Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “This coming from a dead man who steals my root beer.”

  “You’re missing the point, bubba.”

  “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

  Leroy’s expression flattened, the furrows deepened by his laugh filling in. “I didn’t know your daddy was the one who put Cliven Fisker out of the world’s misery. You said it was over Fisker killing that friend of his who kept him safe when he first went in.”

  “There’s more, champ. Boone Masters was doing a three-year stretch for robbery. This would be back in the early eighties, just before he joined up with Caitlin’s father, Jim Strong. Cliven Fisker ordered the murder of a young black inmate who was the son of a man who’d taken the rap for my father years before and died in prison for it. My father figured he owed him that much. Armand Fisker was probably a little older than me at the time.”

  “I never had no idea.”

  Cort Wesley turned toward the passenger seat, where Leroy’s physical form faded and then sharpened again. “Guess it never came up.”

  “So now you’re keeping secrets from me?”

  “Boone Masters isn’t my favorite topic of conversation, in case you forgot.”

  Leroy’s form solidified again, to the point where Cort Wesley could smell the talcum powder he’d used on his diabetes-bred sores to quell the rotting stench emanating from them. “My point, bubba, is that if I had no idea your daddy shanked Cliven Fisker, how much else from those years might we not be aware of?”

  “Pertaining to Cliven Fisker, you mean.”

  “Man dies in prison, he leaves a whole lot of secrets locked in his cell behind him. Everything Armand’s got was born behind those same walls. We want to find out what’s going on at the root of all this shit, that’s where we’ll find it.”

  “In Huntsville. At the Walls.”

  “Was there another prison where we shared a cell?”

  “Don’t crack wise with me, you damn ghost. And Huntsville is the last place in the world where I want to go right now.”

  Leroy leaned back and folded his arms behind his head. “We got a long trip ahead of us, bubba. What you say we stop off and pick up some Hires for the ride?”

  65

  ALAMO HEIGHTS

  “Come on, baby, let’s have some fun,” David Skoll said to one of the two beautiful women he was lying in bed with, the one who hadn’t passed out.

  She muttered something unintelligible, smiling softly with her eyes closed, when Skoll spread a line of cocaine over her exposed breast and snorted it, finger pressed against his free nostril.

  “This ever goes legal, I’m getting the merchandising patent,” he said, as the first of the brain rush struck him.

  Both women had passed out now, Skoll wondering if he should bother dispensing with the hundred bucks he usually tipped. Who knows, before too long he might need every penny he could get his hands on. Facing off against the government was bad enough on its own, and now he had Armand Fisker front and center in his life, instead of just a peripheral participant.

  Packing for Ecuador had become an even more attractive proposition, turning state’s evidence against Fisker a slightly less appealing one. He could have his lawyers test the waters, see if the FBI or Justice Department was interested. Not seeing witness protection as a viable option, though, where exactly did that leave him once the deed was done? Fisker could get to him anywhere. Those damn bikers he commanded would off somebody for a thirty-rack, one can for every bullet in an AR-15 magazine.

  He never should have spilled the beans to Fisker about the wonder drug that wasn’t so much a wonder. A drug that was supposed to improve, and even save, millions of lives that ended up a potential weapon of mass destruction in the wrong hands.

  Like Armand Fisker’s.

  Maybe Skoll should have his lawyers contact Homeland Security. This seemed more up their alley and maybe they could deport the son of a bitch to Guantanamo. Skoll had some gangster friends he could talk to about a more permanent solution, but they were greaseballs who didn’t make much of a match for Fisker’s biker army.

  The other girl, the brunette, was stirring now, coming awake, her mouth making cracking sounds from the dryness all the cocaine she’d snorted had left behind. Her eyes opened and she stretched a hand up to run through Skoll’s long hair that made him look like he was still in high school. That made him think of the invite list to his fortieth birthday party in two years.

  “You’re pretty,” she said.

  Skoll held the back of her hand, while she fingered his sweat-dampened locks that smelled like motor oil right now. “So are you, darlin’.”

  “I want to club this back in a ponytail. Make you even prettier.”

  “Maybe later,” he said, moving her hand from his hair to his groin. “First things first.”

  The brunette slid down him, feeling like a snake slithering across his chest. She replaced her hand with her mouth, while Skoll waited for the cocaine to work its magic. How many lines had he done today exactly, a little afternoon delight he figured he had coming to him? Maybe he should just go back to sucking the white powder up his nose, until his brain exploded. Go out with a bang in the same moment the brunette, or the blonde, finished their business. Fuck the world, the government, and Armand Fisker, too. Truth was, Skoll hated Ecuador.

  Down below, the brunette’s head was gyrating like crazy, but nothing was happening. Absolutely nothing.

  What the fuck?

  Well, Fisker had taken his balls, so why should he be surprised? Maybe he needed the man’s permission to get a hard-on now.

  His phone chimed with a special ring reserved for only those he couldn’t put off. He groped for it and dragged it to him with AF in the caller ID.

  “Hey, Arm,” he greeted, as the brunette continued trying to bring him to life. “I was just thinking about you.”

  PART SEVEN

  They were men who could not be stampeded.

  —Colonel Homer Garrison, Jr., director of Texas Department of Public Safety, 1939–1968

  66

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  They sat on opposite sides of the big oblong table in the conference room adjacent to his office, Caitlin staring at Jones as if to make sense of what she was seeing.

  “How’s your first day as a Homeland Security agent going, Ranger?”

  “When was the last time you were in an all-out brawl?” Caitlin asked him.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “If you don’t count a few hours back, neither can I.”

  Jones’s gaze softened. “I told them to hold Frank Doyle as a person of interest for Homeland. That won’t hold up for long.”

  “I won’t need long to question him.”

  “Come again, Ranger?”

  “I think he’s the man who raped me, Jones. I think he raped the Beasley girl, too. Check with the hostess. Doyle was on stage security that night, maybe just a few feet from where Kelly Ann was dancing. My guess is we’ll learn he was on break or something around the same time she was sexually assaulted downstairs in the restaurant.”

  She rubbed the shoulder that had started to act up on her, a residue of her fight with Frank Doyle. It hurt her jaw to speak or swallow, and her head throbbed from where she’d slammed into the bar outside Stubb’s Barbecue. She didn’t feel dizzy or nauseous, prime indicators of a concussion, but she’d felt light-headed a few times, passing it off as a lingering spike in her blood pressure produced by the altercation.

  “Frank Doyle’s refusing to provide a voluntary DNA sample,” Jones told her.

  “Maybe you don’t need him to. After that fight, I’ve got plenty of his DNA all over me.”

  “That’s a thought.”

  “And you wouldn’t need a warrant, or anything like that. What about Kelly Ann Beasley?”

  “What about her?”

  “I was hoping I could show her Doyle’s mug shot, see if it strikes a chord. After all, I’m working for Homeland Security now.”

  Jones
stiffened. “She and her family are off-limits, Ranger. I thought I made that clear.”

  “So the investigation of her rape disappears into the wind.”

  “I have to think of the bigger picture here.”

  Caitlin thought of the rage, anger, and hatred that had simmered inside her unchecked for eighteen years, most of it tucked away beneath the surface, eating at her until it had finally spilled forth this afternoon in the heat and dirt outside Stubb’s Barbecue. Each blow she struck to Frank Doyle felt like rewinding time, getting a few of those years back. Who knows, a few more blows and she might have taken the clock back all the way before the night of her assault.

  “There is no bigger picture than this, Jones,” Caitlin said coldly. “Maybe if somebody had ever forced themselves on you, you’d know what I was talking about.”

  He leaned forward and crossed his arms on the scratched-up table. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “To what?”

  “Armand Fisker.”

  “I figured he might be on Homeland’s radar. You sent Paz because you must’ve gotten wind that Fisker was en route with his private army in tow. You got someone inside his organization, right? Otherwise, you would’ve come clean when the subject came up originally.”

  Jones remained noncommittal. “We’re onto Fisker for running drugs and guns from coast-to-coast through biker gangs organized out of the Aryan Brotherhood. He’s turned pond scum into millionaires. Franchised out distribution networks by state and region, utilizing a separate force to deal with the competition. You want to know why so many of the Colombians and all the other drug gangs who don’t drive Harleys turned tail and went home? Look no further than the private army you saw firsthand last night.”

  “You want to tell me how a man like that operates under the radar?”

  “Because he’s not actually under it, Ranger, so much as flying stealth. Like the way he set up shop in Elk Grove, bringing all the right people and turning local law enforcement into enablers. You know what his organization calls itself?”

  “No.”

  “Because it doesn’t have a name. Fisker is street-smart in the same way his father was. He’s turned corruption and bribery into an art form, and bikers into businessmen who wear three-piece suits and park their hogs in the private garages of high-end office buildings. If estimates of his reach are any indication, he employs more people than IBM ever did.”

  Caitlin shook her head, something unsettling in Jones’s tone. “You sound like you admire him.”

  “I may have, until last night. Storming a suburb of San Antonio was hardly the best thing for business. Looks like his son’s killing finally flushed him out. Has a Shakespearean ring to it, doesn’t it?”

  “I didn’t know you read Shakespeare.”

  “Figure of speech, but I’m sure there’s an allusion in there somewhere.”

  “Hamlet comes to mind, maybe King Lear and Macbeth, too. You know, the mad king syndrome.”

  Jones smirked. “Whatever you say.”

  “You have my official Homeland creds yet, Jones?”

  “No, something better: the next part of the story involving your grandfather and J. Edgar Hoover.”

  67

  DALLAS, TEXAS; 1944

  Earl and Captain Henry Druce searched the home of Abner Dunbar until the late afternoon sun bled away and twilight bloomed in the Texas sky.

  “You ready to give me a clearer idea of what it is we’re looking for?” Earl finally asked him.

  “I believe I already did.”

  “No, you said it was some kind of list. You didn’t say exactly what kind. Dunbar being involved in resettling these Nazi assholes made me figure it must be a list with names like that of Gunther Haut. Now I’m figuring it’s something else.”

  “Such things don’t happen in a vacuum, Ranger. You want to stop such an operation like this in its tracks, you need to do so at the source. Those men like Dunbar are ultimately beholden to.”

  “And that would be…”

  “Plenty of powerful Americans who never really did support your country’s entry into the war. This same plenty would have much preferred either you stayed out of things altogether or, even, cozied up to Germany.”

  “These being businessmen?”

  “The name Joseph Kennedy mean anything to you?”

  “Of course, it does. A man cut from the same cloth as John D. Rockefeller who my own granddad had quite a tussle with back in his time.”

  “Then it may interest you to know, sir, that Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New Jersey shipped fuel to Germany through neutral Switzerland in 1942, at the same time millions of American and British people had to fend with rationing coupons and lines at the gas stations. And, speaking of gasoline, I’m sure the name Henry Ford means something to you.”

  “It sure does. I drove a Ford truck for a time, Captain.”

  Druce stepped farther into the light of Abner Dunbar’s living room they’d been searching to no avail. “Then, sir, it may also interest you to know that Ford trucks, until quite recently, were being built for the German occupation troops in France with direct authorization from Dearborn, Michigan.”

  “I can go that one better,” Earl said. “Did you know Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate IT&T, flew from New York to Madrid to Bern during the war to help improve Hitler’s communications systems and fine-tune the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that IT&T built the Focke-Wulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial ball bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Göring’s cousin in Philadelphia? All this while American forces were desperately short of those same ball bearings.”

  Druce’s eyes widened in surprise. “I must say, sir, that I was not aware of any of that. It’s a pleasure to be in the company of such a learned man.”

  Earl scratched at his scalp. “Well, Captain, I don’t know about any of that. I read lots of newspapers to ease my guilt over the fact I’m here instead of over there. And when I read those kind of stories, it makes me feel like a man doesn’t have to go all that way to find his share of vermin.”

  Druce checked his watch. “Speaking of which, we must consider the possibility that your friend Mr. Hoover will be here before too much longer.”

  Earl turned his gaze about the room, imagining he was seeing it for the first time. “We’ve been wasting our time. Man charged with this kind of mission wouldn’t leave anything of note anywhere men like us could find it.”

  “Dunbar wasn’t working alone, Ranger. He was part of a network with a reach that extends into the United States and every country in Europe. If we don’t find some clue as to the other spies he was working with, I’m afraid the killer you’re chasing will slip away forever.”

  Earl’s eyes settled on the mail slot built into the front door, beneath which a stack of envelopes lay, some captured in a rubber band. “I believe I’ve got another idea.”

  * * *

  The next morning Earl and Captain Druce rode the elevator in the Lone Star Gas building up to the twelfth floor and the office of Witchell Long, president and owner of the company that had provided the building its name. Located on St. Paul Street in Dallas, the thirteen-story tower had been completed in 1931 as an Art Deco masterpiece, although Earl had no idea what Art Deco actually was.

  The elevator opened into a spacious reception area, already humming with activity centered around the biggest wooden double doors Earl had ever seen. They looked hand carved and custom fitted to allow someone as big as Paul Bunyan to pass under the arch without ducking.

  Earl led Druce to a reception desk set directly before those doors, making sure the woman eyeing them suspiciously could see the Texas Ranger badge pinned to his chest.

  “Ma’am, I’m here to see Mr. Long.”

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “
No, he’s not.”

  “And you don’t have an appointment?”

  “No, we don’t. But it’s vital I see him and I don’t expect to take too much of his time.”

  The woman nodded, eyes shifting back and forth between Earl and the badge that glistened in the bright reception area lighting. “If you could give me some notion as to what this is about, I’d be happy to buzz Mr. Long.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, ma’am. This is a personal matter involving Mr. Long’s family, and I’m not at liberty to share the details with anyone but him.”

  “Mr. Long’s son has been in and out of trouble with the law,” the woman said, more to herself than either of them. “Why don’t I go in and see if he’s available?”

  The woman emerged from Witchell Long’s office inside of a minute later, holding one of the big double doors open for Earl and Druce. “He’ll see you now, Ranger.”

  Earl passed the woman, tipping his hat to her with Druce on his tail. He closed the door behind them and engaged the bolt before he turned to find a big man, who looked to be a better fit for the oilfields than the boardroom, rising from behind the biggest desk he’d ever seen. Witchell Long looked to be as close to seven feet as six, carrying more of his three hundred or so pounds around his midsection than he used to, but still looking as if he could wield a sledgehammer just fine. He had tawny skin with tiny cracks that made it look like leather tanned by the sun and a scalp that featured only a dollop of hair on each side. He laid a pair of hands that might have been slabs of meat atop his desk blotter and studied Earl Strong and Henry Druce as they approached.

  “You said you had business pertaining to my family, Ranger,” he said stiffly, as if that came as no surprise to him. “Something you can share only with me.”

  In Earl’s experience, all rich and powerful families had plenty to hide and the ruse he’d just used to gain access to one of the most successful businessmen in all of Texas had never failed him, not even once.

  “I do indeed, sir. There’s something I need to show you that’ll help explain things.”