Texas Outlaw (Rory Yates #2) - James Patterson Page 0,75
the carbonated beverage.”
As he talks, everything I’ve seen in Rio Lobo starts to make sense. The fact that most of McCormack’s employees look more like mercenaries than oil workers. The way his ranch is fortified with hurricane fencing and razor wire and a guard station. The way he travels with an entourage, driving together like a military convoy.
Dale says he picked up the drugs from a location over by the Mexico border earlier in the day. McCormack owns land out there, with a single pump jack that’s just for show, housed inside a securely fenced area. Someone from McCormack’s team takes a trip out there two or three times a week under the guise of filling a truck with oil when in reality what they’re doing is picking up drugs.
The location is close to the border but otherwise in the middle of nowhere, with hills and rocks and no easy way for trucks to travel between the countries. But there’s a trapdoor at the pump station that opens to a twenty-foot shaft. At the bottom is a tunnel equipped with metal tracks, similar to a mine passage, with a pulley system to move a cart back and forth.
“I don’t know how long the tunnel is or where it goes,” Dale says. “It’s a quarter mile from the Rio Grande, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they got it rigged to go under the river somehow and into Mexico. All I know is whenever I show up, there’s a big pile of drugs waiting to be picked up.”
Dale says there’s even a makeshift elevator they use to bring the drugs up, similar to a dumbwaiter. The only slightly difficult part of the job is carrying the kilos up the ladder of the truck to stash in the hidden compartment on top.
“That’s why you need two people most of the time,” Dale says. “Skip and I used to make the run pretty regular.”
In recent years, Dale says, Carson McCormack’s whole operation has transformed from oil drilling to trafficking in illegal drugs. Mostly cocaine, but also heroin and methamphetamine. The operations center on McCormack’s land, with all the buildings once associated with oil production having been converted to drug refineries. They bring in the cocaine, cut it with laundry detergent or boric acid, repackage it, and ship it throughout the Southwest.
Dale explains that Carson McCormack sat down with all his oil workers a few years ago and gave them a choice: either they get with the program and start working in his drug business or he buys them out.
“That’s what happened to the guy Walt and I used to play with,” he says. “Carson bought him out and he started a new life somewhere else.”
Dale says he considered moving, but he’s lived in Rio Lobo his whole life. He didn’t want to leave. And by staying, he was making better money than ever. He didn’t think about the people the drug trafficking might hurt—on either side of the border. When Susan Snyder died, he honestly thought McCormack had nothing to do with it. But when Skip was killed, he knew Carson and Gareth were responsible for both murders.
“I’m ashamed to admit I still might not have said nothing,” Dale says, “but when they tried to pin it on Ariana, that was the final straw. I couldn’t stay quiet anymore.”
Ariana arrives just as the sun disappears behind the horizon. She is out of breath with a healthy dose of sweat mixed into her river-soaked clothes. She looks exhausted, but when she climbs up onto the truck and I shine a flashlight into the hidden chamber in the oil tanker, her expression lights up with amazement. Dale begins explaining to her what he’s already told me.
When she realizes what this means—that he does in fact have the keys to her freedom—she throws her arms around Dale and gives him a tight hug. She kisses his cheek.
He looks as happy as I’ve ever seen him.
“Before we celebrate,” I say, “we need to figure out what the hell we’re going to do next. This is far from over.”
Chapter 80
AS THE SKY darkens, the three of us discuss our options.
Out here in the hills, we have no cell service and no radio signal. And while McCormack’s tanker is able to navigate the thoroughfare from his property to the highway in the south, there’s no way it could make it over the roads I drove in on. They’re too narrow and several skirt hillsides with steep embankments below. Driving