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

by Land, Jon

  “Eleven.”

  “But years later…”

  “I hunted down the men who killed the priest, the ones who were still alive, and killed them. It didn’t make me feel any better. But helping my Ranger, that makes me feel better.”

  “You said this time was different.”

  “I’m getting to that. As I get older, I get more like my mother, the visions and shit. They used to come and go, now they just come, in my dreams mostly.”

  Paz could feel the priest stiffen on the other side of the confessional as he started in on the “Z.” “My son, the church does not think kindly of such things. Some might even call it sacrilege.”

  “But you believe in miracles, don’t you?”

  “The church does, yes. Of course.”

  “Then why not consider this a miracle?”

  The priest cleared his throat. “I recall you saying before how things had come to you in your dreams, mostly about the Texas Ranger you always refer to.”

  “This is different, padre. In my dream, there were men in a bar, bad men. Then a man entered who was even worse. I don’t think he was human.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The way he killed the men around him, each and every one of them. The last two begged for their lives and he cut their heads off.”

  “Not human, you say,” the priest said, after a pause.

  “I’ve learned there are plenty of things in this world we can’t explain.”

  “But this man was no miracle, my son.”

  “No, he’s a mistake of nature, a violent aberration. I only dream about things that are destined to cross my path or the path of my Ranger. That means he’s coming this way. That means he’s coming soon.”

  “You don’t sound like that bothers you much.”

  Paz completed the “Z” and brushed the freshly carved letters clean of any shavings. “I’m protected now, padre.”

  “God protects us all.”

  “This is even better: the United States government. It’s like every bad thing I’ve ever done in my life has been erased, the tablet wiped clean.”

  “But not the memory, my son. You’d be wise to remember that, lest you find yourself straying down old paths.”

  Paz shifted his vast bulk to ease closer to the screen. “That’s the problem, Father. I don’t do as well serving others as I do serving myself.”

  “What about serving God?”

  “Same thing in my mind. I mean, where else could these visions be coming from? And that’s the thing.”

  “What’s the thing?”

  “Serving the government types who wiped my slate clean has left me empty. I lost my sense of purpose and even stopped dreaming. Started going to college classrooms to find answers that weren’t there because I was asking the wrong questions. Then my Texas Ranger called and the dreams started again.”

  Paz could see the priest nodding on the other side of the confessional. “Bringing you back to your one true self, your one true nature. This Texas Ranger has lent purpose to your life, but beware of that on the chance it’s a false purpose.”

  “How could that be?”

  “It justifies a part of your nature and being that frightens even God Himself.”

  “You just said we’re here to serve Him and, pardon me if this comes out the wrong way, I doubt anything really scares the big guy very much.”

  “No,” the priest said, “only when man tries to be as He is.”

  “You think that’s what I’m doing?”

  “I think that’s what whoever’s coming this way is doing. I think you are indeed doing God’s work when you stop him.”

  “So what’s the problem, padre?”

  “Only God has no better, my son.”

  Paz reflected on that briefly. “Maybe not, but He’s got the devil and I think that may be who I saw in my dream. I think that’s who’s headed here now.”

  59

  SAN ANTONIO

  “I don’t know about this, Ranger,” Fernando Lorenzo Sandoval said in response to Caitlin’s proposal.

  “I’d suggest, sir, that what you have in common with these two other men vastly outweighs your differences right now.”

  “In common with criminals?”

  “Grieving fathers, Mr. Sandoval. Last time I checked, even cartel heads grieve.”

  Caitlin made the call from her cell in Cort Wesley’s living room just before midnight, not feeling much like going home. She’d convinced Cort Wesley to try and get some sleep and volunteered to take the first watch.

  “Mr. Sandoval?” Caitlin prodded, after he remained silent. She could feel him stiffening over the phone, heard a soft, guttural whimper.

  “You’re asking me to meet with two men committed to killing me,” he said finally.

  “Two men who lost their children just like you did, sir. I think that trumps everything else, and for now I’m asking you to help me do my job.”

  “Your job?”

  “Your boy and those other kids were killed in Texas. That makes it my job, and I will see that job done by bringing whoever’s behind this to justice. But I need your help to do that, I need all of your help. I need to figure out what links two major cartel heads with the leader of Mexico’s antidrug resistance.”

  “What about the father of the final victim?” Sandoval asked her.

  “Jesus Aguilar, a schoolteacher from Mexico City, remains hospitalized with terminal cancer.”

  “No involvement in drugs?”

  “Not besides chemotherapy. The daughter he lost in Willow Creek was ten years old, Mr. Sandoval. I can interview him separately if necessary.”

  Caitlin left it there, not bothering to mention the teenage sons of Maura Torres. Caitlin wondered what Maura thought about the role she’d taken in her sons’ lives, wished she could speak with her the way Cort Wesley seemed to with Leroy Epps. She’d spotted the spectral images of her father and grandfather often enough to know there was plenty about this world nobody really understood, and was probably better left that way.

  “Mr. Sandoval?” Caitlin prodded, listening to him breathing rapidly over the otherwise quiet line.

  “When would you like to set the meeting, Ranger?”

  “I’m thinking late morning tomorrow.”

  “¿Eso es imposible!”

  “That explains my thinking perfectly, sir. I’ll send word on the location and will rely on you to contact the two cartel leaders. No extra guns, no entourages. The three of you let it rest for a few hours to help me catch a killer.”

  This time the silence lasted so long, Caitlin figured Sandoval had hung up or was about to. Then his voice finally returned.

  “I’ll be waiting for your call, Ranger.”

  60

  SAN ANTONIO

  Cort Wesley couldn’t sleep. If Caitlin Strong hadn’t been downstairs watching the house, he’d have been able to pass it off to his own sense of hypervigilance when it came to protecting his sons. But that wasn’t it at all; the future was more his concern right now.

  Spending your life as a soldier, an enforcer, and then a resident of the Walls correctional facility in Huntsville tends to make mundane day-to-day worries the stuff of other people’s lives. But trying to play father to a pair of teenage boys had confronted him with a host of things he’d never had to consider before.

  Like how much money it costs to raise them and keep them happy. That’s what Cort Wesley wanted more than anything, and up to now he’d done a pretty good job. But selling the house and moving to an apartment or rental trailer like the kind his own father had spent his last drunken days in wasn’t a good bet to continue that trend. And on top of everything else killers were undoubtedly still gunning for Dylan and Luke, and he had no clue how to find those killers first.

  “Bubba?” came the voice of Leroy Epps.

  “Where you been, champ?” Cort Wesley asked, sitting upright in bed.

  In the darkness of the bedroom broken only by the moonlight s
lipping through the window, Leroy was just a dark shape set against the wall, standing there as if he’d been painted onto it.

  “Here and there. Heard you calling for me.”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “Your thoughts did the talking for you,” Leroy said, stepping away from the wall so the moonlight both framed and passed straight through him. “You’re nothing like your own daddy, bubba.”

  “No, he was a drunk who liked it when I snuck a peek at him beating my mom when I was a boy. Said it made me hate him and hating him made me tougher. Maybe he was right.”

  “That the sum total of your thinking?”

  “Need more time than we’ve got to cover all of it.”

  “Don’t know about that—I got all the time in the world, bubba. It don’t actually pass where I be.”

  Cort Wesley rose from the bed and moved to the window, blocking the shaft of moonlight that had been illuminating Leroy Epps. “I used to think he stopped mixing it up with me because he was afraid of getting beat himself, given my size and strength by the time I was fifteen. Then I realized it was something else he was afraid of, champ.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Being alone. After my mom died, if I ran off he’d have nobody and even a degenerate violent drunk like Boone Masters doesn’t want to live out his life that way.”

  Leroy smiled tightly, still reluctant to show the teeth that had gone brown with rot in the last months of his life, even though Cort Wesley was pretty certain death had restored their luster. “I knew we’d get around to that.”

  “Get around to what, champ?”

  “Your boys and the Ranger gal downstairs. Hardly makes you alone like your daddy. Last thing you got to worry about in the world.”

  “There’s people out there who want to take all that away. And that scares me more than anything.”

  “Nope,” Leroy Epps said, shaking his head.

  “Nope, what?”

  “Nope, what scares you the most is your oldest likely going off to college next year with his younger brother not far behind. Being alone didn’t scare you before ’cause you didn’t know no damn difference. Now you got something to compare to the alternative and you don’t like them prospects one damn bit.”

  “Any words of wisdom beyond that, champ?”

  “Maybe you can learn something from your daddy.”

  Cort Wesley tried to make him out clearer through the darkness. “Come again?”

  “No need to on account of you hearing me fine the first time. Boone Masters done one thing right, even if it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

  “Do all ghosts talk in riddles?”

  “Wouldn’t know, bubba. I don’t talk to many. Doesn’t work that way where I be now. Anyway, that one right thing your daddy did was teaching you how not to be a father. I’d venture to say that avoiding his example has changed you as much as a man can change for the better.” Leroy started to fade out, Cort Wesley able to see right through him to the moonlit wall when his form suddenly thickened again. “Oh, almost forgot to tell ya. Ranger gal fell asleep downstairs. You may want to check on her.”

  PART SEVEN

  The Texas Ranger Frontier Battalion developed a reputation for individual daring and success in restoring order to lawless areas—a reputation which helped enshrine the legend of the Texas Rangers in popular imagination.

  Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State

  61

  NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO

  Caitlin saw the spire of San Agustin Church rising over the plaza rich with tourists strolling past sidewalk kiosks and open storefronts, snapping pictures with their cell phones and fishing cash from their wallets. She had switched off the air-conditioning and opened her SUV’s windows after being waved through the Customs stop. The air here just across the border, mere miles away from where Strong’s Raiders had met with Pancho Villa’s three generals to plan their response against esos Demonios, was dry, dusty, and laced with the scents of grilled food sifting out from restaurants featuring open fronts.

  She finally found a parking space down the street from a Mexican restaurant called Los Jocales. Caitlin entered to find it all but deserted as the staff prepared for the busy late-morning and lunchtime rush. She’d set the meeting in the same back alcove where Cort Wesley Masters had been brought after being sprung from prison by Jones the year before. Approaching the bead curtain separating the alcove from the rest of the restaurant, Caitlin saw three figures sitting in silence inside. The lights in this part of the restaurant had yet to be switched on, and the result was to place the figures in shadows broken only by the spill of light coming in through the spacious windows that formed the entire side wall beyond the alcove. She thought she smelled cigarette smoke and saw wisps of it rising as she drew closer, parting the beads to find the eyes of all three men fastened upon her.

  Sandoval rose respectfully first, waiting for Alejandro Luis Rojas and Juan Ramon Castillo to join him before bowing his head slightly. Rojas and Castillo nodded her way, Caitlin doing a mental review of both as they retook their seats, even as she felt the thick tension that had settled between Sandoval and his mortal enemies.

  Alejandro Luis Rojas, second in command and chief enforcer of the Juárez cartel, was a ruddy-looking man with a dark pockmarked complexion and stubby, callused hands that looked like a farmer’s. His forehead was stitched by permanent lines that ran across it in slight waves. He brushed his thick black hair straight back and Caitlin noticed dried flecks of hair dye dotting the shoulders of his white button-down shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled up just past the elbows.

  Juan Ramon Castillo, fourth in the chain of command for the Sinaloa cartel, but currently number one given that the three ahead of him were all in prison, was rail thin and bookish-looking thanks to a pair of spectacles he wore on the tip of his nose. Caitlin noticed that one of the lenses was cracked and his belt was struggling to hold his trousers over his narrow hips. Nonetheless, the intensity of his gaze and general flatness of his expression mirrored Rojas’s in both respects, the two of them looking as if the emotion, the very life, had been washed from their features. There was no fierceness, no hatred, no unnerving sense of awareness of the power each held, not even any grief. Caitlin guessed the unusual nature of this meeting was to blame, both these men and Sandoval at a loss to find the proper face to wear for a tragic occasion that, however temporarily, had joined them in a common purpose.

  “I want to thank all you gentlemen for coming,” she said when she reached the table. At that point, Caitlin cautiously eased the SIG Sauer from its holster, ejected the shell from the chamber and popped out the magazine, laying all three down before her. “Seems like the right thing to do given what’s brought us here, and I appreciate the three of you all coming alone.”

  “Anything that helps us find the killer of our children,” said Rojas, the last of his words spoken softer through a lump that Caitin saw was actually visible in his throat.

  “Perhaps the guilty party sits at this table now,” Castillo followed, holding his gaze on Sandoval. “I would not put it past some to have orchestrated this entire ruse to cloak their own part in weakening our operation.”

  “You think I’d sacrifice my own son to such a cause?” Sandoval asked him.

  “The only body I’ve seen is my son’s. I have no way of confirming the other deaths, do I?”

  Rojas nodded slowly in assent, echoing Castillo’s words.

  “I saw the bodies,” Caitlin told all three of them. “It was the Rangers working with Mexican authorities who made the IDs. If this were a trap, it’d already be sprung. And I got my own reasons for wanting this to go smoothly.”

  “Perhaps you should share them with our new friends,” Sandoval suggested, eyeing both of them.

  “Two boys have been targeted north of the border as well, two boys who mean a lot to me.”

  “Spoken in the present tense,” Castillo noted, “while we spe
ak in the past.”

  “You have other children, don’t you, Señor Castillo?”

  Castillo bristled at Caitlin’s remark.

  “Two to be exact,” Caitlin continued, “both born to your mistresses. How long you think it’ll be before the killers catch on to that fact and come after them too?”

  “I can protect my own without help from los diablos tejanos.”

  Caitlin held his stare. “Well, right now this Texas devil needs to remind you that wasn’t the case four days ago, sir.”

  Rojas leaned forward, his hands coiled into fists so tight that the veins looked like branches growing out of his skin. “So what do you want from us?”

  “To find out what the three of you, and Señor Aguilar, have in common, because that’s why five children are dead and others are in danger.”

  “You think we haven’t searched for that answer ourselves?” challenged Castillo, shaking his head. “You think we wouldn’t have found it if such a thing truly existed?”

  “Reason for that being,” Caitlin told him, “is that you’ve been looking in the wrong place.”

  62

  SAN ANTONIO

  “I’ve gotta be back in time for the game tonight,” Dylan told Cort Wesley, pulling his boots on. His hair was still damp from the shower and he smelled like the liquid soap Caitlin used because he said it made his skin feel better.

  “So you don’t want to come along.”

  “No, Dad, I do. We just have to make sure I’m back. It’s the district championship.”

  “Still?”

  “Huh?”

  “I thought maybe something had changed from the first fifty times you told me.”

  “Ha-ha. Very funny, Dad. Remind me to laugh later.” He pushed his foot the rest of the way into his boot and stood up. “Where we going again?”

  * * *

  It wasn’t anything like boosting refrigerators with Boone Masters, but this was still the first time Cort Wesley had ever taken Dylan with him on a trip like this, specifically to the Rio Grande Valley and the farm where the daughters of both Mateo Torres and Enrique Cantú had been born in 1973. He hadn’t asked Luke to join them and his younger son would’ve likely rejected the proposition anyway since he hated missing any school, a freshman now already thinking of grades, college, and test scores.