head and punctured the link, releasing a steady stream of water directly over the kid maneuvering the phone in his hand. It slipped from his grasp and clacked to the floor, the kid lurching to retrieve it, when Dylan launched himself into motion.
He crashed into the kid, tackling him to the floor and preventing him from reaching the phone. A nearby table toppled over, spilling food to the polished floor. Dylan felt the air forced out of the kid, his whole sternum rattling on impact. He was still groping and flailing for the phone, Dylan watching big red letters counting down below the one-minute mark. He jammed his left elbow under the kid’s chin to hold him in place and stretched his own right hand for the phone.
49, 48, 47 …
Almost there, the kid flailing at him, thrashing with his legs to no avail. Dylan grazed the phone casing with one finger, then another, feeling for the screen.
37, 36, 35 …
The kid was biting his other hand now, sinking his teeth in deep. Dylan gutted through the pain, kept stretching his fingers outward, aiming for the PAUSE button on the screen.
30, 29, 28 …
The kid kept biting. Dylan kept stretching, jerking himself sideways as the kid bit down harder. His index finger was over the glass now and lowering, finding PAUSE. Watching the screen freeze at 22 after he touched it with his finger. Then he managed to get the whole phone in his grasp and slammed it again and again into the floor, spitting pies of glass and metal in all directions until the thing was barely recognizable as a phone at all.
Dylan stayed on top of the kid, pinning him, until a pair of cops yanked him off. As two more Houston officers stood with guns drawn, one of those cops pressed Dylan down right next to the kid and started to slap the handcuffs on.
The kid wasn’t much older than him—the homegrown version, for sure, who’d probably spent the past few years waging make-believe war on shooting ranges and meeting in dark, dingy basements with the windows blacked out. Dylan met his hate-filled eyes, returning a glare the kid probably practiced in the mirror.
“That was for Ela,” Dylan managed, with half his face still pressed hard against the tile, “you piece of shit.”
EPILOGUE
The Rangers were here before there was a Texas, and we have survived all that time. Now, we didn’t survive because we were good at riding horses. We didn’t survive because we can hunt or camp out on the prairie. We survived by being able to change with the times. When Texas needed Indian fighters, we were Indian fighters. When Texas needed border war fighters, we were that. When Texas needed someone to quell oil boom riots, we did that. When Texas needed detectives, we became that. When DNA became the mainstay of law enforcement work, we got good at that. We’ve had to change, and there have been some growing pains along the way. We have tripped and stumbled, and we’ve had times that were not our finest hours. But by and large we’ve had more successes than we’ve had misses. And we’re going to keep changing and evolving so we’re still here a hundred years from now.
—Ranger Matt Cawthon, 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)
HOUSTON, TEXAS; SIX WEEKS LATER
“I’m really proud to be addressing you today,” Caitlin said to the students and families gathered on the football field of the Village School, which was adorned with the Vikings logo and the school color, navy blue. “I’d like to talk to you about a lot of things, but mostly I’d like to talk about bravery.”