Texas Ranger Read online

  His playlist is mostly rock: AC/DC, Springsteen, Foo Fighters. He and Anne used to joke that she was a little bit country and he was a little bit rock and roll. Truthfully, she was a little bit country and he was a lot rock and roll.

  That was until she came along. She soothed the raging rocker in him and helped him appreciate the simple yet heartfelt stories told in country songs. Now he could enjoy the sound of a musician jamming on the fiddle as much as an electric guitar solo.

  That’s why there are a handful of country songs interspersed throughout his playlist. But tonight, when one of them comes on, he presses Skip to find another loud, distracting, fist-pumping rock anthem.

  A Kenny Chesney song comes on, and he presses Skip.

  A Garth Brooks tune.

  Skip.

  Then a familiar fiddle solo starts and Cal’s hand freezes over his phone. He knows he should skip the song, but he can’t.

  This was his and Anne’s song.

  It’s Garth Brooks’s “Callin’ Baton Rouge”—a fast-paced, two-minute jam about a trucker stopping every hundred miles to call his girlfriend in Baton Rouge.

  Neither he nor Anne had ever actually been to Baton Rouge, but when he first started driving rigs out of state, he called her constantly and said he felt like the guy in that corny Garth Brooks song. She said she loved the song, and so it became their song.

  It was the one song he could line dance to. Anne taught him. Back before the Pale Horse hired that Willow Dawes to perform every night, he and Anne would play the song on the jukebox and dance to it, whether anyone else was out on the floor or not.

  And they developed a saying between them: “We’ll always have Baton Rouge.”

  They were like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca saying, “We’ll always have Paris,” even though Cal and Anne were never in Baton Rouge.

  Whenever life brought them hardships—if Anne’s car broke down or the roof leaked—they would breathe a deep sigh and joke, “We’ll always have Baton Rouge.”

  Cal thought that one day he would propose to Anne, and for their honeymoon, he would take her to a bed-and-breakfast in Baton Rouge. It wasn’t much of a tourist destination, he was sure, but the two of them would laugh about it. Anne would get the joke. They wouldn’t need to leave the room often anyway.

  But instead of proposing…

  Cal doesn’t want to think of it. He presses Skip. When a Van Halen song comes on, he finds himself unable to listen. Sammy Hagar is singing about dreams, but Cal is dreaming about Anne. He backtracks to the Baton Rouge song. He knows he shouldn’t, but he can’t seem to stop himself.

  The fiddle begins again, and Cal starts to cry. The road lights blur as tears fill his eyes.

  The grief is bad enough. Unbearable.

  But Cal is also experiencing the pain of something else.

  Guilt.

  Chapter 47

  CAL’S SEMI APPROACHES a truck stop he frequents on the outskirts of Amarillo. It’s a big travel center, with a long queue of pumps and a large back lot for truckers to park their rigs overnight. There’s a diner nearby—his favorite on the roads he’s traveled—and even though he hasn’t had much of an appetite lately, he figures he should make some effort to give his body sustenance.

  He checks his phone and sees that there are missed calls from the company that hired him for this job as well as another from the detective, DeAndre Purvis. He doesn’t bother to listen to the messages.

  He fills up with diesel and parks the truck in the gravel back lot. Inside the building, there are showers, and Cal heads there before going to the diner. He hasn’t had a shower in days, and he can smell his own stink. Even though Anne’s house is technically his now, he hasn’t spent much time in it since she died. Each time he steps through the front door, the quiet and the emptiness spook him. The stench of antiseptic cleaning products doesn’t quite hide the lingering smell of blood. When he walks into the living room, looks at the bare floor, and sees the maroon stain on the plywood, he feels nauseated and has to leave the house. He’s been sleeping in his truck in the driveway, urinating in a milk jug, and driving to Walmart to use its restroom when he has to do more than piss.

  The showerhead provides only a trickle of lukewarm water, but it’s better than nothing. Afterward, he shaves at the sink and then puts on fresh clothes. He takes his dirty jeans and T-shirt back to the truck. He stuffs them into a black garbage bag. He reaches into the storage cubby above the driver’s seat, where he keeps two things: his wallet and a seven-inch military combat knife.

  He takes the wallet and leaves the knife.

  The night air is warm and smells of diesel. He actually feels pretty good. Cleaned up, he has a nostalgic memory of when he was young and he would get dressed up and hit the town, looking for adventure. His mission: to get high, drunk, or laid—preferably all three.

  Sometimes Cal misses those days. But now that his life with Anne is over and there’s nothing stopping him from going back to being the partyer he once was, he has no desire for that. He prefers the life with Anne. But prefer isn’t even the right word. It was as if, when he was with Anne, he could be the real Cal. The other one, the younger Cal, was only a stupid kid trying to find himself.

  Now he’s lost again.

  This line of thinking makes his legs feel wobbly beneath him, but he forces himself to keep walking. He pushes through the diner’s door—greeted by the ding of a bell—and makes his way to the counter. He sits on a round spinning stool with a cracked vinyl seat and turns a white porcelain mug over to show the waitress that he wants coffee.

  Emily, a cute twentysomething girl who has been serving him for years, comes up and pours him a cup of decaf. She knows what he likes.

  She looks around the room, making sure no one is listening, and she says, “That cop called again.”

  “He did?”

  Emily is normally bubbly with flirtatious banter, but tonight she looks worried. Her eyes are bloodshot, as if she’s been losing sleep.

  “I don’t think he believes me,” she says. “About where you were that night.”

  Cal stares at her. “Which cop?”

  It could be DeAndre Purvis, the detective in charge of the investigation. Or it could be Rory Yates, Anne’s self-righteous ex-husband, conducting an investigation on his own time.

  Cal hopes it’s the former. Even though Purvis is the one who’s actually assigned the case—the one with the resources and authority—Yates has always had it in for Cal. And if Cal is honest with himself—which is hard because he despises Yates so much—he knows that Rory is the better cop. Rory’s a damn good Ranger, as much as Cal hates to admit it. He can be like a bloodhound who won’t stop hunting once he’s caught a scent.

  But Emily says she can’t remember the cop’s name.

  “Was it DeAndre Purvis?”

  “That sounds right,” she says, looking scared.

  She tells him that Purvis also talked to Paul, the diner’s manager, who also gave Cal his fake alibi.

  “I don’t think he believes us,” Emily says. “I’m afraid I’m going to get into big trouble for lying to the cops.”

  “Sit down for a second,” Cal says.

  “I’ve got customers,” she says.

  “For a second,” he says sternly.

  She does as he asks, sitting on the barstool next to him. He takes her hand and looks into her eyes.

  “If you tell them I wasn’t here that night,” Cal says, “I’ll probably spend the rest of my life in prison.”

  She pinches her lips together, as if steeling her resolve.

  “As long as you and Paul keep your stories straight and don’t change a thing,” Cal says, “there shouldn’t be any trouble. They’re just double-checking all their information.”

  “I just…” She hesitates and then decides she feels comfortable enough to tell Cal what she’s feeling. “I just don’t know why you can’t tell them where you were.”

  “They won’t belie
ve me,” he lies.

  The real answer is, I don’t want anyone to know.

  Now it’s Cal’s turn to look around and make sure no one is listening. He whispers, “You know I didn’t do it, don’t you?”

  Emily hesitates a second too long and then says, “Of course you didn’t, Cal. I know you loved her.”

  Emily rises from her seat and goes to place Cal’s regular order: steak, mashed potatoes, and corn.

  Later, as Cal is eating, a TV above the counter shows the local Texas news. DeAndre Purvis is on the screen, and the words SECOND MURDER IN SMALL TOWN are stamped at the bottom.

  But the TV is muted, and Cal never notices what’s on it.

  He just chews his steak mechanically, his eyes staring at nothing, his mind replaying over and over the last fight he had with Anne—and what happened after.

  Chapter 48

  CAL RETURNS TO his truck.

  The cab is cramped compared to some semi-tractors. There is a sleeper space behind the front seats, but the mattress is narrow and the storage spaces are limited. Because Cal has been living out of the truck, the interior cabin is a mess, with clothes in piles and fast-food wrappers strewn about. He keeps a small Igloo cooler next to the front seat, but the ice has melted and the Cokes inside it are warm. An old shoe has been turned into a makeshift cup holder that’s on the floor by his bed, with a half-drunk cup of coffee sitting in it.

  He stretches out on his mattress, lying on top of his sleeping bag. He considers watching a movie on his TV, but he’s seen all his DVDs a hundred times. He pulls out a couple of Playboys from a drawer under the bed and flips through them. The women are all fake—silicone breasts and airbrushed skin—and he grows bored of looking at them. None of them are as pretty as Anne was.

  He turns off his light and draws back the curtain to block out the streetlamps shining through the windshield. In the darkness, he smells a pleasant aroma. His own body odor was so bad before that he didn’t notice it, but now that he’s clean, he can smell it.

  Is it Anne’s smell, lingering?

  No, he realizes.

  It’s Patty. She was the last woman in the cab of the truck.

  Cal sits up, suddenly angry. He yanks back the curtain and crawls into the driver’s side seat. His whole body feels tense, as if he might burst into flame at any moment.

  He reaches up and grabs the knife out of the cubby above the seat. He yanks off the sheath and stares at the blade. It’s a KA-BAR Marine Corps knife. The blade is black nonreflective steel, so it won’t glint in the dark, and it’s sharp enough to easily cut through flesh. Cal has only ever used it to open packages or cut rope. But it’s built to kill people—the Marines don’t issue it so they can open letters from home.

  He looks out the window and watches the truck stop around him. It’s late and business is slow, but there are a few people about, filling up trucks or walking back from the diner.

  The back door of the diner opens, and Emily steps out, walking briskly toward her car.

  She and Cal have been flirting for years. She has a longtime boyfriend and Cal always had Anne, so they never put themselves into a position to act on their attraction.

  But he bets he could get her into the back of his truck if he tried.

  He could open the door, call out to her, and…see what happens.

  He considers it for a moment, but he knows that won’t make him feel better. Not tonight.

  He watches her taillights as she drives away.

  He stares at the knife.

  He places the blade against his wrists. He presses down—not enough to cut flesh. Not yet.

  But if he pressed down just a little and slid the blade across his wrists, his skin would open up and his veins would stream forth a river of hot blood.

  He could sit here—growing numb, growing tired—and let the world turn dark.

  And he wouldn’t have to wake up tomorrow with all the guilt eating at him like acid.

  He tosses the knife onto the passenger-side floorboard.

  Killing himself would be too easy.

  He decides to torture himself instead.

  So he presses Play on Garth Brooks’s “Callin’ Baton Rouge,” and he puts his head in his hands and weeps.

  “We’ll never have Baton Rouge,” he mutters.

  Chapter 49

  I WAKE UP with sunlight coming through the hospital window. I’ve pretzeled myself into one of the chairs, and I sit up with a sore neck and back.

  Dad’s eyes are open, and he’s looking at me.

  “Dad,” I say. “Are you okay?”

  The room is empty except for the two of us. I’m not sure if Mom and my brothers stuck around or if they went home for the night.

  “I’m okay,” Dad says. “Are you?”

  It takes me a moment to figure out what he means, but then it comes to me: Patty’s death.

  “I guess so,” I say. “I just can’t believe it.”

  Dad nods, knowing there are no words to offer for comfort.

  He doesn’t look well. His eyes are underlined with dark crescent moons, and his skin is the color of cigarette ash.

  “Any leads?” Dad says.

  His voice sounds rough and raw, as if someone has taken a belt sander to his vocal cords.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve been cut out of the investigation. No one’s telling me anything.”

  He gives me a skeptical look. Without him speaking a word, I know what he’s trying to tell me: There’s a police investigation and then there’s your investigation.

  I tell him that I want to find out who killed Patty and Anne but my hands are tied. Freddy has been able to tell me some inside information, but otherwise I don’t know anything. There is so much information that Purvis has access to that I don’t: forensic evidence collected at the scenes, interviews with people the victims knew, phone records, email accounts. The list goes on.

  “In a case like this,” I say, “where it looks like the same suspect killed both victims, Purvis should be looking at all the ways the two are tied together, narrowing down the suspect list.”

  Dad gives me the same look as before, as if he’s saying, Don’t bullshit me, Rory. “You know what connects them,” he says. “You.”

  “Yeah,” I say, and I hang my head.

  We’re both silent for a moment.

  “Before I got the call that you had collapsed,” I say, “I was about to kick Anne’s door down and look around in her house—Cal’s house—for some kind of evidence. I probably would have gotten myself thrown in jail.”

  Dad asks if I’m sure Cal did it.

  “Ninety percent sure,” I say. “It doesn’t make sense that he was the one to kill Patty, though. Anne’s death would have been a crime of passion for Cal. Guys kill their girlfriends all the time. Extreme domestic violence. But why Patty? In the same way? Her death makes it seem like these murders have been the work of a serial killer.” I add, “Still, Cal was the last person seen with Patty.”

  Dad clears his throat. “Sometimes doing the right thing ain’t the same as doing what the rules say you’re supposed to,” he says. “You’re the best person to figure this out, son, and just because you got one hand tied behind your back don’t mean you can’t do it.”

  I look him in the eye. While his body has gone frail, his eyes still hold the strength I always admired when I was growing up.

  “You’re telling me I should jeopardize my career and risk going to jail?”

  “If it’s the right thing to do,” he says, “then it’s the right thing to do. It don’t matter if there’s risks. Or consequences. Right is right.”

  I nod my head, preparing myself for what I need to do.

  “But,” Dad says, raising his hand to caution me, “that don’t mean you should be stupid. It ain’t gonna do nobody no good if you’re sitting in jail and the killer’s on the loose. You gotta be smart. When you’re 100 percent sure, son, that’s when you go kick the door down.”

  I t
ell him that when Mom or Jake or Chris get back to the hospital to sit with him, I’m going to get to the bottom of what’s happening.

  He tells me not to wait.

  “Don’t you worry about me, son. I ain’t dying till you get this son of a bitch.”

  I smile—that’s the dad I know so well.

  “I didn’t have a daughter,” Dad says. “My daughters-in-law are the closest thing I’ll ever have. Your brothers’ wives are wonderful women, but between you and me, Anne was always my favorite. And just ’cause you got divorced don’t mean I didn’t still love her. Patty was a sweet girl, too. Your mom and I both wanted you to make it work with her. It ain’t right what happened to her.”

  Dad raises a trembling arm and points toward the door.

  “You shouldn’t be in here, waiting around to see if I die,” he says. “Go find who killed our girls.”

  I rise and Dad grabs my hand before I can leave.

  “And Rory,” he says. “If you can, you arrest the son of a bitch. But if you can’t, you put him in the ground. You understand?”

  I do.

  Chapter 50

  THE FIRST THING I do is call Creasy and tell him I need an extended leave of absence.

  “I never should have come back so soon,” I say. “And now, with Patty’s death, the last thing I should be doing is working.”

  “You take all the time you need, partner,” Creasy says. “You just get some rest and spend time with your family. The Rangers will be waiting for you when you’re ready.”

  As I hang up, I think, You might not be so supportive when you find out what I’m up to.

  I drive over to Glen’s Garage, a mechanic shop where Cal used to work. I always suspected that Cal sold drugs out of the place. I know it’s been a while since he worked there—and supposedly he turned his back on that life long ago—but I have a feeling some of Cal’s old skeletons might be hidden there. And it might be a place DeAndre Purvis hasn’t looked yet.

  “Well, if it ain’t Rory Yates,” says Glen himself as I walk up.