“But it’s mine, Mr. Torres. It’s my business,” Ela said, standing side by side with Dylan, addressing Cort Wesley respectfully. “This is a protected refuge. The oil company can’t touch any of it, except here on the reservation, since my people were deeded this part of the land. So that’s where they came, bringing promises to build new schools, new housing, new jobs. My people kept voting down a casino, but they accepted the company’s promises because the elders sold them a bill of goods. Carbon copy of North Dakota, but nobody’s paying any attention.” Ela squeezed Dylan’s arm. “Maybe this will change that.”
“First, my name’s Masters, not Torres. Second, the only thing that’s gonna change is what happens when heads start getting busted,” Cort Wesley told her.
Caitlin held her gaze on Ela. “Are you accusing anybody of breaking the law here?”
“The laws of nature, of history, yes.”
“Those aren’t the laws I was talking about.”
Ela shrugged.
Caitlin felt a chill run through her, and she scanned the spectators again for the tall young man, so rail thin that he seemed to have no waist at all. But she turned back toward Dylan and Ela before she could find him.
“Tell you what I can do. I can speak with the right folks at this minerals company to determine if their intentions are just. I can’t make any promises, but in my experience, people real good at hiding behind intentions don’t talk such a good game when you pull back the curtain.”
Ela looked over Caitlin’s shoulder toward the congestion of construction workers milling about, just beyond the police line. Anger was squeezing their expressions taut, and they seemed ready to erupt again at any moment. Caitlin’s gaze, meanwhile, drifted yet again toward the gallery of spectators, fixing on the precise spot where the tall kid with the pants sagging past his hips had been standing. She was still trying to place how she recognized him, the answer flitting along the outskirts of her consciousness like a bad dream she couldn’t quite keep ahold of.
“You don’t know what you’re dealing with here, Ranger, not with these people,” Ela told her.
“Well,” said Caitlin, still trying to spot the tall kid she couldn’t chase from her mind, “they don’t know what they’re dealing with, either.”
PART TWO
They were … one of the most colorful, efficient, and deadly band of irregular partisans on the side of law and order the world has seen.
—T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2000)
12
AUSTIN, TEXAS
“You risked compromising this mission. You risked everything.”
Daniel Cross stretched his long legs under the table in Hoover’s Cooking and looked up from the chicken-fried steak the waitress had just set down on his place mat. “How’d I do that, just hanging around the reservation for a few minutes?” he asked the two men seated across from him in the booth.
“You must learn to follow the rules, exercise caution,” Razin Saflin said. “There’s so much at stake here, and your presence at that Indian reservation could have harmed our plans.”
The two men on the other side of the booth were uniformly flat faced, their gazes caustic. Both were average looking, nondescript, just like him, except they had neatly trimmed beards and he barely needed to shave at all. Cross was tall and thin, with a waist that hadn’t changed much since middle school and still struggled to hold pants up, even with a belt. His brown, stringy hair was almost as oily as it had been back then, his skin, too, and his acne was just as bad—lately to the point that he had to go back to using the medication that made him smell like antiseptic.
“What do you think you were achieving?” the second man, Ghazi Zurif, asked him, gazing about the restaurant again.
Cross tried to smirk, to be the guy in control, which was what they’d made him feel like, until now. It was what he’d enjoyed most about this whole experience: being the one in charge, calling the shots for a change. Now it seemed like he was back to being no different from “Diaper Dan,” the nickname given to him in second grade, when he’d wet himself in class after the teacher refused to let him go to the lav. The nickname had stuck all the way through high school.
“Nothing,” Cross told the two men who’d made him feel like Diaper Dan again. “I was just hanging around, watching. What’s the big deal?”
“You were warned to be careful in your movements,” said Saflin, who had a drooping eye. “That’s the big deal.”
“And you weren’t supposed to leave the apartment without informing us,” Zurif added.
“Am I supposed to ask permission before I take a shit, too?”
Saflin shot a hand across the table, brushing against Cross’s iced tea and nearly spilling it. The hand clamped onto the hand in which Cross was holding the steak knife and squeezed the wrist so hard that Cross felt his fingers go numb, the nerve held in a way that sent pain shooting up his forearm, all the way to his elbow. The steak knife slipped from his grasp and rattled against the floor.
“You think this is a game?” Daniel Cross felt Saflin’s hot breath blow into him like air from a sauna, his droopy eye bulging wide now, the angle of his glare making one side of his beard look longer than the other. “What did you think was going to happen when you left those posts all over social media, enough to command even the attention of Allah?”