Strong Cold Dead (2 page)

“Stories,” Steeldust Jack repeated.

“They never leave the reservation, Ranger. Live off whatever they can fish or farm, and make do with the rest of whatever's around them. At night, when the wind's right, you can hear 'em performing all these rituals about God knows what.”

“Anything else?”

“They're a dangerous lot for sure, that's all.”

Steeldust Jack didn't look convinced. He lumbered all the way back upright, grimacing until he was standing straight again.

“Tell you what's dangerous, Sheriff,” he said, his gaze tilted low toward the body of the unidentified man. “Whatever did this. 'Cause I got a feeling it's not finished yet.”

 

2

N
UNAVUT,
C
ANADA;
N
OVEMBER 1930

Joe Labelle was dying, the freezing cold having pushed itself through his clothes and skin to numb him right to the bone. He could feel the blood slogging through his veins, turning his movements sluggish to the point that the thick snow waylaid him more with each step. All that kept him going was the certainty that an Inuit village lay ahead amid the ice mist that made him feel as if he were walking through air choked with glass fragments. Seemed much thicker than fog, and trying to breathe hurt all the way down to his lungs. Every time he came close to giving up, though, the image of one of his boys appeared before him, urging Labelle on. Their mother being lost to tuberculosis proved more than enough motivation to make him push through the numbness and avoid the temptation to stop awhile to find his breath.

I just need to rest for a few minutes. Then I'll be fine.

Winter's harshness had come early this year to Canada's Lake Anjikuni region. It would've been reasonably tolerable if the sun shined more than six hours per day, so that Labelle didn't have to keep trekking through snow mounds as high as his waist in the darkness. But he had visited this area before and he knew it to contain a bustling village perched on the lake, where gentle currents dappled the shoreline. Formed of tents, primitive huts, and ramshackle shanty structures visible under the bright spray of the full moon, sure to be inhabited by friendly locals proud of the fact that theirs was one of the few outposts in the great frontier. Labelle felt a tremor of hope pulse through him, his heart pounding anew, his skin suddenly resilient against the frigid, prickly air.

The hope faded as quickly as it came.

Labelle could see those ramshackle structures silhouetted under the full moon, but he saw no people about, nor barking sled dogs, nor any other signs of life. Labelle also noted with a chill that not a single chimney had smoke coming out of it. Then he spied a fire crackling in the narrowing distance, evidence of some life, anyway.

Labelle, his heart hammering so hard against his rib cage that his chest actually hurt, picked up his pace and headed toward the glowing embers of the dying fire in the distance, eager to find some trace of humanity. The ice crystals lacing the air felt like flecks of sand scratching at his mouth and throat, dissipating the closer the trapper drew to the flames. He was greeted there not by a friendly face but by a charred stew that had bafflingly been left to blacken above the embers.

Labelle had spent his life negotiating shadowy and inaccessible lands, no stranger to the dark legends of lore in places that could steal a man's mind. Right then and there, he wondered if this whole thing was some illusion, a twisted dream or mirage built out of snow instead of sand. What else could account for a village being abandoned in such a manner?

Maybe I'm dead,
he thought as he walked past derelict, wave-battered kayaks, into the heart of the ghost village. Either he was lying in the snow somewhere back a ways, imagining all this, or the village had … had …

Had
what
?

Labelle methodically pulled back the caribou-skin flaps and checked all of the shacks, hoping to find telltale signs of a mass exodus, but much to his chagrin he discovered that all of the huts were stocked with the kinds of foodstuff and weapons that never would have been abandoned by their owners. In one shelter he found a pot of stewed caribou that had grown moldy, and a child's half-mended sealskin coat, discarded on a bunk with a bone needle still embedded in it, as if someone had deserted their effort midstitch.

He even inspected the fish storehouse and noticed that its supplies had not been depleted. Nowhere were there any signs of a struggle or pandemonium, and Labelle knew all too well that deserting a perfectly habitable community, without rifles, food, or parkas, would be utterly unthinkable, no matter what circumstances might have forced the tribe to spontaneously flee.

Labelle scanned the borders of the village, hoping to ascertain in which direction the Inuit might've gone. Even though the villagers' exit seemed to have been relatively recent, and hasty enough to leave food on the flames, he could find no trace of a single snowshoe or boot track marking their flight, no matter how hard he searched under the spill of the bright moon.

But then the wind shifted and his nose caught a scent that froze him to the bone, even through the chill he was already feeling. A smoky, carrion stench that reminded him of coming upon the body of a trapper who'd frozen to death in winter and whose body didn't begin to thaw until spring.

Labelle followed a narrow, choppy path through the thick snow, into an overgrowth of brush and dead trees entombed in white. He saw smoke wafting up from what looked like some sort of natural depression in the ground. The smoke rose straight out of that shallow slice of ground, rooted in smoldering clumps that the fire hadn't finished with yet.

Smoldering clumps …

Labelle got no farther. His legs gave out and he sank into a bank of snow thick enough to reach his neck. He wasn't sure he'd ever move again, wasn't sure he wanted to, until he heard a shuffling sound coming from the thickest part of the grove. Labelle knew the sound of feet crunching over hardpack when he heard it, though the wind and crackling flames disguised just how many sets were coming.

Labelle didn't wait to find out. He pulled himself through the drifts, finally reclaiming his feet and dragging himself along.

The trapper quickly lost track of how long or how far he walked from there. He knew only that, as he made the trek, he was the whole time fearful of looking back to see what might have been coming in his wake.

He stumbled upon a remote outpost not long after dawn, sure to be rewarded for his persistence with food, warmth, and shelter.

“What are you exactly?” a ranger greeted him after responding to Labelle's pounding on the door. He ran his eyes up and down the trapper's ice-encrusted clothes and hair, then his face which was sheathed in a thin layer of it as well. “Please say a man.”

“I am that,” Labelle said, exhausted and picking at the ice frozen to his beard. “But what's coming might not be.”

“What's
coming
?” the ranger repeated, gazing over Labelle's shoulder. “What say we get you warmed up inside?”

Labelle followed the ranger through the door, the blast of warm air hitting him like a surge from a steam oven. He could feel the ice crystals attached to his skin, hair, and beard turning to water, the flow from his clothes leaving thin puddles in his wake as he made his way to the fire.

The trapper's gaze fixed on a telegraph machine as he peeled off his gloves. “Does that work?”

“Why?”

“Because we must get off a message to the Mounties,” Labelle said through still-frozen lips.

“Sure thing, soon as we get you warmed up with blankets, and fed right.”

“No!” Labelle barked, grasping the ranger's forearm so hard it seemed the cold bled into him as well. “
Now!
Before it's too late!”

The ranger yanked his hand away, stumbling backwards in the process. “Too late for what?”

Labelle peered through the closest window. The morning sun had melted away enough of the ice crust for him to see the path down which he'd come. “For us. Before whatever's coming gets here.”

 

P
ART
O
NE

The depredations of your enemies the W. [Waco] and T. [Tawakonis] Indians and their hostile preparations, has driven us to the necessity of taking up arms in self-defense.… The frontier is menaced—The whole colony is threatened—under these circumstances it became my duty to call the militia to the frontier to repel the threatened attacks and to teach our enemies to fear and respect us.

—Stephen Austin, 1826, in Mike Cox,
The Texas Rangers

 

1

E
AST
S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“Nobody goes beyond this point, ma'am,” the tall, burly San Antonio policeman, outfitted in full riot gear, told Caitlin Strong.

“That includes Texas Rangers…” She hesitated long enough to read the nameplate over his badge. “Officer Salazar?”

“That's
Sergeant
Salazar, Ranger. And the answer is yes, it includes everyone.
Especially
Texas Rangers.”

“Well, Sergeant, maybe we wouldn't need to be here if a couple of your patrolmen hadn't gunned down a ten-year-old boy.”

Salazar looked at Caitlin, scowling as he backed away from her Explorer. A few blocks beyond the checkpoint, a grayish mist seemed to hover in the air, residue of the tear gas she expected would be unleashed again soon. That is, unless the youthful crowd currently packed into the small commercial district at the near end of Hackberry Avenue dispersed, which they were showing no signs of doing. The third night of trouble had brought the National Guard to the scene, in full battle attire that included M4 rifles and flak jackets. Caitlin could see that more floodlights had been set up to keep the street bathed in daylight brightness. They cast a strange hue that reminded her of movie kliegs, as if this were a scene concocted from fiction rather than one that had arisen out of random tragedy.

Sergeant Salazar came right up to her open window, close enough for Caitlin to smell spearmint on his breath as he worked a wad of gum from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Those patrolmen found themselves in the crossfire of a gunfight between a neighborhood watch leader and gangbangers he thought were robbing a convenience store where most pay with their EBT cards. The clerk who chased them down the street just wanted to return the change they'd left on the counter for their ice cream, but the watch leader, Alfonzo Martinez, saw the scene otherwise and ordered the bangers to stop and put their hands in the air.”

Neighborhood watch leader Martinez, a lifelong resident of J Street, who'd managed to steer clear of violence all his life, started firing his heirloom Springfield 1911 model .45 as soon as the gangbangers yanked pistols from the waistbands of their droopy trousers. The only thing his shots hit was a passing San Antonio Police car. The uniformed officers inside mistook the fire as coming from the gangbangers, and the officers opened up on them so indiscriminately that the lone victim of their fire was a ten-year-old boy who'd emerged from the same convenience store.

It was almost dawn before everything got sorted out and the investigative team, comprising San Antonio police and highway patrol detectives, thought they'd managed to get control of the situation. Then, relatively peaceful protests by day gave way to an eruption of violence at night, spearheaded by rival gangs who abandoned their turf wars to join forces against an enemy both of them loathed. Violence and looting reigned, only to get worse by the second night, when eight officers ended up hospitalized—one injured by what was later identified as a bullet rather than a rock. And now, the third night found the National Guard on the scene in force, along with armored police vehicles from as far away as Houston, barricading the streets to basically shut the neighborhoods of east San Antonio's northern periphery off from the rest of the city.

“You're still here, Ranger,” Sergeant Salazar noted.

“Just considering my options.”

“Only option you have is to turn your vehicle around and leave the area, ma'am. You're not needed or welcome here.”

“On whose orders, exactly?” Caitlin wondered aloud.

“Mine,” a female voice boomed, a moment before Caitlin heard a loud pop, like a shotgun blast, crackle through the air.

 

2

E
AST
S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

A few blocks beyond the checkpoint, one of the spotlights fizzled and died, more likely the victim of a well-thrown rock than a bullet. Caitlin was out of her Explorer by then, hand instinctively straying to her holstered SIG Sauer P-226 in anticipation of more shots to follow.

“Get back in your vehicle, Ranger,” said Consuelo Alonzo, deputy chief of the San Antonio Police Department, as she strode forward, red-faced from the exertion of rushing to the scene from the police line upon learning of Caitlin's arrival.

“You got a problem with getting some more backup?” Caitlin asked her.

“I do when it comes from you.”

“Why don't you catch your breath and hear me out?”

“Because there's nothing you have to say that can possibly interest me right now. In case you haven't noticed, we're sitting on a powder keg, one spark away from blowing San Antonio to hell. We don't need you providing that spark, Ranger. No way.”

Instead of settling down, Alonzo's agitation continued to increase. Her face had grown redder, her words emerging through breaths that were becoming more and more rapid. She had risen quickly through the ranks of the department, the youngest woman ever to make captain, three years prior to her recent promotion to deputy chief. And she had been rumored to be in line for the job of public safety commissioner, which came with a plush Austin office and would make her, among other things, chief overseer of the Texas Rangers. Alonzo had no doubt relished that particular perk of a job certain to be hers—until the death of a Chinese diplomat, exacerbated by Caitlin's solving of the murder while Alonzo was dealing with more politically oriented ramifications, led to her being passed over.