Texas Outlaw

by James Patterson

  I stare down at Gareth McCormack. His sunglasses have fallen off, and his vacant eyes stare upward. There’s no life behind his stare—I can tell that even from this far away.

  “I told you once, you son of a bitch,” I mutter aloud, not that he can hear me.

  He was dead before he hit the ground.

  I turn away from Gareth over toward the ranch house. A half mile is a long way to see with the naked eye, but I can make out a cluster of men standing in the grass by the ranch house. I assume Carson McCormack is one of them.

  I see something else—Harris’s police cruiser coming up the driveway.

  I kneel down and grab Gareth’s M24. I check to make sure it’s loaded, then I pull the gun up to my shoulder and try to orient myself with the telescopic sight.

  I get the scope into position in time to see McCormack yanking Ariana from the police car. He makes her face toward the derrick and he stands behind her, using her as a shield. He’s quite a bit taller than her, but only his head and shoulders are exposed. In one hand, he holds a walkie-talkie. In his other hand, he holds a pistol.

  He points it at Ariana’s temple.

  She looks scared, but more than that she looks apologetic—she thinks she’s disappointed me.

  A static crackle comes from eighty feet below, and I hear Carson say from the walkie-talkie still on Gareth’s belt, “Yates. Can you hear me?”

  I can’t answer. Instead, I scan the other men. I count three others besides Carson.

  Harris.

  McQueen—aka Mr. Broken Nose.

  And one more guy I haven’t seen before.

  Harris hasn’t drawn his gun, but the two soldiers carry automatic weapons. The one I don’t know is holding binoculars to his eyes, relaying to McCormack what he sees.

  “You just killed the only thing I ever cared about,” Carson says from below. “How about I hurt something you care about?”

  I kneel and use the railing as a shooting rest. I put the sight on McCormack, but I can’t keep the gun steady. The crosshairs float all over the place. A foot to his left. A foot to his right.

  He knows I can’t make this shot—that’s why he isn’t ducking for cover.

  I might have been able to draw a pistol faster than his son, but when it comes to this rifle and shooting a bullet the length of ten football fields, I’m not in the same league as Gareth.

  “I’m going to count to three, Yates,” Carson says through the walkie-talkie on Gareth’s belt. “When I get to three, I’m going to shoot Ariana. If you want to save her, drop my son’s rifle off the derrick before I get to three.”

  Chapter 101

  I TRY TO remember where my bullet hit the last time I fired this gun.

  A foot high and to the left.

  If I were sighting in the gun, I’d shoot at least three times, try to find a pattern, then adjust the sight. The problem is I’ve had only one test shot.

  I aim at what I think would account for the difference—a foot low and to the right—and I find that the crosshairs are lined up directly over Ariana’s face.

  “One,” Carson says.

  I can’t do this.

  There’s no way to know if the range is the same. It looks like a thousand yards, but I could be off a hundred either way. I’m shooting at a downward angle now—that changes things, too. And there’s no real way for me to know that the one and only shot I’ve taken with this rifle was a good one. If I took one or two or ten more shots, it’s doubtful they would hold a tight pattern around the first. I don’t know if the adjustment I’m making is the right one.

  I stare at Ariana’s scared expression through the scope.

  If I squeeze the trigger, I might kill her.

  But if I toss down the gun like Carson wants, he’ll kill us both.

  Taking this shot is the only chance we have.

  “Two.”

  My trigger finger itches—that damn rash!—and I try to push the distraction out of my head.

  My father taught me there’s a lot that goes into being an accurate shooter. There’s your angle and trajectory, velocity and range, all that stuff—physics and math. But to be a truly good shooter, it’s really about the feeling.

  Muscle memory.

  Knowing in your gut—not on a piece of paper—that you can make the shot. Especially when you’re shooting at something more than paper targets.

  I learned to trust my feeling when I was growing up hunting deer, when I’d shoot uphill, downhill, sometimes at targets bounding through the trees. And I learned to trust my feeling in the Rangers when the thing I was hunting could shoot back.

  I tell myself to trust my feeling.

  I line the crosshairs over Ariana’s nose.

  From the walkie-talkie below, I hear Carson say, “Thr—”

  I squeeze the trigger.

  Chapter 102

  “—EE,” CARSON SAYS.

  Ariana sees the muzzle flash from Rory’s rifle, just a tiny spark from atop the oil derrick. She knows she has a second or two to wait for the bullet and considers trying to dive to the ground. But that might disrupt where Carson is positioned and make Rory miss.

  She has to trust Rory.

  Carson must have seen the muzzle flash as well and doesn’t believe Rory can hit him. As soon as the bullet zings by, she’s sure the gun jammed against her temple will go off and she’ll be gone.

  She closes her eyes and waits.

  I believe in you, Rory, she thinks.

  There is a noise—thwack!—like the sound of a nail gun popping against a piece of plywood. The sound is so close and so loud that she’s sure the bullet must have hit her.

  But then the gun barrel jammed against her skull pulls away.

  She opens her eyes and turns her head in time to see Carson McCormack falling backward, as stiff as a board. He lands unmoving in the grass, his python-skin boots pointing at the sky.

  Her whole body feels numb. She lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

  I can’t believe I’m alive, she thinks.

  And then she realizes this isn’t over. Harris and two of McCormack’s men are still crowded around her. Harris—her former boss, that son of a bitch—reaches for his pistol.

  Ariana scrambles onto her knees and pries the gun out of Carson McCormack’s dead fingers.

  “Freeze!” Ariana shouts, pointing the gun at Harris.

  He stops, his gun half in, half out of its holster. He looks scared for an instant, and then he realizes the odds remain in his favor. He grins.

  “Ariana, sweetheart, you’re still outnumbered.”

  Keeping her gun on Harris, she glances around quickly. The guy with the broken nose and the other man both have their AR-15s aimed at her.

  She turns her attention back to Harris and sees that he’s pulled his gun the rest of the way out. He hasn’t raised it yet, but his body language tells her that he feels confident she won’t shoot.

  He’s wearing a bulletproof vest, and although it’s unlikely to fully stop a bullet at this close range, she’s sure it’s giving him extra confidence. She raises the gun so it’s aimed at his face. Then, still crouched over Carson McCormack’s body, Ariana reaches down slowly and picks up the walkie-talkie.

  “Rory,” she says into it. “If you can hear me, I’ve got Harris. Put your gun on one of the other guys.”

  Harris chuckles. “It’s still three against two, sweetheart,” he says. “And as soon as the shooting starts, your boyfriend ain’t gonna be able to hit a goddamn thing. That shot against Carson was impressive, but we both know he ain’t no Gareth McCormack with that thing.”

  “You’ll be dead first,” Ariana says.

  “You’ve got to hit me for that to happen,” he says, and he begins leaning his head from side to side, like a boxer bobbing and weaving. “The rest of us here, we’ve served in war zones. This ain’t nothing new to us.”

  Ariana’s arm begins to tremble. She can’t help it.

  She knows that if she p
ulls the trigger, she’s dead. Even if Rory gets someone with his first shot. Even if he gets them all after the fact. As soon as the first shot is fired, she’s dead.

  “It’s three against two,” Harris says again, unable to keep from grinning. “Your call.”

  Ariana prepares to pull the trigger.

  If she has to die today, she’s going to go down fighting.

  “Actually,” she hears someone say in a nasal voice. “It’s two against three.”

  She looks over and sees that the soldier with the broken nose—the one Rory had talked to at the gate that day—is pointing his AR-15 at McCormack’s other man.

  Harris looks like a gambler who thought for sure the three aces he was holding would be a winning hand, only to find himself penniless after his opponent dropped a royal flush.

  Ariana glares at Harris and says, “Your call, sweetheart.”

  Chapter 103

  I WATCH THROUGH the rifle scope as Harris and the other man lower their weapons and set them in the grass. Ariana, with the help of Mr. Broken Nose—or McQueen, as I guess I need to start calling him—makes the two men lie on the ground with their hands clapsed behind their heads.

  When I’m sure they have the threats secured, I sling McCormack’s M24 over my shoulder and start down the ladder. It takes me almost ten minutes to walk over to where they are. When I get there, Ariana gives me a tight hug.

  She was stoic through it all, but when she’s in my arms and I can feel the tremble of fear in her body, I get a sense of just how scared she was.

  “You saved my life,” she whispers in my ear.

  “I owed you one,” I say, and then when we break the embrace, I wink and give her a smile.

  I walk over to McQueen and extend my hand.

  “I had a feeling about you,” I say.

  “I couldn’t stand by and be a part of this anymore,” he says. “I knew what we were doing was illegal, but I never signed on to hurt innocent people. I didn’t sign on to kill Texas Rangers.”

  “You did the right thing,” I say. “If most of your brethren in the armed forces are more like you—and less like Gareth McCormack—then America is in good hands.”

  “If the rest of the Texas Rangers are anything like you,” he says, “then Texas is in great hands.”

  We both laugh. It feels good to laugh.

  I ask McQueen if he’ll help us until the cavalry arrives. When more law enforcement officers get here, I’ll ask him to give up his gun.

  “You’ll be arrested,” I say. “But I swear I’ll do everything I can to make sure you’re treated fairly. We’ll need a cooperating witness to help us make sense of everything that’s been going on here. If I have anything to do with it, you won’t see the inside of any jail cell.”

  He considers my proposal.

  “The other option,” I say, “is you take off right now. You’ll be a fugitive, but I won’t stop you from going. Not today. I owe you that.”

  He shakes his head. “No. I’ll stick around and do the right thing. Like you said, it’s not too late.”

  I nod my head and turn back to Ariana.

  It’s been an intense forty-eight hours. Her hair is a mess. Her face is streaked with dirt. Her clothes are torn and dirty.

  But she has a smile on her face that gives me butterflies.

  “What now?” she says.

  I nod to Harris, lying in the grass with his hands over his head.

  “You want to do the honors?”

  She smiles even bigger.

  “With pleasure,” she says.

  She walks over and kneels next to Harris’s face.

  “Chief John Grady Harris,” she says, “you have the right to remain silent…”

  Chapter 104

  THIRTY-SOME HOURS later, Ariana and I are at the Rio Lobo police station, talking through the latest in the investigation.

  A lot has changed.

  Instead of the two of us by ourselves in the cramped conference room, there are at least fifteen other people representing a variety of agencies: the Texas Ranger Division, the county sheriff’s department, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, and Homeland Security. Each has at least a few representatives here.

  And this meeting is only the tip of the iceberg, just the epicenter of the investigation tornado. Out and about in Rio Lobo, there are two dozen Rangers—not to mention at least twice that many other law enforcement officials—doing investigative work. Most of them are at McCormack’s ranch, searching the buildings and the property, bagging evidence, scouring the hills with cadaver dogs, excavating hidden graves. At least ten people are just inventorying all the cocaine and illegal guns we’ve found. Other investigators are interrogating town officials. We don’t yet know how widespread the corruption was and who all was in on it, but I feel certain that the arrests we’ve made so far—Harris, his right-hand man Hank Humphreys, and fifteen of McCormack’s soldiers—won’t be the last.

  The town population has probably doubled in size overnight if you add all the law enforcement officials and all the journalists who have converged on this little map dot, vying for rooms in the motel, which was vacant a day ago and is now filled to capacity, with the overflow bunking in RVs or tents set up in vacant fields. Every major newspaper in Texas is here, not to mention all the national news channels. Reporters from CNN and Today aren’t too famous to wait sixty minutes for a restaurant table. The town’s two stoplights can’t tame the street traffic.

  I’ve been told that what happened in Rio Lobo is the top story on every news network. This won’t go down as the biggest drug bust in US history, but it will certainly make the top ten.

  Not that I’ve seen the news myself. I’ve been working nonstop since I climbed down from the oil derrick, with the exception of about two hours of sleep and the time it takes to shower and put on clean clothes. The El Paso company commander brought me new pants and shirts since everything I had burned up in my truck.

  McQueen has been a big help, explaining McCormack’s operation, pointing us to where Kyle and the others were buried, showing us the stockpile of drugs McCormack had on the property. McQueen is currently housed in Rio Lobo’s one and only jail cell, but if I have anything to do with it, his incarceration will be temporary.

  Every hour or so a new bombshell of information drops in front of me.

  Earlier today someone found a cardboard box hidden under the floorboards on McCormack’s property that contained a variety of items, ranging from Middle Eastern clothing to Kyle Hendricks’s badge, Dale Peters’s familiar Dallas Mavericks cap, and Skip Barnes’s cell phone. Skip’s phone revealed texts from Gareth assuring him that the McCormacks would buy his silence and asking him to meet Gareth by the old shed out by the oil derrick—a trap luring him to his death.

  We suspect the box holds keepsakes of some kind from all or most of Gareth’s victims, and we’ve got people trying to figure out who once owned the rest of the items. The fact that the box contained a belt buckle Ariana recognized as belonging to the former police chief has led us to believe that Gareth killed him to put Harris in power. That’s a new arm of the investigation. What happened with Ariana’s father, who is now in the final months of his prison sentence, is another new aspect.

  Despite how busy we’ve been, Ariana was able to make a tearful phone call, telling him that for the first time in her law-enforcement career she could finally help him and apologizing for ever doubting his innocence.

  Cadaver dogs also sniffed out some hidden gravesites on the property, and we now believe that the employees who used to work for McCormack, the ones he supposedly bought out and sent on their way, were probably killed. That would include the lead singer Dale and Walt used to play with. We’re waiting on DNA testing of all the bodies. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Walt yet about Dale. I’m sure he’s heard—everyone in town knows—but I’m going to have to break it to him that his other friend was also murdered.

  When I first met Harris, he bragged that Rio Lobo hadn’t had
a murder in over a decade. Turns out that was far from true.

  After a long time of spinning our wheels in this investigation, it feels good to finally get some answers. Ariana and I have been going on adrenaline and caffeine, but I can feel my body needing to crash. All I want is to crawl back to my little apartment over Tom and Jessica’s garage and pass out.

  But before we call it a day, Ariana and I—and the rest of the team leaders—are talking about a mystery we still haven’t solved.

  The death that started all this.

  Who killed Susan Snyder?

  Gareth admitted to me that he killed Kyle, Dale, and Skip, but he denied murdering Susan. He said poison wasn’t his style, suggesting that she was killed. We just don’t know by whom.

  “Did you ask McQueen?” a senior special agent from the FBI asks me.

  “Yeah,” I say. “He swears he didn’t know about their involvement. Like everyone else, he was still fooled into thinking the McCormacks were bad, just not that bad. Drug dealers but not murderers.”

  We speculate about whether Harris knows anything, but so far he hasn’t been willing to cooperate. He and the others are locked in the jail at the county seat.

  “After all that’s happened,” Ariana says, shaking her head in disbelief, “we’re back to square one on the murder that started it all.”

  Ariana has circles under her eyes and looks as tired as I feel, while somehow remaining as beautiful as ever. Like me, she was able to get a shower and change into clean clothes. She’s back in her signature jeans, white T-shirt, and boots, with her hair pulled back.

  It’s been a pleasure to work with her. We make good partners.

  I can’t help but think we might make good partners off duty as well.

  As I’m looking at Ariana and thinking this, I realize a hush has come over the crowd in the station.

  “Is that who I think it is?” someone says.

  I look up from my daze and see a familiar face standing in the lobby.