Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “Can you name the man, or men, who put you up to this, the real villains in this picture show?”

  “No,” the man said, his voice losing a measure of its indignation and his grip on Bo Lowry’s son slackening. “But I can give you an address.”

  * * *

  Earl Strong and Henry Druce drove north twenty miles to a town comprised of scattered ranches and pig farms, the smell of manure the strongest Earl could ever remember. They’d waited until the police arrived to ensure that Captain Lowry’s wife and children were turned over in proper fashion, along with their single surviving prisoner.

  The address of the ranch in question wasn’t marked, meaning Earl had to find it through a combination of the rough description the man he’d spared had provided and the process of elimination.

  “You would have made a splendid soldier, Ranger,” Druce complimented, after Earl parked his truck and turned off the lights, now that night had fallen.

  “I’ll take those words to heart, Captain,” he said, letting his eyes adjust to the ribbons of darkness. “They mean a lot to me, especially coming from a man like you. Do a bit to fill the emptiness guilt has left behind.”

  “I suppose, sir, you were meant to stay here and fight the Nazis on your own ground.”

  “That does seem to be the size of things, doesn’t it?” Earl studied the well-lit house that stood out amid the night, impossible to tell exactly how far away it was. “I’m thinking this place must be a haven for Nazis or, maybe, their sympathizers.”

  “I’m afraid that particular distinction is lost on me.”

  “True enough. The bullets from my forty-five sure aren’t about to distinguish one from the other, if we go into this shooting. You figure Gunther Haut is inside?”

  “If not, whoever’s inside will be able to provide a notion as to his whereabouts.”

  “What do you think of my interrogation skills, by the way?”

  “Did you bring your hammer, Ranger?”

  * * *

  They’d advanced a hundred feet onto the property, forgoing the use of flashlights that would have alerted any patrolling guards, when Earl jerked a hand against Druce’s chest to stop him in his tracks.

  “Something’s wrong with the ground,” the Ranger said. “I’m seeing bumps, like pimples cut out of the grass and scrub.”

  Druce followed his gaze, but picked up nothing. “Point one out to me. Lead me to it.”

  A few moments later, Druce was kneeling over the first raised impression Earl had brought him to. He took a knife from a sheath belted to his calf, and worked it about the slight mound that was no bigger than an anthill, testing what the tip found for him.

  “It’s a land mine, Ranger,” he said softly, rising again. “Crude, crass, and homemade but more than enough to blow your bullocks off with a wrong step.”

  Earl kept surveying the grounds around them for a flashlight’s spray or match’s flare, a guard lighting up a cigarette. “Get behind me and let’s walk in single file and real slow, Captain.”

  “If you feel one of them under your boot,” Druce started, “don’t lift it up again. Some mines are pressure-based. Stepping on it activates the explosives, but it’s stepping off that blows them.”

  “I didn’t come this far to get us both killed, sir.”

  They continued advancing toward the house, avoiding the spill of light raining down from the floods mounted on the roof.

  “Something here ain’t right,” Earl said softly to Druce.

  The Brit had his pistol in hand, clearly not trusting the quickness or reliability of his draw the way Earl did. “The lack of guards?”

  Earl didn’t bother nodding. “Yup, that was my thought. If this is some sort of Nazi hideout, if Gunther Haut is here, there should be at least a couple about.”

  “None that I can see.”

  Earl crouched and plucked something off the ground where the light from one of the floods hit it. “Well, this cigarette butt here is still soft enough to suggest there was a guard out here, and not all that long ago, either.”

  They continued toward the house, breaking off to peer through the windows on all sides, and joining up again at the rear of the house.

  “It appears to be empty, Ranger,” Druce reported.

  “Yup, that was my estimation, too. What say we have a look inside anyway?”

  * * *

  The doors were all locked, so Earl resorted again to using a rock to break a window on a door that opened into the house’s kitchen. He stuck a hand through, careful to avoid the jagged glass, threw back the bolt, and twisted the knob. Then he eased the door open and entered ahead of Druce.

  They walked the first floor together, each with pistols palmed now, finding no one about and nothing amiss. Same thing on the second floor, which featured five bedrooms, all of which looked to have been recently made up. There were a pair of bathrooms upstairs as well, with medicine cabinets fully stocked and towels still slightly damp, either splayed across rods or hanging from hooks. Earl checked the drains, but couldn’t tell from them how long it had been since the showers had actually been used.

  “They must have left in a hurry,” Druce concluded.

  “Right, but who left in a hurry? If I didn’t know better, I’d say this place was a kind of way station for Nazis like Haut to hole up for a time, while more permanent travel arrangements were being made.”

  “If he was here, though, it couldn’t have been for more than a day.”

  “Let’s check the basement,” the Ranger suggested.

  * * *

  Earl knew what awaited them in the basement as soon as he eased open the heavy plank door. It had warped, causing it to scratch across the floor and jam to a halt when it was halfway ajar, and it released a coppery stench Earl recognized all too well.

  The first body lay at the foot of the stairs, four others lying in clumps on the floor in the same general vicinity. So much blood had spilled from the five victims that it had pooled together in a series of thick puddles on the verge of joining up. From the look of things, absent closer inspection, it appeared to Earl as if someone had taken a Thompson machine gun to them and stitched it up and down their spines. There was nothing like what the blistering fury of those .45 caliber shells could do, a weapon made by the devil to do the work of God.

  But not here.

  “Oh my Lord,” Earl heard Druce mutter, following his gaze to the assortment of Nazi flags and regalia that dominated the walls.

  Especially flags, the swastika making its presence known one place after another, as if each of the treasonous residents of this house had one for himself. There were pictures of Hitler and his top cadre, men like Goebbels and Göring, whose faces were well known to Earl from all he’d read and studied about them, in lieu of being able to go and fight them for himself.

  Seeing their faces plastered over a basement wall in Texas, in close proximity to the flags of the most murderous, hateful regime in human history, brought the pangs over his being ruled physically unfit for duty back to him. Like an itch he couldn’t reach, or a dull throb no amount of aspirin could relieve.

  But it wasn’t the flags and photos that had moved Captain Henry Druce to invoke the name of the Lord, it was the assortment of weapons stored on a wall bracketed by the two biggest swastikas in the entire basement. Earl recognized German Mauser machine guns and carbines, to go with an assortment of Lugers. There were other pistols and rifles as well, along with gun belts and ammo packs for the heavy machine guns stored on shelving nearby next to long, thick, tubular weapons that looked as if they’d been made to fire the longer German-style grenades.

  “Man oh man,” was all Earl could think to say, pushing his hand through his hair to scratch at his scalp. “Looks like they were fixing to bring World War II to Texas.”

  “There are a few weapons missing from where the machine guns are hanging.”

  “And no Thompson in evidence,” Earl added, his boots striking a pair of the gun’s expend
ed shells that must’ve bounced all the way over here. “That tells me whoever killed those boys we stepped over, must’ve taken it with them, along with a few others, if I’m seeing this wall right.”

  “Why slaughter their own, Ranger?” Druce asked him.

  Earl was looking at the bodies again. “I’m guessing because ‘their own’ is a relative term. These boys must’ve been nothing more than grunts, hired help. Easily dispensed with, once they’d outlived their usefulness.”

  “Because of Gunther Haut.”

  Earl crouched again and touched a finger to the pooling blood. “This happened in the last hour, Captain. We must’ve just missed the sons of bitches. I’d like to ask our friend Witchell Long what he knows about this place.”

  “I’d venture to say he doesn’t know it even exists. Haut killed Long’s man at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, remember? That means we’re facing two different factions here of Nazis, maybe two entirely different groups: one composed of nothing more than sympathizers, probably in it for the profit, the other composed of more soldiering types who genuinely believe in the cause, clearly not reluctant to get into a shooting war.”

  The Ranger stood back up, his knees cracking. “A shooting war against five men who couldn’t shoot back. Drew lines up their spines with .45 caliber bullets when they headed for the stairs. Poor bastards never knew what hit them,” Earl said, again picturing the fury of the Thompson, or Thompsons, that had done this.

  “So the big boys killed their own men and then fled with Gunther Haut.”

  “That’s the way it appears to measure up, doesn’t it, Captain?”

  “But we’ve got no idea where they went from here.”

  Earl nodded. “So what do you say we take a closer look at things upstairs to see if we can find something that can tell us?”

  * * *

  They found a large pantry off the kitchen that had been converted into a kind of command center complete with telephones, typewriters, and an old printing press. Earl was glad for the pungent scent of ink, since it washed the coppery stench of blood from his nostrils.

  The Nazis headquartered here hadn’t bothered to cover up their presence, and clearly, they had no plans to come back; nobody leaves five bodies in the basement and comes back.

  But the weapons, Earl thought, the weapons were another matter. For men like this, weapons were like extra appendages. Men like this never left their weapons behind.

  Unless they’d left in a real hurry.

  Unless the purpose of their mission called for it.

  Gunther Haut …

  It all came back to him.

  Who the hell was he?

  “Did you say something?” Captain Druce asked him.

  “Nah,” Earl said, checking the contents of a trash can now, “just thinking out loud.”

  He came to a crumpled piece of carbon paper and flattened it out carefully, so it wouldn’t rip, holding it up to the renovated pantry’s thin light to see if he could read what it would have stenciled onto a second piece of paper.

  “Think I may have something there, Captain.”

  And that’s when the explosions sounded outside, one after another.

  * * *

  The screams followed almost immediately. A group of men, by the sound of things, who’d traipsed across the property without realizing the ground was booby-trapped. Earl Strong and Henry Druce rushed outside with guns ready, realizing almost immediately they wouldn’t be needing them.

  Even without recognizing them individually, their suits and dress shoes were more than enough to tell Earl the men who’d done the screaming were FBI, Hoover himself likely somewhere amongst them.

  “There was a phone inside,” Earl said to Druce. “You go get help here on the double, while I see what I can see.”

  Druce nodded stiffly and retraced his steps back to the house, leaving Earl clinging to the original path he’d taken across the field. He found J. Edgar Hoover standing board-stiff fifty feet away, having figured out his next step might very well be his last.

  “Don’t move, Mr. Hoover,” Earl warned. “You got one on either side of you.”

  The director of the FBI squinted through the night. “Ranger Strong?”

  “Bet you didn’t think our paths would be crossing again, not under these circumstances anyway. But, as long as you follow my instructions, you’ll come out of this just fine.”

  Earl could see Hoover swallow hard in the light spilling from the moon that had just risen. “My men…”

  “I got somebody calling for help. A bunch are down, some worse than that. Now, sir, I want you to take one step forward, then sidestep a foot in my direction and turn face-on toward me.”

  Hoover switched on a flashlight he’d been holding and followed Earl’s orders, looking like a man who’d woken up in the middle of a tightrope.

  “One step to the left now.… That’s it, sir. Now, walk straight for me.”

  Earl met him on a patch of flattened scrub. Hoover was shaking horribly and breathing so fast it seemed he was about to hyperventilate.

  “We were both too late, sir,” Earl told him. “Gunther Haut has flown the coop. You get a call from the local boys in Abilene about what they found at Captain Lowry’s house?”

  “You could have called me to deliver the report yourself, Ranger.”

  “Must’ve forgotten to get your number, sir.”

  J. Edgar Hoover groused but didn’t challenge him on that subject further.

  “You mind if I borrow that flashlight?” Earl asked him, gingerly removing the now folded-up piece of carbon paper from his pocket.

  “What is that?”

  The Ranger was already aiming the beam at two rows, one on top of the other, of what looked like lines of typed letters and numbers. “Where Gunther Haut and whoever’s with him may have gone from here, Director. We better get a move on if we’re gonna catch them.”

  79

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  “Four of Hoover’s men died that night and three more were seriously injured,” Jones finished. “Only Hoover himself and his driver emerged unscathed. He, your grandfather, and Captain Druce must have headed for the train station in Abilene.”

  “Train station?”

  “That’s what your grandfather found on the carbon paper: a train schedule, specifically the schedule for trains running from Abilene to Fort Worth that same night.”

  “What happened when they got there?”

  Jones shook his head. “Sorry, Ranger, the file, and the story, ends there.”

  “There’s got to be more.”

  “I had a hard enough time digging this part up. The rest is buried in a box with whoever really killed JFK. Oh, which reminds me: there was one other thing.”

  “What’s that, Jones?”

  “Does the name Bill Kennedy mean anything to you?”

  “Big Bill Kennedy?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Well, if it’s Big Bill, he was a rookie Texas Ranger right around that time. Nephew of the legendary Ranger Frank Hamer who the governor of Texas herself called out of retirement to track down Bonnie and Clyde.”

  “Opinions vary on that, Ranger.”

  “Then they’re wrong. Where’s Big Bill Kennedy fit into all this?”

  “I don’t know. His name was on the last page of what I managed to dig up. Whatever else there was is gone for good.”

  “Well, that sucks.”

  “All this must’ve been covered up to spare Hoover the embarrassment of fucking up so bad.”

  “What about Gunther Haut, Jones?”

  He shrugged. “Beats me. After he fled that house and headed for the train station, he dropped off the face of the Earth. There’s no record of him anywhere, and no record of any continued or follow-up investigation of his escape, or the murders he committed, by the Rangers or any other law enforcement body.”

  “I think Hoover knew more than he was saying. I think he’s the one who orchestrated the whole da
mn cover-up.”

  “Par for the course, given his history, especially if he failed to bring Haut to justice. Last thing the country needed at that point was rumors of escaped Nazis running wild.”

  “They weren’t rumors.”

  “It was only one Nazi, Ranger.”

  “Clearly a real important one, though.”

  “I’ve got something else here to take your mind off all that,” Jones said, sliding across the table a manila folder Caitlin didn’t recall him setting down in the first place. “Homeland’s file on your friend David Skoll. I skimmed it, enough to know he’s a real piece of work. SEC has him dead to rights on an insider trading beef, but he’s slippery as an eel and will probably skate.”

  Caitlin lifted the folder from the conference table, but didn’t open it. “Gotta love your faith in the system you’re a part of.”

  “My part of the system doesn’t employ judges and juries, Ranger, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “No, you employ Guillermo Paz instead.”

  “That bothering you, all of a sudden?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  Jones aimed his gaze toward the folder in Caitlin’s grasp. “Happy reading, Ranger. As if you needed any more reason to want to shoot this son of a bitch Skoll.”

  “I’m sure I’ll find at least one, Jones,” she said, turning for the door.

  PART NINE

  Still, the Rangers’ caseload has continued to grow, along with the rest of Texas. In 1996, a total of 3,680 investigations resulted in 601 felony arrests, 157 misdemeanor arrests, and 598 indictments returned. The Rangers executed 319 search warrants, and secured 2,875 statements of which 473 were confessions to various crimes. The Rangers also recovered $3,129,349.13 in stolen property and at the same time seized contraband which totaled $1,088,659.00. There were 774 convictions for various crimes investigated by the Rangers resulting in 4 death sentences, 48 life sentences, and a total of 6,703 years in penitentiary time being assessed. Additionally, 518 court writs and 568 warrants were served and 107 executive security assignments were handled by the Rangers. The Rangers traveled 2,254,875 miles during 1996 and made 140 separate traffic referrals to appropriate authorities for dangerous drivers or driving conditions.