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

by Land, Jon

  “It is not too late, señores,” Castillo started. “There is still a way to rid the world of Esteban Cantú’s esos Demonios.”

  “Two days from now,” Rojas picked up, “he has scheduled a military parade to honor the Mexican troops who bravely fought and defeated the forces of Pancho Villa in the battle of Juárez. Out of respect for his cousin, President Carranza,” he added with a smirk, not bothering to disguise the irony in his voice.

  “It will take place in the central square of Mexicali,” the general named Aguilar explained, taking a tattered, hand-scrawled map from his pocket. “Cantú will surely lead the procession and all residents are required to attend. He will be accompanied by his soldiers—you know them as esos Demonios—and among them will be the very same men who were responsible for Willow Creek.”

  With that Aguilar unfolded the map and handed it to William Ray Strong, who passed it on to Manuel Gonzaullas.

  “I know this place,” Gonzaullas said.

  “So can we do it, M.T.? Can we take out this many men at once?”

  “The participants won’t be expecting anything but more tequila and sangria when the procession ends. It will be hot in the sun and by the end of the route, the effects of their first round of drink will have worn off and left them sluggish. So, yes, Ranger, we can do it.”

  “The next question being,” William Ray said, moving his eyes from one general to the next, “what’s in it for the three of you exactly?”

  “The war is lost, señor,” said Rojas. “The revolution is over.”

  “Leaving all enterprising men like us,” added Castillo, “with a need to stake out the next stage of our lives.”

  “You want to take over Cantú’s drug business,” Earl Strong realized.

  “Only the business in Mexico, señores,” Aguilar told all of them. “That is more than enough to suit our needs once Cantú is out of the way, and the three of us intend to divide our interests through the country, separate groups responsible for different regions.”

  “You’ve thought this thing out, haven’t you?”

  “We wouldn’t have wasted your time if we hadn’t, señor,” Rojas said to William Ray.

  “And we’re supposed to take you at your word that you won’t spread your poison across the border into Texas just like Cantú did?” raised a skeptical William Ray Strong.

  “Sí,” said Aguilar.

  “You see, we’d rather keep you as amigos, rather than risk having you as enemies,” Castillo explained.

  “Even though you’re not coming entirely clean?”

  The three generals looked at one another.

  “You’re the ones who betrayed Pancho Villa,” William Ray continued. “You had all this thought out and you used us to do your dirty work right from the start.”

  None of the generals bothered denying the assertion, Rojas speaking for all of them. “We get what we want and you get what you want.”

  William Ray Strong thought back to the scene in Willow Creek, feeling a grimace stretch across his lips. “You boys got yourself a deal,” he said, taking the map back from Manuel Gonzaullas.

  * * *

  “Those Mexican bastards done fucked us again,” said Frank Hamer once Strong’s Raiders reached Mexicali two days later.

  They’d arrived to find the city overrun with soldiers and members of the federal police force. Armed men were everywhere, not just esos Demonios preparing for the procession at the head of the street.

  “This ain’t good,” Monroe Fox added, dressed like the others in capes and sombreros to give the impression they were no more than visitors here to enjoy the festivities.

  The three generals had failed to mention the Gatling guns poised in a church steeple at one end of the Mexicali central square and jerry-rigged upon a rooftop at the other. Those guns, combined with the abundance of additional armed troops, made the formidable supply of BARs, Thompsons, 12-gauges, and .45 caliber pistols scattered through the three cars the Rangers boarded to drive here pale by comparison.

  All morning the square’s cantinas were packed with soldiers, locals, and tourists mixing easy among one another. William Ray dispatched Manuel Gonzaullas and Bill McDonald to hide a pair of Thompsons and scout out the remainder of the square for other potential surprises. But foremost in his mind remained the opportunity to slay those who had perpetrated the massacre at Willow Creek. Esos Demonios would fall hard and quick once the bullets started flying, that was for sure.

  Or maybe not.

  Because a few minutes later, Gonzaullas rushed up to William Ray, nearly out of breath.

  “They’re moving on Captain Bill!” he managed, heaving for air in between breaths.

  “Christ on a crutch! Where?”

  “Another cantina. Somebody recognized him and wanted to make sure he wasn’t a ghost.”

  William Ray looked to Monroe Fox and Frank Hamer. “We need those BARs set up in the high ground. That means—”

  “I know what it means,” Hamer interrupted. “Taking out those Gatling guns.”

  “Just give me a few minutes to get Captain Bill back,” William Ray Strong told him. “Then let’s show these bastards what happens when you cross the Texas Rangers.”

  * * *

  William Ray, Earl, and Manuel Gonzaullas reached the cantina just as Bill McDonald was being led out by federal police officers and the first beats of a drum began to pound, signaling the procession was about to start. At its very head was Mexico’s first engine-driven fire truck, purportedly a gift from the governor of California. The three Rangers moved to block the path of the federales, Manuel Gonzaullas stepping forward to do the talking.

  “There must be some mistake. Why are you arresting our friend?”

  The federal captain, who walked with a limp, grinned, his bravado reinforced by the half dozen officers he commanded and the bevy of well-armed soldiers filling the streets and bars. “If you are his friend, then you must be an el Rinche too, eh?”

  He grinned again, wet eyes big in the sunlight, an instant before he and the other men went for their guns. But Earl and William Ray drew theirs first, Earl opening up with his Colt and William Ray with his .45 in a blistering crescendo that accompanied the now heavier rhythmic drumbeats of the procession. More band instruments joined in, stealing the sound of the gunfight from the street, but not the sight of the federal and his men straining to return the Rangers’ gunfire.

  William Ray heard a gasp and saw Bill McDonald stagger, wincing and clasping his hand against a side leaking blood. Still firing, he moved to the Ranger legend and shielded him with his own body, supporting his weight.

  “I’m okay, goddamnit!” McDonald said. “Just get me a goddamn gun!”

  Earl and Manuel Gonzaullas dropped the last two policemen with their Colts, as the patrons closest to the disruption rushed to flee. The crowd just slightly beyond was clustered too tight and, to a man, too drunk to realize anything was awry until Monroe Fox and Frank Hamer started firing their Brownings from top-floor hotel windows centered in the square. Their first targets were the Gatling gun perches, way too open and the soldiers behind them much too bored to offer any resistance at all. The BARs’ bullets chewed them, and the wood composite around them, to shreds.

  “Let’s do this, son!” William Ray, with Bill McDonald still in his grasp, yelled to Earl.

  Earl finished reloading his Colt and positioned himself to provide cover for his father and Bill McDonald, while Gonzaullas rushed into a nearby building to fulfill his part of the plan. William Ray eased a gasping Bill McDonald against a nearby adobe facade, holding him steady there with his freshly reloaded .45 in hand.

  “Get to it, Ranger!” he yelled to his son, who was already stripping light canvas coverings from the pair of Thompson machine guns squeezed in a gap left to drain rainwater from the flat rooftops above two matching structures.

  Earl handed one of the Thompsons to his father, who, in turn, pressed his .45 into Bill McDonald’s grasp. “If you get yo
urself killed, make sure I get this back first, Captain.”

  “Do my best, Ranger,” McDonald said, wincing.

  The loud riffs of the marching band continued to drown out the sounds of battle long enough for Fox and Hamer to train their Brownings downward on the rearmost flank of the esos Demonios following the band and fire truck in the procession. In their absurdly garish dress uniforms, they looked like cartoon characters falling in waves to the relentless BAR fire. The Brownings came equipped with detachable ammo boxes that held twenty 30.06 Springfield rounds that would put a man down wherever it hit him. Instinct drove esos Demonios to surge forward away from the heavy fire, starting to recover their senses when Gonzaullas rained a half dozen smoke grenades down from a building rooftop overlooking the central square. A few of the grenades never actually went off, but the four that did quickly sent a thick blanket of gray over the street that hung like a curtain long enough for William Ray and Earl to enter the battle with Thompsons in hand, sifting through the fleeing members of the marching band.

  They scattered in all directions while holding fast to their instruments the way a gunman would his weapon. The driver of Mexico’s first ever fire engine, meanwhile, lost control of the vehicle, its front end crashing into cantina tables set up on the curb and sidewalk for patrons to better view the parade. That cleared the way for the Strongs to fire straight into esos Demonios, who were rushing straight for them to escape the BAR fire.

  Neither would talk of the ensuing moments or that day at all ever again. Even in the sometimes storied, other times muddied history of the Texas Rangers, this battle was never mentioned, not even as the fodder of legend and myth. For the Strongs there was only the sense of the Thompsons rumbling in their hands, growing so hot the feeling of a fever would linger for hours afterward. The volume of the rounds tearing out the barrels bubbled their ears before deafening them to the clatter of the ejected shells clamoring to the pavement.

  Earl actually smelled nothing at all until his Thompson finally clicked empty, feeling featherlight in contrast to when he’d first hit the trigger. Then he was accosted by the smells of smoke, blood, sweat, and fear all hitting him at once in a wave so powerful it nearly buckled his knees, as he slammed a fresh drum home and laid waste to more esos Demonios. His heart was going so fast, it stole his breath and only William Ray’s hand tugging on his shoulder got him moving from the maelstrom.

  Both caught a glimpse of Esteban Cantú himself, dressed in a colorful uniform affixed with epaulets, stumbling in and out of the smoke clouds to escape the carnage. But the Strongs had other priorities ahead of chasing him down, first and foremost being Captain Bill McDonald, who’d taken another hit, this time in the shoulder. His breath sounded wheezy, as William Ray hovered over him. The surviving esos Demonios struggled to regroup in tandem with the federales and regular Mexican army conscripts who’d come to enjoy the procession. But Manuel Gonzaullas tossed more smoke bombs down toward the street, giving the Strongs enough cover to get McDonald onto his feet.

  “They got us boxed in!” Earl realized.

  But William Ray’s eyes had fixed on Mexico’s first motorized fire engine. “Not for long, they don’t.”

  * * *

  William Ray took the wheel, Bill McDonald squeezed next to him with Earl on the legendary captain’s other side.

  “I’m not worth the extra weight to carry, Ranger,” McDonald told Earl.

  “Don’t you even think of dying today, Captain.”

  “Hey, didn’t you hear?” McDonald managed between gasping breaths. “I already died, a year ago.” His grin quickly dissolved into a hacking cough that brought blood into his hand.

  William Ray got the truck righted and headed down the plaza amid a sudden relentless torrent of fire unleashed by the surviving esos Demonios. He opened up with his .45 toward them while he drove with one hand, Earl laying the Thompson’s barrel on the doorframe through the open window and unleashing a rainbow of muzzle fire on the gunmen firing from that side. Bill McDonald had slumped between them unconscious, and William Ray shoved him down further to keep him safe from a stray or ricocheting bullet.

  The Strongs had just run out of ammo when Frank Hamer and Monroe Fox hit the streets blasting away with their BARs, leaping up to take the handholds of the fire engine as if they were firemen wielding promised death instead of hoses. They emptied the remainder of their ammo boxes, the 30.06 cartridges chewing through flesh and bone, leaving nothing whole in their path.

  “Where’s M.T.?” Earl realized suddenly.

  “Don’t you worry about that boy, son,” William Ray said from behind the wheel. “He knows how to keep his wits about him for sure, a damn lone wolf if ever there was one.”

  “Dad,” Earl started and William Ray knew something must be serious for his son to call him that. “It’s Captain McDonald. I believe we’ve lost him.”

  “Shit.” William Ray tried to rouse the legend with no success as they left the plaza for the city’s outskirts, Hamer and Fox still returning the fire chasing them. “I’m of a mind to turn this rig around and go for round two.”

  But he knew they were too low on ammunition to mount another effective attack, and the sight of the multitude of bodies fallen to the combined onslaught of the BARs and the Thompsons was plenty enough to tell him they’d won the day. Accomplished just what they came here to do, though at a terrible price given the loss of Bill McDonald.

  “We had no choice here, son,” William Ray said in a voice strained by the battle that had left his throat hot and dry. “No matter how many years you live from this day, you need to never forget that. Otherwise, it’ll steal your sleep first and then your sanity. Just remember Willow Creek and you’ll keep note of our purpose.… You hear me, boy?”

  “I do, Ranger.”

  William Ray nodded, feeling the fire engine’s gears buck as they left Mexicali behind them. “We didn’t start this, but we damn well finished it.”

  90

  LOS MOCHIS, MEXICO

  “They did at that,” Ana Guajardo finished. “And I imagine that if YouTube had been around then, there would be a record of plenty of women and children bleeding in the street from those Thompsons and Brownings. In Mexico, we call that a massacre.” She took a breath to steady herself. “My great-grandfather survived that day at the hands of yours, but not the fallout that followed. He left office in disgrace—the entire Cantú family was disgraced—a few months later. His political career was over and he was never heard from again.”

  Caitlin remained silent, at once understanding why this was one of the few, perhaps the only story her legendary grandfather had never shared with her.

  “Nothing to say, Ranger? Te comió la lengua el gato? Cat got your tongue? I believe you’ve come all this way for nothing more than a history lesson. No one’s been able to control my brother since my own family gave up trying. So if his trail is what brought you down here, I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time.”

  “Four of the murdered children in Willow Creek were descendants of those three generals who betrayed Pancho Villa so they could take over the Mexican drug trade, ma’am. They used my ancestors to take down yours and became the original founders of what we now call the cartels,” Caitlin said finally. “The fifth victim in Willow Creek was the son of Fernando Lorenzo Sandoval, the man who put your father, Enrique Cantú, in the Walls prison. And those nephews you’ve never met are the grandchildren of Mateo Torres, the man who gave up your father to Sandoval.”

  “But Enrique Cantú wasn’t really my father, was he, Ranger? This Mateo Torres was my real father.”

  “I’d tell you to ask Enrique himself,” Caitlin said, stealing a look at the man hunched in a wheelchair in the lee of an oak tree, “but I don’t expect he’s been in much condition to answer since suffering that four-story fall.”

  “If you’re right, Ranger, you could very well be in danger yourself.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Well, you are a descendant of the m
an who ultimately destroyed Esteban Cantú, aren’t you?” Guajardo said, fixing her harsh stare on Caitlin and letting it hang there. “I’d watch my back if I were you.”

  Caitlin seemed all too happy to meet her gaze. “I know my enemies when I see them.”

  “You don’t have much family, do you, Ranger? No one, in fact.”

  “While you have your brother, Locaro. I thought you might like to let whoever got him sprung from prison know I’ll be coming after them too, once I hunt down the killer of those children. I’m guessing you’ve done some hunting yourself, señora.”

  “What’s that have to do with anything?”

  “The children were killed with some kind of field dressing knife, for starters.” Caitlin gazed about their surroundings. “And this being a game preserve, I figure you’d know your way around such a thing. Thought maybe you could give me some pointers in its use, so I’ll know better the kind of killer I’m looking for. According to our medical examiner, that killer would be just about your height too.”

  “I believe we’re finished here, Ranger.”

  “I’ll let you know when we’re done, señora.”

  “Perhaps you’re forgetting your jurisdiction and that you came down here to warn me, not accuse me.”

  “I only accused you of being a hunter. But now that you mention it, doesn’t seem as if a man like your brother would launch a random attack north of the border. Who do you suppose landed him that pardon? We find that out, we’ll know who’s pulling his strings, that’s for sure.”

  “We look the other way when it comes to our families, Ranger,” Guajardo said, stiffening only slightly. “But that doesn’t stop them from being the one thing in our lives we can’t replace.”

  “I guess if you could’ve replaced your father, it might’ve spared him that fall, ma’am.”

  Whatever fear or trepidation Ana Guajardo might have felt in Caitlin’s presence vanished with that statement. Instead of showing anger, her expression grew almost frighteningly flat. Instead of her breathing picking up, it slowed. Instead of sneering or scowling, she simply smiled.