'Are you drinking?'
'No… yes.'
He could never lie to her, except about Mandy.
'How'd you find me?'
'GPS. Your cell phone.'
'My phone? '
'Cell phones are just tracking devices that make calls.'
'You tracked my phone?'
'The Rangers did. So what do you think you're doing?'
'I'm nursing.'
'Who?'
'No. I'm going to work as a nurse.'
'In Laredo?'
'In the colonias.'
'Oh, for Christ's sake, Lindsay, that's crazy!'
'Maybe to you, Bode. But not to me.'
'You're the governor's wife.'
'Not down here.'
'Go home, Lindsay. Now.'
'No. I'm staying here. Give my best to Mandy.'
The line went dead. He stared at the phone. Shit.
Lindsay stared at her phone a long moment then looked up at the doctor looking at her. His arms were full with two bags of groceries and his face with the awkward moment.
'She's twenty-seven. Mandy.'
Which made the moment even more awkward.
'So,' he said with a forced smile, 'let us have dinner.'
'I hope you bought wine.'
The governor of Texas downed his bourbon. His third. He needed hard liquor after learning that his wife knew about his mistress.
'That sonofabitch can carve up a cow faster'n those raptors in that dinosaur movie,' John Ed was saying. 'I get Manuel to run a dried-up cow inside the game fence every week or so. That big ol' lion sniffs her out in no time, hunts her down, pounces on her, rips her apart. Damnedest thing I've ever seen.'
Mandy, Ranger Hank, and Jim Bob had gone upstairs. Mandy needed her beauty sleep, Hank needed his sports fix on satellite TV, and Jim Bob needed to plug his laptop into a landline like a patient on life support. Bode and John Ed had gone into the study to drink Kentucky bourbon and smoke Cuban cigars.
'You sure you want me to shoot your lion?'
'There's more where he came from. Course, you gotta track him down and get close enough to put a bullet in him. Maybe two.'
John Ed puffed on his cigar.
'Manuel, he'll have the horses saddled and your guns packed, ready to ride at dawn. He's a good tracker. He'll find that lion for you. Used to be the foreman on a game ranch outside Guadalajara, big place catering to Americans. Then the cartels took over the country, so Americans stopped going south to hunt-they became the hunted instead of the hunter. I needed a place to hunt, so I turned this land into a game ranch, hired Manuel. Been with me five years now.'
'He legal?'
'Hell, no. None of my Mexicans are legal.' John Ed chuckled. 'While back, me and Manuel, we're riding the range in the Hummer, he asks me, ' Senor John Ed, is Obama going to make me a citizen?' I said, 'Why the hell do you want to be an American citizen?' He says, 'I want to vote.' You believe that? I bring him up here, give him a job, place to live… now he wants to vote. How's that for gratitude?'
John Ed Johnson had come of age back when men were men and women were cheerleaders and Mexicans did the hard work and kept their mouths shut.
'Life was simple back then,' John Ed said. 'Oil, cattle, and Mexicans doing what they were told and didn't expect us to educate their kids or make them citizens.'
Bode knew better than to get John Ed started on Mexicans, so he diverted the conversation.
'You riding out with us in the morning?'
'Nope. Man my age, I sleep in. You and Jim Bob have fun. Me and Mandy, we'll have a long breakfast.' He winked. 'You know, I never lost my testosterone. Most men my age, they need a pill to get it up, if they can. Not me. You?'
' Me? Hell, no.'
Bode said it with such conviction he almost believed himself.
'I still wake up every day with a hard-on,' John Ed said, 'which is why I sleep in… usually with Rosita. I enjoy sex in the morning.'
John Ed Johnson had a reputation for being a horny old bastard, chasing skirts all across Texas and plowing through four wives. He was currently between wives if not skirts. But being a self-made billionaire-and not in computer code that no one understood, but in cattle and oil that everyone understood-he had achieved that larger- than-life legendary Texan status, the kind of man kids would read about in their Texas history class one day, like LBJ and H.L. Hunt. A Texas politician could never have a better friend-if you always said yes-or a worse enemy-if you ever said no. You did not want to be on his bad side. As Jim Bob said, 'That's a dark place indeed.' John Ed had contributed $20 million to each of Bode's last two campaigns-there was no limit on campaign contributions by individuals in Texas-and Bode was waiting on his $20 million check for the current campaign. John Ed Johnson had put Bode Bonner in the Governor's Mansion.
And he could take Bode Bonner out.
Like Bode, John Ed had grown up on a cattle ranch; unlike the Bonner family's modest five-thousand-acre spread, the Johnson family's land in West Texas spread over three counties and was measured in square miles rather than acres. His granddaddy had taken a hundred thousand head of cattle on the long trail drives north to the railheads in Kansas back in the 1800s. By John Ed's time, the trains had come to Texas.
But if his old man had been the Bick Benedict of his time, John Ed was the Jett Rink of his. After his dad died, he turned production on the ranch from Angus beef to black gold. Oil. Just as Texas had produced the beef the nation needed during his old man's time, Texas produced the oil the world needed during John Ed's time. Texas had so much oil that from 1930, when the great East Texas field was discovered, and for the next forty years, the Texas Railroad Commission controlled the price of oil-in the entire world-by controlling the amount of oil Texas produced. Texas sat on a sea of oil.
But the Middle East sat on an ocean of oil.
In 1960, the Arabs formed OPEC, modeled after the Railroad Commission. By 1973, Texas no longer controlled the price of oil; OPEC did. Americans stood in gas lines during the oil embargo because Texas no longer supplied the world's oil or even America's oil; the Arabs did. For the last forty years, the Arabs had controlled the price of oil in the world. Even in Texas.
'Took a lot of the fun out of the oil business,' John Ed always said, 'not being able to control prices.'
So John Ed moved on to the next big thing: water. Just as a landowner in Texas owns the oil under his land, he also owns the water. And he can sell that water.
'Ninety percent of Texans live in the city now, and they're fast running out of water because they want their pools full and their grass green. They'll be drinking spit in twenty years, ten if this drought don't let up. Then they'll pay an arm and a leg for drinking water. My water. I bought up groundwater rights all across West Texas, figure I can pump that water out of the ground, pipe it to the cities, and turn a nice profit. Water's more valuable than oil these days. If you control water, you control Texas.'
'I thought you already controlled Texas.'
'Not all of it.'
'What'll happen to West Texas without water?'
'Who cares? Ain't much to look at now.'
