by Land, Jon
Tepper settled back in the booth and stretched his arms out to either side, forgetting about his eggs. “What else?”
“D.W.?”
“You got that look that says you got something you’re not ready to tell me. You mind if I take a guess?”
“I’d love to hear it.”
“We got five dead kids in what’s left of Willow Creek at the same time Mexican hitters go after Dylan and Luke Torres.”
Caitlin took a bite of her bagel, saying nothing.
“I knew it,” Tepper followed.
“Seems about as obvious as it gets, Captain,” she said between chews.
“The connection lying somewhere on Regent Tawls’s marijuana farm back around nineteen-eighty.” Tepper thought for a moment. “You said Tawls told you Enrique Cantú and Mateo Torres stole a truckload of marijuana from him?”
“They stole the truck too,” Caitlin nodded. “It was my dad’s case, though it seems Tawls wasn’t very cooperative.”
“You figure maybe he’s more involved in all this than you think?”
“He’s no killer,” Caitlin said, shaking her head. “Tawls’s receptionist asked for my autograph.”
“You give her one?”
Caitlin nodded. “On the way out.”
Tepper rubbed his forehead, leaving a red welt that began to fade as quickly as it came. “Only time I ever did that was in an elementary school they sent me to speak at with your granddad. He had a line of kids out into the playground waiting for him to sign while I got ten maybe and then went to take a piss. I came out of the bathroom, went to lunch, and Earl was still signing when I got back.”
“He never liked to disappoint people.”
Tepper hesitated, holding his next forkful of eggs suspended between the plate and his mouth. “What else is on your mind, Ranger?”
“Just this Torres and Cantú stuff.”
“You wanna be more specific?”
“I’m still trying to figure things out, but I believe it all goes back to nineteen-nineteen again.…”
51
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO; 1919
Strong’s Raiders met their Mexican counterparts for the first time in mid-May, crossing the Rio Grande in a trio of Ford trucks over the Laredo International Foot Bridge into Nuevo Laredo. The bridge had been destroyed by a flood in 1905 and had taken six months to repair. Lava, the Mexican soldier William Ray and Earl Strong had first met in Willow Creek, had set up the meeting, the subject being how to take down esos Demonios, Esteban Cantú’s soldiers currently carving a bloody distribution network across the border into Texas.
Lava had chosen a cantina featuring electricity for the meeting, the officers and soldiers inside surprised when a twelve-year-old boy known for giving free shoe shines entered instead.
“I have a message for you,” the boy said to Lava.
The message directed Lava to bring the three generals, and only the three generals, to a spot on the shores of the Rio Grande protected by the Chihuahuan Desert to the west and the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains to the east.
“I don’t like surprises,” William Ray said in English and then repeated it in Spanish for Lava and the generals once they arrived at the rendezvous. “And the number of horses I saw tied up around town told me a lot more than just the four of you might be attending our meeting.”
His face was lit by the crackling flames of a fire that sent embers twisting away into the breeze lifting off the river. His skin shone thanks to the desert heat even at night this time of year.
“It’s mutual interests that have brought us here,” William Ray continued, “and it’s mutual interests that we’re gonna keep in mind ahead of everything else. You need to be rid of esos Demonios for your side to bring down Carranza, and we need to be rid of them to keep the shit they carry from poisoning the state of Texas. Question being how best to go about that.”
“Señor,” started Lava, serving as spokesman for the generals, “it is our feeling we cannot defeat esos Demonios here in Mexico. They have too much power and inspire too much fear in the people. We are worried our soldiers would run from them at the first sign of battle.”
“Well, I thank you for your honesty,” said William Ray, “and truth be told, I was thinking the same thing, though for a different reason entirely. We don’t want to fight these demon soldiers on their own turf. Question being how do we lure them into a trap we can spring?”
“I believe we’re going about this in the wrong way,” said Frank Hamer, no longer able to restrain himself. “All tactful and shit.”
“What would you recommend, Frank?” William Ray asked him.
“For starters, I’d take the fight directly to Cantú. Pay him a visit up close and personal like.”
“Lava, what you have to say on that front?”
“Señores, Cantú has many enemies. He is very cautious in his movements and very well protected when he goes anywhere. No one has been able to get to him.”
“Texas Rangers ain’t tried yet,” Frank Hamer reminded, suppressing a laugh.
“I don’t believe that’s a bad idea, just not on its own,” noted Manuel Gonzaullas.
“What’s that mean exactly, son?” William Ray asked him.
“Cantú is not a man likely to respond simply to threats.”
“Knowing Ranger Hamer here, simple isn’t in his vocabulary, and I imagine he’s got something bigger than what you’d think of as a threat in mind.”
“I do indeed, starting with the barrel of my old Colt.”
Gonzaullas avoided Hamer’s gaze in responding. “Cantú must have known this battle was coming when he expanded his business east into Texas. That means he’s prepared for whatever we throw at him.”
“That is true,” Lava echoed, as Pancho Villa’s three top generals who’d accompanied him nodded in virtual unison. “We would be better served focusing our attention elsewhere.”
“I believe there’s a way to make our point to Cantú so he gets the message we want sent,” Bill McDonald suggested, swallowing air to stifle a fresh coughing fit. “That being we keep our focus trained on these esos Demonios of his. We’ve all had our share of scrapes with Mexicans of this kind, and these might be worse or better depending on your thinking, but they’re Mexicans all the same. We know how they think and how they’ll respond.”
“Captain McDonald,” began Earl Strong, “with all due respect, sir, you didn’t see what they did in Willow Creek. I’d argue that this is a new kind of enemy we’re up against, chosen specifically for their ruthlessness and desire to kill pretty much everything in their way. Just the way it’s gotta be for Cantú to make the inroads he needs in Texas for his smuggling operation. Makes it all the more important we stop him here and now. Be a lot harder to do that once he’s got things built up on our border with Mexico the way he did it in Baja.”
“Now you’re talking, son,” said Frank Hamer.
“Señores,” began Lava, as the Mexican generals shook their heads vociferously, “taking esos Demonios on in Mexico would be suicide, even for the likes of you.”
“Who said anything about taking them on in Mexico?” raised William Ray Strong.
52
SAN ANTONIO
“The Battle of Juárez,” Tepper realized.
“Happened just the next month, in June of nineteen-nineteen,” Caitlin told him.
“What you’re saying doesn’t exactly match how history ended up weighing in on the subject, Ranger.”
“Truth be told, my grandfather never said much about things beyond that. It was one of the last tales he ever told me, like he was saving it for the end. Turned out to be the one he never got to finish,” Caitlin said, suddenly sad over the memories stirred of her legendary grandfather, making her miss the man who’d practically raised her even more.
Tepper ran a finger in and out of the furrows lining his face before responding. “You ever figure Earl never finished the story ’cause he had reason not to?”
�
��I suppose that’s why I never looked for all the answers before.”
“But here you are doing that now.”
“Something connects the attempts on Dylan and Luke Torres’s lives with the other murdered children in Willow Creek. And that something is somehow related to Mateo Torres and Enrique Cantú stealing marijuana from Regent Tawls’s farm back in my father’s day. I find out how all that fits together and I can get to the bottom of who’s behind the killings.”
“Same party is likely to try for Cort Wesley’s boys again, Ranger.”
“I’ve thought about that too.”
“Not even your friend Paz can keep them safe forever,” Tepper said, a degree of both caution and harshness framing his words.
“Who said anything about Paz?”
“You didn’t have to. Man walks on water now, thanks to your friend Jones…”
“My friend?”
“… like he’s been given a damn free pass for every bad thing he’s done. In my mind, a man saying he’s sorry for shooting you in the gut don’t make it hurt any less.”
Tepper shook his head and looked for a fresh cigarette to light, as Caitlin’s cell phone rang and she excused herself to answer it.
“Regent Tawls calling, Ranger,” said the familiar gravelly voice. “I believe there’s something I left out of our conversation yesterday.”
53
GUADALAJARA, MEXICO
Ana Callas Guajardo always took a security detail with her when she traveled to visit her business interests in Guadalajara. Two cars, one leading and one trailing the bulletproof Lincoln Town Car in which she rode. Kidnapping was big business in this part of the country and Guajardo knew the power she held didn’t render her immune to that.
For any number of years Guadalajara had escaped the drug violence that plagued the rest of Mexico. That was, until relatively recently, when the Zetas, a cartel composed primarily of former soldiers from Mexico’s Special Forces, saw an opportunity to take over the city’s methamphetamine trade lurking beneath the surface of what many called the Silicon Valley of Mexico.
With good reason. Sitting on a mile-high plateau in western Mexico, Guadalajara had sprouted into the country’s main producer of software and electronic and digital components. Guajardo knew that telecom and computer equipment manufactured in the city accounted for over a quarter of Mexico’s exports in electronics and that companies like General Electric, IBM, Intel, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Flextronics, and Oracle had set up shop there. All welcomed by Guajardo in no small part because they enabled her to better keep her own modest software company under the radar.
She’d named the company Zuñiga after Tlajomulco de Zuñiga, the sprawling slum-riddled county where both her parents had been born. Zuñiga was nestled amid other companies and buildings just like it in a software park located on the western edge of the city. Guajardo’s convoy passed through security en route to an underground garage where more armed security personnel would be waiting.
A captain in the federal police saluted her stiffly as she emerged from the rear of the Town Car and escorted her into an elevator with two more of his men and three of hers. They rode not up, but down, to a secret, secured floor of the Zuñiga building where two-dozen software engineers toiled without distraction or danger, including the two Americans who’d been supervising the final stages of this part of her operation for over a year now.
The elevator doors opened and Guajardo felt immediately chilled by a blast of reprocessed air. Strange how, as she grew older, she found herself colder more times than she could ever remember. A priest whose church she’d leveled because it sat on land too valuable to leave to God had once told her the depths of her soul were a frozen wasteland. In moments like these, when she felt so chilled, Guajardo couldn’t help but take him literally.
The lighting down here was dimmer than above, more ambient and less harsh, as she let the entourage lead her along the hallway to an open door at the end.
“No way, dude,” she heard emanating loudly from within, “Chamberlain’s got Russell beat six ways to Sunday.”
“Chamberlain?” a second voice came back.
“Wilt the Stilt, man, Wilt the Stilt. Scored a freaking hundred points in a single game.”
“Oh yeah. But how many championships did he win? No, dude, Bill Russell is the man!” A brief pause followed as Guajardo neared the door, then, “He shoots and … scores! Game over, man, game over!”
The two young men high-fived each other and then quickly stiffened, spotting Guajardo standing in the doorway, her guards stationed just out of sight beyond.
“And what about the game I hired you to play?” she asked them.
54
GUADALAJARA, MEXICO
One of the young men switched off the 3-D video game as Ana entered the room and closed the door behind her. In the brief glimpse Guajardo had caught, the basketball players had seemed amazingly lifelike, right down to the sweat dripping off their bodies to disappear into some virtual ether. She actually found herself looking at the top of the conference table to see if the basketball was still resting there.
“You developed this,” she said to the two young men. They’d turned the room’s lights down to better enjoy the video game, an ashtray on the table lined with the refuse of marijuana cigarettes rolled in cigar paper. A sweet grape smell hung in the air, mixing with stale cannabis yet to be washed out by the air-conditioning that hummed softly in the background.
“Sure did,” said the taller, bushy-haired one, whose eyes were glassy over the grin that looked painted onto his face. John. Last name not important.
“In our spare time,” added the squatter one, whose khaki pants fit him too snugly. David. Last name not important.
“Spare time,” Guajardo noted, not bothering to hide her displeasure. “I’m surprised you had any, given the responsibility with which you’ve been entrusted.”
“That’s because we’re the best,” John said, rising to pull a chair back for Guajardo. “Let us demonstrate, my lady.”
She took her seat, holding his gaze sternly the whole time. The other one, David, took a fancy remote control device in hand and began working the buttons. Suddenly, a three-dimensional map of the United States appeared before her, the state of Texas even with Guajardo’s face until the map began to rotate.
“First subject of the day,” John said. “Population distribution.”
Working in tandem with him, David pressed some keys on the remote and various shades of red, ranging from pink to rose to scarlet, appeared in varying swatches across the map. The largest centers of population were the darkest.
“Here’s a simple fact, my lady,” John continued. “Eighty-two percent of the population of the United States is concentrated in roughly ten percent of the country’s landmass. You can see why that’s important to our plan.”
“I believe I do.”
“Second subject of the day: what this means exactly. Let’s look at things in terms of sports. Baseballs, basketballs, and footballs.”
“Because we’d already created the icons,” David chimed in, looking up from the remote. “For those games we’ve been working on.”
“In your spare time,” Guajardo echoed.
“Right. Sure.”
“Basketballs first, fifty-eight hundred of them.”
With that, tiny basketballs appeared all over the moving map. Tightly clustered and even layered over one another in the more populated areas, but with space to spare in the light-colored pink places.
“Next,” Jon picked up, “footballs. There are about ten thousand of those.”
The footballs flashed on the map as green oblong shapes with almost identical distribution density as the basketballs.
“And now baseballs, numbering just over a hundred thousand.”
The baseballs appeared as mere pinpricks across the map.
“For our purposes, let’s eliminate the baseballs,” John told Guajardo. “That leaves us with only the foo
tballs and the basketballs. Focus on that ten percent area accounting for eighty-two percent of the total population, and this is what you’re left with.”
“How many basketballs?” Guajardo said, rising to better acquaint herself with the three-dimensional map.
“Roughly two thousand.”
“And footballs?”
“Thirty-five hundred would be a fair estimation.”
“And if you reduced the number of basketballs to fifteen hundred or so?”
David worked the keys on the remote, doing just that. Guajardo watched basketballs drop off the projected map into nothingness.
“Seventy-five percent of the population would still be affected,” John told her.
“But the remaining twenty-five wouldn’t be far behind,” David added. “Thanks to the ripple effect. We’ve done a lot of research into the ripple effect.”
“Show me,” Guajardo ordered. “Show me this ripple effect.”
John took a hefty swallow before nodding to David, who returned the map to its original scope with the total number of all three balls displayed at once. The result was a congestion of colors and shapes that made for a vast rainbow-like blotch.
“Zero hour,” John said.
And a few keystrokes from David later, a large percentage of the footballs, baseballs, and basketballs concentrated in the most populated areas of the United States vanished.
“Zero hour plus one day.”
Another hefty portion of balls dropped off the map, spreading beyond the brightest population grids.
“Zero hour plus three days.”
And with that the rest of the balls in those areas were gone, leaving only those concentrated in rural and less populated areas in place.
“Zero hour plus four days.”
The balls were all but gone.
“Can’t be a hundred percent sure of the time frame,” John reported, “but this is well within the margin of error, my lady.”
Ana Callas Guajardo found herself staring at the map spinning slowly over the table before her, all but a very, very few of the balls that had formed all that clutter missing.