Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  Only one way to find out, Caitlin figured.

  She approached him slowly, feeling her own boots crunching over gravel and dirt already dried by the sun.

  “Mr. Doyle,” Caitlin called when she was just close enough, continuing when he started to turn, “I was wondering if I could trouble you for a few minutes. I’ve got some questions about the other…”

  Caitlin glimpsed the rake coming up and around, a mere instant before she recognized Frank’s eyes. She realized he’d shaved his eyebrows as well, wondering if his baldness was due to illness instead of choice.

  His chest muscles rippled as he swung the rake, Caitlin backtracking a single step and arching her spine, so its tongs whistled past her, spraying a thin fountain of dirt. She could have tried to pull her gun in that moment, but Frank bull-charged her, figuring he could overpower her with his size and brute strength.

  In the flash of an instant, time rewound to reveal a slighter figure with long sandy brown hair and a charming smile that shined beneath his twinkling eyes, Caitlin smitten by his looks and his charm. The moment passed as quickly as it came, and she stepped to the side and kicked one of Frank’s legs out. He stumbled on for a few steps, ready to fall, but he didn’t right away, and when he did it was hard and face-first into the ground.

  Caitlin could have drawn her gun then, slapped the cuffs on him, and gone about this by the book. But this might well be the man who’d stolen her sleep and haunted her dreams, a man whose actions had forever changed her life. How long was it before she could let someone touch her again? How long before she could be alone in the same room, or just share the same space, with a man without questioning his motivations and intentions? How long before she stopped believing that people, even strangers who met her gaze, could read her shame and embarrassment, looking into her eyes and seeing the ugliness that had penetrated her soul? How long before she got her life back?

  She’d visualized this moment from her first day at the police training academy, the opportunity to face her attacker and look him in the eye, as she dispensed the payback she’d long thirsted for. And right now, more than anything, she wanted to hurt Frank Doyle, eighteen years of pain, heartache, and guilt finally boiling over.

  Frank staggered back to his feet, eyes narrowed in surprise at the gun still holstered on her belt.

  “Go ahead,” she heard herself say, like it was someone else, “finish what you started. Go ahead and try.”

  He lumbered toward her, limping on the leg she’d swept out, with the look of a man who’d done some bouncing and so-called tough-guy work in his time, but not especially skilled or trained as a boxer or martial artist. He had six inches on her, though, and that reach counted for something.

  Caitlin didn’t wait to find out what. She lurched toward Frank Doyle, making it look like she was going to let loose with a flurry of blows with her hands, when she snapped her foot out and smashed his other knee from the inside.

  Frank started to double over, then surprised her by lunging forward, and grazed her under the chin with an uppercut that would’ve knocked her silly, if it had hit full force. Still, it rattled her teeth and left both sides of her jaw feeling as if they were working independently of each other. He stormed her, Caitlin anticipating a body blow, but he bull-rushed her again instead, successfully this time.

  Caitlin hit the hard, flat ground with an impact that shook her spine and stole her breath. She recovered her senses as Frank worked to straddle her, his face twisted in hate and exhaustion.

  Just like he, or someone else, had eighteen years before. Mounted her like a dog in heat and had his way with her, while she lay dazed and unconscious.

  Not this time!

  Before he planted himself atop her, Caitlin got a knee up. Frank dropped straight onto it, making it less design and more fortune, but either way, she could feel his balls mash inside his jeans. He grunted and fell off to the side, already teetering on his knees, when Caitlin tightened her palm by curling the fingers over, and then slammed the heel of her hand into his nose, cracking the cartilage on impact.

  Blood exploded from both his nostrils and Frank keeled over to the side. The gurgling sound that wheezed from his mouth made her think he was done, finished, and Caitlin reclaimed her feet. She’d lost her hat in the fracas and decided to retrieve it from the dirt between his downed form and the patch of ground he’d been raking.

  Caitlin picked up her Stetson, flapped it clean, and turned back toward the man she couldn’t vanquish all those years ago, but had today. Breathing hard as she fit the hat back upon her head.

  Frank came at her again, the speed and power of the move springing out of nowhere. Caitlin went with it, propelled backward and stumbling over the discarded rake. The shadow of the bar overtook her, an instant before Frank’s force projected her up and over the polished wood finish. Her splayed boots shattered a host of bottles and glasses, sent an entire shelf tumbling down upon her.

  Caitlin looked up from the plank bar flooring, her shoulders propped up against a trash can, just in time to see Frank lunging at her with the jagged edge of a broken bottle. She deflected his first blow, then rerouted his second upward, drawing a nasty gash up his left cheek almost to the eye to match the blood still oozing from his nose.

  When Frank jerked backward, recoiling instinctively, Caitlin grabbed hold of the metal trash can behind her in both hands and slammed it into his face. He pitched over to the side hard, Caitlin stumbling to her feet over him, as she discarded the trash can, now dented to the specifications of his face that was taking on a purplish glint from the swelling. Then she hopped back over the bar, retrieved her Stetson yet again, and laid her hands on her knees to get herself settled.

  Caitlin heard a plop and watched Frank hit the hard ground after rolling off the bar’s top. He made it back to his feet, first wobbling about and then listing from side to side, a small-bladed knife flashing in his right hand.

  Caitlin moved her hand toward her SIG-Sauer in response.

  “Gaw head, shoot me!” he raged, starting toward her unsteadily with both knees swelling up and seeming to bend inward.

  Caitlin had as much of her breath back now as she needed. “That would be too easy,” she said and moved her hand away from the SIG.

  Frank spit out the blood that had collected in his mouth from his busted nose. The eye that had taken the brunt of the damage from the trash can was half-closed and his forehead looked vaguely simian shaped from the swelling.

  “I don’t even remember you,” he sputtered, through the froth, drool, and blood oozing from his nose and mouth. “How’s that make you feel?”

  Caitlin backed off from him and sidestepped under the roasting sun. “But I’ll bet you remember Kelly Ann Beasley from the other night, don’t you?”

  She continued to circle before Frank, getting him positioned just the way she wanted to. Let him poke and thrust at her a few times with the knife, blows she effortlessly avoided.

  Why have I not shot him?

  Because that would be too easy, just like she’d told him. Use her gun, shoot him here and now, and he’d be the winner, just like he’d been for eighteen years. Just like he was last night when she’d killed a kid and two nights before that when she’d shot Willie Arble.

  Frank had recovered his footing, his knife starting to come dangerously close to Caitlin, when the sun hit his eyes. She watched him turn his head away and tuck his face low against the blinding rays. He probably never actually saw the blows she unleashed that pounded his solar plexus, ribs, and throat. Either way, Frank was standing and then he was lying on a heap on the ground, the old-fashioned switchblade separated from his grasp.

  Caitlin kicked it aside, only then realizing the fight had drawn an audience of diners and workers from inside Stubb’s, either through the window, out on the back deck extended from the restaurant, or having claimed a position on the hard-packed dirt for themselves.

  “You lost, Frank,” she said, twisting his hands behind him.
“And you’re under arrest.”

  62

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  “You sure this is a good idea, bubba?” the ghost of Leroy Epps asked Cort Wesley from the passenger seat of his truck. “I mean, as I recall, things didn’t go so well the first time we came out here and they can only get worse this time.”

  “Sorry I forgot to pack your root beer, champ,” Cort Wesley said to him, squeezing the wheel tighter.

  Dylan was back home, under the watchful eye of Guillermo Paz. Cort Wesley had told the colonel he was driving up to Houston to pick up Luke. He was sure Paz knew he was lying but didn’t care, since it was better than saying he was going to pay a visit to the man who’d raised holy hell in the street last night. Circumstances aside, he figured Armand Fisker had that coming to him, along with a message Cort Wesley wanted to deliver in person.

  “Last night was a pickle, wasn’t it?” Leroy resumed, peeking into the backseat to make sure there was no cooler packing root beer there. “That boy of yours sure is a chip off the old block.”

  “That a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “Depends on your perspective. From where I be, right and wrong look distinct as black and white. Man can’t hide his intentions or the contents of his soul from those of us on the other side. There ain’t no gray.”

  “Where you going with this?”

  “Your boy shares your soul, bubba. He’s a gen-u-ine piece of work, an anachronism costumed as one of them rock and rollers that drives the girls crazy.”

  “Biggest word I’ve ever heard you use. Anachronism,” Cort Wesley repeated.

  “Don’t try changing a subject you brought up. Your boy’s a walking contradiction.”

  “And you think that applies to me, too?”

  “You look in the mirror lately?”

  “As little as possible. Normally, only when I’m shaving.”

  “Imagine a mirror where you could see the inside of folks, too, bubba. That’s the perspective from this side, biggest difference there be between the two realms. I look inside your boy, I see your ilk. I saw it last night when he gunned down that boy whose soul was black as pitch.”

  “You’re just trying to make me feel better, champ,” Cort Wesley said, the outskirts of Elk Grove almost upon him.

  “Not my call to make you feel better or worse. I tell it as I sees it,” Epps said, his sometimes lifeless, bloodstained eyes glowing and bright. “Not my business neither to tell you what you already know about what’s been. I’d rather we conversate on what’s to be.”

  “Conversate?”

  “You got an issue with my vocabulary today?”

  “Just tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “’Sides the fact that this drive is a mistake? I know what you’re doing and I know why, and it’s as bad a notion as notions get.”

  “Can you be a bit clearer?”

  “Not if you ain’t gonna open your mind to what I got to say.”

  “It’s open.”

  “How can you even tell? There’s so much clutter in your thoughts. You figure the best way to keep Armand Fucker away from your boy is to draw him onto you. Not sure if you’re doing some deflecting or distracting, if you’d like to clarify, but it won’t work either way.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because Armand Fucker got enough hate and ugliness in his soul to go around, more than enough to allocate on you and your boy. And you got yourself riding straight into a shit storm.”

  What had been a mere speck on the horizon filled out ahead of him as the shape of two McMullen County sheriff’s department cruisers parked nose to nose across the road, blocking both sides.

  “See what I mean, bubba.”

  Cort Wesley shot the ghost of his old friend a look, then turned back to a pair of deputies standing before their cruisers, tightening their grasps on the shotguns they were holding. He looked to his right to see if old Leroy had any more pearls of wisdom to dispense, but the ghost was gone, leaving a slight impression in the passenger seat.

  Cort Wesley pulled his truck to a halt on the side of the road, climbed out, and approached the roadblock with his hands in the air. The deputies jacked rounds into the chambers of their twelve-gauges in virtual unison, as the rear door to one of the cruisers opened and a man he recognized from a Google search as Sheriff Donnell Gaunt stepped out.

  “Road’s out ahead,” he told Cort Wesley, the hands planted on his hips nearly disappearing into the rolls of fat layered around his torso.

  Cort Wesley left his hands in the air. “I want to talk to Fisker. Tell him, it’s—”

  “I know who you are, Masters. This road’s closed to avoid the kind of trouble you bring with you.”

  “Tell Fisker I want to see him.”

  “Nothing you can say about your boy blowing a hole in his that he wants to hear.”

  Cort Wesley took a few steps closer. “It’s not about his son, it’s about his father.”

  63

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  Armand Fisker arrived at the roadblock ten minutes later, four thugs armed with assault rifles piling out of the sleek, dark SUV ahead of him. He moved straight toward Cort Wesley in their shadow, stopping on the other side of the cruisers blocking the road.

  “You got something you want to say to me?”

  “Father to father, man to man, I’m sorry.”

  Fisker stiffened. “And that’s supposed to mean something?”

  “You need to hear this from me, because I’m the one your boy was sighting on. He’d just popped in a fresh magazine to do the job, when my boy did what he did.”

  “Scattered my son’s guts across the roadbed, you mean.”

  “You ever see what an M16 on full auto can do to a man?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “I’ve had considerably more experience.”

  “On account of you being a war hero, a goddamn Green Beret? Like that’s supposed to mean something to me.”

  “It’s not,” Cort Wesley told him. “What’s supposed to mean something to you is the fact that your son had his finger on the trigger of a fully racked magazine when my son dropped him with a round from a twelve-gauge. There anything you find unfair in that picture?”

  “Just the fact that my boy’s dead and yours isn’t. And the sheriff told me your coming here was about my father, not my son.”

  “It’s about both. See, we had a history between us long before yesterday.”

  “I don’t think I follow you.”

  “My father was in the Walls prison at the same time Cliven Fisker was running the whole show, members of his Aryan Brotherhood killing what they called ‘niggers’ or ‘darkies’ to prove their mettle to him, like initiation rites.”

  Fisker shook his head and laid his hands on the boiling hood of one of the cruisers, letting the heat singe his palms. “You come here to tell me something I already know?”

  Cort Wesley leaned as close to Fisker as the hood would allow. “I came here to tell you he went too far and that’s what got him killed, just like your boy last night. I guess it runs in the family.”

  Fisker jerked his palms from the sizzling paint and backed off, stopping just short of swinging all the way around. “I believe we’re done here.”

  “Not quite, Armand,” Cort Wesley told him. “One of those ‘darkies’ killed on your father’s behalf was a friend of my father’s, a man who’d kept him safe when he first went in. Two weeks after somebody forced a bottle of bleach down that man’s throat, your father got shanked in the shower.”

  “If you’re trying to make amends for your boy, hero, you’re going about it the wrong way.”

  “Just a little clarity on the history we got between us, Armand: it was my dad who shanked yours.”

  64

  ELK GROVE, TEXAS

  “I thought it best you hear that straight from me,” Leroy Epps said, picking up Cort Wesley’s exchange with Armand Fisker when they were back on the road, Cort Wesley still half expe
cting a fusillade of fire to rain down on his truck. “Did I hear right? You really say that to him, bubba?”

  “You heard right, champ.”

  Cort Wesley thought he heard the leather creak, as Leroy settled back in the passenger seat. “Man, I could really use a Hires now. I’d settle for whatever you can scrounge up at the next gas station. Watching over you’s a full-time job and I thought my working days were done a whole long time ago.”

  “Isn’t that what angels do?”

  “Who said I was an angel? You see any black wings sprouting from this here body?” Leroy stopped there and turned his gaze out the window, as if seeing the landscape for the first time, resuming with his gaze still aimed in that direction. “You really think you improved your cause back there?”

  “I’m not sure that’s what I was trying to do.”

  The ghost swung back toward him, his motion a blur, his spectral appearance fading for a moment. “That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day, including back there. Those are the kind of sumbitches used to hang folks like me for entertainment at a weekend barbecue. You just tried to put out a fire with gasoline and, if things go bad, it’s your boy who’s gonna get burned. Did you ever think of that?”

  “I was trying to make this personal enough to take Dylan out of the picture, remember?”

  “Fisker’s got an army, bubba.”

  “I’ve gone up against worse.”

  Leroy’s expression turned even dourer. “I’m not sure about that. I’d like to tell you the man’s got a dark soul, but I’m not sure he’s got any soul at all.”

  “He’s got blood pumping through his veins, though, and that’s what I intend to spill.”

  Leroy reared back his head and chortled, his laugh pushing out a curtain of mist through his spectral mouth that seemed to envelop him.

  “Something funny, champ?”

  “You ever sit back and listen to yourself? Man oh man, you are a walking cliché!”