Cougar's Prey (9781101544846) (3 page)

The barkeep shook his head no. His face was fat, sweaty, and deep brown. A thin black mustache sat atop a set of full, puffy lips. “A bad wind is coming, Mr. Zeb.”

“Looks like a perfect day to me,” Josiah said.

“Wind is changing. Can't you tell?”

It was Josiah's turn to shake his head no. “Feels the same to me.”

Agusto smiled, exposing a mouth full of broken yellow teeth. “The sky will rumble before the day's over, Mr. Zeb. Mark my words.”

Josiah nodded then and said nothing. He took another slow sip of beer and stared up at the sky. Something
was
coming, that was for sure; he just wasn't sure what.

 

 

The woman was tall for a Mexican. She wore a tight-fitting black dress, the neck cut deep, exposing a generous view of healthy cleavage that no man in the cantina could ignore—not even Josiah.

Long, wavy black hair flowed over the woman's shoulders, and her lips were as red as the fiery sun. Her sultry brown eyes were locked on Josiah, and she ignored every man's attempt to get her attention. She stopped directly in front of Josiah and offered him her hand.

“Would you like to dance, señor?” the woman asked.

Josiah stared up at her. “It's before four o'clock. In the heat of the day?”

The woman smirked and withdrew her hand. “You have no sense of adventure.” Her accent was soft, her English easy to understand. She was exceptionally beautiful, and Josiah had never seen her before. He rarely saw any of the girls from upstairs in the cantina during the day, so her appearance was out of the ordinary.

For a moment, Josiah was uncomfortable. He wasn't quite sure if she was what he was waiting for or not.

“Perhaps,” the woman continued, “you would like to dance in private. Are you bashful?”

Josiah forced a smile. “I'm sure Agusto wouldn't mind me stumbling about.”

Agusto didn't say anything, just smiled and waved Josiah off, like he was fending off one of the many flies that called the cantina home.

The guitar music had stopped. Josiah hadn't seen the guitar player disappear, but the stool where the Mexican had sat just minutes before was now empty, like he'd never existed at all.

“Looks like we've lost our music,” he said.

“We can make our own music, Señor Zeb.”

“How come you know my name, and I don't know yours?”

“I am Maria. Maria Villareal.”

Josiah nodded and stood up. “After you, Maria Villareal,” he said. He'd been given the name Maria Villareal as a contact. She
was
who he'd been waiting on.

The woman flashed him a grin, looked him hard in the eye, quickly, to acknowledge he'd made the right choice, then walked slowly toward the back of the cantina.

Josiah followed, his hand inches away from the Peacemaker he carried on his hip. He had a knife in one boot and a small .25-caliber pistol in the other. He was not entirely trusting of this woman, or of anyone in Corpus Christi for that matter.

The woman rounded the corner first. Josiah lost sight of her for a second and hurried his pace.

When he came to the other side of the building, he walked straight into the barrel of a gun, forcing him to come to a quick, unanticipated stop.

The guitar player was waiting for him, a Walker Colt, a revolver with a nine-inch barrel, cocked and ready to fire.

“You better tell me what you're doing here, Ranger, or you're a dead man.”

December 1874

 

Josiah sat alone in a room on the second floor of the state capitol building. There were three empty chairs sitting behind a simple table void of any papers, pens, or anything that might look official. The room smelled musty, like it had been locked up for a long time, and there was a slight chill in the air; a draft circled around his ankles like a set of invisible shackles had appeared out of nowhere to hold him in place. Beyond the temperature of the air, Josiah barely felt anything. He was numb from the inside out.

On the other side of the table, a single-pane window looked out over Capitol Square, then south, down Congress Avenue. The Old Stone Capitol building stood at the end of the avenue, a three-storey Greek Revival building that was less than grand but would have to suffice, considering the budget constraints put on the state by the Panic of '73. Everyone was having to make do, including the Rangers, and all of the government agencies, because of the nationwide financial collapse.

The avenue was lined with buildings, mostly two-storey but some, including the hotels, were three storeys. It was a clear, sunny day, and daily life was progressing at a normal pace. Wagons were coming and going. A stagecoach sat waiting in front of the old Bullock Hotel, just arriving from Brastop. So far, the winter season had been reasonably dry. Horses kicked up dust on the road as they came and went, even at a slow pace. The sounds of activity were audible but slight. Even though it was midday, a piano banged distantly from a nearby saloon, the sound muffled but unmistakable.

Josiah was wearing his best set of clothes, the ones he reserved for funerals and other important matters. The last time he'd worn them was not so long ago, to a fine dinner that he had been invited to at the Fikes estate. It was the night Pete Feders asked Pearl to marry him in front of every important man and woman in Austin, and she had declined. It was also the night that Feders relieved Josiah of duty with the Frontier Battalion, reassigning him to Captain Leander McNelly's company of Special Rangers. That night was hard to forget, indelibly imprinted in Josiah's mind, as a night of tragedy and pure happiness, as he ended up spending the night making love to Pearl Fikes in the barn. The beginning of the end. Days later, Josiah faced Pete Feders, a gun in his hand, and surprise and regret in his heart. He shot and killed his captain, who had joined up with an outlaw to start a cattle rustling operation.

Now he had to suffer the consequences of his own actions—answer for them in a way that he'd never thought he would. Though during the many sleepless nights of late, even he had questioned if his response had been of pure intention. His own motivations were a mystery even to himself, other than to stay alive—for his son, for himself, and whatever the future held. At that point, he thought he actually had a future for the first time in a long, long time. But he couldn't be sure if the future was all he had been protecting. It was not the first time Josiah had ever killed a man, but it was the first time he ever had reason to question whether he was a cold-blooded killer or not. His feelings for Pearl Fikes were confusing everything in his life.

Footsteps approached down the long corridor. They echoed, causing Josiah to stiffen in anticipation.

The room he was sequestered in was at the very end of the hall.

At first, the steps were distant, but they grew closer at a quick pace, like thunder rolling toward him, announcing the coming of a storm of undetermined severity.

The doorknob turned. Josiah stood up and turned to face those who entered the room.

Captain Leander McNelly looked away from Josiah and pushed by him with an air of discontent.

McNelly was a thin, bony man, with a mid-range beard free of muttonchops, and his black frock coat and pants were free of lint or dust. He was a long sufferer of consumption, but his will was strong, and he managed his company of Special Rangers with the grip of a man not to be mistaken for a weakling. Every man in the company had great respect for McNelly, including Josiah.

The next man to enter the room was Major John B. Jones, who headed up the Frontier Battalion.

Josiah had ridden with Jones and had even, at times, considered him a rival for the affection of Pearl Fikes. Jones was a well-known womanizer, still a bachelor, with rumored acquaintances in more than one Texas town. He wore a perfectly trimmed V mustache and was dressed similar to McNelly, all in black, except the highly starched white shirt. The major always looked very official, always took pride in his appearance, and there was not a whit of soil to be witnessed on his clothes. Even his boot heels glimmered in the late morning sunlight streaming in through the window.

William Steele was the last man in the grim parade and followed behind Jones with heavy footsteps and a noticeable limp.

Steele was the elder statesman of the three, a stout man who towered over both Jones and McNelly. His beard was grizzled and gray, with wiry hairs poking out in every direction. In comparison to Jones and McNelly, Steele looked like he had just rolled out of bed and jumped into his clothes, which were black, too, but wrinkled. They didn't look like they'd seen the hands of a laundress or a Chinaman since they'd been delivered by the tailor.

Each man had served in the Confederate Army, all in varying capacities, but each in a commanding position, each coming to, or returning home to Texas with a desire to put the past behind him.

For some men, the loss to the Union was harder to take than for others. Josiah wasn't sure which man held any anger toward that subject, nor did he care—he was thankful the War Between the States was long over. The only importance of any of the men's attitudes was simple: Josiah had also served the Confederacy, and was a former military man himself, having spent his entire service in the First Texas Brigade. On a small scale, they all had a shared experience, a brotherhood, that would hopefully make things a little less tense and more equitable for Josiah.

Chairs scooted in as each man took his place. Steele sat in the middle, with Jones to his right and McNelly to his left. Josiah kept standing, waiting to be told what to do next, what was expected of him. This was not a formal military inquiry, but it needed to be treated as such, as far as Josiah was concerned.

Steele had carried a satchel full of papers into the room with him. He dug out a pair of reading glasses from inside his coat, opened the satchel, and cleared his throat. “Close the door, Wolfe. We've seen enough of your shenanigans in the newspaper of late. Hard to say who's out there lurking within earshot.” His voice was booming and commanding.

Josiah did as he was told, his mind racing, his stomach nervous. He had never been in trouble to this degree in his entire life. Nor had he, or his escapades, been the subject of direct and vicious coverage in any newspaper. The
Austin Statesman
was having a heyday with the story of Feders's death, painting Josiah as a rogue Ranger, questioning whether he had killed Pete Feders in cold blood for the hand of Pearl Fikes. The social pages had carried the news of the engagement party gone wrong, and it seemed as if every tongue in the city was wagging about the whole affair.

Josiah was certain that Pearl's mother was behind the stories; if not directly, then she was feeding the fire somehow. She had promised him as much, that she would ruin him, and it looked as though she was intent on keeping that promise.

The constant everyday front page stories had left the state government, and the Ranger hierarchy, little choice but to investigate the shooting in a very public way.

The Ranger organization itself had been under constant scrutiny since it had been organized less than a year earlier.

Governor Richard Coke had been under pressure to cut the Rangers' budget, which was already increasingly thin. The Comanche were still attacking white settlements to the north, but to a lesser degree, and that had been one of the main reasons for the Rangers being formally organized in the first place. The Sutton-Taylor feud had been quelled in Dewitt County, McNelly's first assignment, and a major success—but overshadowed by Josiah's actions in South Texas.

There was a growing chorus of fiscally restrained citizens who were questioning the need for the Rangers to exist at all—and if they did, what their function truly was, and how they should be funded. Somehow, Feders's death was being turned into a political debate, another matter Josiah had no experience with and did not desire now. But it didn't matter.

“The Feders killing,” as it was being called, was being used as further proof that the Rangers were a renegade bunch of men, set on making their own laws, while they raided the state coffers.

Josiah was not accustomed to being known, to walking down the street and having people whisper behind his back, or utter scurrilous terms like “traitor” or “murderer” as he passed by on the street.

Because of that, over the last few days, since the burial of Pete Feders had been conducted, and as the newspapers drummed a demand for a formal investigation into the death of the Texas Ranger captain, whose record and attributes had been portrayed as flawless in the
Austin Statesman
, Josiah had laid low, staying shut up in his house as much as was humanly possible. He did not dare take Lyle anywhere. He did not want his son subjected to any ill treatment caused by his own actions.