Texas Outlaw

by James Patterson

  “Sometimes life isn’t fair.”

  “Tell me about it,” she says, throwing her arms up in a gesture to her current situation.

  “Did you think I would never find out?”

  She whirls around and faces me. “Gareth never talks about it. He acts like it never happened. Like I was nothing to him. Maybe I was. I thought it would be okay to act like it was unimportant to me because that’s the way he acts.”

  I lean against my pickup, trying to be as relaxed as possible with my body language. I want this to be a discussion, not a fight.

  “Was it serious?” I ask.

  “It was to me.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  She leans against the truck as well, her anger over my betrayal mostly replaced with exhaustion.

  “It’s what you might expect,” she says. “Rich popular kid asks out the poor girl from the wrong side of town. Rumors fly.”

  She explains that she was head over heels for Gareth. Carson didn’t approve. Gareth defied his father. But when Ariana wouldn’t sleep with him on Homecoming night, Gareth broke up with her.

  “He was going against his father just long enough to get laid,” she says. “When I wouldn’t put out, he tossed me aside.”

  She says she was heartbroken. She had really fallen for him. A few months later, her father was arrested, making her final year of high school even more stressful.

  “That’s the other reason I didn’t say anything,” she adds. “I was embarrassed. Not because he threw me aside like I was trash. I was embarrassed because I fell for him to begin with.”

  Looking at her now, I can see how the events of that year of her life stole the carefree happiness from the pretty girl in the photo.

  “I’ve had trouble opening myself up to people ever since,” Ariana says, looking at me, her eyes glossy with tears. “Which is why it hurts so much to know you still don’t trust me.”

  As an answer, I pull out my truck keys and open the storage box in the bed of my F-150. I reach in and grab the two rifles I keep inside: a standard-issue .223 M4 and a heavier caliber LaRue .308.

  “I trust you,” I say, holding a gun in each hand. “Which is why I’m going to give you one of these rifles to cover me when I go see Dale Peters.”

  “I thought you said you trusted him.”

  “Let me put it this way,” I say. “I have a hell of a lot more doubt about him than I ever had about you.”

  Chapter 78

  ARIANA OPTS FOR the .223 M4, which is an accurate gun even at long ranges. Nothing like Gareth McCormack’s M24, but still a damn fine weapon.

  We drive toward the rendezvous in silence. The tension between us has dissipated, but it’s left a lingering effect. We’re both tired, our nerves ragged from too much happening in the last few days.

  I let Ariana out of my truck one ridge over from the GPS coordinates Dale gave me. She scrambles up the hill to find a good vantage point.

  The truth is, if this is an ambush, she won’t be able to do much good. If Dale is in cahoots with Gareth McCormack, the sharpshooter could be anywhere. He could be farther away and, with his shooting skills, far more accurate than Ariana. There is no way Ariana could protect me.

  But covering me isn’t my only reason for asking her to hunker down in the hills while I drive out to see Dale. I also want to keep her hidden. That way, if a bullet sails a thousand yards through my skull, Ariana may still be able to get away.

  Maybe.

  As I round a bend, I spot one of McCormack’s tanker trucks parked in the ridged valley below. I scan the hillside for Ariana and don’t see her among the sagebrush and gnarled tree snags. I drive slowly, looking around for any sign of an ambush. With McCormack’s range, there are dozens of places he could be hiding, especially now as the sun is lowering and casting shadows in every hollow in the hillsides and every crevice in the rocky outcroppings.

  I approach the tanker truck and see Dale sitting on the tank with some kind of box in his lap. The truck is a single unit, with the cylinder of the tank connected to the truck itself—an eight-wheeler instead of an eighteen-wheeler, but still an enormous vehicle. There’s a metal ladder on the passenger side of the rig, which Dale must have used to climb up there.

  I park my truck and shut off the engine. I leave the keys in the ignition in case I need to make a quick getaway. As I approach Dale on foot, my heart is racing. My nerves are on high alert.

  The air is still and silent except for the crunch of my boots on the rocks.

  “Howdy, partner,” Dale says, smiling down at me with the big grin I’ve come to expect from him.

  The box on his lap appears to be a pizza box. Dale is chewing a slice.

  “Want a piece?” he says. “It’s cold, but it’s still damn good.”

  “Maybe later,” I say.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Why’d you bring me out here, Dale?”

  “All business, huh?” he says, grinning with a piece of pepperoni stuck in his teeth. “No time for bullshitting today?”

  “Sorry,” I say. “It’s been a long day.”

  My body is tense, my hand ready to fly to my pistol and draw.

  “Where’s Ariana?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “She’s a fugitive.”

  “That’s too bad,” he says. Then he adds, “Climb on up. The surprise is up here.”

  I feel nervous about this. Is he asking me to climb on top so Gareth can get a better shot? I’ll be in full view for a thousand yards in any direction. But I’ve come this far.

  I set my boot on the bottom rung of the ladder and pull myself up. I keep my eyes on Dale as I do. When I get to the top, I stand, my feet unsteady on the narrow, flat walkway atop the cylinder.

  There appear to be two hatch openings on top, each with a hinged steel strap across it and a clamp securing the strap. I don’t know enough about tanker trucks to be sure, but I assume one hatch is where oil is pumped in, and the other is where it’s pumped out.

  Dale kneels before the closest hatch and releases the clamp.

  “Move slowly,” I say, knowing he could have a weapon stashed inside.

  “I ain’t gonna shoot you, Rory,” he says, looking back at me. “I seen that video of you. I ain’t stupid.”

  I watch him closely.

  “Ready?” he says, giving me a big shit-eating grin.

  “For what?” I say.

  Dale swings back the metal strap and opens the hatch door, about the diameter of a basketball. He steps back to let me look inside.

  I expect to see an opaque ocean of oil.

  Instead, there is a compartment full of bricks and bricks of white powder vacuum-sealed in plastic wrap.

  “Holy shit,” I say. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Well,” Dale says, grinning, “it ain’t baker’s yeast.”

  Chapter 79

  I WAVE FOR Ariana to come down from the hillside. When Dale sees her start to make her way down from the rocks with my rifle slung over her shoulder, his grin widens even more.

  “Didn’t trust me, did you?” Dale says, although he doesn’t look the least bit disappointed that I didn’t.

  “What the hell are you doing carrying thousands of dollars in drugs in your truck?” I say.

  “That ain’t thousands of dollars in drugs, Rory.” He points to the cache. “That’s millions.”

  I can’t tell how large the compartment is, how deep it goes into the tank. But if each brick is a kilo, that means they’re probably worth anywhere from ten to thirty thousand dollars apiece. If there are a hundred bricks, that means the pile of them could be worth one to three million dollars.

  Carson McCormack’s oil business, Dale explains, is a front for a more lucrative drug business.

  “His wells are going dry,” Dale says. “Most of the pumping you see is just for show. Whenever you see his tankers going up and down the highway, they’re more likely to be carrying coke than oil. And I
ain’t talking about the carbonated beverage.”

  As he talks, everything I’ve seen in Rio Lobo starts to make sense. The fact that most of McCormack’s employees look more like mercenaries than oil workers. The way his ranch is fortified with hurricane fencing and razor wire and a guard station. The way he travels with an entourage, driving together like a military convoy.

  Dale says he picked up the drugs from a location over by the Mexico border earlier in the day. McCormack owns land out there, with a single pump jack that’s just for show, housed inside a securely fenced area. Someone from McCormack’s team takes a trip out there two or three times a week under the guise of filling a truck with oil when in reality what they’re doing is picking up drugs.

  The location is close to the border but otherwise in the middle of nowhere, with hills and rocks and no easy way for trucks to travel between the countries. But there’s a trapdoor at the pump station that opens to a twenty-foot shaft. At the bottom is a tunnel equipped with metal tracks, similar to a mine passage, with a pulley system to move a cart back and forth.

  “I don’t know how long the tunnel is or where it goes,” Dale says. “It’s a quarter mile from the Rio Grande, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they got it rigged to go under the river somehow and into Mexico. All I know is whenever I show up, there’s a big pile of drugs waiting to be picked up.”

  Dale says there’s even a makeshift elevator they use to bring the drugs up, similar to a dumbwaiter. The only slightly difficult part of the job is carrying the kilos up the ladder of the truck to stash in the hidden compartment on top.

  “That’s why you need two people most of the time,” Dale says. “Skip and I used to make the run pretty regular.”

  In recent years, Dale says, Carson McCormack’s whole operation has transformed from oil drilling to trafficking in illegal drugs. Mostly cocaine, but also heroin and methamphetamine. The operations center on McCormack’s land, with all the buildings once associated with oil production having been converted to drug refineries. They bring in the cocaine, cut it with laundry detergent or boric acid, repackage it, and ship it throughout the Southwest.

  Dale explains that Carson McCormack sat down with all his oil workers a few years ago and gave them a choice: either they get with the program and start working in his drug business or he buys them out.

  “That’s what happened to the guy Walt and I used to play with,” he says. “Carson bought him out and he started a new life somewhere else.”

  Dale says he considered moving, but he’s lived in Rio Lobo his whole life. He didn’t want to leave. And by staying, he was making better money than ever. He didn’t think about the people the drug trafficking might hurt—on either side of the border. When Susan Snyder died, he honestly thought McCormack had nothing to do with it. But when Skip was killed, he knew Carson and Gareth were responsible for both murders.

  “I’m ashamed to admit I still might not have said nothing,” Dale says, “but when they tried to pin it on Ariana, that was the final straw. I couldn’t stay quiet anymore.”

  Ariana arrives just as the sun disappears behind the horizon. She is out of breath with a healthy dose of sweat mixed into her river-soaked clothes. She looks exhausted, but when she climbs up onto the truck and I shine a flashlight into the hidden chamber in the oil tanker, her expression lights up with amazement. Dale begins explaining to her what he’s already told me.

  When she realizes what this means—that he does in fact have the keys to her freedom—she throws her arms around Dale and gives him a tight hug. She kisses his cheek.

  He looks as happy as I’ve ever seen him.

  “Before we celebrate,” I say, “we need to figure out what the hell we’re going to do next. This is far from over.”

  Chapter 80

  AS THE SKY darkens, the three of us discuss our options.

  Out here in the hills, we have no cell service and no radio signal. And while McCormack’s tanker is able to navigate the thoroughfare from his property to the highway in the south, there’s no way it could make it over the roads I drove in on. They’re too narrow and several skirt hillsides with steep embankments below. Driving the tanker truck, which probably weighs twenty thousand pounds, might collapse the slope and send the truck rolling downhill.

  And even if we could make the drive, Dale says that McCormack’s men will be positioned at all the roads going into and out of the open space. On the drive today, before he went into the hills, he’d been privy to all the radio chatter among the men.

  “It might not be but two or three guys at each place,” he says, “but they’re going to have AR-15s and TEC-9s and God only knows what else. I know you’re good with that peashooter of yours, Rory, but I don’t think you’ve got the firepower to go up against a couple of guys with fully automatic weapons.”

  With my pistol, two rifles, and the shotgun still in my storage box, that’s a pretty good portable arsenal a Texas Ranger hauls around. But the last thing I want to do is get into a firefight with some ex-military mercenaries, especially with the lives of Dale and Ariana at stake. There has to be another way. Bloodshed should be a last resort.

  It’s tricky. McCormack and his men don’t know where we are—at least not precisely—but now we can’t leave the open space without running across one of their traps.

  “They don’t figure you made it out of the Rio Lobo area,” Dale says to Ariana. “So now they’re going to tighten the noose and see if they can squeeze you out.”

  “If Chief Harris is in on it,” I say, “he’ll tell law enforcement to keep an eye out for my truck. They’ll know soon enough I haven’t left town, either.”

  To further complicate our problems, Dale says that if he doesn’t show up at McCormack’s ranch soon, he’ll at least need to find a place with cell service so he can call and give him an excuse.

  “I’ll tell him I’ve got a flat tire and that I won’t be there till morning.”

  “What about tracking devices?” I say. “Are there any on the truck?”

  “Not that I know of,” Dale says. “But it ain’t gonna be hard to figure out where I am. If they ain’t able to get me on the radio or the phone, there ain’t but one place I can be.”

  As we talk, I feel claustrophobic. We’re standing in wide-open country, but I feel like walls are closing in around us.

  “If we can’t get out,” I say, “we’re going to have to bring someone in to help us.”

  “You think Tom and Jessica can help?” Ariana asks. “You think they can get in here without arousing suspicion?”

  I don’t want to involve the Aarons. It’s too dangerous, and I’ve already put them at risk enough.

  Unfortunately, the person I have in mind is someone I don’t trust nearly as much as Tom and Jessica Aaron.

  My lieutenant—Kyle Hendricks.

  Chapter 81

  I USE A flashlight and do my best to look for a tracking device of some kind on the tanker. When I’m satisfied there isn’t one, Dale and I leave Ariana to guard the tanker truck. I hate to abandon her, but both Dale and I need to make phone calls and she’s the only one left to keep an eye on the truck and the evidence inside.

  We drive south, heading the way Dale came in. I haven’t been this direction in the open space yet, and before long the hills start to flatten and the roadway smooths out. I turn my lights off and do my best to drive by moonlight. The desert hills are pale in the darkness, and the roadway is a clear corridor through the sagebrush and cacti.

  Dale says we have about one more mile before we get to the highway—and McCormack’s roadblock—and I feel anxious that we’re not going to get a signal before his men see us. But we keep checking our phones and finally discover we have one bar.

  I park the truck and let Dale make the first call.

  “Hey, boss,” he says. “I’ve had some bad luck.”

  He tells McCormack the elevator in the tunnel was malfunctioning, and he had to climb down via ladder and carry up the whole load
, just two or three kilos at a time.

  “Then I’ll be damned if I didn’t blow a tire as soon as I got on the road,” Dale says.

  He looks nervous in the moonlight, but he is able to keep his voice calm.

  “I think he bought it,” Dale says afterward. “Your turn.”

  I try to mentally prepare myself for this call. Kyle and I have been butting heads since the day in the bank. Somehow I need to get through to him. I could go over his head, call Company E in El Paso. But they’d be wondering why I was going outside the chain of command. The first thing they would do is check with Kyle before sending anyone. Then he would tell Harris, and Harris would tell McCormack.

  And then it would be over—his men would descend on us and we’d fall in a hail of bloody gunfire, like a reenactment of The Wild Bunch.

  I need to get Kyle to come out here without tipping off McCormack.

  The best way to do that, I figure, is to lie to him. He wouldn’t believe me if I told him there was an oil tanker full of cocaine. But there is one thing he might believe.

  “Yates,” he says when he picks up, “you better be calling me from Fort Stockton by now.”

  “I’ve got a proposition for you,” I say, cutting to the chase. “A way for us both to walk away from Rio Lobo looking pretty good.”

  If Kyle’s anything, he’s opportunistic. If I can convince him that I want to play ball, work out some kind of deal with him, then he might agree to what I’m asking.

  He takes a breath and says, “I’m listening.”

  “I know where Ariana Delgado is,” I say.

  “Then you better tell me where,” he says. “Right now.”

  “Hear me out first.”

  I tell him that I don’t trust Chief Harris, so I want the Texas Rangers to handle the arrest without the help of local law enforcement.

  “You and me,” I say. “We’re going to bring her in together. That way we know she gets a fair shake.”