by Jon Land
Before Caitlin could respond, D. W. Tepper reached them in a slow jog, so out of breath he dropped his hands to his knees in a crouch.
“We got to get a move on, Ranger,” he wheezed. “Chopper’s already warming up. There’s somewhere else we need to be, and fast.”
21
NEW YORK CITY
Brandon McCabe returned to his room upstairs, a bit wobbly after a stretch spent in the hotel bar to celebrate his victory. Because that’s what embarrassing the shit out of the asshole who’d cost him his leg felt like. Of course, thanks to that leg, a few of Dane Corp’s stockholders staying at this hotel insisted on paying for his drinks—out of guilt. He could see it in their eyes; the money they’d put into the company was partially responsible for the pesticide that had disabled him, no matter what the courts had to say on the subject. He’d taken Calum Dane down like an opponent on the wrestling mat back in high school, before he understood the depths of phantom pain, something that wasn’t there throbbing incessantly.
What sense did that make? No more than him becoming a crusader on behalf of those with their own ax to grind against Dane Corp.
His thoughts slurring the way his words must have downstairs, McCabe stepped into his hotel room, thinking how his missing leg never throbbed when he was wearing his prosthetic, as if the space-age plastic somehow fooled his nervous system. He was pretty sure he must’ve left some of the toy soldier legs inside it, because he could hear something clacking about when he walked, like the sound of pennies dropped into an old-fashioned piggy bank.
McCabe closed the door behind him and flicked on the light.
“Evening, son,” greeted Calum Dane, as he wedged a toothpick between his teeth.
* * *
Dane sat in the room’s easy chair, draped in the thin spray of light that left him mostly lost to the shadows.
“Oh, that’s right,” Dane continued, the chair’s leatherlike material creaking as he pushed himself out of it, “you’re not my son. I wish you were, since then I’d have a chance to say good-bye. Didn’t get that with the boy I lost in Afghanistan.”
Dane started the kid’s way, Pulsipher falling into step behind him as if held on a leash.
“Sit down,” Dane ordered Brandon McCabe, his words a bit garbled by the toothpick wedged in his mouth. “I said, sit down.”
McCabe eased himself to the edge of the bed, gingerly, to avoid putting too much weight on his prosthetic.
“Nice performance today. Tell me who put you up to it and I won’t break your other limbs.”
“You’re guilty and you know it, you son of a bitch,” McCabe said, trying to sound brave.
“Not so easy sounding tough when you’re not in public anymore playing to the crowd, is it, son?”
“Huh?”
“I’m going to say it again. Give me the name of whoever put you up to this.”
McCabe laid his palms down on the bedcovers, seeming to hold himself up. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about a setup, son,” Calum Dane said, easing his arms from the sleeves of his jacket and handing it to Pulsipher as if he were a coatrack. “I’m talking about someone sending you to disrupt Dane Corp’s shareholders meeting. Since I don’t know who, I also don’t know why. Could be it’s somebody with a plan to short my stock, hoping to depress its value. Could be a competitor looking to fuck us in the marketplace or with the FDA.” He stopped and shook his head, seeming displeased with himself. “Please excuse my language, me setting a bad example for a fine, upstanding young man like yourself who’s already suffered enough.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That you’re a solid citizen, son.”
“I was talking about what you meant by ‘suffered enough.’”
Calum Dane took another step toward McCabe, his broad shoulders blocking the bulk of the room’s light shed by the single desk lamp, before it could reach him. “I meant that you don’t need to suffer anymore.”
McCabe tried to look like he wasn’t scared, and failed. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
Another step. “Yes, you do, ’cause I already told you. I want to know who put you up to this, who’s paying the freight. Right now you’re the guy trapped in the middle. In over his head, let’s say, through no fault of his own. I’m going to assume somebody sold you a bill of goods, took advantage of your disability by using you to get me. I imagine they may have auditioned others for the role, but you’re the one who got the call and a decent paycheck to go with it.”
Dane started tapping the hotel room’s stuffy air with a fresh toothpick, in rhythm with his thinking, some revelation apparently striking him.
“Tell you what, son, I’ll make you a deal. Whatever those folks paid you to pull this charade, I’ll double if you give up their names. What do you say?”
“You owe me a leg,” the kid said. “How about you give me back what the doctors sawed off and we’ll call it even?”
“We back there again?”
McCabe made himself look as strong and sure as he could. “I never left. You took my leg with that poison you spread, and unless you can give it back to me we’ve got nothing to talk about.”
Dane shook his head, looking honestly disappointed. He looked down at Brandon McCabe sitting on the edge of the bed and thought of his own boy getting blown to pieces in Afghanistan for no good reason at all. McCabe looking at him smugly, secure in the degree of insulation and protection being disabled afforded him. Who picks on a cripple, right? Dane had no idea what exactly was in the coffin the army sent back. It had been a closed casket at the funeral that had drawn thousands, and plenty of his boy’s friends looked a lot like Brandon McCabe.
Calum Dane looked down and found himself looming directly over the kid, with no memory of taking the steps that had gotten him there. His breath felt hot as it pushed out of his mouth, noisy since it was suddenly the only sound in the room.
“Who put you up to this?”
“Nobody.”
“That’s a load of shit, son. Pissant like you couldn’t have come up with that show you put on by yourself. Hell, maybe they paid you to cut off your leg, too.”
McCabe tried to make himself look defiant. “Get out of my room.”
“Be glad to. Once you tell me who’s behind this.”
“Nobody. Maybe your boy stepped on the land mine on purpose to avoid ever having to set eyes on you again. And I heard you got another boy they took away from you because you beat the shit out of him.” McCabe tried for a smirk that didn’t quite materialize. “But I heard that wasn’t the only thing you did to him.”
Calum Dane had never had an out-of-body experience, didn’t believe such things existed. Which is why it felt so strange to him when he seemed to see himself lurch downward and punch Brandon McCabe square in the jaw.
Time froze.
Then it started up again.
Dane’s knuckles erupted in fiery pain an instant after feeling the crunch of bone beneath the skin that split into a neat gash between the kid’s cheek and jaw. The kid plopped backwards atop the bedcovers, eyes going glassy as they fixed on the ceiling. Then Dane watched himself reach down to McCabe’s jeans and thread his hands up to find where his prosthetic was fitted into place. He twisted, pulled, yanked, twisted again, and pulled harder until he felt it come free.
And watched the kid’s face fill with fear and shock, eyes bulging as if they were seeing what was to come next.
Calum Dane saw it a moment later, saw himself raising Brandon McCabe’s prosthetic leg into the room’s stale air and bringing it down hard.
Thwack!
He wasn’t sure what cracked on impact, the kid’s face or the plastic leg. Decided it must’ve been the leg when the next three impacts yielded the same sound and the upper portion of the prosthetic seemed to be breaking away from the lower.
Dane didn’t care, just kept hammering the kid with it, left to right and back again, feeling his own brea
th deserting him from the exertion and only then realizing he had no idea how many times he’d actually struck McCabe. He thought he remembered the kid first crying out in pain, begging for him to stop. That was followed by a gasping, a wheezing, and then nothing. All of it a blur amid a reality caked over by a thickening haze, like mist from hot water steaming up a glass shower so you can’t see what’s outside it.
The mist finally cleared from Calum Dane’s vision.
And he saw the kid’s face reduced to what barely passed for pulp, flesh-colored splinters and shards protruding from it. Dane realized he was still holding the fractured remnants of the prosthetic leg by half a foot, all that remained of it, coated in blood and skin and sinew, some dripping down to the bedcovers in thick globs.
Dane tossed it aside and realized he was gasping for breath, awakening as if from some kind of trance that left him looking at Brandon McCabe’s face pulped into mashed potatoes. He remembered hammering a frog to death with a rock as a young boy, how much he loved hearing the plopping sound and feeling skin and bone smashed under his control. He’d never felt so powerful and strong as in that moment and had sought to recover that same sensation his entire life. He’d come close numerous times, but this was the first time he’d ever replicated the feeling in its entirety, actually exceeding the original one.
But I heard that wasn’t the only thing you did to him.
The kid’s hands and feet were still twitching, and Dane watched until they spasmed, seized, and stopped. The scent of blood was like heavy copper hanging in the air, sweet and sour at the same time. He remembered there’d been no scent with the frog, other than something acidic and bitter rising from beneath the rock. Standing there over the remains of Brandon McCabe, Calum Dane remembered for the first time how that had disappointed him.
That’s why this time was better.
Dane felt Pulsipher’s hands on his shoulders for the first time, trying to draw him backwards. He swabbed a sleeve across his own brow, feeling it pick up a thin bit of bone, and realized he was still holding what was left of the kid’s leg.
“Here you go,” Dane said tossing it atop the kid’s corpse. “So you can’t accuse me of taking this one from you too.”
22
AUSTIN COUNTY, TEXAS
“Here we are,” D. W. Tepper said, gazing out the helicopter at the sea of revolving lights churning through the late afternoon’s fading sun. “This is a day for the ages, Ranger. If I had it to do all over again, I would’ve stayed in bed.
Caitlin followed his gaze as the chopper settled into a brief hover over a ranch belonging to one Karl Dakota. They had taken off from one crazed scene only to land in another—and worse, potentially, given that Dakota was currently walled up in his house threatening to kill his wife and four children. Local sheriff’s deputies had been summoned by a cattle buyer who’d showed up for an appointment, only to have his tires and windows shot out when he was heading for the house. He’d called 9-1-1 from behind the cover of an old-fashioned well, right down to the rope and pail.
“Are you in immediate danger, sir?” the operator had asked him.
“If that’s what you call getting shot at, you bet your ass.”
The deputies arrived to a similar greeting, screeching their shot-up cruisers in reverse to what seemed to be a safe zone before calling for backup, and lots of it. The hostage negotiator had gotten absolutely nowhere with Dakota, who claimed he needed to shoot his wife and kids in order to save them from a far more horrible death.
“Pick ’em to the bone they will, just like they did my cattle!” he ranted.
Neither the negotiator nor any of the deputies had any notion what the rancher was talking about. According to reports, he owned a stockpile of weapons and ammunition, accumulated when his survivalist leanings led him to build a shelter off the back of his house—until the backhoe busted a shovel, striking shale, and he postponed the effort. That was five years ago now and Dakota had chosen today, apparently, to put those weapons to use. In addition to traditional ordnance, he was rumored to have purchased hand grenades, a pair of fully automatic M16s, and a vintage .50-caliber machine gun from illegal dealers, who were as common in Texas as ice-cream trucks.
“How’d he come by that name, exactly?” Caitlin asked Tepper, as their chopper set down in a barren field across a thin dirt road from his farmhouse and surrounding land. “Karl Dakota.”
Tepper waited for a belch, spawned by his acid reflux, to surface before responding. “Legend has it that the man’s great-grandmother was kidnapped by a Cheyenne Indian chief she ended up marrying, while insisting that their children maintain at least a semblance of their native German heritage. That’s how his name came to combine German with the one the chief had taken, after the US Army finally conquered the plains and shipped the disenfranchised Indians out to settlements that became the reservation system, seen by them as a scourge and source of misery to this day.”
“Can’t argue with them there, D.W.”
“I can’t stomach any more kids getting hurt today,” Tepper said, his expression pained and uneasy, as if another belch was building. “Austin asked for you specifically after that police negotiator’s family almost got early death benefits for his efforts.”
Caitlin also suspected her presence here was due to the proximity of Karl Dakota’s farm to Lonesome Pines, a world-famous ranch resort and top tourist attraction, similarly located in the rolling hills of Austin County. It was among the most beautiful country Texas had to offer, lush and full and green. Viewing it from the air in the chopper almost made her think there was no way anything bad could happen down there.
And now it had, or was very close to.
Captain Tepper and Caitlin hurried up to the perimeter, erected clumsily by sheriff’s deputies most concerned with not getting shot.
“We didn’t call for any Rangers,” the local sheriff told Tepper, spitting a wad of tobacco juice close enough to Tepper’s boot to make him pull it back.
“Then it’s a good thing Austin did, Sheriff. We know our way around these sorts of things and we’ll be running lead now.”
The sheriff took a long, sliding gaze about the rim his deputies formed, poised protectively behind their cars. “Maybe I’ll just pull up stakes, then.”
“Feel free to take the rest of the day off, Sheriff. But your deputies are now under our command and ain’t going nowhere.”
The sheriff fingered the big wad of tobacco from his mouth and tossed it behind him as far as he could. “Can’t you see we know what we’re doing here?”
“From what I can see,” Caitlin told him, “your men don’t know what they’re doing at all. If they did, they’d be well aware that the kind of load Karl Dakota is packing will cut straight through those car doors like they’re Swiss cheese. But you take our advice and do what we say and they’re liable to make it out of the day alive.”
“You think I don’t know who you are, Ranger?”
“I hadn’t given it much consideration, sir.”
The sheriff stepped forward, close enough for Caitlin to smell the stale tobacco odor lacing his breath. “Well, let me share some truth with you, little lady. Any mess you make here, I’m gonna have to clean up. But you won’t find me nearly as hospitable as all those other towns you left with blood drying on your boots.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Sheriff. Now tell me where we’re at here.”
The sheriff’s expression crinkled, reducing his eyes to mere slits. “Where are we at? A crazy man’s got his family held hostage and all he talked about when our negotiator got him on the phone is aliens eating his cattle to the bone.”
“Aliens?”
“Yes, ma’am, as in from outer space, not illegals.”
“I’m familiar with the term.”
The sheriff pulled a pack of tobacco from his pocket and worked the flap open, packing a fresh wad in his mouth. “Dakota said he had to kill his wife and kids to keep them from the same fate of getting eaten
to the bone.”
“That’s what he said, in those words?”
“Close enough, for Pete’s sake. Jeez, it’s hard to hear clearly when you know there’s a rifle barrel bearing down on you.”
“That depends on who’s doing the listening, Sheriff.”
Caitlin couldn’t tell if the sheriff’s snarl spread in reaction to her comment or to the wad of tobacco that was too big to fit in either cheek.
“You want an excuse to gun somebody down?” he said. “Just walk straight ahead toward that house and wait for Karl to start shooting.”
“You know,” Caitlin said, glancing toward Tepper, “that’s not a bad idea.”
23
AUSTIN COUNTY, TEXAS
Caitlin moved in front of the haphazardly arranged police cruisers, into a clearing set between them and the farmhouse where Dakota and his family lived. She approached, keeping herself between two centrally placed windows on the first floor, expecting Dakota and one of his rifles likely to be poised behind one of them.
Drawing close to what she judged to be comfortable shooting range for any reasonable gunman, Caitlin eased her SIG Sauer from its holster and placed it on the ground between a flatbed and a pickup truck. She kept her hands in the air as she addressed whoever was listening inside.
“I’m a Texas Ranger, Mr. Dakota, and I just want to talk. Listen up, sir. I understand until this point nobody’s been hurt, most of all your own family. Why don’t you let me help keep it that way?”
“How do I know you’re real?” a muffled voice called through a window opened barely a slit.
“A real Texas Ranger?”
“A real person, as in not one of the space aliens that picked my cows down to the bone like they was chicken. I figure they must look like us to have been getting away with this with nobody knowing.”
“I’d like to come inside, sir, so you can tell me more about what happened to your cows, while we’re looking at each other. That okay?”
Silence followed; the only sound was the wind whistling through the open space between the bevy of police cars and the farmhouse.
