“I did. He said he’d rather fuck me.”
Cort Wesley felt the tension returning.
“He said he’d done kids like me in prison,” Luke continued. “Exact words.”
“You never saw either of these guys before?”
“I would’ve told you if I had.”
“What about the SUV? You get a license plate, anything like that?”
Luke frowned and shook his head. “I screwed up there. Too scared to think straight. It was a Cadillac Escalade, I think. Smelled brand new inside, but also like paint.”
“Paint?”
“You know, like from an auto body shop, like it had just come out of one or something.” Luke’s expression changed. “What’s this have to do with Dylan, with an Indian reservation?”
“What do you think?”
“A girl?”
“It’s always a girl with your brother,” Cort Wesley said, immediately regretting he’d put it that way.
“You don’t have to do that, Dad.”
“Do what?”
“Worry about choosing your words. I’m not fragile. I don’t break so easy.”
Cort Wesley squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Well, that’s a relief … You really told the guy to go fuck himself?”
“Yup.”
“How’d that feel?”
“Fucking great.”
Cort Wesley rose from the twin bed, its old springs creaking. He waited until Luke joined him on his feet.
“I think I’ll tell the son of a bitch that, once I find him.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Luke said.
“Which question is that?”
“What this Indian reservation has to do with me getting jacked from a McDonald’s.”
“Long story. Let’s just say your brother’s latest girlfriend is a Native American who doesn’t take kindly to having her land spoiled by oil drillers.”
“That’s a new one, anyway.”
“It sure is,” Cort Wesley said, something clicking in his mind.
Doesn’t take kindly to having her land spoiled by oil drillers …
And then he realized what it was, something he should have realized as soon as he arrived at the reservation the day before.
“What is it, Dad?” Luke asked him. “You got that look.”
Cort Wesley shared a smile with his son, started for the door, then stopped and looked back at him. “The head of your school happened to mention your rooming situation for next year has been resolved.”
“Really?” Luke beamed. “How’d you manage that? You didn’t have to beat anybody up, did you?”
“No, but that’s coming,” Cort Wesley told him, taking out his phone to call Caitlin with the news about what he’d just realized.
Before he could dial, though, he saw a half dozen missed calls from her, and one text that read, 9-1-1.
39
AUSTIN, TEXAS
“They’re expecting me,” Caitlin Strong said to one of the two Austin policemen manning the checkpoint at the intersection of Manor Road and Comal Street, beneath a blistering late-afternoon sun that made her squint from the reflection off his sunglasses.
She handed over her ID, realizing that this whole section of the city had been cordoned off, from the LBJ Presidential Library to the north, off of I-35, to where Manor met Alexander Avenue, to the east. She might have used the term quarantined instead, except that, according to what Captain Tepper had been able to piece together, authorities were in the process of evacuating the area to a one-square-mile radius. Strangely, a lone cloud had settled over the block beyond, leaving it as an ink splotch of darkness enclosed by blazing sunlight on all sides.
Caitlin watched one of the patrolmen get on his radio with her ID in hand, to make sure she was cleared by higher authorities to proceed. Right now that higher authority was Homeland Security, in the form of none other than her old friend Jones, who, just like a bottle top, kept sticking to her boot and scratching everything it touched. Beyond that, she didn’t know much, other than that around twenty people were dead inside Hoover’s Cooking, a down-home family restaurant squeezed into the Manor Road Plaza, under that lone cloud.
“You’re free to pass, Ranger,” the Austin cop told her, handing Caitlin back her ID. “Give the devil our regards.”