Strong Light of Day (16 page)

“Get back to what you were talking about before,” she said across the swing, which was slowing now.

“Before what?”

“Before you changed the subject from our friend Jones, the man whose checks you've been cashing to pay for your kids' educations.”

“I told you—”

“Right, Homeland Security's using direct deposit now.”

“I'm not sure he's even Homeland Security anymore,” Cort Wesley told her.

“Then what is he?”

“I'd say kind of acting in a freelance capacity, off the books.”

“In other words,” Caitin advanced, “free to use men like you and Paz without making any accounts.”

“As long as it pays the bills, that works for me.”

“You mentioned something about Russians too.”

“Yeah, specifically the owner of a strip club off Harry Hines Boulevard, just north of Dallas. I planted an old-fashioned bug in his office. Looked mobbed up to me.”

“Why would Jones be interested in him?”

“I didn't ask.”

“Since when does Homeland Security, or its various offshoots, care about a Russian mobster? Or the Russian mob in general?” Caitlin stood up, needing to stretch her legs but also made suddenly uneasy by the whole conversation. “Jones is up to something.”

“Jones is
always
up to something, Ranger. That's his business.”

“Not if it involves Texas. And if something about this mobster caught his eye, that's something I need to be seeing, too.”

Cort Wesley joined her on his feet. “So call him.”

“Can't. I programmed my phone to blow up if I ever press out his number again.”

“Okay, so tell me what you and Luke talked about upstairs.”

“I already told you that he was asleep.”

A taxi pulled up to the curb, Dylan lunging out of the backseat before it had even come to a complete halt. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and jogged toward them across the front yard. He bounded up the porch in two bounds and surged straight past Caitlin and Cort Wesley as they moved to greet him.

“I can't believe you people,” he said, shouldering his way through the front door.

Cort Wesley and Caitlin were just looking at each other when her cell phone rang, “Captain Tepper” lighting up in her caller ID.

“You get any sleep, Ranger?” he asked for a greeting.

“Not yet. Why?”

“Because you're not going to. Dallas authorities got a suspect in the disappearance of those kids.”

 

P
ART
F
OUR

While the gunfight [between Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and two men named McMeans and Phillips] was in progress there was a Nolan County grand jury in session. The jury paused from their deliberation to watch the entire street battle from upstairs windows across the street. In a supreme example of the swiftness of Texas justice, while Frank was being treated by the doctor for his wounds, the grand jury convened in the matter of the death of McMeans. In minutes it returned a no bill, ruling Frank Hamer's killing of McMeans was an act of self-defense.

—Dan Marcou, “Frank Hamer, Texas Ranger: Legendary LEO Was a Hard Man to Kill,” Policeone.com

 

33

M
IDLAND,
T
EXAS

“What do you hear from your contacts in New York?” Calum Dane asked Pulsipher, who was walking alongside him through one of several oil fields Dane owned in the Permian Basin.

“The situation has been contained,” Pulsipher reported. “We've dealt with the security camera footage showing Brandon McCabe returning to the hotel, and right now it's being treated as a missing persons case.”

“And the room?”

“I've used these particular cleaners before, sir,” Pulsipher said, leaving it there. “You have no concerns on that front.”

“But I do on another front, don't I?”

They'd come straight from Midland International Air and Space Port to the first oil field Dane had ever staked, on the grounds of what had been a potter's field graveyard where he'd buried his own father. On a beautiful, clear morning like this, it was easy to forget the land's original roots before the pumpjacks had moved in with their steady clanking. He surveyed the scene, recalling the endless rows of graves marked only with wooden crosses and trying to recall the location of his father's.

“Know the day I got rich, S.?” he asked suddenly, sun blistering his eyes now as it had back then.

“Sir?”

Dane remained facing away from him, gaze fixed toward nothing in particular. “It was the day I buried my father here. It was skin cancer that got him, from too much time spent working the fields right here in Glasscock County. But me getting rich had nothing to do with cotton and everything do with oil.”

To this day, Dane still remembered being transfixed, as a small boy, by the steady chugging of the pumpjack rigs that lined the barren land, sometimes as far as the eye could see. He remembered them so clearly because they'd terrified him at first, sentencing Dane to a week of nightmares the first time he glimpsed a scattered track of them from the back of a pickup truck. His imagination conjured them uprooting themselves from their moorings and waging war on humans the way Martian machines had in some movie whose title he couldn't remember. And, like another horror movie Dane recalled, about giant ants emerging out of the New Mexican desert, you'd know the metallic monsters were coming thanks to their smell. A corrosive, sulfurlike odor that reminded him of smoldering matchsticks.

“The ground was soft and muddy the day they lowered my dad's coffin into a grave already pooling with water at the bottom,” Dane resumed. “I'm standing there at my father's grave site and all of a sudden I catch the faint sulfuric aroma and think to myself, There's oil here; maybe lots of it. By then, much of the Permian Basin was thought to have gone dry, at least insofar as the limits of current pumping technology went. It had been mostly abandoned by the biggest oil exploration and drilling companies in favor of richer finds easier to plum for their riches. But what I couldn't get out of my head was the irony of a father who'd never done shit for me while alive coming through big-time now that he was dead and in the ground.”

Dane started to wonder how he compared as a parent, then pushed the thoughts aside because he hated where they took him. A son dead in Afghanistan, then the divorce …

“I guess it was fate, S.,” he said, to distract himself as much as anything.

“Sir?”

“Smelling that oil coming from my father's grave.”

Dane had worked for a year solid, seven days a week, holidays included, living like a pauper in order to put aside every available penny he could. He finished a year of hardscrabble labor, after lying his way into a job on an offshore oil rig, with just the ten thousand dollars he needed to buy up a few small acres in the area around the potter's field—available in large part because nobody wanted anything to do with land packed to the hilt with graves and small wooden crosses rising out of the ground.

“That smell was H-two-S, or hydrogen sulfide,” Dane resumed. “Some oil fields, I learned, have sweet crude that contains very little sulfur, while others, like West Texas in particular, have sour crude that contains high amounts of sulfur. And I was particularly sensitive to the scent after hearing stories about people dying in their sleep occasionally, when an oil company accidentally released a gas compound that turned out to be H-two-S. But, officially anyway, they were covered up, with something else being pegged with the blame, at the behest of oil interests that fueled the entire Texas economy. Can't say I blame them; can you?”

Pulsipher didn't say whether he did or not.

Dane had leased the mineral rights to the land he'd sold—not to the highest bidder but to a decently high one that included a percentage of the profits. And those profits created the basis for his entire fortune today.

The problem, to some degree, was that Dane had never lost his thirst for adventure, for being the boy again smelling oil rising from his father's grave. That had produced Dane Corp's expansion into high technology, petrochemical development, and agriculture. He'd started off buying excess farmland about the Permian Basin. Rolling cotton fields mostly, made especially cheap by the fact that he had his own way of getting the price down.

Dane finally turned and locked Pulsipher in his gaze, his eyes tearing up from the sun. “It turned out that besides being buried in oil-rich ground, my father had done me another favor by teaching me how to battle the pesky varmints that preyed on cotton crops. Boll weevils, mostly; insects that appropriately enough entered the United States in the late nineteenth century by crossing the Rio Grande into Brownsville. My father said that some years up to half the state's cotton-producing land was infested. And, in the worst years, the decline of the crop yield had a direct effect on how much food we could put on the table.

“Now, farmers had employed all kinds of strategies to battle the loathsome bugs, from burning their nesting grounds to laying traps to digging moats filled with a combination of water and gasoline to drown them. But it was my dumb-as-a-stump father with a third-grade education who won the war instead of just a battle.

“My family had been farmworkers and sharecroppers since before the Civil War and had passed down a formula mixing a crude form of turpentine made of simple pine resin with powdered tar. Mixed with dirt, the compound worked because the taste of it was like candy to the bugs that devoured it voraciously, poisoning themselves and left to be crushed underfoot by additional advancing hordes. These boll weevils would then consume the remains, while the ground grew rich with the stench rising from the corpses flattened to a pastelike consistency, which snared further hordes in their tracks. Instead of the cotton, thanks to my father, the bugs ended up eating each other.”

Dane had never forgotten that, or the fact his father could've gotten rich off his invention but lacked both the initiative and the smarts to do so. Quite the opposite of his son. And that experience had engrained in Calum Dane an appreciation for the additional revenue that could be coaxed from land kept reasonably free of boll weevils and less-pervasive pests. So, once he expanded his interests into petrochemicals, he invested a fortune in synthesizing the turpentine and powdered tar compound into a chemically enhanced pesticide capable of raising cotton crop yields between twenty-five and fifty percent. That pesticide had enjoyed a spectacular debut, distributed all across the state of Texas, until the cancer shit started, on the eve of its national rollout a few years back.

This had been followed, more recently, by something much, much worse, which was the source of Dane's biggest set of problems right now, stemming from a goddamn high school field trip to some goddamn nature preserve.

“Tell me about your father, S.,” he said suddenly, needing to hear something other than his own thoughts.

“He was army. We moved around a lot.”

“Growing up on military bases. Toughened you up, I bet.”

“I believe it did, sir.”

“Just like working those cotton fields did me. Your dad still alive?”

“No, sir. He'd just been posted to the Pentagon. Nine eleven was his first day.”

Dane turned away again, gazing out into the fields as if searching for his father amid the endless rows of long-gone cotton. “Know what I learned from my father, S.?”

“What, sir?”

“Indirectly, that true power in the future doesn't lie in oil, gas, gold, or the Fortune five hundred. It belongs to whoever controls the food supply. Imagine being the person responsible for doubling the world's food. Imagine the profits involved. All because my father had stopped boll weevils in their tracks.”

Funny thing was, Dane could no longer remember the name of the kid he'd beaten to death with his own prosthetic leg just yesterday. As if he'd excised the memory from his psyche, along with all the lawsuits filed by cancer victims like him. He did recall that, while using that prosthetic leg like a club, the kid on the bed morphed into little Calum Dane as a boy. And he knew that if he looked into the mirror in that moment, his father's snarling, drunken face and bloodshot eyes would look back. He understood, in the moment of beating the kid senseless, how much his father had enjoyed beating him, so much so that he couldn't stop until the shattered leg had spit shards of plastic all over the hotel room and the kid lay beaten to a pulp.

“What are we gonna do about those kids, S.?” he asked Pulsipher.

“You can't hold them forever, sir,” Pulsipher said suddenly. “And there's a chance that the two we missed saw something.”

“What do our sources have to say?”

“The Texas Rangers are supervising the case. We don't have any sources there. And we've got another problem.”

“What's that?”

“One of the kids we missed.”

“The other one? Don't tell me,” said Dane, “the son of a Texas Ranger.”

“Close enough,” Pulsipher told him.

 

34

E
ULESS,
T
EXAS

“Maybe you forgot what I told you last night,” D. W. Tepper said, when he saw Caitlin approaching.

“What was that, Captain?”

“To be somewhere else. We're here strictly as observers.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Just remember that when you get the urge to shoot somebody.”

They were standing down the street from the Fountain View office building on Industrial Boulevard in Euless, just outside Dallas. Caitlin and Cort Wesley had set out on the long drive up here from San Antonio almost as soon as Tepper had delivered the news that a potential suspect, with ties to past kidnapping cases as well as to the Village School in Houston, had been identified. According to Tepper, video surveillance showed him entering his suite of offices here in Fountain View late the previous night, with three other men, but never emerging, even after night had bled into day.