Strong Cold Dead (36 page)

He reached the shed and pressed himself against its back side, closest to the woods, safe from being seen by anyone who might be about. When no new sounds came to signal such a presence, Dylan sidestepped around the shed's perimeter to the unlocked door. Peering inside through the crack between door and frame, he saw that the shed appeared to be unchanged from the previous night. Then the wind caught the door and widened the gap just enough to let a shaft of light pour past Dylan.

It illuminated the dark gravel floor. Only, a central square of it looked even darker.

The gravel had been shoveled aside, revealing a hatch that was now propped up to provide access to some secret underground chamber. Impossible to tell how long it had been here, though the scent of freshly dug earth suggested maybe not too long. Maybe.

Perhaps again reassured by the Smith & Wesson, Dylan slid all the way inside the shed, just before the door clanged against the hasp once more. The shaft of light had been reduced to a sliver, but it still was enough for him to see a ladder descending into the darkness, maybe going all the way down to Dante's nine circles of hell, which he knew well from another of his classes at Brown.

Who said football players couldn't be smart?

He'd played lacrosse in high school, too, after squandering years on youth soccer. Sports had always come easy to him, in large part because of a fearless nature on the playing field, which belied his modest size. He took after his mother in that respect, instead of his father. And it was that same nature that led Dylan to position himself in place over the ladder, grasping its top-mounted handles as he lowered his feet several rungs down. If he'd known for sure that the Lost Boys were down there, maybe he would have just closed the hatch and sealed it, trapping them, as apt payback for what they'd done to him the night before. Ela, though, could be down there too, and beyond that, Dylan reminded himself, there was a greater mission here: to get to the bottom of whatever was going on and why it had led her to use him the way she clearly had.

Dylan descended slowly and cautiously, careful to keep his boots from clacking against the wooden rungs. Whatever light he'd been using was pretty much gone at around what looked to be the halfway point. But shortly after that he glimpsed the naked spray of lantern light and thought he caught the faint smell of kerosene in the cooling air.

Just like the kerosene lantern Ela had used to light the root cellar where they'd made love and gotten zonked out of their minds on peyote.

Dylan stepped off the lower rungs of the ladder, onto a cushion of soft, moist dirt pitted with pools of standing water. The lantern-lit, winding tunnel before him didn't look man-made so much as it seemed like an underground extension of the caves that were dug out of the hillside overlooking White Eagle's property. It was like some kind of beehive, combined with a maze that twisted and turned this way and that.

Dylan started to reach for his dad's pistol, then stopped. He hadn't bothered to turn off the ringtone of the ancient-looking flip phone forming a bulge in the front pocket of his jeans, because nobody had the number he'd made himself memorize. He could take it out right now and call his father, or Caitlin, and tell them what he'd uncovered. But something pushed him on instead, gun left tucked in place until he was sure he needed it.

Drawing deeper down the labyrinthine path, he was struck by a rising odor on the air, something rotten and spoiled. Not a carrion or death smell, though, nor a scent resembling excrement of any kind. This was a different smell, foreign and yet vaguely familiar, as if the far reaches of his mind held some notion of it. The stronger and more acrid the stench grew, the less familiar it became, until Dylan began to consider the original thought an illusion.

Only he couldn't, not totally, because he was sure it held some meaning for him, some memory he couldn't quite grasp.

A bit farther along, the path canted upward, toward a smell of freshly dug earth that was strong enough to break the persistent oily, stale stench, at least for a moment. The path seemed to widen where it forked to the left, seeming narrower to the right. Then Dylan realized that the right path actually led to an evenly carved, door-size breach leading to a passageway forged by man and not nature.

The acrid stench seemed to peak, and Dylan saw he'd entered some kind of chamber. But it was too far from the spill of lantern light to discern anything more, until he noticed a matching pair of lanterns on either side of the dug-out entryway and turned one of them up.

A chamber all right—a
storage
chamber, encased by limestone walls.

He spotted what looked like tarpaulins thrown over uneven heaps and piles of
something
that seemed to hold the source of the stink, overpowering in the tight confines. Breathing through his mouth, Dylan peeled back the edge of one of the tarps as unobtrusively as he could, pulling—stupidly maybe—a clump of whatever was concealed beneath it free and up to his nose.

Its powerfully sour scent almost made him retch, and it was all Dylan could do to steady his stomach. He recalled the same scent emanating from the patch of fungus on the mold-riddled ear of corn that he'd made himself eat after Ela had called it a delicacy.

It's a secret my people have kept for centuries, our greatest secret.

Dylan moved deeper into the chamber, into the shaft of light illuminating almost all of it.

And that's when he saw the bodies.

 

87

D
ALLAS,
T
EXAS

“A blessed target,” Hatim Abd al-Aziz proclaimed, seated at the picnic table across from Razin Saflin, Ghazi Zurif, and Daniel Cross in Klyde Warren Park. “How many do you think are here now who could be dead tomorrow by the grace of God?”

Al-Aziz said that in a way that sent a chill up Cross's spine, reminding him of how close he'd come to a moment like this a decade ago, of the lives he had wanted to take in his crowded school cafeteria. And that made him wonder whether Caitlin Strong had noticed him the other day outside the Comanche reservation. A decade ago, she'd done her best to convince him he was worth something, but the feeling had only lasted until the other kids started up on him again. Caitlin Strong might have talked him out of pulling a Columbine, but he knew his day was going to come. Now that it finally had, he found himself fearing her disapproval.

Why'd she have to be at that damn reservation?

“I only wish I could be here to see it,” al-Aziz continued, smiling so placidly at the prospect that it utterly unnerved Daniel Cross.

Klyde Warren Park was a pristine, tree-lined, eco-friendly stretch of land erected on a mothballed overpass of the eight-lane Woodall Rodgers Freeway. A public and private partnership initiative to combat urban sprawl and create a sprawling green space on the site of a former crumbling concrete blight between Pearl and St. Paul streets, where uptown and downtown Dallas meet. An urban oasis set in the shadows cast by skyscrapers lining the site's east and west peripheries.

The park was normally dominated by a large, open grassy stretch lined with lawn chairs, food vendors, and ice cream trucks, adjoining a botanical garden, walking trails, and an assortment of pavilions. But an old-fashioned traveling carnival had set up shop on the grounds in recent days. The bulk of the rides and attractions—including the House of Horrors, the Buggy Whip, the mini Flume, various kiddie rides, and a family-friendly roller coaster that swept over the expanse of the entire carnival, erected from Pearl Street, across the great lawn crossing Hart Boulevard. Food booths and game attractions forming a makeshift midway rimmed the perimeter on the eastbound side of Woodall Rodgers Freeway, across from the Dallas Museum of Art.

Al-Aziz sat alone on one side of the shaded picnic table, amid the smells of grilled hamburgers, falafel, and various Mexican-style offerings. Saflin, Zurif, and Daniel Cross sat across from him, with a clear view of the botanical garden and the section of the park devoted to children's activities, which today had been usurped by a pair of bounce houses, where lines had begun to form. The carnival was just starting to fill up, locals streaming in to loiter away a few hours during spring break for Texas schools. A local radio station was doing a live remote, and both the Nancy Collins Fisher and Muse Family Performance pavilions offered live performances featuring clowns, mimes, and jugglers.

Cross looked around at the rapidly growing crowd of happy people who had no clue about the fate that ultimately awaited them. Thanks to him.

“I just want to see the world burn,” Cross said, to no one in particular. “I want to be the one lighting the match.”

Cross glanced back at al-Aziz, who was lowering a cell phone from his ear, grinning anew above his trimmed beard. “This place will be our second target. Houston will be the first.”

“Houston?” Cross asked, feeling something quiver in his stomach.

“Inshallah,”
al-Aziz said, bowing his head slightly.

 

88

B
ALCONES
C
ANYONLANDS,
T
EXAS

Dylan recognized the Lost Boys immediately, the same ones who'd tied him to a tree and left him for dead the night before. He counted seven of them. Their blood was everywhere, whether from bullet or knife wounds, he couldn't be sure.

He tried to make sense of what he was seeing, to put everything together.

Our greatest secret …

That greatest secret of the Comanche had been stockpiled down here atop trays sealed in airtight plastic wrapping. Hundreds of pounds of the mold, fungus, or whatever it was, divided into six stacks, squeezed tightly against the walls. Hidden in this secret chamber for who knew how long to do who knew what. Dylan whipped the phone out of his pocket to call his father and started to back out of the chamber.

He turned to find Ela Nocona standing before him, and she collapsed in his arms.

Dylan crumpled under her weight, cushioning Ela the whole way.

“Take it easy,” he tried to sooth her.

He was cradling her waist and her head at the same time, the hand nearer her torso feeling warm, wet, and sticky.

With blood.

“They thought I was dead,” she managed to say, after swallowing hard.

“Who?”

She shook her head, eyes gaping in fear at the rekindled memory. “I don't know. They spoke…”

“What?”

Ela swallowed hard again. “Arabic, I think. I'm sorry…”

“Sh-h-h.”

“For what I did.”

“You didn't do anything.”

“I set you up. Left your medal out near the body of that construction worker, so you'd get hauled in. Get the blame. Turning you into a patsy, following my grandfather's plan.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“It does, because I stopped it. I stopped Houston, wouldn't let them go through with it, any more than I could let them hurt you.”

Dylan looked into Ela's eyes, grasped her terror.

“It wasn't supposed to be this way,” she said.

“Sh-h-h,” Dylan soothed her again. “I already texted my dad. He's coming. He'll know what to do.”

She shook her head. “It's too late. They've got them—the backpacks I took from my cousins. Wired and ready to blow. To make our mark, our point.” Ela tried to smile, but failed. “Be badasses.”

Dylan looked around the chamber again at those hundreds of pounds of mold, fungus, or whatever—but some must be missing now. Loaded into the backpacks Ela had just mentioned, now in the killers' possession.

Our greatest secret …

“You have to go after them,” Ela said, her voice strong in that moment, her grip digging into his arm.

“I'm not going anywhere.”

Another swallow. “I'll be okay.”

“For sure.”

Her eyes faded, then came back to life. “My pocket. It's there.”

Dylan felt about her jeans, which were darkened by blood, until he found a folded piece of paper, similarly stained around the edges.

“What is this?” he asked, unfolding it to find a schematic of some kind, with a bunch of red Xs at what looked like equidistant points.

“Houston. Our plan. The one I stopped.”

“What plan?”

Her eyes faded again, fluttered, closed.

“Ela, what plan?”

She was trying to hold her eyes open, leaving Dylan to picture a bunch of killers who spoke Arabic carrying backpacks filled with some weapon the Comanche had been safeguarding for generations.

“What do the Xs mean?” he asked, regarding the schematic again.

Ela's breathing came in fits and starts, but her eyes suddenly sprang to life. “Targets,” was all she said, before her eyes closed again.

Dylan eased her head into his lap, cradling it with one hand while the other hand felt for his cheap flip phone to text his dad again.

 

P
ART
N
INE

A lot of the old-time Rangers were not happy when they had to start reading Miranda warnings to suspects. They thought the world had ended. They couldn't figure out why on earth you would spend months investigating a case and hunting down a suspect, and then once you've got him, the first thing you have to say is “You have the right not to talk to me.”

—Ranger Doyle Holdridge, in
Tracking the Texas Rangers: The Twentieth Century,
edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Harold J. Weiss, Jr. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2013)

 

89

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

“Footage off a traffic camera shows all three of our targets entering Klyde Warren Park in Dallas less than an hour ago,” Tepper explained to Caitlin and Jones, after Cray Rawls had been escorted from the room.

“They wouldn't be there unless it was to meet someone,” said Caitlin.