The old priest finished working that spoonful down his throat and opened his mouth for the next. His once-bright eyes were dull and lifeless, his thinning white hair flattened to his scalp in some places and sticking up askew in others. The room was laced with deodorizing spray to hide the stale scents of bodily waste and dried, scaly skin racked by bedsores. Paz detested injustice of all kinds, but this seemed like the ultimate one, for a man who’d given his life to others to have his own snatched from him this way. Feeding the man was the least he could do, but it always left him wishing he could do more. It had made Paz feel good at first, but now the whole process left him empty and drained. Powerless, too.
“I’ve got that feeling again, that something bad’s coming. I got it in this apartment I raided today that belonged to some pissant who normally wouldn’t amount to a speck of dust in the great chain of the universe. Problem is, all that’s changed now. Pissants like him have become as dangerous as assassination squads. They’re walking nuclear bombs, Padre, able to do a lot more damage with a keyboard or a test tube than men like me could ever do with a rifle. When I killed the man who killed my priest back home in the slums, I did it up close and personal, just him and me. I even used the same knife he did. But those days are gone. Now the worst danger, the biggest threat, comes from people you can’t even see, who don’t have the cajones to do face-to-face what they thrive on from a distance.”
Paz watched his priest swallow the latest spoonful and readied another.
“The philosopher Rousseau wrote that ‘Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.’ Now those chains are power cords, and they have the potential to strangle everything good people hold dear. Your favorite philosopher, Aristotle, bucked the system by believing in free will over determinism. But it’s the free will of people like that pissant whose apartment I raided that’s bringing us all to the edge.”
Paz realized his priest’s lips were trembling in anticipation of more oatmeal, and he quickly readied the next spoon, scooping too much up for the old man to manage and needing to shake some of it back into the bowl.
“I know what you’d say, if you could still speak, Padre,” Paz told him, gently dabbing up the stray oatmeal with a napkin. “You’d tell me that was my job, that my lot in his life is to tighten a noose on the necks of all the pissants before they can do the same to the world. Problem is, there’s just too many of them for me, my Texas Ranger, and her outlaw to contend with now.”
Paz’s words froze there. He was thinking of the apartment he’d raided this morning and the kid who lived there. The spoon froze, too, suspended in the air halfway between Paz and his priest, the excess oatmeal concoction dribbling down to the bedsheet. Paz thought of the cold feeling that had enveloped him as soon as he crashed through the apartment door, a vague sense of discomfort, coupled with a certainty that something very, very bad was coming—a product of this kid now gone missing. The ratty apartment stank of body odor and unwashed clothes. It was infested with ants, thanks to the stray candy wrappers strewn about. But it was the residue of something else that plagued Paz the most.
The kid’s thoughts.
They seemed to hang in the air, and now they clung to Paz’s consciousness the way the stench had clung to his clothes.
“Yup, there’s more pissants than ever looking to do damage. And you know what, Padre?” Paz resumed, starting the spoon toward his priest’s waiting mouth again. “I’ve got this feeling the worst is yet come.”
27
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“Love the new digs, Ranger,” Jones greeted her, the next morning, when Caitlin reached the back corner of the open first-floor office space of Texas Ranger Company F headquarters. His shiny new cowboy boots were propped up on the still drying varnish coating her desk.
“Glad you approve,” she said, twisting the back of his chair around so his feet flopped back to the floor. “Nice boots, by the way.”
“Had some business up in Austin, so I picked them up at Allen’s, just like you recommended.”
“I recommended you buy them a size too small.”
“The sales clerk frowned on the notion. He said it would make my feet go numb. Cause a fall maybe.”
“A girl can hope.”
“Homeland Security is no longer investigating your use of an alleged weapon of mass destruction.”
“Should I say thank you?”
“Not to the people whose houses still smell like roadkill. Next time you unleash a stink bomb, you may want to advise people to close their windows.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. And I appreciate you making this go away.”
“Speaking of which…”