Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  Fisker gazed past Tepper toward the yard and the police, Rangers, and sheriff’s deputies, all with guns drawn, dotting the lawn. “Why, I’d bet he’s around here right now, maybe inside that house. So what’s it gonna be, Captain? You gonna give the shooter to me or am I gonna take him?”

  Tepper made sure Fisker could see his hand close to the old-fashioned .45 he still carried. “Stand down, sir.”

  “How many of us you think you can get with that dinosaur of a gun?”

  “One is all I’m thinking about right now.”

  Fisker nodded, as if processing the information. “I’ll bet it was the pansy ass, Mexican-loving punk that did the deed. Kid who drew down on my boy and vandalized his truck the other day. You telling me my boy didn’t have the right to get a little payback?”

  “Not packing fully automatic weapons he didn’t, Mr. Fisker. You want to explain to me how your son and his friends acquired the military-grade M16s they brought along for the ride? Seems like a lot of firepower to get a little payback. More like they were going to war.”

  And they lost, Caitlin thought to herself, feeling naked without a weapon and finally starting to backpedal, with Cort Wesley, toward her truck and the weapons tucked inside a locked spare tire compartment. Her father always said it was better to have a spare gun instead.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Tepper was saying to Armand Fisker. “You’re gonna get back in your vehicle and drive off with your friends, and I’m going to watch you do it.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “One way or another.”

  Fisker looked down at the street, then up again. “I already lost a son tonight. I don’t have much else to lose.”

  Caitlin could see where this was going, the inevitability of it. The sense of it felt like a thick fog settling over the scene. Starburst firecrackers about to shoot out of Fourth of July cannons. She had an AR-15, a shotgun, and two extra pistols in her SUV. Enough to make the odds better, but still not very good.

  That’s when she heard a roar almost as loud as the one the biker convoy had announced itself with, ahead of an ash-gray pickup truck with massive oversized tires blazing onto the scene from the other end of the street behind a blinding floodlight array. Tearing across lawns and plowing over trash cans and mailboxes, en route to spinning to a screeching halt between Tepper and Armand Fisker on the street.

  Caitlin watched a dark torrent of gunmen in flak jackets and tactical gear pour out of the truck’s bed in a stream equal to the flood from a clown car. They positioned themselves fearlessly before Fisker’s army in a semicircle, with M4 assault rifles steadied before them. This as the driver’s door opened and the massive shape of Guillermo Paz emerged, wielding twin M4s that looked like toys in his grasp.

  The bikers froze at the sight of the sudden and formidable threat before them, their surly confidence draining with the breath misting before their mouths. Caitlin expected Paz to do any number of things in the next moment, from chasing Fisker and his men off with a spray of fire over their heads to providing a philosophical backdrop on the error of their ways.

  “¡Vete!” he ordered flatly instead, his voice knifing through the night air. “Leave!”

  A moment of hesitation followed, no sound but the trees shifting in the breeze and the blare of a television through an open window nearby. Then a motorcycle engine flared to life, followed by a second, and a third. Ultimately, it grew into a roar Armand Fisker had to shout over for Captain Tepper to hear him.

  “This isn’t over, Captain! Not by a long shot!”

  Tepper stood silent and stiff, as Fisker headed back to his truck amid the flood of motorcycles swinging around and tearing off around him.

  53

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “How’d you know, Colonel?” Caitlin asked, drawing even with Paz’s huge shape.

  He kept his focus trained dead ahead, turning toward her only when the engine sounds faded out in the distance. “Jones thought you could use my help.”

  “Jones?”

  “And it looks like he was right,” Paz said, fixing his gaze forward again, as if Armand Fisker’s biker army was still there. “He told me the boy killed one of the attackers.”

  “It was Armand Fisker’s son,” Caitlin nodded. “Dylan saved Cort Wesley’s life.”

  Paz turned all the way to look at her directly, his eyes sad and his expression long. “Sophocles’ message in Oedipus the King is that all heroism is ultimately tragic. He questions to what degree we can actually succeed at doing the right thing without paying a price for it. Even if we do everything right, in Sophocles’ mind, act on the best information available and with the best of intentions, we are still bound to be haunted by what we do in pursuit of good. Because sometimes in doing good, it’s necessary to unleash the dark side that can never again be chained.”

  Paz’s statement brought Caitlin’s thinking back around to the kid she had killed, and then to the lawsuit filed against her, indirectly, by Willie Arble. Could she have handled things a different way in Stubb’s? Did she really have to shoot him?

  “I don’t know any other way of dealing with animals, like the ones we just saw, when they’re off the leash, Colonel,” she said, forestalling the need to answer those questions.

  Paz nodded once. “George Orwell once wrote that ‘People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.’ But that speaks nothing about the effects on these so-called rough men. Nietzsche and Schopenhauer both believed that violence, once embraced or resorted to, is not easily shunned.”

  “Like for you, Colonel?”

  “And you, Ranger.” Paz turned back to the street, his stare utterly blank, his next words spoken so quietly they were almost lost to the night. “I saw the darkness again today, before I heard from Jones. I knew something was coming.”

  “Well, it came.”

  Paz turned his head slowly. “This is just the beginning. The fuse has been lit, the true nature of this darkness to reveal itself only once it burns down.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of, Colonel.”

  54

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “One of us needs to talk to Dylan, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin said, when the activity finally began to die down, save for a number of media personnel who seemed prepared to camp out to get the full story.

  “I was thinking both of us. You know, double-team him,” Cort Wesley said, not bothering to hide his discomfort over doing it alone.

  “You remember the first man you killed?”

  “It was more of a boy, and so was I at the time. He pulled a knife, tried to rob me and the girl I was dating at the time. I stuck it into him, as she reached into her handbag.”

  “You ever see her again?”

  “Turned out she was reaching for a thirty-two caliber she kept in her bag. If I hadn’t killed the kid, she would have. But, no, I never saw her again. Her father found out who I was and didn’t want his pristine daughter associating with a criminal.”

  “Your father was the criminal.”

  “The girl’s father failed to see that distinction. How about you, Ranger?”

  “A junky who was holding a tour group inside the Alamo at gunpoint.”

  “You shot your first man at the Alamo?”

  “I came in to negotiate. He wasn’t in a talking mood. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “You didn’t have a choice tonight, either, Ranger.”

  “It show that much?”

  “That kind of pain is hard to disguise, but it’ll pass.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Caitlin told him.

  “Someone real smart once told me it’s not the person you shoot, it’s the gun.”

  She shrugged. “Easy to make pronouncements like that when I’m not aiming at anybody.”

  “What are we supposed to tell Dylan? How are we supposed to help him get through this?”

  “How’d he look to you, C
ort Wesley?”

  “Normal,” he said, gazing back toward the house where detectives were finishing up their questioning. “That’s what scares me. I don’t want this to just run off him. I want it to hurt. I don’t want him to think that because it’s okay for us to gun down people for the good, that it’s okay for him, too. And Paz is right: this isn’t over, Ranger, not by a long shot. Armand Fisker isn’t the type to let bygones be bygones.”

  Caitlin watched the detectives emerge from the house. “How about we go have that talk with Dylan?”

  55

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “This was all my fault,” Dylan said, seated at the edge of his bed. “And don’t try to tell me it wasn’t.”

  Caitlin stood on the left of him, slightly closer than Cort Wesley, who stood on the right. When Dylan kept his gaze fixed downward, she let her stare linger on him. For some reason Caitlin had expected him to look different, as if the ordeal had changed him in some way. Instead, though, he looked younger and more vulnerable, time rewound back to his fifteenth birthday or so. His hair hung over a large measure of his face, smelling of musk and oil, the room itself smelling sour and stale, as if he’d dragged the ugliness of what had happened inside with him.

  “You ask those punks to terrorize illegals?” Cort Wesley challenged. “You ask them to talk wise and strut their guns after you inquired about their presence? You ask them to come here tonight and fire over a hundred rounds our way? You didn’t ask them to do any of those things, the way Ryan Fisker asked for a bullet tonight.”

  Dylan snapped his gaze upright. “You think I don’t know that? You think I’m sitting up here regretting what I did?” He shook his head. “Not for a minute,” the boy insisted adamantly, though the cracking of his voice and tears welling in his eyes said otherwise. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I would’ve shot him again if he didn’t have the good sense to die.” Sounding less convincing now, as if he were reading lines that someone else had written for him. “You wanted me to go back to school,” Dylan said, clearing his throat to try and stop his voice from cracking.

  “I wanted you to do what was best for you, son.”

  “And if I’d gone back to school, none of this would have ever happened.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” Caitlin said, interjecting herself into the conversation. “Fisker and his posse would still have terrorized those illegals; there just would’ve been no one there to stand up for them.”

  “But they’d still have jobs, wouldn’t they? ICE wouldn’t have up and arrested them all. And the three kids who got killed here tonight would still be alive.”

  “So now you’re feeling sorry for them, too?”

  “I don’t feel sorry, I don’t feel bad. I just feel stupid.” Dylan’s eyes moistened again, and he swiped a sleeve across his brow, sniffing as he turned to Cort Wesley. “I’m going back to Brown next semester, in time for summer football camp.”

  “That’s good, that’s real good,” Cort Wesley told him.

  Dylan looked back at Caitlin, sniffling again and wiping his nose this time. “How much trouble am I in?”

  “You’ll have to ask Coach Estes about that.”

  “I’m talking about tonight, I’m talking about … what I did.”

  Caitlin sat down on the bed next to him, fighting the urge to wrap her arm around Dylan’s shoulder and reel him in against her. “We got something called the Castle Law in Texas, and under its tenets, you’re free and clear. Beyond that, you were acting in clear defense of another on your own property. Did I mention this was Texas?”

  Dylan looked past, more than at her, as if unsure Caitlin was there at all. He looked even younger, dating back to the first time Caitlin had seen him, standing at the front door of this house with his mother’s body lying at his feet.

  “I never even realized I was doing it,” he said, in that boy’s voice. “I don’t remember pulling the trigger.”

  Cort Wesley checked his phone. “I’m going to try your brother again at his boarding school in Houston. I want him to hear about this from me before he sees it splashed all over the internet.”

  56

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “He doesn’t know what to say to me,” Dylan said to Caitlin, after Cort Wesley was gone.

  “Neither do I.”

  Dylan puckered his lips but didn’t blow out any breath this time. “You come closer.” He turned to look at her. “Should I feel bad? About what I did, I mean.”

  “You mean, killing somebody who was about to do the same to your father? I remember something my first instructor at the police academy said about turning the other cheek, besides that it was bullshit. He said that it was as much of a sin to let yourself be hit, as it was to strike another. Biblical teachings and misplaced morality for its own sake belong to people who are already lying dead on the ground. If you let somebody kill you because you feel it’s wrong to kill him, who’s really to blame for you dying?”

  Dylan gave her a long look. “Are you asking me?”

  “It was more of a rhetorical question. Maybe I was asking myself as much as you.”

  He ran a couple fingers through his hair. “How long’s it gonna hurt the way it does now?”

  “That depends on whether you feel you had a choice or not.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “That’s right. Your dad would be dead now otherwise. You want to tell me how you’d feel right now, if you didn’t fire?”

  “I feel like I got hit by a truck.”

  “Beats a twelve-gauge shell, Dylan,” Caitlin said, realizing she was trying to convince herself of the very same thing.

  57

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  Armand Fisker stood on the roof of the town hall building, one of the few structures still whole when he took over Elk Grove. Its original corrugated tin roof that held the day’s heat like an oven remained in place. Right now, Fisker felt he was standing in a sauna, as much from the heat flaring inside him as out.

  He’d deal with recovering his son’s body tomorrow; nothing else he could do now but stew in his own thoughts. The fact that Ryan had disobeyed him, the fact that the boy’s behavior had drawn attention to his work and presence here, the fact that the boy had led his posse of morons to exact violent revenge for no more than showing him up, were all rendered insignificant in the face of the boy’s death. Everything was rendered meaningless.

  His own father, Cliven Fisker, hadn’t let prison stop him from building a nationwide organization based behind prison walls like the ones he’d die within. That loose, patchwork amalgamation of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gangs had formed the basis for everything Armand Fisker had built outside of such walls. Now, standing on the town hall roof and looking over a world of his own creation, he could only think of the metaphorical ones that were closing in on him.

  Picturing his son lying on the ground and taking his last breath choked Fisker up. He wished he could have cried, but it seemed he’d forgotten how. The boy who’d done the shooting, Cort Wesley Masters’ kid, had to die; there was no doubt about that. And he would, along with the war hero and the Texas Ranger, because that was the way things were done, even though Fisker knew that would provide only a small measure of satisfaction.

  Fisker wished he could unleash Davey Skoll’s accidental creation on them all. Let the sons of bitches go out that way: weak, helpless, and shitting their pants when their intestines failed, along with all their other organs. Even getting all of them, though, wouldn’t be enough to still his pain. He needed to make a mark that extended far beyond Texas. He needed to do something that would swallow the likes of Caitlin Strong and Cort Wesley Masters.

  They represented order.

  Fisker represented chaos, a chaos from which he and others like him could emerge stronger than even their wildest dreams suggested. Not just in America, Fisker insisted to himself, everywhere.

  * * *

  That thought sent Fisker back to his office, where he
switched on his computer and used the instructions taped inside his top desk drawer to log on to the Dark Web. The message he sent to a dozen associates around the world represented a call to arms of sorts, a means to vastly expand their power, influence, and thus, their revenue.

  Money, after all, was power.

  From the infamous Walls prison in Huntsville, his father had eventually forged chapters of the Aryan Brotherhood in prisons across the world. Though small in design and intention back then, those chapters had morphed into much larger movements beholden to Armand Fisker today that owed their origins, in large part, to what Cliven Fisker had built. The chapters went by a variety of names now, much of the funding that supported their more politically driven efforts stemming from control of the drug trade in their respective countries. They could call themselves anything they wanted, but the fancy titles were just another way of saying Nazi. In Austria, it was the Freedom Party; in Germany, the National Democratic Party; in France, the National Front.

  All of them had eyes on far more power than they currently wielded, and which Armand Fisker now had the capacity to deliver. The means to bring on the chaos they longed for, the chaos that would allow them to take control of their countries. And he wanted to share the means to do that with others who thought as they did, cut from the same cloth as he was. Fisker had never personally formed a political thought in his life, but found the notion of chaos, of civilization spinning off its very axis, just what the world, and he himself, needed right now.

  But not this way, not via email no matter how secure the Dark Web might be. No.

  His message would provide scrambled instructions to head to Texas immediately for a meeting. A bunch of men joined by the same goals, values, and concerns in the same room for the first time. Christmas was coming early for them, because Armand Fisker would come to that meeting bearing gifts. In his mind, the definition of a criminal was a businessman who thrived on chaos. And, after tonight, more than anything he wanted to rain chaos down on the world.