Strong to the Bone--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  —“Lone on the Range: Texas Lawmen” by Jesse Sublett, Texas Monthly, December 31, 1969 (Reprinted from Mike Cox’s official history pamphlet “Silver Stars and Six Guns,” published by the Waco Convention and Visitor Services.)

  80

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  Caitlin stood in the darkest reaches of the front yard, a department store mannequin dressed like her seated in her usual spot on the porch swing, just in case gunmen dispatched by Armand Fisker paid a return visit. She had leaned both her twelve-gauge and AR-15 against the tree she was using for cover, half hoping Fisker showed up himself so she could finish this once and for all.

  Cort Wesley would have quite a surprise waiting when he got back from the Village School in Houston, if that came to pass. She hoped he’d be bringing his younger son, Luke, home with him. She imagined the school would probably insist, after Guillermo Paz’s men shot three bikers, but not before one managed to toss a hand grenade into the boys’ locker room while Luke was changing after soccer practice.

  What were the odds of that grenade not going off?

  The colonel had told her about the visions he’d inherited from his mother, a woman who residents of the Caracas hillside slum where he’d grown up had labeled a bruja, or witch. She listened to Cort Wesley tell her about the lessons imparted to him by his dead cellmate, Leroy Epps. Caitlin herself was sure she’d spotted her late ancestors, including her father and grandfather, from time to time, although she neither conversed with them, nor did they offer her a glimpse of the future. She couldn’t say for sure whether their fleeting presence had been conjured up by her imagination, any more than she could attest to the veracity of Paz’s visions or Cort Wesley’s ghostly conversations.

  At least until tonight.

  Only two explanations existed for why the hand grenade tossed into the boys’ locker room at the Village School hadn’t exploded: either it had been a purposeful act engineered by Armand Fisker or …

  Go ahead, say it.

  … it had been some kind of act of divine or spiritual intervention. Maybe Paz’s mother, Cort Wesley’s ghost, or some even higher power had disabled the firing mechanism that would’ve otherwise turned all those kids into pincushions for deadly shrapnel. Sometimes you had to accept the impossible, because nothing else made any sense.

  Early into fixating on that thinking, she went inside and upstairs to check on Dylan. He lay atop his rumpled bedcovers in a twin bed that looked two small for him, earbuds connected to his iPhone still in place. Caitlin could hear the muffled riffs of a classic rock song she thought she recognized but quickly lost track of. When sleeping, Dylan looked no different than he had when she’d first met him when he was just thirteen. Maybe sleep really was more than just rest for the body and brain. Maybe it could rewind time and, if you tried hard enough, you could wake up in the midst of another phase of your life. Then she recalled a book she’d read in college by Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, where a character was forced to relive his life in random order. As Caitlin remembered, it didn’t go too well.

  She went back outside and resumed her vigil behind the big elm tree, just as happy to be on her feet to avoid the nightmares sleep promised. Every time she drifted off lately, her dreams felt like snippets from an old-fashioned newsreel. Frank Doyle was present in more than his share of the footage. No, he hadn’t raped her or Kelly Ann Beasley, but Caitlin had a powerful notion that he knew who did. She couldn’t dismiss him being on the scene of two sexual assaults, no matter how spread apart, as coincidence.

  Standing behind that tree, Caitlin conjured visions of her grandfather, Earl Strong, mowing down men in Nazi uniforms from the ramparts of the Alamo, defending the nation from the same spot all those proud Texans had stood up to Santa Anna. The Nazis kept coming and Earl kept shooting, shells flying from the Thompson’s chamber, its steel drum packed to infinity with ammo.

  She thought of Texas Ranger Big Bill Kennedy, the only person who might know what happened to her grandfather and J. Edgar Hoover next. He’d be in his midnineties, likely riding the range with her grandfather by now, but it couldn’t hurt to ask D. W. Tepper to look into it for her.

  Caitlin checked her phone to find she’d been out here for more than an hour, when Cort Wesley’s truck pulled in to the driveway.

  81

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  Luke piled out of the truck’s passenger seat after him, Caitlin feeling her heart thump at the sight of the boy and the thought of that grenade landing within feet of him just hours before. He lumbered toward her across the lawn, one hand tucked into the jeans that looked molded to his skin, the other holding a backpack until he slung it over one of his sagging shoulders.

  When had he grown up so much exactly?

  He bounded straight into her arms, wordless and sniffling slightly, his hair damp with sweat. He was taller than Dylan, taller than she, almost as tall as his father.

  They separated and Caitlin swiped a tear from his cheek.

  “Dylan upstairs?” Luke said, clearing the scratchiness from his voice.

  Caitlin aimed her gaze inside. “I didn’t know he liked classic rock.”

  Luke derided her with his gaze, snickering. “Where you been? It’s all he listens to.”

  Then he disappeared inside, Cort Wesley suddenly by her side, the two of them watching Luke close the door behind him before they wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders.

  “Who was that again?” Caitlin said, shaking her head.

  “I can’t even blink anymore. Every time I do, he’s a whole other person.” He looked up at the department store mannequin dressed like her. “Friend of yours?”

  “The idea came to me at the last minute.”

  “So you’ve been standing behind that tree?”

  “Come on,” Caitlin said, taking his hand. “I left my root beer over there.”

  * * *

  “Couldn’t we do this from inside the house?” Cort Wesley asked her, once they were behind the shaded darkness of the big elm tree. “You know, peer out a window?”

  “Not if we don’t want the boys to hear us.”

  “Hear us say what?”

  “I can’t make sense of what you said happened at Luke’s school.”

  “The grenade didn’t go off. I’m still trying to get my head around that.” He turned her way with a gaze as black as the contents of the Hires bottle from which she was sipping. “One thing’s for sure: this shit isn’t going to stop until we take Armand Fisker off the map.”

  “I think it was meant to be a dud. The real thing would’ve brought the wrath of God down on Elk Grove.”

  “They won’t find any connection between him and those bikers, Ranger. The whole message was meant just for me.” He started to look away, then changed his mind. “I’m sorry, by the way.”

  “You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”

  “I’m talking about your tracking down that guy from all those years ago,” Cort Wesley said, leaving things there.

  “DNA test results came back negative,” Caitlin told him. “He’s not the guy.”

  “I know. Paz told me.”

  “Who told Paz?”

  “You’ll have to ask him, Ranger. But he knows where this is headed, too, just like he always seems to know.” Cort Wesley stopped, and then started again right away. His eyes held her tighter. “What’s the next step for that bouncer you beat the shit out of?”

  “I got my share of lumps, too, Cort Wesley, but the man I’m after is still out there. I’ve waited eighteen years to find him. I can wait a little longer,” Caitlin said. “So how’d it feel to return to the Walls prison as a visitor?”

  “It didn’t feel like anything at all, which is pretty much what I got out of it.”

  “That old man couldn’t remember anything helpful about Cliven Fisker?”

  “He thought I was Boone Masters. Darl Pickett’s stuck in the 1970s, unfortunately, and what he’s got left for brains have turned to mus
h.”

  “You got nothing valuable out of him?”

  “Valuable? No. Crazy? Oh, yeah, something he claimed Cliven Fisker confided to him over prison moonshine. In other words, I wasted a trip.”

  “Let’s go inside, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin said, picking up the AR-15, while he grabbed the shotgun.

  * * *

  Caitlin laid the file Jones had assembled on David Skoll on the coffee table and opened it while Cort Wesley kept an eye peeled out the window.

  “What’s that?” he asked her.

  She started scanning the pages and flipping through some pictures, not really paying attention. “The file on another lowlife we’re looking into on something else entirely.”

  “Are there really this many assholes in Texas, or do we just attract the lion’s share of them?”

  Caitlin kept flipping. “It’s a big state, Cort Wesley.”

  Caitlin had gotten to the part of Skoll’s file that listed all his holdings, both past and present. There were four pages, capsule summaries following each listing. She skimmed them quickly, not expecting to find anything of note until her eyes fastened on one of the last items listed.

  “Holy shit,” she managed.

  82

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  Frank Doyle glared at Caitlin from the other side of the table in the interrogation room, the chains affixed to the manacles fastened around his wrists rattling. His face was a patchwork assemblage of cuts and bruises, inflicted during the course of their fight, along with a nose swollen to twice its normal size down by the tip where Caitlin’s palm-heel strike had done its damage.

  “Why don’t you ask them to take these off?”

  “You’re looking good, Frank,” Caitlin said, taking a seat across from him and laying the file on David Skoll that Jones had provided down before her. “Looks like none of that damage I did to your face is going to make you any uglier than you already were.”

  “I’m gonna sue you. My lawyer says I got a case. He says we gotta get in line behind another innocent person you just put in the hospital.”

  “Except I shot him, so you should consider yourself lucky.”

  “My lawyer says you identified yourself as a Texas Ranger, even though you’re on suspension or something. He says that’s the equivalent of impersonating an officer. Your career’s finished, from where I’m standing.” Doyle gloated.

  “Except you’re sitting, Frank, and as I recall you came at me before I had a chance to identify myself as anything.”

  “My lawyer was referring to you talking to the hostess.”

  “She saw the badge, drew her own conclusions.”

  “You had no right to be wearing it.”

  “It belonged to my father and his father before him. It’s an heirloom, like a piece of jewelry. And I drove all the way up here today to offer you a jewel of your own: an opportunity to reduce your sentence, maybe walk altogether.”

  “A suspended Texas Ranger? There a reason why I should believe a damn word you say?”

  Caitlin studied Frank Doyle from across the table, paying special attention to the way his eyes kept shifting, as if he couldn’t decide what to focus on. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”

  “I remember you assaulting me.”

  “I’m talking about eighteen years ago, back when you were pretending to be a college student.”

  Doyle grinned, showing a black hole in his mouth where Caitlin must have knocked out a tooth. “Best snatch around, lady. You blame me? Guess you weren’t much of one to have faded out of my memory.”

  “Or maybe it was because you weren’t the one who raped me, Frank, any more than you raped Kelly Ann Beasley. Her name ring a bell?”

  “I’m drawing another blank.”

  “It took me a while to figure out. Things didn’t even dawn on me, when I was sitting in the same room with her. But she looked something like I did eighteen years ago.”

  “Poor thing.”

  Caitlin ignored him. “Same color hair, same height or a little taller. Maybe a little shy.”

  “What does ‘shy’ look like exactly?” Doyle smirked, rattling his chains dramatically.

  Caitlin leaned forward over the manila folder, close enough for Doyle to try grabbing her, even manacled. “Why don’t you tell me, Frank? It’s why you picked me out eighteen years ago at that party, isn’t it? And it’s why you picked out Kelly Ann at Stubb’s Barbecue at that graduation party a few nights back. Yup, I had you all wrong, making you out to be a rapist, when all you are is a pimp.”

  “You’re not supposed to be talking to me without my lawyer present.”

  “I’m doing you a favor, remember? I’m the only hope you’ve got to avoid a long stretch in Huntsville. You think Texas Rangers, suspended or otherwise, ever fail to make a case? You think if we don’t have the evidence we need against you, it won’t magically appear?”

  “The fuck you say?”

  Caitlin switched gears on a dime. “It doesn’t have to go down like that. I can make this all go away. I just need a little help.”

  With that, Caitlin flipped open the manila folder and extracted a picture of David Skoll, angling it so Doyle could get a good look. “His name’s David Skoll. Recognize him?”

  “Nope,” he said, after a quick glance.

  “You want to try that again?”

  “I don’t have to. Never saw the man before in my life.”

  Caitlin nodded and crossed her arms, leaving Skoll’s picture on the table between them. “That’s funny, because he’s your boss, Frank. David Skoll owns Stubb’s Barbecue.”

  * * *

  “He hired you as a part-time bartender and bouncer,” Caitlin continued, before Doyle could respond. “But what you really were was his full-time pimp, same capacity you served in eighteen years ago. Remember that party, us going down into the basement where you handed me that red Solo cup half-filled with punch you got from the bar?”

  Doyle tried to cross his arms, forgetting he had the manacles on, rattling the chains again. “I’ve got nothing to say to you, and I got no clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you do, Frank. Because David Skoll was the bartender.”

  83

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  Doyle’s face had gone white as a sheet. He suddenly looked like a man studying his own breathing patterns.

  “When we met for the first time last night, first time while I was conscious anyway, I knew I’d seen him before,” Caitlin continued, “but I couldn’t remember from where. And I thought I’d hit a dead end when Kelly Ann Beasley said she thought her attacker was a woman. But David Skoll kind of looks like a girl, doesn’t he, Frank? With that boyish hair and the face of a cherub, he’s kind of pretty. So tell me, was pimping girls for him the only thing the two of you did together?”

  Doyle snapped his hands toward her, his elbows jerked back into place by the chains binding him to the steel table.

  “I paid a visit to Kelly Ann Beasley on my way here,” Caitlin lied. “Turns out she wasn’t all the way out when he raped her. After I arrest him, she’ll be able to pick him out of a lineup dead solid perfect. When that happens, either you’re going down as an accessory, which means you carry the full load, or you testify against Skoll, starting now, in which case you may have nothing to carry on your own. Hell, I’ll even drop the assaulting an officer charges.”

  “I wish I’d killed you the other day,” Doyle said, in a hissing growl.

  “As opposed to getting your ass kicked by a girl, you mean.”

  He made a low rumble in his throat, like a dog getting ready to pounce.

  “Same girl you served up to David Skoll on a platter eighteen years ago. And there’s no statute of limitations on the crime of rape in Texas, in case you didn’t know.”

  “My lawyer’s gonna have your badge,” Doyle said, not sounding very convincing.

  “You mean my daddy and granddaddy’s badge? You’re lucky it’s me sitting here right now inste
ad of one of them, or you’d be wearing a bullet hole in the middle of your forehead. How many times has Skoll pulled you out of the gutter since the two of you fed me GHB in that Solo cup? You’ve been in and out of jail. Judge let you try rehab instead once, except you ended up getting arrested for stealing cigarettes, and your last known address is a flophouse. I guess it was a good thing Skoll was hiring.” Caitlin leaned forward again. “So, tell me, Frank, was this all part of the plan when he bought Stubb’s Barbecue? Was pimping and spiking college girls’ drinks included in the job description? Skoll’s going down, and I’m gonna enjoy being the one to kick his legs out from under him. Decision you need to make is which side of this you wanna come down on. But if I walk out that door without your statement in my hand, your opportunity to make that decision goes away. So we got a short window here. I’ve got a headache and I hear David Skoll is running a warehouse sale at Redfern Pharmaceuticals in Waco on aspirin. Tick-tock, Frank, time’s running out.”

  Caitlin got up, intending to move for the door, just as she’d threatened. But Frank Doyle’s eyes holding fast to her changed her mind. Those eyes were the one thing about him that hadn’t changed, hadn’t aged with the pathetic adult he’d turned into, beholden to a millionaire’s sexual cravings for what meager livelihood he could eke out. She looked in those eyes and it was eighteen years ago again, Frank Doyle coaxing her out of her shell with his looks, his charm, and his smile. Maybe exchanging a quick, knowing glance with David Skoll at the basement bar, as he handed Caitlin the Solo cup that had turned the rest of the night into a black hole and haunted her life ever since.

  With that thought, she came around the table and glared down at Doyle.

  “David Skoll, Frank. It’s you or him. Make your choice.”

  84

  BOERNE, TEXAS

  “I knew you’d be coming, outlaw,” Guillermo Paz said, looking up from his priest’s bedside at Menger Springs Senior Living Community. “I wanted to be here when you came looking for me.”