Chapter 12
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West Texas
From the co-pilot’s seat in the Sikorsky’s cockpit, Scarlett watched the familiar ground below as they approached her childhood home. Hard pale dirt. Dry creek beds cut into the ground. Sweltering, flat country the color of rust.
A steel windmill here and there along the way turned slowly on a fence post, pumping water up out of a well into a metal tank for skinny cattle to drink. The cattle thrived in whatever shade they could find, swishing biting flies with their tails.
Like the land she came from and the cows that survived there, Scarlett had to believe her strength, endurance, and resilience would prevail against all odds. What choice did she have?
When Drake glanced over from the pilot’s seat to check on her again, she realized her silence worried him.
“Sorry for the radio silence,” she said. “I can’t figure out what’s going on here.”
Flint replied through the headset from the back, “What’s troubling you?”
“This could be a trap. We all knew that before we came aboard,” Scarlett replied. “But I feel like we’re missing something.”
Drake flashed a grin. “Could be because we know almost nothing.”
“Exactly.” Scarlett rewarded him with a smile. “What we know is that Flint and I are both targets. We don’t know who is targeting us or why. We also don’t know why they think we’d take the bait and haul our asses out here.”
“It’s not just the two phone calls we got, though. Cody Patterson and his brother are in the mix here, too,” Flint said.
“Right. We can’t assume anything. The two callers could be working together or separately,” Scarlett replied. “The woman sounded genuinely afraid when she called last night. Maybe she’s afraid of those guys in your alley.”
“Whoever set this up asked for Scarlett. If Flint shows up alone, she might not come out,” Drake said.
“Assuming the caller is a she. Or that my caller is a man. Voice altering tech is widely available now, too, don’t forget,” Flint replied.
“And if I let them think they’ve made me afraid to leave my own house, what kind of message is that for my daughter? What kind of life? No thank you.” Scarlett’s tone was harsh enough to show she meant every word of it.
“You’ve got Maddy secured,” Drake said. “Nothing can happen to her.”
Scarlett gave him a curt nod in response and returned her attention to the ride as they approached two lanes of asphalt running south to north.
At the crossroads, a fuel awning covered a cluster of buildings.
Semis lined up along the south side. Pickups and SUVs filled the angled spots near the convenience store.
The store windows were papered with flyers and neon flashing signs advertising coffee, beer, and hot dogs.
A car wash stood off to one side with two of the bays open.
“Passing Mildred’s Corner,” Drake said, in case Flint hadn’t noticed.
“Mildred Tuttle ran a one-room store out of the front of her house here when we were kids,” Scarlett said aloud. “It was the only stop for forty miles in any direction. Whoever bought the land after she died put a truck stop on it. Fifteen miles south of the Lazy M.”
Drake kept the Sikorsky on a heading that carried them past the crossroads and on up the line of the old road toward the ranch.
“Let’s get the comms up before we land,” Flint said.
Drake reached forward and turned a knob on the panel while Scarlett checked her earpiece. They tested transmit and confirmed they could hear each other.
The Sikorsky crossed a dry creek bed, and Scarlett saw the iron archway a mile off. The letters in the hand-cut steel arch had rusted through in places but the shape was there. LAZY M.
From the air, the property opened up the way she remembered it.
A washed-out gravel drive turned north off the county road under the archway and ran a quarter mile to the house perched at the end of it with its back to the barn.
Past the barn was an equipment shed. Beyond that, the stock tank, and farther along, low against the ground, was the pump house.
The yard in front of the house was flat and packed hard. Drake already knew he could land on it.
The wood siding on the house had gone silver where the paint had worn off. The metal roof caught the sun. The porch sagged to one side.
Plywood nailed the front door shut and she saw no signs of life in the house. No vehicles in the drive or horses in the corral behind the barn. It was too hot for smoke from any of the stovepipes, but she didn’t expect to see any.
Drake brought the Sikorsky around to the west and into the wind. The rotor wash kicked up dust as he settled lower.
He landed the Sikorsky smoothly onto the packed dirt. Once the skids settled, Drake shut the engines down. The rotors slowed and stopped. The dust began to settle around them and heat moved into the cabin.
They readied their weapons and disembarked. When Scarlett stepped down onto the yard, the heat enveloped her from every direction like a suffocating blanket. Behind her sunglasses, she squinted and took in the house.
It was smaller than she remembered. Dust coated the porch boards and the windowsills. One of the front windows was broken, the glass jagged where someone had punched it out. The screen door hung crooked off one hinge.
The house had never been well cared for when Scarlett lived here. But now it seemed sad and abandoned, probably because it was.
Drake and Flint came up behind her.
“Let’s check the house first. No point pulling the plywood down when there’s a back door,” Scarlett said. “Keep your guard up. We already agreed we don’t know what we’re going to find in there.”
Scarlett started around the south side of the house. Flint walked beside her on the right. Drake took the left.
The windows on the side were also covered with plywood, but these boards were more weathered, suggesting they had been up longer.
Around the back of the house the yard fell off into a sunburnt slope toward the barn. The kitchen door stood open about six inches. The wood at the latch had been splintered out at some point by a pry bar of some sort, but it was old damage. The frame had silvered around the break.
“Somebody’s already been inside,” Flint said, raising his weapon and moving up to the door.
He stopped beside it, back to the wall, weapon up. Scarlett took the other side. Drake covered the yard behind them.
Scarlett listened for thirty seconds. She heard nothing from inside but the small ticks of a hot building cooling unevenly under the sun that had been beating down on it all day.
She pushed the door open with her left hand and stepped through low and swept her weapon across the kitchen. It looked like a tornado had blasted its way through.
Crushed beer cans shoved along the baseboard.
Fast-food wrappers wadded up under the table.
A spread of grease and ketchup dried hard.
A blackened circle in the middle of the room where a small fire, maybe burning in a coffee can, had tipped.
The burn pattern radiated out throwing soot up the wall behind it.
Cigarette butts everywhere. A pile of them in one corner like they’d been swept there with a boot.
Mouse droppings along every baseboard. Some old, some not.
Down the wall near the doorway to the front room, a section of plaster had been torn open to the ceiling. The lath behind it was visible. Wiry black hairs were caught on a splintered edge. Destruction she had seen before in deer cabins and outbuildings.
“Racoons have been in here,” she said.
Drake looked. “Big ones.”
She moved through the doorway into the front room. Flint came along behind her. Drake stayed at the kitchen and covered the back hall.
A couch rested against the long wall. The cushions were torn open down the middle and the stuffing pulled out and spread across the floor. A pillow had been chewed to nothing. Springs showed through the upholstery. A bedroll was wadded against one armrest.
Empty pints of cheap whiskey lined up along the windowsill behind the couch. Six of them. Maybe eight.
Light came in around the edges of the plywood in thin yellow lines.
Scarlett crossed the front room. A bookcase lined the far wall. A water stain ran down the wall above the bookcase from a place where the roof had let go. Books remained on the shelves. They had been rained on and dried again and the pages had warped.
A grackle, the loud black bird that ran the open country in flocks across that part of Texas, called from somewhere outside a broken upstairs window. Another answered.
“Back hall clear to the stairs,” Drake said quietly as he returned.
“Front room clear,” Scarlett said, taking a quick visual inventory. “There’s no way to tell who or what has been here or when.”
Weather and animals and vagrants had done this. Damage layered over damage. Some looked recent. Some older.
Flint looked around the room. “Agreed.”
Drake joined them. “Nobody in the rooms on the ground floor. I’ll check upstairs.”
“Okay,” Flint said. “We’ll head for the outbuildings. Join us when you can. Keep in touch.”
“Roger that,” Drake replied on his way to the staircase.
Scarlett returned through the kitchen and out the door into the yard. Flint followed behind her. The sun’s blinding glare hit her vision like a hammer. She donned her sunglasses again, took a breath of the dry air, and started for the barn.
The barn doors stood open a foot. Scarlett pushed it wider with her free hand and stepped inside to let her eyes adjust. Slats of light came down through the gaps in the roof boards in long columns. The air inside was hot and still and smelled like livestock. A few pigeons shifted in the rafters.
The stalls along the east wall had been for milk goats and the one saddle horse for the kids who could ride.
The stall gates hung open, revealing nothing in them now but old straw broken down to dust on the floor.
The tack wall at the back had a single length of rope looped over a peg where the bridles once hung.
Flint walked the length of the center aisle and checked the dim corners. He came back and shook his head.
“Nobody here.”
Scarlett took one more look around and headed out toward the equipment shed sixty yards past the barn. A corrugated metal building the size of a two-car garage with a rolling door on the front and a service door on the side. The rolling door was closed. The service door stood open.
Scarlett took the service door. Flint went around to the rolling door side. The shed held an old tractor, a tangle of rusted implements, a workbench under a blanket of dust, and nothing alive.
When she came back out, Flint was waiting after he’d cleared his side.
“One building left,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They walked past the equipment shed and approached the back of the property. The stock tank sat in a low spot a hundred yards out, the surface of the rainwater it had accumulated brown and still. Past the tank, low against the ground on the far side, sat the pump house.
The old fort she and Nora Weiss had shared was smaller than Scarlett remembered, too. Fieldstone walls maybe four feet high and a shallow peaked roof of tin over them. A wooden door on the near side, set between the stone.
Flint stopped walking. Scarlett stopped beside him.
“Check the ground,” he said quietly.
She looked down.
The dirt around the stock tank was embedded with tire tracks.
They were narrower than a truck, wider than a motorcycle.
Probably an off-road vehicle. They came in from the east along an old two-track, looped the tank, and went back out the same way.
The ORV had made the trip several times.
Some tracks looked fresh. Others were older.
Boot prints laced between the tire tracks. One set. The tread was fine and close-spaced and too small for a man. A woman’s work boot. The prints moved from the ORV’s parking area to the pump house door and back. She had walked back and forth many times.
“One person,” Flint said.
Scarlett replied, “Probably female.”
They stood at the edge of the stock tank and looked at the pump house. The door was closed. She saw no window on this side and heard no sounds from the interior or movement in the brush around it.
Flint said into his comms, “Drake.”
“Yeah?”
“We’re at the stock tank. Pump house is fifty yards out. Single set of tracks. One occupant likely. We’re making the approach.”
“Copy. House is clear. On my way.”
Weapons ready, Flint and Scarlett came around the stock tank on the north side and closed on the pump house. Scarlett moved to the left of the door. Flint took the right. Neither stood directly in front of it.
Before Scarlett had reached her position, a gunshot blasted through the door.
The round punched a splintered hole through the wood and shot out across the open ground.
Scarlett dropped behind the low fieldstone wall to her right and pulled her weapon up over the stone. Flint was already down behind a concrete slab on his side.
Neither returned fire.
“Drake,” Flint said into the radio, low. “Hold the back side of the house. We’ll handle this.”
“Copy.”
Scarlett kept her weapon on the door. The hole in the wood was chest high and dead center.
“Hold your fire,” Scarlett called out. “We’re not here to hurt you.”
The silence held for a long count. Hot wind moved the scrub at the edge of her vision. Somewhere past the barn a grackle called.
A woman’s low, tired response traveled across the distance.
“Did you come here to help me or not?”