“Deal’s a deal,” Cort Wesley said to Rawls, when they were in the backseat of Paz’s massive truck. “We got you out of there. Now talk, starting with the truth about what you’re after on that Indian reservation.”
Rawls had his phone pressed against his ear before Cort Wesley even realized he was holding it. “Think I’ll just call my lawyer first.”
Cort Wesley snapped out a hand, clamping it on the man’s wrist. “You might want to rethink that, partner.”
Rawls winced from the pain in his wrist, but clung to his cell phone. “I’m not your partner, cowboy. My partner just got his brains splattered back up in that office.”
“I thought he was just your associate.”
Rawls tried to smirk through the bolts of pain shooting up toward his elbow. “If you’re really working with Homeland Security, I’m sure we can work something out, once I get my lawyer on the horn here. Now, take your hand off me.”
Instead, Cort Wesley squeezed his hand harder, picturing his fist reducing the man’s nose to mincemeat and wiping the smirk from his face.
“You were raised here in Texas, have I got that right, Mr. Rawls?” he asked, his breath heating up as he posed the question.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I’m just curious why you left. Heard you may have had a beef with the law.”
Rawls stiffened, the smirk wiped from his expression. “You heard wrong.”
“Something about hurting a woman.”
“People make up stories, Mr. Masters. I’ve got lots of enemies.”
“Then you don’t need another, do you?”
“Could we get to the point?”
“I believe I already did,” Cort Wesley said. “Reason your partner’s brains are painting his office walls is what you found on that Indian reservation. Problem is, somebody else found it too, and we haven’t got time for phone calls.”
“How do I know you’re not intending to steal it? How do I know that sniper wasn’t working with you and this isn’t all some kind of setup?”
Cort Wesley let go of Rawls’s hand and watched it flop into his lap, still holding the smartphone. “Make the call, partner. Tell your lawyer to meet us at the Texas Ranger barracks in San Antonio.”
81
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS
Dylan knew the combination to the safe that held his father’s guns, because his father had given it to him. It was a kind of ritualistic rite of passage, especially in Texas. Passing down the responsibility of guarding the house when his dad wasn’t around. He’d been fourteen at the time, not long after Cort Wesley Masters had moved into the spare bedroom, following the murder of Cort Wesley’s girlfriend, and Dylan’s mother, Maura Torres.
“So next time you’ll be ready,” his father had said, after teaching him to shoot on a nearby range.
Cort Wesley Masters wanted his oldest son never to feel helpless again, but Dylan felt helpless now. His memory of what he’d seen in the shed on White Eagle’s property had been foggy, a result of being forced to ingest more peyote, but it had been sharpening again in the past few minutes.
Hanging from hooks all over the walls of the shed were things like iron lawn tools, which looked lifted from some cheap horror movie. At first he had mistaken them for work gloves, but then he recognized one tool, fashioned in black steel, as a cultivator—a hoe-like assemblage with two curved prongs set over a third. He touched a fingertip to one of the prongs, then jerked it away when the slight motion was enough to prick his skin. Somebody had sharpened it to a razor’s edge. It was nine inches long, with a wooden handle half that size sewn inside a work glove.
At first glance, it might have seemed that the jerry-rigging was intended to make the tool more convenient to use. But a second glance revealed something else entirely: the tool would make a deadly weapon, as would all the other tools dangling from the walls, like the one he recognized as a loop hoe. Impossible to determine how old they were or how long they’d been hanging there. The only clear thing was that they’d been fashioned for one purpose and one purpose only: killing, up close and personal, in the most violent style imaginable.
Like the work foreman whose mutilated body had been found within reach of the Miraculous Medal that had belonged to Dylan’s mother. The apparent victim of an attack by an animal bigger and stronger than a bear.
Or by a person, or persons, trying to give that impression.
Ela knew all about that, and more—Ela and her Lost Boys. Neither his dad nor Caitlin was answering their phone, and Dylan wasn’t about to wait around for them to get home to tell them what he’d finally recalled from last night.
You don’t pull a gun unless you intend to use it.
Something else his father had taught him. So, was that what he intended to do now, to head back to the reservation and gun down Ela’s cousins, the Lost Boys? Was that just punishment for how they’d humiliated him the night before?