Page 79 of The Killing Plains

Avery threw up her hands. “Dammit, Jimmy—Jace has been missing since yesterday and you’re just now telling us this?”

“How was I s’pposed to know he took his camping gear?”

“Forget it,” Colly said. “Draw us a map. Then get Animal Control and Solid Waste Management over here—there’s a parrot and a dead hog to deal with.”

Chapter 21

Although heavy on facts about the Revolutionary War, Thomas Edison, and the wreck of theHindenburg, the textbooks employed in the New Jersey school system of Colly’s childhood had painted the history of Texas with a very broad brush. What knowledge she’d acquired on the subject had come through a middle-school history project she’d once helped Victoria complete. West Texas had always seemed to Colly like a dreary, arid wasteland—but it had seen its share of action and atrocity.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, federal soldiers had abandoned the forts guarding the old Butterfield Overland stagecoach route and hurried east to fight, leaving the Texas frontier largely unprotected. The Comanche, displaced by the government decades earlier, seized the opportunity to push southward from the Indian Territories and reclaim vast swathes of the stony scrubland that comprised their ancestral Comancheria.

After the war, General Philip H. Sheridan was charged with expelling the tribe once again from West Texas. Lacking the troops to accomplish the task militarily, he decided to starve the Comanche into submission. Federally authorized and munitioned hide hunters slaughtered the great herds of buffalo by the millions, skinning the humps and leaving the carcasses to rot in the sun.

The tactic was brutal but effective. The Comanche who survived the ensuing famine were driven off. And in the years that followed, white settlers lured to the area by the promise of cheap land were astonished to find it strewn so thickly with bleached buffalo skeletons that the ground seemed covered with snow. Homesteaders gathered up and sold the bones by the ton to fertilizer companies, who ground them into meal so that gardeners in the more “civilized” parts of the country could compost their vegetables with the evidence of a federally sanctioned genocide.

Every inch of this desert is soaked in blood, Colly thought, gazing absently out of the window as Avery navigated the squad car along the backroads of Coke County.And for what? Who’d want to live here, let alone kill for the privilege?

“Think we’ve gone too far?” Avery asked.

Startled out of her musings, Colly squinted at Jimmy Meggs’ crudely drawn map. “We’re supposed to ‘turn at the buffalo skull’—Meggs said we can’t miss it.”

“Jimmy couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight.” Avery nodded towards the ominous blue-black cloudbank flickering like a paper lantern in the distance. “Hopethatholds off till we’re back on asphalt.”

After a few more miles, they came to a dirt track that branched away from the road on their right, ducking beneath a rustic archway of cedar logs. A gigantic horned skull loomed over the passage, its blank round eye sockets gazing down at them from the arch’s crossbeam. Staring at it, Colly felt gooseflesh rise on her arms.

They followed the track down a slope and back up to the top of a shallow ridgeline, where it plunged into a forest of dark juniper dotted with stands of still-leafless mesquite.

“We should have an SUV for this,” Avery muttered as they lurched over deep, dried ruts. She glanced at Colly. “What’s theplan—just drive up to Hoyer’s camp and hope he doesn’t open fire?”

Colly was well-trained in urban tactics but had little wilderness experience. “I’m not sure. Any suggestions?”

“Visibility’s shit in here. I could approach in the car while you cover me on foot. With any luck, Jace wouldn’t see you.”

“Good idea—but I’ll take the car.”

“You’ll be more exposed.”

“I’ve been shot at before, but I don’t know the first thing about sneaking up on someone in the woods.”

Avery shrugged and stopped the car. “Give me the map.” She studied it carefully. “Jimmy says Jace likes to set up here.” She tapped on a largeXin the upper corner. “Stupid of him, but good for us. That close to the creek, he won’t hear us coming.”

Tossing the map back to Colly, Avery eased the cruiser forward.

A few minutes later, she stopped again as they approached a blind curve. “Hoyer’s camp should be just ahead.”

They climbed out of the car, and Colly walked around to the driver’s side. Avery had drawn her service pistol and was checking the magazine.

“Handguns are no match for what Hoyer’s probably got, but they’re better than nothing.” She looked up. “I’ll follow on the left. Go slow or you’ll lose me.” Avery turned and stepped quietly into the forest.

Colly climbed behind the steering wheel. Unholstering her own gun, she laid it beside her, then shifted the car into gear. Around the bend, the track ran beside a narrow, swift-flowing stream that chuckled over moss-covered stones and fallen logs. The ground was damp here, and Colly spotted recent tire tracks. In her excitement, she accelerated for a few seconds before remembering herself. She stopped and waited for a minute, then continued at a crawl thatshe hoped would match the pace of someone on foot in the dense vegetation.

A hundred yards further on, the road curved again, following a bend in the streambed. Rounding the curve, Colly’s pulse quickened. In a grassy clearing ahead, Jace Hoyer’s pickup sat beside a lime-green pop-up tent. Hoyer was nowhere in sight. The door and windows of the tent were zipped closed, and the firepit beside it had not been recently used.

Colly shifted into park and quietly opened the car door. Outside, she understood Avery’s earlier comment about Jace’s choice of campsite. Whitebone Creek was surprisingly noisy for its size. It would easily obscure the sound of an engine or the crack of a twig.

Colly peered through the trees to her left. No sign of Avery.We should’ve arranged a signal, she thought.

Though in Houston she’d followed armed men down dark alleyways and into crack houses without hesitation, here Colly moved forward nervously, clutching her sidearm. She hadn’t gone three steps when a horrible baying erupted. Two enormous pit bulls scrambled from beneath Hoyer’s pickup and raced towards her. Colly stepped backwards, raising her gun. Her heel caught on an exposed tree root. She fell, landing hard on her back. The impact knocked the gun out of her hand. It flew beneath the squad car.

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