Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

The garage door was closed, and Fisker hit the button to open it as soon as he pulled into the driveway. Already mapping out what he was going to say to his son, he saw the garage was empty, both Ryan and his dented-up truck gone.

  47

  BOERNE, TEXAS

  Guillermo Paz sat at his priest’s bedside at the Menger Springs Senior Living Community. The side rail had been lowered so he could feed the man his dinner consisting of watered-down oatmeal the texture of drilling mud to make it easier for him to swallow. Paz was the only one who could get him to eat anything at all, convincing himself that Father Boylston could still grasp the meaning of his words, even if he could no longer respond to them. Strange that he hadn’t even known the priest’s name until Father Boylston had been brought here after suffering his stroke.

  “I want to believe in miracles, Padre,” Paz said as the old man worked his mouth feebly and then managed a swallow. “I want to believe I’ll walk in here one day to find you back to your old self again, at least enough to keep me on the straight and narrow like you used to. But we have to face the fact that maybe the doctors are right and the damage was too severe to hope for any improvement at all.”

  Paz dabbed the spoon into the bowl of soupy oatmeal and eased it forward. His priest opened his mouth a crack and sucked up the meager contents with a slurping sound.

  “I know you can’t talk to me anymore, Padre, but you can still listen and that’s almost as important. Because if you get tired of living like this, and want to meet God on a personal level, find a way to give me the word and I’ll help you out. I’ve sent more people with the Ferryman up the River Styx than I can count, but never somebody who asked me to punch their ticket for them. But if that’s what you want, just say the word, so to speak, and you’ll be walking and talking wherever it is you’re headed.”

  The old priest finished working that spoonful down his throat and opened his mouth for the next. His once bright eyes were dull and lifeless, his thinning white hair flattened to his scalp in some places and sticking up askew in others. The room was laced with deodorizing spray to hide the stale scents of bodily waste and dried, scaly skin wracked by bedsores. Paz detested injustice of all kinds, but this seemed like the ultimate one. For a man who’d given his life to others to have his own snatched from him this way.

  “Blink twice and I’ll know you understand what I’m saying and that you’re ready to go check into a different zip code. When I killed the man who killed my priest back home in the slums, I did it up close and personal. I even used the same knife he did, and I wanted it to hurt. But death doesn’t have to hurt, and sometimes life is a lot more painful. The philosopher Rousseau wrote that ‘Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.’ So blink twice if you want my help getting those chains off you, just like you helped me shed mine.”

  Paz watched his priest swallow the latest spoonful without blinking twice. He realized Father Boylston’s lips were trembling in anticipation of more oatmeal, and he quick readied the next spoonful. Scooping too much up for the old man to manage and needing to shake some of it back into the bowl, Paz watched the old man swallow and then waited again for the two blinks, relieved when they didn’t come.

  “If you change your mind, Padre, the offer still stands. I’m glad you’re not ready yet, because I need someone to talk to like this, even if you can’t talk back. You know how I always get those feelings before the bad times come? Well, I’ve got another one. Different from all the others, but just as bad. That’s why I needed to see you, because I was there when a body shop got raided today and all these illegals got hauled away. Government officials hoisted open this big bay door, and all I saw beyond it was darkness. Then the darkness burst outward and, for a moment, swallowed everything before me. But it’s not just the darkness that got out, Padre, it was something hiding inside it. Whatever the nature of that evil is, it’s loose now, and I know I’ll be seeing it again, probably soon. Only this time I’ll be ready.”

  48

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “You’re still shaking, Cort Wesley.”

  “That’s what breathing the same air as Armand Fisker will do to you, Ranger.”

  “Dylan coming home?”

  “I think he’s staying at a friend’s house.”

  “And you let him?”

  Cort Wesley took another sip of the Freetail Brewing Company’s Original Amber Ale that had become his favorite and wrinkled his nose at the taste, leading Caitlin to tip her bottle of Hires toward him.

  “Maybe you should follow Leroy Epps’s lead, like me.”

  He laid the bottle down on the porch floor and leaned back in the swing, rocking it slightly. “It’s lukewarm. How long have I been drinking it?”

  “A half hour, maybe.”

  “That explains it.”

  “But not why you’re letting a lowlife like Armand Fisker get into your head.”

  Cort Wesley looked at her in the spill of the porch light that splayed the shadows of the nearby juniper bushes across Caitlin’s face. “You run him through your system?”

  She nodded. “Just the boilerplate stuff at this point. I’m thinking I need to get more detailed, maybe go have a talk with him myself.”

  “The man might be a lowlife, Ranger, but he’s got his own town and who knows how many bikers and other assorted dregs of humanity doing his bidding. Did I tell you my dad crossed paths with his in Huntsville?”

  “Cliven Fisker, founder of the Aryan Brotherhood,” Caitlin recalled.

  Cort Wesley tried his beer again “Foundation of everything Armand Fisker has built today. But what does a man need his own town for?”

  “The McMullen County sheriff, Darnell Gaunt, fancies himself a true nineteenth-century lawman, right down to letting the local outlaws buy his loyalty. Rangers have crossed paths with him on numerous occasions. We’ve hauled him into federal court a bunch of times for various violations of the criminal code, mostly involving the treatment of illegals in his county. I think he’s still appealing four cases.”

  “Takes a lot of money to do that, Ranger.”

  “And now we know where it’s coming from.” Caitlin held the old-fashioned root beer bottle in her lap. “You want me to take a run at Fisker?”

  “As in an official visit?”

  “Define official, Cort Wesley.”

  “The kind where you shoot him if he doesn’t cooperate.”

  She took another sip, revealing her bottle had gone lukewarm, too. “Wishful thinking. What about letting the whole thing go?”

  “You’re forgetting about Dylan’s part in this. He hasn’t been right since we took on ISIS in Houston, like he’s standing on some kind of edge. We handle this wrong, maybe he goes over. He’s blaming himself for those illegals getting hauled in. We don’t do something, I’m worried he will.”

  “In other words, you’re worried his fuse is burning again.”

  “It’s like he’s on some kind of cycle. Maybe it’s the moon.”

  “The moon didn’t create the assholes he’s come up against,” Caitlin said, and blew into the top of the Hires bottle, making a whistling sound.

  “Leroy Epps does the same thing,” Cort Wesley noted.

  “Maybe he taught me.”

  “Nothing surprises me anymore, Ranger.”

  She slid closer to him. “How about I call Jones about these illegals, see if there’s anything he can do to intervene?”

  “Maybe Paz could deputize them.”

  “They know how to shoot an assault rifle?”

  “They know how to chop a car. How about some clerical work?” Cort Wesley asked lightly, guzzling a hefty gulp of beer as if the taste had returned.

  “Only clerical work the colonel requires is somebody to fill out all the death certificates he generates.”

  Cort Wesley looked away, then back at her, Caitlin noticing the muscles in his neck were flexing. “I can’t believe I’m thinking this.…”

  “Thinking what?”

&nbs
p; “Asking Paz to deal with Fisker.”

  “I can’t believe it, either.”

  “I’m worried about Dylan, Ranger. He’s not going to let this go. He ends up forcing the issue with Armand Fisker’s son, cleaning his clock or worse, what do you think Fisker does?”

  Caitlin felt herself stiffen. “This goes to guns, whatever Fisker’s building in Elk Grove will have to contend with the whole of the Texas Rangers, Cort Wesley.”

  His face was caught in the jittery spray of headlights, and Caitlin followed their origin to the driveway, where Dylan’s 1996 Chevy pickup rumbled to a halt, bleeding oil and gushing tar black smoke from its tailpipe. The engine sputtered before shutting off altogether, Dylan closing the driver’s door gently behind him and heading stiffly up the walk with his hair bouncing in a halo around him.

  “Why are the two of you looking at me like that?” he asked, stopping between them and the front door.

  “Glad you came home,” Cort Wesley said to him, his words sounding like he was reading someone else’s line.

  Dylan stopped just short of reaching for the latch. “Maybe I just need to pick up a few things, so you can stop babysitting me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Cort Wesley shot back, Caitlin laying a hand on his knee to keep him calm.

  “A truck followed me a good part of the way home. Doesn’t the big guy have anything better to do with his time?”

  Caitlin felt Cort Wesley’s leg harden under her grasp, and then lifted her hand off when he started to rise. “I think we better sort this out, son, because that truck wasn’t—”

  A barrage of gunfire swallowed the rest of his words, the line of windows over their heads blown out as all three of them hit the porch floor.

  49

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  Pistol already in hand, Caitlin scanned the front yard, locking on dark shapes silhouetted against the night. She put the count at four, though it could’ve been five, Cort Wesley already answering their fire, which peppered the railings, blew out more windows, chipped divots from the shingle-like siding, and took out the dangling light fixture, sending it crashing downward.

  “Stay down!” he cried out, when Dylan started to push up with his hands.

  “I’m getting the shotgun!” the boy rasped back to him, dragging himself closer to the front door.

  “I said, stay down!” Cort Wesley tried again.

  Caitlin fought to collect her thoughts, measuring the enemy force by the concentration of their fire and muzzle flashes flaring in the night beyond. Dylan was crawling forward, and she stretched out a hand to restrain him, but he shook it off and kept pulling himself along.

  “Goddamnit!” Cort Wesley wailed between his own shots, his anger aimed at his son.

  “Four or five?” Caitlin called to him, just loud enough for Cort Wesley to hear over the fire she’d added to his.

  “Five, by my count. They’re firing full auto. Lousy shots.”

  “Lucky for us.”

  “Stay where you are, son!” Cort Wesley blared, stealing a glance back at Dylan, who’d just reached up for the front door latch when a blistering volley blew divots out of the wood. “What did I say?”

  “Cort Wesley,” Caitlin started.

  “Cover me, Ranger.”

  And she watched Cort Wesley launch himself up and over the railing in a single fluid motion that drew a fresh concentration of fire from beyond.

  Caitlin emptied the rest of her SIG-Sauer’s magazine and snapped a fresh one home. Ratcheting a round into the chamber and opening fire again from her prone position, she smelled the combination of chipped lumber and gun smoke. An earlier round taking out the porch light had proven a godsend in that it enabled her to better spot the motions of the dark shapes before her converging on the house. Cort Wesley had been right; there were five. She fired to hold them at bay and give them something to think about more than anything. And the hesitation in their fire, accompanied by the wild sprays that followed, told her gunfights had likely not been in their vocabulary until tonight.

  She encountered that a lot with an assortment of bullies, mob lackeys, and gangbangers who know only how to wield overwhelming force against those who couldn’t, or didn’t, fight back. The failure of their initial ambush would normally have made these kinds of gunmen flee. The fact that they were still firing away was a testament to their determination, but also to their stupidity.

  Caitlin started in on aiming for her targets. She glimpsed one pitch sideways and then go down, uttering a cry that sounded more like a boy’s than a man’s.

  Ryan Fisker …

  A picture of a truck with him behind the wheel, packed with his fellow tough guys barely college age from Elk Grove, filled her mind, right down to the dents left by the bricks tossed by Guillermo Paz.

  Crack!

  She thought it was another gunshot at first, then felt the surge of chilled air surging out from the house through the door Dylan had crashed through to grab the twelve-gauge shotgun from its spot. Kept within easy reach ever since a different set of gunmen had killed Cort Wesley’s ex-girlfriend, his mother, Maura Torres, and would have killed Dylan and his younger brother, Luke, too, if she hadn’t been there.

  Caitlin rolled under the porch swing, bettering her position, when the first of the flaming Molotov cocktails crashed through the house’s windows.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley caught the first gunman, poised beyond the cover of an old elm tree straddling his and his neighbor’s yard, in his sights. The back of his mind recorded the distant blare of sirens in the same moment a sliver of moonlight peeking out from the clouds revealed this shooter to be no older than Dylan. A lumbering blob of a shape barely contained by the substantial width of the elm tree’s base.

  Cort Wesley wanted to shoot him but couldn’t. He looped around the yard instead, the front porch aglow with flame bursts that had erupted from inside his house.

  Just kill him!

  He heard the words in his head, not from Leroy Epps, but the same disembodied voice he’d first heard in Iraq during the Gulf War. He hadn’t even known Leroy then and could only imagine what the ghost of his old friend would have to say about Cort Wesley gunning down a kid whose M16 trembled atop the tree branch upon which he’d rested it.

  Cort Wesley came up from behind the kid and hammered him hard in the soft, vulnerable part of his head certain to knock him out. He felt bone recede on impact, the nine-millimeter’s butt seeming to dig through his skull like a shovel. The kid, who smelled like fast-food onions and grease, didn’t go down, but pitched forward, his face smacking a tree branch that kept his unconscious frame propped up on his feet.

  One down, he thought. Old Leroy would be proud.

  But then Cort Wesley heard heavy, untrained feet pounding across the grass, automatic fire spraying the air above him when he hit the ground, steadying his pistol.

  * * *

  Caitlin was down to six shots, maybe five. Her nostrils clogged with the clashing scents of gasoline, burned fabric, and nitrogen-rich fire-extinguisher foam. She pictured Dylan inside the house, abandoning the shotgun in favor of putting out the flames set by the Molotov cocktails crashing through the windows. The boy faced again with an unimaginable assault where he should’ve been safe. The last time, only Caitlin’s intervention had saved him. Tonight, there was a shotgun, soon to replace the fire extinguisher she could hear spraying throughout the first floor.

  She wondered which of the shapes scurrying beyond belonged to Ryan Fisker. She knew she’d wounded one of those who’d accompanied him so far, but couldn’t spot his shape or any other right now amid the hazy glow of the LED streetlights over the yard. That all changed when she saw a shape rushing Cort Wesley’s way, trying to balance an assault rifle, and letting loose with a wild torrent of fire that was as likely to find Cort Wesley as not.

  Caitlin sighted in, about to pull the SIG’s trigger when it looked like somebody yanked the world out from beneath her target.r />
  * * *

  Cort Wesley had fired twice while still rolling, the kid going down as if a hole had opened under his feet. He thought he detected a blood burst from the kid’s skull, the air turning misty red in his mind’s eye.

  He twisted around, still churning over the ground, close to a gore-strewn patch where whatever had blown out of the dead kid’s skull had landed. Two more of them were converging on the porch, seizing an opening, unleashing twin fusillades of fire that spilled planters, took out the wind chimes hanging alongside the door, and exposed pocks of wood beneath shattered siding. He tried to discern Caitlin’s shape as he sighted in on them, yanking back on his trigger to take one in the leg and maybe back with at least one of the three shots. Sighting in on the second, when fresh fire sliced up the ground around him, coughing grassy divots into the air and filling his nose with the scent of the fertilizer he’d laid the week before.

  50

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  Dylan’s nostrils were on fire, scorched by a combination of smoke, heat, and the blowback from the corrosive chemicals raining out of the fire extinguisher nozzle. He sprayed without restraint, where there were flames flaring and where there weren’t, the hot night air hitting the conditioned cool of the house like a ram.

  He didn’t realize he’d discarded the drained extinguisher until he heard it clang to the floor and then launch into a noisy roll. He looked down to find the twelve-gauge Remington he’d picked out with his dad the day after Cort Wesley Masters had moved into the house in his grasp, with similarly no memory of having hoisted it from its perch by the door.

  It felt heavy, as heavy as it had all those years ago when he’d held it in the store for the first time. Like he was thirteen again, half expecting a reflection of that boy’s face to look back at him when he crossed before a still whole window that blew out under a fresh burst of gunfire, just after he’d crossed it.

  Dylan started to drop to the floor, but caught himself halfway and kept moving toward the front door, still open part of the way. He’d held guns before where the possibility of squeezing the trigger was very real, most recently just the other day in East San Antonio, but never with the foreknowledge that he was going to fire. Pulling the shotgun’s trigger was as certain in his mind as using the fire extinguisher’s nozzle to douse the flames kicked up by the exploding Molotov cocktails.