Page 1 of Lone Star

One

Nighttime in December, in the desert, was colder than a non-desert-dweller might expect. A fine, crystalline layer of frost settled on the hard-packed dirt, and the hardy, spiny vegetation that grew in tufts between boulders, and along the open, dry-cracked pans of flat ground that ran between the highways and the jagged, unclimbable hills. A cold that could send you into hypothermia if you weren’t properly equipped. A cold that could, in this case,preservesomething.

The bodies had been dumped yesterday evening, just before dark, Candy judged. Late enough that, when the cold came on, quick and brutal, it had slowed the decomposition process. It had started up this morning, when the sun finally reached its zenith, when its brightness melted the last traces of frost and heated the arid earth to the sort of cozy temperature that made you want to dig your toes in, like you were at the beach.

Dumpwas an unfair word for it. They’d been positioned carefully.Staked: long railroad spikes driven in, the arms and legs star-fished out and secured with polymer rope tied tight. They’d been alive, still, when they were secured, and killed on-site: throats slit, ugly black gashes, serrated at the edges where the blood had clotted and dried. The blood had slipped down their necks, and pooled on the sand below, now an attraction for ants and scorpions. Buzzards had been here, too. The eyes were gone. A chunk from one cheek. Bits of finger pecked that Candy didn’t want to look at too closely.

There were three. Men in their twenties and or thirties; hearty, but showing signs of starvation, their clothes fitting as loosely as if they’d been staked out here in the sun for months, rather than a matter of hours.

Beside him, Blue let out a low, almost-impressed whistle.

Candy turned to the man who’d called him out here. Pacer Menendez stared off across the long, flat pan of this stretch of empty land, off toward the squat, abandoned little shack that housed the electrical boxes of the cell towers that threw long shadows against the far cliffs. He held his knuckles pressed tight to his mouth, edges of his lips white with stress and sickness, pupils shrunk down to pinpricks against the blazing sun. Candy had never seen him without a hat; when he took off his helmet, he always pulled a battered, curled-brim Houston Oilers hat out of his back pocket, and crammed it down on his head; it had left a permanent dent across his forehead over the years. He didn’t wear it, now, sweat beading on his brow and sliding down his temples unheeded.

It wasn’t hot. Candy wore his thickest Carhartt under his cut.

“Pace,” he prodded gently.

“I just don’t understand,” he said, voice low, and thready. “We don’t…we didn’t…who would do this to us?”

Candy didn’t know, but he intended to find out.

Two

“Ritualistic,” Agent Cantrell announced, grimly, and stood, shaking the creases from his trouser legs with one blue-gloved hand.

Candy had finally, after careful thought, and even more careful consideration, convinced Pacer to call the police. Two portable, open-sided tents had been set up, sunlight filtering through their blue nylon and making the bodies look especially dead. One had been erected over the corpses – the larger of the two – and the other had become a sort of command central. Candy was there, standing beside the folding camp chair Pacer had finally been steered down into, hand white-knuckled around a can of warming Coke, condensation dripping unheeded down onto one denim-covered knee.

He’d met Pacer for the first time when he himself was ten, when Pacer was a scrawny Lean Dogs prospect, his pimple-flecked face pale with stress as Jack Snow held out a hand for the cut the boy still gripped like a lifeline. “Hand it on over, son,” Jack had said, his rich voice low and soothing. “There’s no shame in finding out you aren’t a good fit for something. This isn’t meant to be your world, and nobody can find fault with that.”

He’d gotten his walking papers that day, but he’d left the club as a friend, and, a few years later, when he’d founded a non-outlaw riding club called the Road Runners, he’d done so with Jack’s – and the Lean Dogs’ – blessing. It had become a sort of haven for all the Harley riders who loved the open road, but didn’t love the idea of running guns and drugs to earn their bread and butter.

“No shame in it at all,” Jack had always said. “The world needs the good ones more than it needs us.”

A hell of a thing to tell one’s son, but it had stuck in Candy’s mind; he’d preserved the treaty with the Road Runners after Dad was gone, and Crockett stepped down. He hadn’t expected the call he’d gotten this morning; hadn’t expected the wavery panic in Pacer’s usually-mellow voice.

Definitely hadn’t expected “ritualistic” killings in the flat, arid stretch of land where Lean Dogs’ territory butted up to Road Runners’ turf, but here they were.

Texas State Troopers had shown up while Pacer sat in the shade of their three bikes parked together, staring sightlessly into the middle distance. A matched pair of boys in khaki, hiking gun belts up beneath their potbellies, one chewing gum, the other wallowing a toothpick around like a tongue-wielded weapon. They’d looked at Candy before they’d looked at the bodies, long stares over the rims of their cliché aviators, glances toward his patches, especially his President tag.

He’d given them his best shit-eating grin. “The poor, unfortunate deceased are over that way, officers.”

The toothpick had twirled his direction threateningly.

After a few minutes of moving around the bodies, crouching, examining, standing, fanning their red faces with their hats, the troopers had decided it was time to call in the big guns. The FBI – a single agent who looked young enough to be Candy’s kid – had pulled up an hour later, parking a dusty Explorer beneath the swooping black shadows of the vultures that kept circling, circling overhead, patient and tireless.

“Well,” Cantrell said now, stepping into the command tent, snapping off his gloves. “It looks like you boys have some cultists on your hands.”

Candy waited for the laugh he figured must be coming, but the agent just looked between the three of them. “Cultists,” he finally deadpanned.

“Yeah,” Cantrell said, reaching to dig around in the cooler for a drink. He paused to press the dripping can of Mountain Dew to his forehead a moment before popping the tab, not seeming bothered by the icy rivulets of water that ran down his face and dripped onto his sweat-darkened shirt front. “Goddamn, it’s hot out here.”

It waswarm, Candy thought. He’d shrugged out of his jacket, but he wasn’t sweating like this guy.

“Cultists,” Cantrell repeated, when he’d taken a few long swallows. “Saw a case in Nevada like this just a few weeks ago. Vics staked out in the open, throats cut. The whole deal.”

“You found the murderers, then?” Candy asked.

Cantrell winced. “Not yet, no. But we’re narrowing it down. The profilers say it’s classic cult behavior.”

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