Strong Rain Falling: A Caitlin Strong Novel (Caitlin Strong Novels)

by Land, Jon

  * * *

  Night had taken firm hold of the sky by then, the lessening light making the mesas look like jagged walls rising for the sky. Having no desire to continue their discussion near so many dead bodies, they found an arroyo maybe a mile out of Willow Creek secure and defensible enough to let them build a fire. The three federales and two Rangers sat down on opposite sides of the fire in the cooling air. This as the now confirmed lone survivor of the massacre rocked nervously back and forth atop the barn coat Earl had spread out for him beneath a makeshift lean-to he’d built against the base of a blue oak tree as heat lightning lit up the sky to the west.

  William Ray showed Lava the drawing the boy had made of skeletal demons wearing bandoliers. “So if it wasn’t monsters, who was it exactly, Captain? I’m thinking maybe more of Pancho Villa’s boys,” he added, referring to the Mexican revolutionary leader who’d already staged several cross-border incursions.

  “We are some of Pancho Villa’s boys,” Lava told him. “We fight for him now, because of the monstruos we are tracking and what they are bringing out of our country.”

  Lava reached into the single pocket William Ray had mistaken for a patch on trousers that billowed in the night breeze. He emerged with a small husk of what looked like dark blown glass, sealed with a tiny stopper at its one open cylindrical end.

  “Christ on a crutch,” William Ray muttered, rising to extend his hand over the fire to take it.

  “Opium,” Earl said, before his father had gotten himself settled back down.

  “The young hombre is right,” said Lava. “These men must have intended to use Willow Creek as a staging ground for their business north of the border, setting up what we believe is a distribution network.”

  “Distribution network? That’s a mighty fancy term for the captain of a disbanded outfit.”

  Lava used a stick to adjust the logs on the fire, spraying glowing embers into the air that flamed out before reaching William Ray. “Forty years ago, the Chinese brought opium with them to Mexico. It has thrived, thanks to our climate and the fertile lands of the Sinaloa province, ever since then. Export into your country through California out of Mexicali and Tijuana has been thriving since nineteen-sixteen thanks to that region’s governor, Esteban Cantú. Now Cantú is expanding his territory through Texas and towns like Willow Creek, and he does this with the blessing of none other than Mexico’s president, Venustiano Carranza.”

  “Now why would Carranza do that?”

  “Because he and Esteban Cantú are cousins, señor.”

  * * *

  The fire framed William Ray’s face in its light, making his wrinkles look more pronounced and deeper, while hiding the sudden intensity his glare had taken on as Lava continued.

  “Señores, if Carranza isn’t stopped, he will crush the revolution with more drug money and spread his poison all across your country.” Lava swallowed hard, the air sticking in his throat. “I have seen what opium has done to my country, the lives it has destroyed, the families it has ruined. I have seen how men like Carranza and Cantú use it to line their pockets and control the weak and less fortunate.”

  William Ray leaned close enough to the fire for its reflection to seize his eyes. “How much of this opium we talking about exactly?”

  Lava shrugged, looking grim. “It is grown all over Mexico now. Poor and peasant farmers have been enlisted as slave laborers, their land taken from them, their crops uprooted so opium can be grown in their place. They live in fear of esos Demonios.”

  “Esos Demonios?”

  “Sí,” Lava nodded. “Killers recruited from the very worst of Carranza’s soldiers, now assigned to his cousin as a private army. They are called that for good reason, reasons you have now seen firsthand.”

  William Ray Strong slapped his knees and rose, his face suddenly out of the firelight’s reach, which made him look headless. “Least we know who we’re up against.”

  “Sí, but some say esos Demonios are invincible, that they cannot be killed.”

  “Guess we’ll see about that,” William Ray told him as the crackling flames rose enough to frame his eyes in their glow, “won’t we?”

  26

  SAN ANTONIO

  “There it was, D.W.,” Caitlin finished. “The virtual beginning of the Mexican drug trade. By the nineteen-thirties, marijuana had pretty much replaced opium as the smugglers’ drug of choice, but the original supply routes remained in place.”

  “You got me on the edge of my chair, Ranger,” Tepper said.

  “My granddad never told you about all this?”

  “Him being there when pretty much the bane of our modern-day existence got started? Bits and pieces maybe,” Tepper frowned. “Maybe I just forgot. I’m older than dirt, you know, so I am entitled.” He hesitated, making the clacking of the blinds against the window frame seem louder. The single bulb in the overhead fixture flickered, then locked back on. “Except I don’t see how this all squares with those murdered kids in Willow Creek, ’sides the date.”

  “Me either, Captain. But right now that’s enough to tell us there’s something else going on here. The killer was making a point two days ago.” Caitlin realized she still held the picture of Daniel Sandoval and handed it back to Tepper. “How’d you come by that photo, anyway?”

  “You’re not Fernando Lorenzo Sandoval’s only friend in the States, Ranger. He was looking for anybody who could help him find his boy.” Tepper let the cigarette smolder in his hand, his expression flattening. “I can’t imagine being in that situation. Don’t even know what I’d do.”

  Caitlin thought of Dylan, how she’d felt when he was kidnapped by Mexican white slavers in league with the Hells Angels two years earlier. “I know it would likely involve guns, D.W.”

  “Guns aren’t the answer to everything, Hurricane.”

  Caitlin pointed toward the picture Tepper had laid down on his desk blotter. “Compare that to the crime scene photo of what somebody did to this kid and tell me if you still feel that way.”

  A knock fell on the door, the two of them turning toward it at the same time to see a familiar broad-shouldered man standing in the doorway with a smirk stretched across his face.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting,” said the man they knew as “Jones.”

  27

  SAN ANTONIO

  He looked to be in better shape than the last time Caitlin had seen him, just before he made a quick exit from the scene, leaving the Rangers to contend with a homegrown terrorist plot all on their own. Caitlin couldn’t say exactly what Jones did with Homeland Security, and doubted that anybody else could either.

  She’d first met him when his name was still “Smith” and he was attached to the American embassy in Bahrain, enough of a relationship formed for the two of them to have remained in contact and to have actually worked together on three more occasions. The first two had ended exactly like the last, with Jones failing to live up to his promises and always succeeding in living down to Caitlin’s expectations.

  Tonight, the thin light kept Jones’s face cloaked in the shadows with which he was most comfortable. Caitlin tried to remember the color of his eyes but couldn’t, as if he’d been trained to never look at anyone long enough for anything to register. He was wearing a sport jacket over a button-down shirt and pressed trousers, making him seem like a high school teacher save for the tightly cropped, military-style haircut.

  “You wanna shoot him, or should I?” Captain Tepper posed to Caitlin.

  “Hey,” Jones said back, flashing his ever-present smirk before she could respond, “maybe you never received the helicopter I sent you folks to make amends.”

  “You wanna make amends, Mr. Smith, you better start with a jumbo jet.”

  “It’s Jones, Captain, and haven’t you seen what William Faulkner said about the past?”

  “Just because it may not be dead doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be, Jones,” Caitlin said, before Tepper could get his own response out.


  Jones stepped into the room and closed the door behind him, looking up at the weak spray of light as if wondering what was wrong with the fixture. The open window seemed to bother him as well, and he took a slight step to the side to take himself from the vantage point it provided from outside. “Don’t take things so personally, Ranger.”

  “Don’t expect me to forget what a gutless asshole you are.”

  Jones feigned hurt, sucking in a dramatic breath. “Maybe I just came here to check on your well-being. That shoot-out last night in Providence was all over the wire.”

  “What wire is that?”

  “The one circulated among people like me who take notice when incidents of that magnitude spring up.”

  “You’re a piece of work, aren’t you, Mr. Jones?” Tepper groused, shaking his head.

  “Just doing my job, Captain.”

  “That’s what worries me,” said Caitlin.

  Jones snapped his gaze toward her. “Maybe you should take your act on the road, Ranger. A regular fifty-state tour, see if you can leave a body behind in each of them.”

  “Maybe one of those bodies will be yours.”

  “Ouch! You hurt me,” Jones said evenly.

  “You don’t give a shit about that any more than you give a shit about keeping your word.”

  “But I do give a shit about somebody messing in my business.”

  Caitlin moved closer to him, the two of them lost to the room’s shadows as she smelled the stale residue of whatever cologne he had sprayed on before making the trip from Washington. Close enough to be just a step from getting right in his face.

  “What’s that supposed to mean, Jones?”

  “You contacted one of my people without authorization. You involved one of my people in a public gunfight that threatened to unpush all the buttons I pushed to keep him in this country without fear of arrest.”

  “Your people?”

  “I’m holding Paz’s leash. He’s my dog now.”

  “You sure you want to refer to him that way? I don’t think the colonel would like it.”

  “I control him, Ranger.”

  “The only person who controls Paz is Paz, Jones. You’d be well advised to remember that.”

  “It’s a different world now, a whole new reality. I get that, Paz gets that, now you need to get it. I’ve tamed him. He understands where the line is and not to cross it.”

  “Right, that’s what those paramilitary types in Houston thought. Remember what he did to them?”

  Jones glanced at Tepper, back at Caitlin, then at the two of them. “That’s not what brought me here, anyway.”

  “No?”

  “Fernando Lorenzo Sandoval did, specifically what happened to his son and the fact that you used to be running the investigation.”

  “Used to be?” Tepper raised.

  “We’ll take things from here, Captain, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “And what if it isn’t?”

  Jones pretended to consider the question. “What’s the lowest of the low when it comes to Ranger duties?”

  “Dealing with you,” said Caitlin.

  28

  SAN ANTONIO

  Jones smirked. Again. It looked like a practiced gesture for him, as if he spent hours in front of the mirror perfecting how to make it the default setting of his expression. Caitlin wondered if the appearance was covered in some secret Washington handbook under a chapter labeled “Condescending.”

  “I thought you were going to say killing me instead,” he said.

  Caitlin shook her head. “No, people be lining up for that job, me first.”

  “You said we’ll take things from here. Is this ‘we’ as in Homeland Security?” Tepper asked Jones.

  “You coming to your senses, Captain?”

  “Just asking a question, Mr. Smith.”

  Jones let the taunt go this time. “Then the answer is ‘close enough.’”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Caitlin. “Homeland’s working with Sandoval now too.”

  “Also, close enough. Have I made my point?”

  “Oh, you made it, all right,” said Tepper. “But that doesn’t mean we have to listen.”

  Jones fixed his gaze all the way on the captain now. “Maybe I wasn’t making myself clear.”

  “I’ll thank you not to come down here and shit where I live, sir,” Tepper told him, putting out the cigarette that had burned all the way down. “People get killed in Texas, it’s the Rangers’ problem, not Washington’s.”

  “This is different. And your cooperation is necessary so as not to impede our efforts on negating the effects of the Mexican drug trade.”

  Tepper looked at Caitlin. “Is this guy for real?”

  “Uh-huh. Unfortunately.”

  “I see what you mean about him now.” Tepper fixed his gaze back on Jones. “I should’ve put a warrant out on you the last time you fled the state.”

  “I didn’t flee.”

  “How would you put it, then?” Caitlin asked him.

  “Voluntary recall. And now I’ve come back to make up for my not saying good-bye last time by telling you to back off this investigation and Fernando Lorenzo Sandoval.”

  “Sorry,” Caitlin said, shaking her head. “No can do.”

  Tepper leaned back in his chair and lit a fresh cigarette, the old springs creaking under the strain. “As luck would have it, Sandoval happens to be right here in Texas now. For some secret meeting up in Austin.”

  Jones’s eyes widened, his nostrils flaring like he was about to lunge across Tepper’s desk. “That’s classified information, Captain. I need to ask exactly how you came by it.”

  Tepper took a deep drag on his Marlboro. “Come by it? We’re the Texas Rangers. Who do you think is handling security for this thing?”

  The air came out of Jones’s expression.

  “Oh,” Tepper continued, “guess nobody told you that, did they?”

  “At least he didn’t have to make the trip all the way from Washington this time,” Caitlin said to Tepper. “And I’ve got a shorter trip to meet up with Sandoval.”

  Jones glared at her, Caitlin feeling as if he were firing needles with his eyes. “You’ll do nothing of the kind, Ranger.”

  “So who’s going to tell him about his son?”

  “That will be handled in due course.”

  Caitlin could only shake her head. “You really don’t give a shit, do you?”

  Jones reached past her to pluck the school picture of Daniel Sandoval from Tepper’s desk. “How do you think your office came by this, Ranger? I’m the one who circulated it, trying to help Sandoval get his kid back.”

  “That’s a moot point now, sir,” Tepper told him.

  “But I’ll be sure to tell him about your good intentions,” Caitlin added.

  Jones sidestepped to block her path to the door.

  “You know what, Jones? Stay there.” In his face now, balanced on the toes of her boots to better look him in the eye. “Please.”

  That brought Tepper up out of his chair. “No, Mr. Jones, don’t stay there. This office is too goddamn dark to find all the blood that’ll have to be cleaned up if I let Hurricane here have her way with you.”

  Jones met Caitlin’s stare again and held it. “You really want to do this?”

  “You really want to find out?”

  “The two of you wanna take this outside?” asked Captain Tepper.

  “Just give me the okay, Captain.”

  “I’m much too big a bite for you, Ranger,” Jones said with a wink.

  “Careful, Jones. Texas has its own Stand Your Ground law now. I could shoot you right now and let things get sorted out later.”

  “Enough!” blared Tepper, dissolving immediately into a coughing spasm that doubled him over. “Jesus H. Christ, Hurricane, you are determined to see me dead.”

  “Jones is ahead of you on my list, D.W.”

  “You back off this and I disappear again,” Jones offered.

/>   “And I’m just supposed to forget about the fact that somebody murdered five kids in a ghost town?”

  “Mexican kids, Ranger.”

  Tepper had finally stopped coughing, the attack leaving him red-faced with his eyes dripping water. “We’re not backing off a multiple murder on Texas soil. No way, no how. Not unless the president himself gets me on the phone, and I’m not even sure I’d take his call on the subject. Rather see Texas secede from the Union than let whoever killed those kids get away with it, and I don’t care if they were Mexican, black, white, or polka dotted.”

  “I can have the FBI replace you on the investigation, and I’ll oversee it personally,” Jones told them both.

  Caitlin could only shake her head. “That was a joke, right?”

  “The real joke is that you have no idea what you’re messing with here, the thousands of hours of manpower and countless resources we’ve put into this operation and the meetings going on in Austin.”

  “Heard they were secret,” said Tepper.

  Jones moved his eyes from him to Caitlin. “Not anymore, it seems. I’m telling you we’re this close to shutting down a big portion of the drug trade and I can’t risk five dead Mexican kids jeopardizing all that.”

  “I owe a pretty big debt to the father of one of them, Jones. And in case you’ve forgotten, Paz used to work for Sandoval before he went to work for you.”

  “I’m an equal opportunity employer.”

  “You’re an equal opportunity asshole. I’m going to tell Sandoval about his son. If he wants to call me off, I’ll consider it. If he doesn’t, you can go fuck yourself.”

  Jones shook his head, scowling. “You’re not going to stop until you flush your whole career down the drain by missing the pot when you piss.”

  “I’m a Texas Ranger, Jones. It comes with the job.” She held her gaze on him, trying to make herself remember the color of his eyes this time, as she continued. “Captain, that meeting in Austin still on tomorrow?”

  “As far as I know,” Tepper told her.

  “Then I think I’ll be paying Sandoval a visit first thing.”

  29

  SAN ANTONIO