Chapter 19
I stomped out of Cap's office pissed off with nowhere to put it.
Pissed at Cap, who'd just done me the worst kind of favor a man can do for another man.
Pissed at Rex Rawlins, who'd been getting away with murder my entire adult life and apparently several other people's lives besides.
Pissed at myself for not seeing it coming.
A man who's been a cop as long as I have should not be surprised when his captain knows things. That was on me.
I was also pissed at the carpet, which had not done anything to me but was there.
Charlene said something on my way past her desk.
I don't know what. I think I nodded. By the time I hit the waiting room, Ransom was already standing, hat on.
He fell in behind me without a word. Good.
I would've bitten his head off if he had, and he knew it.
It annoyed me. I would've enjoyed biting his head off.
I got into the truck on the passenger side. He got in on the driver's side and didn't put the key in.
"That bad?"
I shook my head. "Do not talk to me, cowboy. Not yet."
He put the key in and drove.
Forty-five minutes outside El Paso, I was finally calm enough to talk. "He gave me time."
Ransom looked over. "Time?"
"Said do what you need to do, and we'd talk when it was done. He's going to pull my badge after this, Ransom. No two ways about it."
I knew it might happen when I crossed the border. I knew it when I drove out to Pae Saco to look at the body, and when I lied to the sheriff at the morgue, and when I was elbow deep in the dead judge. But knowing it and hearing it from my captain were two different things.
After a while, he glanced at me.
"You good?"
"No."
"All right."
He went back to the road.
The road in front of us was two lanes of cracked asphalt cutting through desert scrub and sand, with no cars ahead of us and no cars behind us.
The sun was a flat white thing burning everything to powder.
Might as well have been hell on earth. Shit, maybe it was.
Land of Enchantment, my ass. Land of entrapment was more like it.
The sudden explosion of both front tires threw me against the door.
The truck lurched sideways, and smoke came up from the wheel wells.
Metal shrieked on asphalt while Ransom fought the wheel.
My hand was on my weapon before I'd thought about it, and I knew.
I just knew something bad was about to happen.
I'd been a cop too long not to know what a coordinated stop felt like.
We slid to a halt in a cloud of dust.
Fuck.
"Spike strip." Ransom was already unbuckling. "Stay in the truck."
"The hell I will."
He looked at me with no expression, nothing moving in his face. "Winston. Stay in the goddamn truck."
I opened my mouth to argue, and that was when the first man stepped out from behind the rocks. Then a second. Then four more.
Well, I thought. Here we go.
There were six of them, on both sides of the road. Boots crunched on gravel. The man closest to me had a pistol low along his thigh, finger on the frame, not the trigger.
The older one with the shotgun stepped up to Ransom's window and drove the butt of it through the glass. The window shattered, and Ransom reached for the gun he was packing.
The shotgun barrel came through the broken frame and pressed against his temple. "Go on, Ransom," Otis said. "Give me a fucking reason."
"You boys are a long way from Bonney Ranch," I mused.
Then my door ripped open and someone dragged me into the dirt. This is going bad fast.
They hauled me upright by the arms. I twisted hard, like I'd been taught and like I'd practiced.
A fist drove into my liver and Jesus Christ, did that hurt.
The world went gray at the edges. Nausea climbed up through me looking for somewhere to go that didn't exist. My legs quit.
Two of Otis's welcome party held me up between them.
I couldn't get the leverage to break their grip no matter what I tried.
Ransom's door opened. They dragged him out and put him face-first against the side of the truck.
The sound of him hitting it cracked across the road.
Motherfuckers! I lunged forward against the men holding me with no plan and no leverage, and got nowhere.
A gun went to the back of his head, and I had the cold realization that they were going to make me watch.
"No," I said. "No, goddammit, you want me, I'm right here, you don't need him. Point that thing at me, you son of a bitch!"
Otis walked over and handed the shotgun off to one of his men.
"Leave him alone, Otis," Ransom shouted. "He doesn't know anything! Otis!"
Otis didn't even turn his head. "You don't give orders here, Lanza." He spat into the dirt at my feet. "Rex doesn't care for people sticking their noses where they don't belong. Especially not Texas Rangers operating outside their jurisdiction."
"I don't suppose you'd let me speak to your manager, would you?" I said dryly.
"This is a message," Otis said. "For you. For your bosses back in Texas. For anyone else who thinks they can come up here and dig around in Rex's business."
The first punch landed in my gut and put me on my hands and knees in the dirt with my mouth open and nothing in my lungs. The second punch caught me in the ribs. I doubled over and vomited.
They pulled me upright by the hair. Otis stood in front of me with his fist cocked. His eyes had gone somewhere else. His mouth hung a little open, and he breathed through his nose, slow, between hits. Twenty years of this work had taken everything out of his face that wasn't the work itself.
"You listening, Ranger? This is the part where you learn to stay in Texas."
He drove his fist into my face, and my nose broke with a sound I felt more than heard, a wet pop that traveled up through my skull and out behind my eyes.
Blood came hot and fast down my upper lip and into my mouth, copper and salt, more of it than seemed reasonable.
Mama always said I had her nose. Sorry, Mama. Then he drew a knife.
It was a folding knife with a thumb stud and a four-inch blade, and he flicked it open one-handed without looking. He waved it in front of my face, saying something about me, my Mama, my dick. I don't know. I didn't care. My ears were full of my own heartbeat. Couldn't hear much of anything else.
I raised my arm, and the blade sliced through the fabric and skin. There was a moment of cold that became hot like a brand pressed in, and then my whole arm was wet with blood.
Otis raised the knife like he was going to stab me in the throat.
Ransom got to him first.
He headbutted the guy holding him down, spun, and kicked him hard in the balls.
He came around swinging and managed to get his gun free.
There was a pop pop pop, the sound of a revolver firing three quick rounds, and three men went down with brand new holes in them that nature didn't intend to be there.
Otis spun, and I saw his face change when he registered what was coming.
He swung wild. Ransom ducked it without looking and hit him in the gut, then brought a hammer fist down on the inside of Otis's wrist. The knife dropped.
Ransom caught it out of the air. Otis turned to run and didn't make it two steps before Ransom had a fistful of his shirt and dragged him back.
He spun Otis around to face him. Then he looked past Otis.
At me. On my knees in the dirt with my arm sleeved in blood and my face wrecked.
He looked at me for a second longer than he needed to, and his face did something I'd never seen on it before.
Then his eyes came back to Otis, and whatever softness had been there a second ago was gone clean out of him.
"You shouldn't have touched him," Ransom said, quiet enough I almost didn't catch it, and drove the blade through Otis's temple.
Otis's eyes went in two different directions at once. His jaw came open and stayed open. Ransom held him there, close, like he wanted to make sure Otis felt every inch of it on the way out. Then he pulled the knife free, and Otis dropped at his feet like a sack of feed off a tailgate.
The last two ran.
Ransom let them go.
He stood in the middle of the road, the knife still in his hand, breathing hard. Blood ran down his forearms and his shirt. Four bodies lay in the dirt around him.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I sat back on my heels, my hand pressed against my ribs.
"Winston," he started, walking toward me. "You all right?"
"Think so," I managed.
He went down on one knee in the dirt next to me and started looking me over. "Your arm."
"It ain't that bad," I said. It was the truth. The ribs were the worst of it, and they were probably not broken. Probably.
He laid the back of his hand against my cheek, light, and the blood on his knuckles smeared against my jaw. I leaned my face into his hand.
"I thought…" he started, then trailed off and shook his head. "Can you make a quarter mile?"
"What's in a quarter mile?"
"Coyote."
I closed my eyes for a second, got my wits about me, and nodded. "Probably."
"Good."
He hauled me up under one arm. My ribs hurt in a new direction, and I grunted. The world tilted hard and came back. His shirt smelled like blood and sweat and Otis's last bad day. I leaned into him, and we started walking.