The air outside was hot and steamy, but still welcome. Being back in the fresh air left Caitlin grateful for the unseasonably hot sun and the sweat she was now free to wipe from her brow and cheeks with a bandanna lifted from her back pocket. It had been her father’s, and her grandfather’s before that, but neither had ever come up against anything like this.
Caitlin felt a vibration in the front pocket of her jeans and remembered her cell phone was still tucked there.
“I just got your message,” Cort Wesley greeted her. “Please tell me you’re not in Austin.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m headed there now. Give me a place to meet.”
“Not here, Cort Wesley. The Comanche reservation. You and me need to have a talk with Dylan.”
She could hear him sigh over the phone. “What’s he done now?”
Caitlin recalled the item in the evidence bag Doc Whatley was keeping tucked in his desk drawer for safekeeping. “Could be nothing.”
“And if it isn’t, Ranger?”
“I’ll explain when I see you, Cort Wesley.”
44
HOUSTON, TEXAS
“Jackson Whole Mineral,” Cray Rawls said, inside Sam Bob Jackson’s office. “You come up with that all on your own?”
“Like it?” Jackson asked him, swabbing the sweat from his forehead with a colored handkerchief.
“About as much as I like the rest of this state, Sam Bob. Somewhere between a colonoscopy and getting my prostate checked. How does anyone even live here?”
“You did, after that couple adopted you. Brought you all the way here from North Carolina.”
“Even gave me my own room: a windowless closet in the basement they kept locked to keep me from giving in to the devil’s temptation.”
“That wasn’t in your bio,” Jackson noted.
“Neither was the fact I was homeschooled, which in that particular household meant the Bible morning, noon, or night. You ever wonder why I haven’t set foot inside a church since?”
Rawls had his back to a set of finished oak bookshelves lined with framed photos of Sam Bob Jackson with Texas celebrities, most wearing cowboy hats. A wide-screen television was tuned to the local news with the sound muted.
“You want to explain to me why you had this high school boy kidnapped?” Rawls asked, while gazing out the window toward the Katy Freeway beyond.
Jackson’s reflection in the window glass grew so still even the fatty ripples on his face stopped moving. “There’s a lot at stake here. I felt I had to take the initiative, so I used the boy to send a message.”
Rawls nodded, hating the ridiculously low temperature in Sam Bob Jackson’s office, given the scorching temperature outside. He thought about how the environmentalists were always up his ass and figured they’d have a field day in a building like this, where the temperature left you bleeding icicles, in stark contrast to the blast furnace beyond.
“A message to the boy’s father, for sending four of our workers to the hospital.” Rawls nodded. “I get that. What I don’t get is you taking such a risk without knowing squat about the guy.”
Jackson didn’t look surprised at all. Instead, he looked at Rawls smugly. “He did a stretch in Huntsville. Worked as an enforcer for the Branca crime family out of New Orleans for a stretch. A thug, that’s all.”
“Really? He puts four guys in the hospital without suffering a scratch and all you can tell me about him is he used to be mobbed up and did some time?”
Jackson shrugged again. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Your job. What I’m fucking paying you for.”
“Hey, I’m the one who found this deal for you, Cray. What’s that short for, by the way?”
“What’s what short for?”
“Cray. Crayton or something?”
“No, Christopher Raymond. One thing I got left my real mother gave me.”
Jackson’s teeth curled over his lower lip. “That Bible-thumping couple … I heard they got killed in a fire and you inherited all they had—enough to get you out of Texas.”
“True enough.”
“The fire was suspicious,” Jackson added, after a pause.
“You should keep that in mind, next time you decide to make a move like this without consulting me.
“It’s under control, Cray.”
“Is it? I don’t think so, given we’ve still got a full construction crew sitting in the shade on my dime, all because some Comanche are communing with nature. All the more reason to find out more about this guy Masters you decided to pick a fight with.”
“No other choice I could see.”
“You shouldn’t have been looking. You’re hired help, my friend. Next time you get it in your mind to make a decision on your own, find a bucket of ice water to stick your head in. This goddamn state’s full of two things—oil and bullshit—and I don’t have any use for either. The sooner I can get this mess cleaned up, the sooner I can fly the friendly skies the fuck out of this circus you call a state.”
Rawls finally turned from the window, and west Houston’s Energy Corridor beyond, and focused on the muted wide-screen television, which currently showed a slew of flashing lights and a cordoned neighborhood in Austin.
“Like I was saying…” Rawls noted, shaking his head.
45