*
Once back on the road, Caitlin finally checked her phone for messages and saw three labeled CAPTAIN TEPPER, along with five additional missed calls from Tepper. She was ready to pocket her phone without returning them, when he called for the ninth time.
“Glad you decided to answer this time, Ranger,” Tepper greeted her.
“I couldn’t read the caller ID, Captain.”
“You think I’m stupid?”
“Yes, sir, for killing your lungs with those damn Marlboros.”
“Turns out the chair I assigned you hasn’t been sat in. Turns out you showed up where local cops are trying to prevent a riot, outside an Indian reservation, and then paid an unauthorized visit to some mineral company for no good reason at all, other than to piss somebody new off.”
“I’m guessing Sam Bob Jackson called you.”
“Yes, he did. We had a very congenial talk after I explained that I was revoking your day passes off the grounds of the lunatic asylum you belong in.”
“You mean the one called Texas?”
“Give it a rest, Caitlin. You pay the man a visit without even a clue of what it is you were investigating, without any authorization whatsoever, concerning something you don’t even have any jurisdiction over. Is that about right? Oh, hold on. I left out the part about putting you behind a desk until things quieted down at Department of Public Safety headquarters in Austin. Well, Ranger, the volume has now been officially turned up even louder.”
“I got a call Dylan Torres was involved in the protest, Captain.”
“Yes, ma’am, I heard that too,” Tepper told her, a grim undercurrent lacing his voice. “And you should know there’s been some more trouble up at that reservation. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Dylan again?”
“No, Ranger, it’s his father this time.”
16
BALCONES CANYONLANDS, TEXAS
Cort Wesley had been hanging back, in a shady spot that cloaked him from the view of both the protesters and construction workers, when he saw the trouble coming. The kind of trouble he’d learned to sense a whole bunch of years ago, when he’d served in Special Ops during the Gulf War.
The real Gulf War, as he liked to call it now, where they’d had a plan for getting in as well as out and had executed it to perfection. Cort Wesley had been part of the team sent in early, through Kuwait, to act as spotters for the initial strafing runs and, later, close air support aimed at more strategic targets. It was the highlight of his military career, which had ended less than auspiciously and had left him in the service of the Branca crime family out of New Orleans, an enforcer for their San Antonio–based drug business. Only men with a security clearance at Jones’s level could even access the files detailing his military exploits, because, according to one especially frank Special Ops colonel way up the chain of command, “If they ever learned what we did, they’d never let us do it again.”
Cort Wesley had come to realize that combat was an apt metaphor for pretty much everything he’d experienced since then. Raising kids might not be as dramatic, but it was every bit as challenging. You think taking down a half dozen Iraqi soldiers is tough? Try dealing with a pair of teenage boys—especially the oldest, now in college, for whom no cause was too small to make a stand. Dylan had spent his early years nursing sick animals back to health and holding actual funerals when his efforts failed. The boys’ mother—Cort Wesley’s girlfriend, Maura Torres—had sent him pictures of those rescue efforts during the early days of Cort Wesley’s four-year stretch behind bars at Huntsville’s infamous Walls penitentiary. Cort Wesley had papered the walls of his cell with them, focusing on a different shot every day, long after his oldest had outgrown the practice and the photos stopped coming.
Right now, the picture he saw forming was of the police line starting to buckle under a concerted shove forward by the construction workers pressed up against it. Cort Wesley saw the line giving.
Saw the protesters, led by Dylan and Ela Nocona, holding their ground.
Saw hammers, ax handles, heavy lug wrenches, and even chains brandished by the construction workers, to be used as weapons instead of tools.
The violence was inevitable now.