by Land, Jon
SAN ANTONIO
Caitlin was a good shot, but this was going to need a better one, along the lines of Earl and William Ray Strong. Frontier shooters who lived as long as their skills permitted and not a day more. She could only wish either of them, or even her father, Jim Strong, was with her now to take the shot she couldn’t risk through the crowd still fleeing in all directions across the field.
In that moment Paz’s pickup truck crossed her line of vision. In that moment she grasped his intentions and flinched involuntarily, tensing with the certainty of what was to come.
The pickup roared past Dylan, putting itself between him and the two gunmen in the last instant before they opened fire. Their bullets pinged into the truck’s heavy steel frame, a burst of wet mist from the grill indicating at least one had pierced the radiator. But the truck surged on, still picking up speed.
Caitlin actually covered Luke’s eyes in the moment before impact, the big truck’s extended after-market grill slamming into both men at once, hurtling them like bowling pins in separate directions. A combination of the impact and bullet spray sent the pickup whirling into an uncontained spin, the G-forces at that speed sufficient to topple it over. Caitlin saw the huge form of Paz either leaping out of it or being ejected to safety.
Then her eyes were drawn to the origin of fresh screams to see the stout man who looked overgrown with muscle hacking his way through anyone in his path with a machete that showered blood into the air like rain.
“Stay here!” she ordered Luke, pressing him against the corner of a concession stand. “I’m going to get your brother.”
* * *
Incensed after the collision killed his last two men, Locaro decided to finish the boy his way, on his own. This is where guns had gotten the team he’d brought with him; dead, all of them. The best he could find, desperate to breathe the air outside of Cereso Prison again, men as tough as they came killed by their reliance on weapons they falsely believed rendered them invincible.
Locaro would never make that mistake. Locaro avoided guns at all costs, preferred the old ways for the terror they inspired in his enemies. He could find no trace of Paz anywhere around the toppled truck, leaving him an easy path to the uniformed boy still crouched over his teammate, hand pressed to stanch the blood oozing from a chest wound.
Locaro continued to use his machete to clear that path, showered again in the blood of his victims and finally meeting the boy’s gaze when he drew to within twenty feet, thwacks of bullets against his flak jacket stealing his air.
* * *
Caitlin was ready to fire when she saw Cort Wesley shove more bystanders aside and take up a shooter’s stance. He was still fifty feet away from the shape only vaguely resembling a human being that was about to kill Dylan, his initial shots somehow squeezed between more of those fleeing.
Those bullets barely slowed the man down, as if he were made of steel instead of flesh and bone. But Caitlin steadied her SIG once more, ready to try for an impossible shot.
* * *
Cort Wesley didn’t have time to aim his initial shots, hoping only to slow the machete-wielding madman long enough to allow him to sight in for a kill shot to the head. While in Cereso he’d heard rumors of such a man languishing in the stench-riddled bowels of the prison from which no one ever emerged. A man whose final act as a free man had been to hack off the arms of two of the Mexican policemen who’d come to arrest him for throwing his own father off a fourth-story balcony. Then he’d dropped his machete and sank to his knees laughing.
Cort Wesley knew in that moment this was the same man, wished he’d gotten his chance at him in the dusty ring forged out of the prison yard when fights to the death were all that had kept him alive. Then he wouldn’t have needed to deal with him here. He fired two more shots for the man’s head, the first aimed high to stretch over the heads of onrushing bystanders and the second jerked errantly aside when a flood of them crossed his line of vision at the last moment.
Just one bullet left now.
Cort Wesley didn’t hesitate, couldn’t hesitate. Fired with a reasonably clear shot. Saw the man-monster reel sideways, hand to the side of his head where the bullet had impacted. Coming away with an ear in his hand and turning toward Cort Wesley.
With a smile.
Cort Wesley in motion now, sprinting, knowing there was no way to reach the man-monster before the man-monster reached Dylan.
* * *
Still dazed from the heavy fall, Guillermo Paz finally made it back to his knees, as tall even then as many of those rushing past him. He had his knife in hand, ready to hurl it toward Locaro at the first opening of space. Locaro still holding his severed ear as he swung back toward the oldest son of Cort Wesley Masters, who had taken something else in his grasp.
* * *
Dylan had known the boy at his feet was dead, had known it for some time, but still couldn’t bring himself to move his hand from the wound, as if applying pressure might miraculously bring him back to life. Who knew?
Only when the stump-shaped man who looked pumped full of air discarded the ear his father had shot off did Dylan release his hand from his friend’s chest and grasp the lacrosse stick by his side. He brought it up from his knees, the ball he’d scooped up before the killing started still trapped in the webbing, and fired a shot as if the man bleeding down the side of his face was the opponent’s goal.
High for the corner.
Aiming for his third goal of the night.
The ball struck the man square in the forehead, halting him as if someone had just slammed on his internal brakes. His eyes remained open the whole time he dropped to his knees and then keeled over, freeing Dylan to return his hand to the hole in his dead friend’s chest.
* * *
He felt that hand being pried off by his father, no idea how much time had passed or where his dad had come from.
“Let it go, son, let it go.”
Dylan let his father move his hand away, saying nothing, not even feeling himself breathe as he spotted Caitlin rushing toward him too. Then his gaze shifted sideways toward where he’d dropped the killer, who looked somehow like the Michelin Man, with a lacrosse shot.
But he was gone.
“Where’s Luke?” Cort Wesley asked when Caitlin reached them.
She turned back toward the field-level concession stand that they’d taken cover alongside of, Luke certain to be in her view from this angle.
“Oh, shit” was all Caitlin could say.
Because he was gone too.
PART EIGHT
Free as the unchained winds that sweep the boundless prairie, he was a terror to the incarnate Mexican Devils, a sworn foe to the Indians, who with torch, tomahawk and blood-freezing war-whoop terrified helpless women and children; the ranger, characteristic exponent of the Anglo-Saxon race, drove every enemy away from him and established peace and contentment.
Katie Daffan, Texas Hero Stories (1908)
78
SAN ANTONIO
Captain D. W. Tepper’s face was ash white, his expresion utterly flat with an unlit Marlboro hanging out the left side of his mouth. He reached Caitlin, who’d just separated herself from Cort Wesley and Dylan, and flung the cigarette aside.
“Witness statements aren’t worth shit,” Tepper told her. “Near as we can figure, the same Mexican who shot up the crowd made off with Luke on foot. No one saw them enter a vehicle and we can’t find a single person who saw the man you and Masters figure was the leader flee the area. Hell, maybe he just goddamn disappeared.” He swung his gaze back about the chaos that continued to dominate the field under the harsh glow of the stadium lights that now sliced through a slight mist. “Have you ever considered another line of work, Ranger?”
“Not until tonight, Captain.”
“Good thing maybe,” he said, expression looking as if it were caught halfway through a belch.
“You blaming me for this now?”
Tepper’s expression didn’t change, his bony shoulders sti
ffening as if to keep from turning back toward the utter carnage littering almost the entire field that was dark with drying patches and pools of blood. “No, Caitlin, I’m not. I’m just asking because that’s the way I feel right now.” He started to turn to regard what he’d just walked away from, but stopped. “I was at the scene after a nutcase named George Hennard crashed his pickup truck into Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen and then shot up a whole bunch of folks eating their lunch. I was one of the first inside of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, and haven’t been able to get the smell of burned hair and flesh out of my mind since. You wanna tell me what chance I ever have of sleeping again after this?”
Caitlin returned her gaze to the carnage that looked day-glow bright under the sodium vapor lights, the litter of bodies being properly cataloged and zipped into bags while blood-soaked EMTs and volunteers rushed wheeled dollies across the turf, over a field where a district championship lacrosse game should have been played out instead, now turned into a triage unit.
“Who was he?” Tepper asked her. “That freak show of a man who got away somehow.”
“I have no idea, Captain.”
“I think I do,” Cort Wesley said, standing back a ways with his arm stretched around Dylan’s shoulder, spine held so straight he looked a half foot taller.
* * *
“For all the good that does us,” Tepper said, after Cort Wesley had finished describing what he’d heard while in Cereso.
“Somebody got him out of there, Captain,” Cort Wesley told him. “And now he’s got Luke.”
Tepper held his expression steady. “We got roadblocks in place in a five-mile radius. We got choppers, and dogs, the Highway Patrol, and the ghosts of every dead Ranger out there looking.”
Cort Wesley shook his head and ran his tongue around the inside of his parched mouth. “None of it matters. They’d have the escape route planned out. They could have killed Luke, but they wanted him alive.”
“Because whoever’s behind this knows we’re getting close,” said Caitlin grimly, her determination growing with each word. “They needed leverage, something to hold us back. Means they’ve gotta keep him alive, Cort Wesley, and that means we’re going to find where he’s stashed no matter what it takes.”
If the assurance meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. “You shouldn’t have left him, Ranger,” Cort Wesley said almost too soft to hear, as if the words belonged to somebody else.
“Dad,” Dylan started.
“Quiet, son,” Cort Wesley snapped, never taking his eyes off Caitlin. “We just can’t help ourselves, can we? No matter when and where the bell goes off, we’re off racing to the fire and everything else be damned.”
“This one’s on me, Cort Wesley. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I do,” said Captain Tepper. “I know exactly what you were thinking because it’s what you’re always thinking, and this time it caught up to you.” He shook his head. “What is it about you that attracts this shit? I swear, Ranger, you are like some kind of super magnet dragging every monster the good Lord ever made straight to you.” Tepper raised another cigarette to his mouth and started a lighter toward it. The lighter trembled in his hand but he managed to touch it to the Marlboro’s tip, eyes retrained on Caitlin. “You know how I always tell you to ease back on those hurricane force winds that blow with you?”
“Category Ten you’ve called them.”
“Well, this time I’m gonna find shelter in my basement and let you go at it.”
“D.W.?”
Tepper turned away, continuing to puff on his Marlboro as he responded. “No reports, no actuarials, no travel logs, no time sheets, no gas vouchers, no powdering your nose, and no missing what you shoot at. As of now you are on special assignment and nobody needs know where or how, and that includes me. In fact, all I ever want to know is that it’s done once and for all. You find out the why, you find out the who, Ranger, and you leave them the way they left our people here tonight. That clear enough for you?”
Caitlin could only nod.
“Your granddad used to put men on the chain when he cleaned up Sweetwater during the oil boom. I expect you to wrap that chain around as many deserving necks as you can find. Just get that boy back.”
Then, shaking his head, he walked off, leaving Caitlin with Cort Wesley and Dylan.
“What now, Ranger?”
“We go old school, Cort Wesley, just like Captain Tepper said.”
79
SAN ANTONIO
“You go on ahead,” Caitlin told him. “I’ll meet you at home. Got somebody else I need to talk to first.”
Cort Wesley held his gaze on her the whole way back to the parking lot, while Caitlin looked about until she spotted a figure standing by the glass of the press box, the one spot in the stadium lost to darkness. She located the back stairs leading up to it behind the home section of stands and found the single long table set with folding chairs still littered with notebooks and laptops, the attending press having fled in such a hurry that they’d left them behind.
“His name is Locaro,” said Guillermo Paz, stepping into a thin sliver of light so she could see him. “He used to keep reasonable order between the cartels. For a time they needed to seek his permission before killing a major public official or rival. Our paths have crossed before.”
Caitlin looked at Paz through the darkness between them. “I’m trying to understand something here, Colonel.”
“What’s that?”
“Some problems I’m having with how things got handled tonight.”
“Are you talking about you or me?”
“Guess we’ve both had better nights, haven’t we?”
“My men took out the snipers,” Paz said defensively, unnerved by Caitlin’s criticism. “We thought we had them trapped. The wheelchair guises took even me by surprise.”
“Is that it or did you force Locaro’s hand so you could let it play out just the way it did?”
“You rushed the field instead of staying with the boy. I guess that makes us both prisoners, Ranger.”
“Of what?”
“Our natures.”
“That’s a goddamn cop-out and you know it.”
“You’re raising your voice because you’re mad at yourself.”
“But I’m talking to you.” Caitlin again turned her voice toward the window. “This didn’t have to happen.”
“And it didn’t have to end the way it did.”
“You know what, Colonel? I’m starting to think you’re no different from the man who had the mother of Cort Wesley’s boys killed. Maybe I had you wrong. I think maybe you knew it was Locaro all along tonight. I think maybe you wanted this to happen,” she added, casting another gaze outside a window now dappled with flashes of red from revolving lights both leaving and entering the scene.
“Keep going.”
“Excuse me?”
“It helps to turn your anger on me, so you won’t turn too much of it on yourself. You’re capable of hurting yourself more than any of your enemies, Ranger, but that makes you weaker and thus vulnerable to them.”
“So you’re saying what? I should just forget the fact that I got a boy kidnapped tonight while you let a war break out?”
“We did what was right for one moment, not the next. And it’s in that moment we must judge ourselves.”
“Is that how you’ve lived with all this shit for so long, Colonel?”
“I used to have a different approach than you, Ranger.”
“How’s that?”
“I used to remain above it all without feeling, until our paths crossed for the first time. Now I live within it, the same way you do.”
“Means you get to experience pain, Colonel. How’s that feel?”
Now it was Paz who turned his gaze toward the window. “I’m not finished with Locaro yet.”
“And I won’t rest until I bring Luke back safe and sound.”
They looked at each other again.
> “That’s how we live with all this, Ranger.”
80
MEDINA COUNTY, TEXAS
“Thanks for coming on such short notice, Mr. Tawls,” Caitlin greeted, not shaking the man’s hand since it would’ve hurt too much with the bruised knuckles of her right hand wrapped in gauze.
The first thing Regent Tawls glimpsed after he closed the door was a man digging a hole on the outer rim of the wasteland that had once been his farm. The man’s bare chest showcased banded muscles across his arms and shoulders and pectorals that looked like baseballs tucked into his chest. At this time of the morning, when the sun was right, he could distinguish the burned patch of earth that had ruined the dreams bred from his life when he was still a young man. But it was the bare-chested man with thick shovel in hand that continued to claim his attention, as he approached Caitlin Strong.
She’d called Regent Tawls and asked him to meet her on the site of his former farm in Medina County just outside of Devine after the indescribable violence at St. Anthony’s school had culminated in Luke’s kidnapping the night before. She managed to steal some sleep in fits and starts broken by nightmares featuring the monster of a man named Locaro hovering over her bedside.
“The boy’s mine now,” he told her with a grin and, for some reason, the thing she recalled most clearly was a stomach-turning stench that rose off him.
The sun-scorched ground on what had been Regent Tawls’s farm was brown, impossible to distinguish where the refuse of crops grown ended and dirt began, although both smelled musky and sour beneath an unforgiving sky. Looking at the surroundings now, it was hard to picture life ever having sprouted from it, like regarding a massive above-the-earth grave where the dead were still awaiting last rites.
Moments before she watched Regent Tawls pull onto the property in his white Cadillac, which shimmered in the sunlight. The heat rose from its hood in visible ripples that continued to churn as he exited and approached her, forcing a smile even as the buttons of his shirt showed the strain of keeping his stomach contained. His walk was more of a lumbering gait, his cheeks shiny with perspiration that also dappled his forehead in actual drops, his eyes squinting to better make out the solitary figure digging away at the hard ground that fought his efforts every step of the way.