Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  26

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  Armand Fisker sat at his big desk on the second floor of what had once been the town hall, overlooking the central square that dovetailed around a corner toward a secondary row of now similarly closed-up stores. From this angle, it was easy to picture Elk Grove before circumstances had rendered it a ghost town. Fisker imagined oil workers, soaked in crude, slogging along the muddy streets in knee-high rubber boots. Women in long dresses, with their parasols open, walking the plank sidewalks. Clusters of children running this way and that, turning on a dime as if they were a flock of birds. A town content in its existence, with no foreknowledge of its impending decline and doom.

  He sat at his desk, waiting for his computer to fire up, with his right hand encased in a bowl of ice to soothe his knuckles, still swollen from the beating he’d given the pissant Davey Skoll the night before. In almost any other scenario, Skoll would be no different than the mud Fisker scraped out of the grooves of his boots, to be disregarded and discarded. Skoll was a shining example of everything that was wrong with American society and civilization. The country, and the world, would be much better places with his kind bled into extinction, going the way of the dinosaurs or, at the very least, reduced to living amid the shadows of society, off the map and off the grid. But he fulfilled a purpose for Fisker, a damn important one, too, that might be about to expand.

  What if I had something else? Something else you could use, something a lot more valuable than Oxy.

  Fisker could hardly believe the next words out of Skoll’s broken mouth; the ones that had followed those. And if he was speaking the truth …

  Fisker chose not to complete the thought. He’d called this meeting to share the news with his international counterparts, who could use their imaginations just as well as he could.

  Fisker didn’t like computers and never had. Didn’t like trusting secrets to all that metal and wire, that faint hum of something whirring invisibly inside, heating up when left on for too long a stretch. He didn’t trust anything he couldn’t see out in the open. For all he knew, miniature robots were crawling around inside the housing, stealing whatever they could get their tiny hands on.

  But the Dark Web was different. The Dark Web, as his tech people explained it to Fisker, was a secret labyrinth of warrens and alleyways where he could do his business without fear of the authorities catching on. His daddy had started the ball rolling, from prison of all places, where he’d founded the Aryan Brotherhood, a loose assemblage of mostly biker-types that built chapters in virtually every prison across the country. Paying more, and far bigger dividends when those chapters expanded to outside prison walls, encompassing virtually every major biker gang, and thus every major population center, in the U.S.

  Armand Fisker had expanded on his father Cliven’s vision, not just beyond concrete walls topped with barbed wire, but also across the ocean to Europe, where carefully chosen counterparts operated as much under the radar as he did. Violence, Fisker had learned the hard way from his father, was bad for business. Uniting rival biker gangs, Fisker worked toward cornering the nation’s and eventually the world’s drug distribution business. In his operation, violence was to be abhorred and avoided at most costs, though not quite all.

  And business was booming, due mostly to a swell in the ranks of like-minded people not just in America, but also in England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and various smaller nation-states in an ever-expanding landscape across the world. Men who were true leaders and shared his values now roamed within the highest corridors of power across the globe.

  The computer flashed to life, colors filling the screen, and the doorway to the Dark Web opened with a click of his mouse on an icon one of his tech guys had preset for him. The other four participants in the call were labeled ENGLAND, FRANCE, GERMANY, and ITALY, no other sign of identity other than the bar grids that bounced and wavered when they spoke. Always in English, the one rule Fisker maintained over the group he had founded. His business brethren might be foreigners, but Fisker found comfort and familiarity in the fact that they spoke the same language.

  “The meeting will come to order,” Fisker said, his voice aimed toward the computer’s speaker as he took his hand from the ice and dried it with a towel. “We left off the last meeting with an update on the unfortunate fates suffered by numerous elements of our competition in the trade. So fuck ’em, and let’s move on. We’ve all done a little gunrunning and arms dealing in our time. Penny-ante shit mostly to pay a few bills. So what if I told you boys there was a way for us to expand our horizons even further, climb the food chain to the top, and I do mean the very top?”

  “And how would we do this exactly?” asked Germany.

  “The same way we’ve gotten this far,” Fisker said, recalling what a bloodied Davey Skoll had insisted he could provide. “By getting rid of anybody in our way. And what I got to share with you is the means to do just that.”

  Fisker gazed out the window while awaiting the response, spotting a dark pickup truck he didn’t recognize edging its way down the street beyond.

  27

  SOUTH TEXAS

  Caitlin was already gone when Cort Wesley awoke with his head pounding and his mouth dry as a dust. Had he drank that many beers or was he just getting too old to drink any at all?

  Sitting up sent pangs through his head, his eyes tired and the color washed out of the world before him. But he still managed to spot the handwritten note Caitlin had scrawled for him in her scratchy penmanship on her side of the bed.

  Here’s the address that truck you asked me about is registered to, it began, finishing after the address with, Be careful!

  * * *

  He was on the road heading south for a town called Elk Grove twenty minutes later, swigging the first water bottle tucked into his cooler to chase away his hangover. He tried programming the address into his truck’s navigation system, a little ball spinning around until it was replaced by a message Cort Wesley had never seen before:

  LOCATION NOT FOUND

  He wanted to punch the damn screen, but opted to reenter the information instead. When this produced the same result, he tried his phone, coming up with the history of the town of Elk Grove and not much more. Because, it turned out, the town didn’t exist anymore. It had been abandoned years before when the oil boom had gone bust and a new superhighway had rendered the nearby access roads obsolete.

  So how could the truck Guillermo Paz had rained bricks upon be registered there?

  “Now, there’s a mystery, bubba, if ever there be one,” said Leroy Epps, suddenly filling the passenger seat beside him.

  * * *

  The spectral shape’s lips were pale pink and crinkled with dryness, the morning sunlight casting his brown skin in a yellowish tint. The diabetes that had planted him in the ground had turned Leroy’s eyes bloodshot and numbed his limbs years before the sores and infections set in. As a boxer, he’d fought for the middleweight crown on three different occasions, knocked out once and had the belt stolen from him on paid-off judges’ scorecards two other times. He’d been busted for killing a white man in self-defense, and had died three years into Cort Wesley’s four-year incarceration, but ever since always seemed to show up when Cort Wesley needed him the most. Whether a ghostly specter or a figment of his imagination, Cort Wesley had given up trying to figure out. He just accepted the fact of Leroy’s presence and grateful that his old friend kept coming around to help him out of one scrape after another.

  Prison officials had let Cort Wesley attend Leroy’s funeral in a potter’s field for inmates who didn’t have any relatives left to claim the body. He’d been the only one standing at the graveside, besides the prison chaplain, when Mexican laborers had lowered the plank coffin into the ground. Cort Wesley tried to remember what he’d been thinking that day, but it was hard since he’d done his best to erase those years not just from his memory, but from his very being. One thing he did remember was that the service was the fi
rst time he’d smelled the talcum powder Leroy Epps had used to hide the stench from the festering sores spawned by the diabetes that had ultimately killed him. And, in retrospect, for days after the funeral Cort Wesley had been struck by the nagging feeling that Leroy wasn’t gone at all. The scent of his talcum powder still hung heavy in the air inside his cell, and Cort Wesley woke up at least once every night, certain he saw Leroy standing there watching over him, grinning and sometimes even winking when the illusion held long enough.

  * * *

  “Wasn’t no illusion, bubba,” Leroy said today, as if reading his thoughts. “I was there then, just as I be now. Say, you got any root beers in that cooler in the backseat there?”

  “Help yourself,” Cort Wesley told him.

  Leroy turned his gaze toward the windshield, peering out far beyond anything Cort Wesley could see. “Would seem you’re headed up my way.”

  “How’s that, champ?”

  “Place we’re going is a ghost town, ain’t it?”

  “Was that a joke?”

  “You see me laughing? But, yeah, I guess it was. Kind of.”

  “It’s not a ghost town anymore, not if that truck’s registered to somebody living there.”

  “Ranger tell you that?”

  “She ran the license plate.”

  “After you ran your mouth so much, you never caught up to what you were saying.”

  Cort Wesley fished out a Hires Original Root Beer he’d packed in the cooler just in case Leroy paid him a visit during the ride, and placed it in the passenger-side cup holder. “Say what you mean, champ.”

  “Question being, exactly what you meant by what you told her and what you didn’t.”

  “You always talk in riddles now?”

  “No sirree, bubba. Must be the morning. Was never a morning person on Earth, and I ain’t no more of one since I came to be where I am now. How you figure on that, when I’m in a place where time’s not supposed to make a dime’s bit of difference? What I’m talking about is you not telling the Ranger lady the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  Cort Wesley reached over and twisted the cap off the Hires he’d placed in the cup holder for a ghost.

  I must truly be nuts.…

  “I told her I’d asked Paz to keep an eye on Dylan. I told her what happened after Dylan mixed it up with a truckload of punks with Confederate flags painted on both rear quarter panels, how Paz had used bricks to diffuse the situation.”

  “Diffuse the situation,” Leroy said, casting a bloodshot eye toward the Hires Cort Wesley had just opened to let the aroma filter out. “What’s that mean exactly? I’ll tell you what it don’t mean, bubba. It don’t mean you being so scared of your own boy, you gotta ask others to do your business for you.”

  “I think I’ll turn up the radio,” Cort Wesley said, but stopped short of working the controls mounted on the steering wheel.

  “Let me find us a station worth listening to. Ride south to the music of the blues. Say, you know that story about Robert Johnson going down to the crossroads to trade his soul to the devil in exchange for the blues?”

  “Sure.”

  “What if I told you it was true?” Clouds covered the sun, making Leroy’s eyes suddenly look shiny in the truck’s cab. “I know this on account of Robert Johnson telling me so himself.”

  “I’m not scared of Dylan, champ.”

  “Nope, just scared of not having his approval, afraid he’ll drift away on account of your tendency to judge him.”

  “Kid dropped out of an Ivy League school. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Just what you done. And he didn’t drop out, he’s—”

  “—taking some time off,” Cort Wesley completed for him.

  “Problem being that what you asked the big man to do is something you woulda done yourself up until maybe the day before yesterday. There’s ’nother word for that ’sides fear.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Love, bubba. What else?”

  Cort Wesley jostled his hands on the steering wheel, accidentally switching the radio to a station playing a John Coltrane song.

  “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Leroy Epps said, leaning back in the passenger seat with hands cupped behind his head.

  “Why don’t you make yourself useful and tell me about this ghost town we’re headed for, champ?”

  Leroy didn’t move an inch, the sunlight streaming through the windshield again seeming to pass right through him. “Nothing good there I can see, but plenty bad in ways like we’ve never seen before. If I was sending you a sign about what you’re riding into, it would be to stop your watch or maybe make that clock on your dashboard with the numbers freeze up solid. Time doesn’t move where you’re headed. Or maybe it winds backwards.”

  Cort Wesley swept his gaze over the parched and barren world around him, the four-lane that looked like it headed nowhere. “I must’ve missed the turnoff somewhere. I don’t even know where I am right now, and the GPS isn’t worth shit out here.”

  “What’s GPS?” Leroy asked him.

  “Helps steer you in the right direction.”

  “Yup, you can use that, all right.”

  Cort Wesley tried working the navigation system again without success, gazing across the seat to find Leroy Epps, and the open bottle of Hires he’d tucked into the beverage holder, both gone.

  28

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  Cort Wesley went back to following the old directions he’d been able to pull together from a stop at a gas station and farm stand, and finally found himself in what must be Elk Grove. There were no welcome signs to greet him, no banner strung over the town’s main square to proclaim the coming of Founder’s Day or something like that. There was just dust rising over the flattened, hard-packed, unpaved streets and furtive eyes held on him from behind cracks in window blinds.

  He cruised slowly down the street, then doubled back when he reached a residential cluster of tiny homes renovated out of the clapboard shacks used by oilmen, who did nothing but sleep in them during the boom days. Approaching the center of town again, he saw the landscape had sprung to life in the form of three men standing before him wielding shotguns.

  Cort Wesley slowed to a halt, put the truck into park, and slid down the window. Then he watched two of the men fall in deferentially behind the third as they approached. The leader was tall and wiry, with an anvil-shaped head and a torso that looked too big for the rest of his body. A nest of stringy black hair emerged from beneath his cowboy hat, stained by sweat along the brim.

  “You must be lost, stranger,” the man said, reaching the window.

  “Aren’t we all?” Cort Wesley said lightly, drawing no reaction from the man. “But this is Elk Grove, isn’t it? Because if it’s Elk Grove, then I’m not lost at all.”

  The wiry man in the cowboy hat took a step back from the truck’s open window, the two men flanking him tensing.

  “I’m looking for Ryan Fisker,” Cort Wesley said.

  The wiry man stiffened, his frame seeming to fill out as if someone had pumped it full of air. “And why would you be looking for Ryan Fisker?”

  “He got into a scrape with my son that almost went to guns yesterday. I thought I’d come here and make things right. Get it all behind us.”

  The wiry man with the big chest and shoulders bred of pumping heavy iron said nothing.

  “I got this address from the DMV. Since his truck may have suffered some damage in the fracas, I thought I could square that, too.”

  “Why don’t you just be on your way?” the wiry man said, taking another step back to put him in better position to use his shotgun.

  “As soon as I have a talk with Ryan Fisker.”

  The wiry man took off his hat to reveal jet-black hair brushed straight back, save for the stringy patches that had clumped together under his cowboy hat. “I’m his father. You can have your talk with me.”

  Cort Wesley felt a chill of reali
zation pass through him. “You’re Armand Fisker. My dad did time with your dad, Cliven, in Huntsville. Sometime in the early eighties, I think it was.”

  Fisker’s expression flattened, his cheeks puckering, as if channeling the breeze that had suddenly come up.

  “Your dad founded the Aryan Brotherhood there,” Cort Wesley recalled. “Made his bones killing black inmates and built something that sprouted chapters across the country like wildfire. That’s an auspicious act to follow. Think you’re up to the task, Armand?”

  Fisker’s face canted like a curious dog’s. “Do I know you?”

  “Our paths crossed a few times when I was working for the Branca crime family out of New Orleans. My job was to keep the Latino gangs from moving in on the drug trade. I believe you cut a deal to supply the Brancas with crystal meth they moved through the most impoverished neighborhoods in cities across the Deep South. I believe your daddy started the whole operation from prison and built it up from scratch, until somebody shanked him in the shower.”

  “You want to drive out now or never, cowboy? Your choice.”

  Cort Wesley rested his forearm casually on the open window, making sure Fisker could see his other hand still poised on the steering wheel. “Your son’s been driving around East San Antonio, rousting illegals who mean him no harm, Armand. That big truck of his, painted with Confederate flags, has become a regular sight. My boy was just standing up for a few of the illegals he works with. So if you have a sit-down with your son to show him the error of his ways, then the past stays the only thing we’ve got between us. Just tell Ryan to take his hate posse somewhere else, so you and I can go about our business like none of this ever happened.”

  Fisker hacked up a thick glob of spit. “Mister, why don’t you get out of that truck, so we can finish our business right now?”

  Cort Wesley watched the two men who’d accompanied Fisker to the street take up positions in front of the truck, shotguns aimed from low on the hip and ready to fire.

  “I get out of this truck, Armand, and one of us is going down so hard, he isn’t likely to get up again. If that’s what you want, I’m coming out. I’ll kill you first, then the two guns I spotted in those windows on either side of the street, and then the two men blocking the road. If you want to see that go down, just say the word and I’ll pop the latch. If it isn’t, tell your men to stand aside and I’ll be on my way.”