Gazing at Dylan now, she recalled the headmaster of his school, a cousin of Caitlin’s own high school principal, coming up to her after the victorious opening home game.
“The school owes you a great bit of gratitude, Ranger.”
“Well, sir, I’ll bet Dylan’ll do even better next week.”
The headmaster gestured toward the newly installed lights. “I meant gratitude to the Rangers arranging for the variance that allowed us to go forward with the installation. That’s the only reason we’re able to be here tonight.”
She’d nodded, smiling to herself at how Captain Tepper had managed to arrange Dylan’s admission. “Our pleasure, sir.”
Now, months later, on the campus of an Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island, Dylan looked down at the grass and then up again, something furtive lurking in his suddenly narrowed eyes. The sun sneaking through a nearby tree dappled his face and further hid what he was about to share.
“I got invited to a frat party.”
“Say that again.”
“I got invited to a party at this frat called D-Phi.”
“D
what
?”
“Short for Delta Phi. Like the Greek letters.”
“I know they’re Greek letters, son, just like I know what goes on at these kind of parties given that I’ve been called to break them up on more than one occasion.”
“You’re the one who made me start thinking about college.”
“Doesn’t mean I got you thinking about doing shots and playing beer pong.”
“Beirut.”
Caitlin looked at him as if he were speaking a foreign language.
“They call it Beirut here, not beer pong,” Dylan continued. “And it’s important I get a notion of what campus life is like. You told me that too.”
“I did?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I let you go to this party, you promise you won’t drink?”
Dylan rolled his head from side to side. “I promise I won’t drink
much
.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That I’ll be just fine when you come pick me up in the morning to get to the airport.”
“Pick you up,” Caitlin repeated, her gaze narrowing.
“I’m staying with this kid from Texas who plays on the team. Coach set it up.”
“Coach Estes?”
“Yup. Why?”
Caitlin slapped an arm around the boy’s shoulders and steered him toward the street. “Because I may rethink my decision about shooting him.”
“I told him you were a Texas Ranger,” Dylan said, as they approached a pair of workmen stringing a tape measure outside the athletic complex’s hockey rink.
“What’d he think about that?” Caitlin said, finding her gaze drawn to the two men she noticed had no tools and were wearing scuffed shoes instead of work boots.
“He said he liked gals with guns.”
They continued along the walkway that curved around the parklike grounds, banking left at a small lot where Caitlin had parked her rental. She worked the remote to unlock the doors and watched Dylan ease around to the passenger side, while she turned back toward the hockey rink and the two workmen she couldn’t shake from her mind.
But they were gone.
2
P
ROVIDENCE,
R
HODE
I
SLAND
“What’s this WaterFire thing?” Dylan asked, spooning up the last of his ice cream while Caitlin sipped her nightly post-dinner coffee.
“Like a tradition here. Comes highly recommended.”
“You don’t want me going to that frat party.”
“The thought had crossed my mind, but I’m guessing the WaterFire’ll be done ’fore your party even gets started.”
Dylan held the spoon in his hand and then licked at it.
“How’s the ice cream?”
“It’s gelato.”
“What’s the difference?”
“None, I guess.”
They had chosen to eat at a restaurant called Paragon, again on the recommendation of Coach Estes. It was a fashionably loud, lit, and reasonably priced bistro-like restaurant on the student-dominated Thayer Street, across from the university’s bookstore. Dylan ordered a pizza while Caitlin ruminated over the menu choices before eventually opting for what she always did: a steak. You can take the gal out of Texas, she thought to herself, but you can’t take Texas out of the gal.
“I hear this WaterFire is something special,” Caitlin said when she saw him checking his watch.
“Yeah? Who told you that?”
“Coach Estes. What do you say we head downtown and check it out?”
* * *
They walked through the comfortable cool of the early evening darkness, a welcome respite from the sweltering spring heat wave that had struck Texas just before they’d left. Caitlin wanted to talk, but Dylan wouldn’t look up from his iPhone, banging out text after text.
They strolled up a slight hill and then down a steeper one, joining the thick flow of people heading for the sounds of the nighttime festival known as WaterFire. The air was crisp and laced with the pungent aroma of wood smoke drifting up from Providence’s downtown area, where the masses of milling people were headed. The scent grew stronger while the harmonic strains of music sharpened the closer they drew to an area bridged by walkways crisscrossing a river that ran the entire length of the modest office buildings and residential towers that dominated the city’s skyline. A performance area had been roped off at the foot of the hill, currently occupied by a group of white-faced mimes. An array of pushcarts offering various grilled meats as well as snacks and sweets were lined up nearby, most with hefty lines before them.
The tightest clusters of festival patrons moved in both directions down a walkway at the river’s edge. Caitlin realized the strange and haunting strains of music had their origins down here as well, and moved to join the flow. The black water shimmered like glass, an eerie glow emanating from its surface. Boaters and canoeists paddled leisurely by. A water taxi packed with seated patrons sipping wine slid past, followed by what looked like a gondola straight from Venice.
But it was the source of the orange glow reflecting off the water’s surface that claimed Caitlin’s attention. She could now identify the pungent scent of wood smoke as that of pine and cedar, hearing the familiar crackle of flames as she and Dylan reached a promenade that ran directly alongside the river.
“Caitlin?” Dylan prodded, touching her shoulder.
She jerked to her right, stiffening, the boy’s hand like a hot iron against her shirt.
“Uh-oh,” the boy said. “You got that look.”
“Just don’t like crowds,” Caitlin managed, casting her gaze about. “That’s all.”
A lie, because she felt something wasn’t right, out of rhythm somehow. Her stomach had already tightened and now she could feel the bands of muscle in her neck and shoulders knotting up as well.
“Yeah?” Dylan followed before she forced a smile. “And, like, I’m supposed to believe that?”
Before them, a line of bonfires that seemed to rise out of the water curved along the expanse of the Providence Riverwalk. The source of these bonfires, Caitlin saw now, were nearly a hundred steel braziers of flaming wood moored to the water’s surface and stoked by black-shirted workers in a square, pontoon-like boat, including one who performed an elaborate fire dance in between tending the flames.
The twisting line of braziers seemed to stretch forever into the night. Caitlin and Dylan continued to follow their bright glow, keeping the knee-high retaining wall on their right. More kiosks selling hot dogs, grilled meats to be stuffed in pockets, kabobs, beverages, and souvenirs had been set up on streets and sidewalks above the Riverwalk. The sights and sounds left her homesick for Texas, the sweet smell of wood smoke reminding her of the scent of barbecue and grilled food wafting over the famed San Antonio River Walk.
Caitlin was imagining that smell when she felt
something,
not much and not even identifiable at first, yet enough to make her neck hairs stand up. A ripple in the crowd, she realized an instant later, followed almost immediately by more of a buckling indicative of someone forcing their way through it. Instinct twisted Caitlin in the direction of the ripple’s origin and the flames’ glow caught a face that was familiar to her.
Because it belonged to one of the workmen she’d glimpsed outside the hockey rink back at Brown University. And the second workman stood directly alongside him, their hands pulling their jackets back enough to reveal the dark glint of the pistols wedged into their belts.
3
P
ROVIDENCE,
R
HODE
I
SLAND
Caitlin saw the men’s eyes harden, semiautomatic pistols yanked free and coming around.
She shoved Dylan behind her, feeling the muscles that weight-room workouts had layered into his shoulders and arms, as she drew her own SIG Sauer P226.
The last thing she saw before she opened fire were flashes of steel in both workmen’s hands, rising fast in the glow off the nearby flames. Her spin toward them had obviously surprised the workmen, but her gunshots shocked them even more.
She fired through a tunnel in the night air, imagining she could feel the heat of the bullets blazing a path forward. She kept pulling the SIG’s trigger, standing rigid amid the panicked jostling and sudden surge her gunfire had unleashed.
She realized she was still holding fast to Dylan in her off hand, dimly aware of the muzzle flashes and the thuds of her nine-millimeter shells clacking against the concrete beneath her. The impacts forced the workmen backward, where they crumpled to become land mines in the path of the throngs sent fleeing by the gunshots.
Caitlin pushed her way toward the downed gunmen, able to catch sight of their lost pistols being kicked about by feet thrashing over the concrete. No thought given in that moment to the fact that this wasn’t Texas and she’d just gunned down two men in a state the size of a postage stamp, where the authorities might not be nearly as sympathetic to her methods as D. W. Tepper.
She released the hand holding tight to Dylan and stooped to retrieve the stray pistols, realizing she had no plastic evidence gloves, when the sudden roar of an engine grabbed her attention anew. Instinctively, she lurched back upright, facing the sound’s origins on the river with Dylan planted behind her again.
A motorboat sped toward the scene, cracking a gondola from its path and then slamming a small skiff tending the braziers out of its way. Impact sprayed fresh fuel and kindling across the water’s surface, the motorboat jostled just enough to keep a gunman poised in the rear from opening fire with his assault rifle when he’d intended to. Caitlin resteadied her SIG and parted the crowd as she aimed, a clear path between her and the gunman now.
He got his weapon leveled.
Caitlin fired hers. Three times, the pistol’s roar echoing over the panicked cries and Baroque music. She hit the gunman twice, stealing his balance and pitching him into the outboard motor. Plenty of bullets left to use on the boat’s driver, whose right hand had dropped from the wheel.
Caitlin fired at him until she heard the click of the hammer striking an empty chamber as the SIG’s slide locked in place, the motorboat now veering straight for one of the braziers. The violent crash caused a flame burst that showered fiery embers into the air to rain down on the fuel and kindling pooled on the surface.
POOOOOOFFFFFFF!
The exploding speedboat sent a hot wind blowing up against Caitlin as flames erupted on the water, faces twisted in fear along the Riverwalk framed by the glow. Caitlin managed to steady herself with a shallow breath and grabbed a second magazine from her jacket.
“Caitlin!”
Dylan’s cry reached her before she’d jacked it home and she swung toward the boy in the same moment he rushed past her, straight for a big man she hadn’t noticed wielding a big knife.
“Dyl—”
Caitlin wasn’t sure if she started to scream his name or only thought to, as the boy hit the man low with a classic football tackle that drove him up and over the retaining wall. He splashed into the water below with Dylan ready to spill over after him involuntarily, until Caitlin grabbed the boy’s baggy Brown University sweatshirt and drew him backward before he lost the rest of his balance.
Fresh magazine in place, she moved back to the wall in search of the man lost amid the fiery sheen caught in the river’s reflection. She rotated her eyes and pistol, but the river and the night gave up nothing.
Caitlin stepped back, even again with Dylan, the boy’s face shiny with perspiration and looking like a Halloween mask in the river’s angry orange glow.
“Water fire, all right,” she said, falling well short of a smile when fresh footsteps pounded her way.
She shoved Dylan behind her, pistol coming back around.
“Drop the gun!” ordered a blue-uniformed Providence police officer now in her line of vision. “I said,
drop the gun
!”
Caitlin let the SIG fall to her feet and raised her hands in the air, making sure Dylan did the same.
4
F
IESTA,
T
EXAS
“SkyScreamer?” Cort Wesley Masters posed to his younger son, Luke.
“Come on, Dad,” the boy prodded, “take a chance. You never do anything exciting.”
Cort Wesley wasn’t sure where Luke was going with that, until the boy grinned over his own comic reference to the last few years that had seen Cort Wesley and Caitlin Strong taking on just about every bad guy Texas had to offer. He let the boy lead him about the day-glow brightness of Six Flags in Fiesta, just outside San Antonio, located in an old limestone quarry where the two-hundred-acre park was surrounded by majestic ten-story cliffs. From the parking lot, Luke made straight for the SkyScreamer, the sight of which left Cort Wesley’s stomach fluttering. The latest park attraction turned out to be a towering twenty-story swing ride that spun at speeds in excess of forty miles per hour.
“You’re scared,” Luke said, as they took their place in line under the crystal clear night sky.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re gritting your teeth. You never grit your teeth.”