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

by Land, Jon

  “Just like whoever killed those children because of the actions of men dead long before they were born must have had his reasons, or hers, and they must have believed those reasons to be true. They must have thought that the wrongs done to their family justified something so extreme. There are no consolation prizes in life, any more than there are in business. It’s a zero-sum game, Ranger.”

  Caitlin remained just as calm. “Well, I’ve never heard the murder of children called a game of any kind, ma’am. And I’d say anyone who feels that way must figure they’ve got a reason not to be frightened of the consequences.”

  “Why, what makes you say that, Ranger?”

  “Because they’ve got something bigger planned. It all comes down to timing, ma’am. Why now? Why would whoever’s behind your whack job of a brother take such a chance if they didn’t have good reason to figure everybody’ll forget soon enough?”

  Guajardo took a step closer, Caitlin planting her hands on her hips, the right one noticeably closer to her holstered pistol now. “Maybe they let their hatred stew for as long as they could. Maybe they’ve grown powerful enough not to fear the consequences.” She hesitated, seeming to enjoy herself now. “Do you ever hunt yourself, Ranger?”

  Caitlin lowered her hands again, left them dangling by her hips. “I never found much point in killing anything that wasn’t trying to do the same to me.”

  “It’s just a sport, Ranger.”

  “Only for those with a taste for spilling blood, ma’am. And the drug trade your great-grandfather started, the same trade Pancho Villa’s generals expanded, has spilled far more than its share. Throw a stone on either side of the border and you’re bound to hit someone whose family was decimated by the legacy left by Esteban Cantú. What was it you said about revenge, that it’s the most powerful, the purest emotion of all?”

  “Close enough,” Guajardo smirked. “But I only want what’s best for Mexico.”

  “Really? Maybe I should have a discussion with President Villarreal about that.”

  “Better make it fast, Ranger. Word is he’s going to be stepping down soon, is probably crafting his letter of resignation as we speak.”

  “So you can appoint someone else from your party in his place?”

  “That’s the idea. Someone better able to help those of us who love our country realize the vision that’s best for it.”

  “I love my country too, ma’am.”

  “There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.”

  “And how did President Villarreal take his demotion?”

  “There was no one for him to express his displeasure to. Besides me, of course.”

  “Bet it was a good thing he didn’t have a skinning knife available at the time.”

  “Not much of a weapon when it comes to killing.”

  “Tell that to those kids in Willow Creek, ma’am, who suffered a terrible death,” Caitlin said, her eyes boring into Ana Guajardo in search of a reaction that never came.

  “I’d like to help you, Ranger, I really would.” Guajardo took another step closer, stopping when she banged up against something that felt like a force field enclosing Caitlin. “That’s why you need to know you can’t stop the storm that’s coming. The best you can hope for is to find cover before it’s too late.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Then are we done here?”

  “For today, ma’am, for today.” Caitlin returned the Stetson to her head and started to turn, only to stop and look back at Guajardo. “But tomorrow’s another story entirely.”

  91

  HUNTSVILLE, TEXAS

  Entering the Walls prison through the visitors’ entrance had almost a surreal effect to it. Cort Wesley hadn’t been back on these grounds, or anywhere even close to Huntsville, since his own release four years earlier, much less with his oldest son accompanying him.

  Dylan had remained silent through most of the drive from Jan McClellan-Townsend’s spread in the Rio Grande Valley, removing his earbuds when they reached the outskirts of the town that housed eleven of the most notorious prisons in the entire state. Cort Wesley had made an appointment with Warden Warren Jardine, who actually looked happy to see him when he was ushered into Jardine’s spacious office, decorated with all forms of Texas memorabilia that belied the kind of business that went on within those walls.

  “I’ve heard good things, Mr. Masters, good things,” he greeted, shaking Cort Wesley’s hand enthusiastically before his eyes fixed on Dylan with some surprise. “This your oldest?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, son, I’ve heard good things about you too.” Eyes back on Cort Wesley now. “You certainly seem to have turned the corner and I hope you don’t mind me saying I’m proud to have played a part in that.”

  Cort Wesley didn’t bother to tell Jardine he’d played no part at all, that being released after a DNA test determined his innocence didn’t qualify as a successful rehabilitation. “I’ve got a younger son too,” he said instead. “He was kidnapped last night.”

  Jardine looked caught by surprise, clearly with no idea how to respond. “I, er, I,” he stammered, and then just left things there.

  “I didn’t tell your secretary the true subject of my visit, because you don’t need any record of it in the books. But I’m here because I think you might be able to help me get my son back. You had a prisoner here in the early nineteen-eighties. Man by the name of Enrique Cantú, aka Enrique Guajardo. Believe he spent three years in your fine institution.”

  Jardine’s entire expression seemed to sag, the life going out of his eyes. His gaze fell on Dylan again. “You wish to have this conversation in front of your son?”

  “It’s his brother who got kidnapped, remember? And, if you don’t mind me saying, that’s a pretty strange reaction about a small-time marijuana grower who not long before his arrest had bumped up to dealing. Of course, a few years after his release Cantú, Guajardo again by then, was among the richest, most powerful men in Mexico. So unless he hit the lottery while living within your walls, I gotta figure it was something else he hit and I’d like to know what exactly.”

  “I could say I don’t remember him,” Jardine offered lamely.

  “But that would be a lie, wouldn’t it?”

  “It was a long time ago, Mr. Masters. Lots of prisoners have come and gone.”

  “You owe me more than a weak memory, Warden, you owe yourself more too. Because if I don’t get my son back, I’ll have to go after all those who got in my way. Not a good place to be standing anytime soon.”

  Jardine shook his head, looking suddenly miffed. “You haven’t changed at all, have you, Mr. Masters?”

  “Why bother if I wasn’t guilty of anything in the first place?”

  “Oh, you were plenty guilty all right, just not of what made you my guest for four years.”

  Jardine’s face took on the smug expression Cort Wesley recalled all too well from his time here. He’d aged noticeably in the past four years; his skin was paler, almost sallow, and his hair had thinned over drooping eyes that looked tired, sick maybe.

  “You know I’m retiring next month.”

  “I didn’t know, Warden, no.”

  “Forty years in Corrections is enough for any man, Mr. Masters, and I’d like to think I did some good.” His eyes lowered, his shoulders seeming to sag as well. “Enrique Cantú wasn’t one of those things.”

  “How’s that, sir?”

  “I was just a gun bull at the time and didn’t have much to say about how things were run. What I can tell you is that Cantú spent a lot of his time inside with soldiers and heavyweights from La Eme, the Mexican Mafia, that was starting to make its presence felt in the drug world back then. He had a true gift for business, Mr. Masters, and whatever I might have been able to do to the contrary became forbidden, the word past down from on high, as they say. Cantú was off limits. He never ran a gang or spoke for his fellow prisoners; no, what he was doing organizationally was all ab
out the world when he got out.”

  “You believe he was building a distribution network while inside, Warden, don’t you?”

  Jardine’s eyes grew glassy, distant. He suddenly looked unsteady on his feet and leaned back against the edge of his desk. “Let me put it this way, Mr. Masters, for you and your boy here. I followed Cantú after his release, watched him become a major player in Mexican business and politics and listened to all the stories about how he made his stake when I knew they were all lies. Because, you’re right, his initial fortune came from that drug distribution network he built on the inside in league with La Eme. Gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘rehabilitation,’ doesn’t it?” Jardine asked, with a hint of irony in his voice.

  “You know Cantú’s grandfather started the whole process by smuggling opium into California. Guess you could say he was the actual founder of the Mexican drug trade.”

  Jardine nodded. “I’ve heard that, yes. And I’ll tell you something else about Cantú. He spent three years here building alliances with street thugs as much as major dealers and suppliers. He taught men how to read English and lent them money he never asked to be repaid. He left here with hundreds of men in his debt and all their names and the names of their associates in his personal Rolodex. I’d venture to say he called all those debts in.”

  “You’d be right there, Warden,” Cort Wesley told him, “you’d be damn right.”

  92

  MEXICO

  After leaving Ana Guajardo’s game preserve, Caitlin climbed back into her SUV and switched the air-conditioning on full blast to relieve the heat flushing through her system as if she’d spiked a fever. She began the ten-hour drive back home slowly, shaking too much from knots of tension to grip the wheel tightly or give the vehicle the gas it needed to make time.

  She needed those minutes to sort out her thoughts, distinguish knowledge based on surety from assumptions based on very little at all.

  “That’s why you need to know you can’t stop the storm that’s coming. The best you can hope for is to find cover before it’s too late.”

  Recalling Guajardo’s final words chilled her more than the cold blast of the air-conditioning. She’d known countless psychopaths, sociopaths, megalomaniacs, and residents of a lunatic fringe that the vast reaches of humanity went to bed every night never suspecting even existed. They shared, above all else, a uniquely self-destructive impulse that inevitably caught up with them as they betrayed themselves and their own intentions instead of letting someone else do it for them. It was a world where someone as extreme as Colonel Guillermo Paz could remake himself into a veritable moral center.

  But Caitlin found Ana Callas Guajardo worse and more terrifying than any of those who dwelled on the fringe of humanity, because she lacked the self-destructive nature that doomed the others. She had said, hinted at, just enough to tell Caitlin what was coming without telling her anything. And she had practically confessed to murdering five children in Willow Creek without actually saying anything at all.

  Ana Guajardo was settling all her family’s old scores. The descendants of the three generals who had betrayed her great-grandfather, the current head of Mexico’s antidrug efforts, who had arrested her father, and, finally, the grandchildren of the man who had betrayed her father to a young Fernando Lorenzo Sandoval years before Ana herself had likely pushed him off a fourth-story balcony. It would have all been madness had she not gone about things so systematically with utterly unrestrained violence emblematic of someone who felt either she had nothing to lose or, soon, there’d be no one to go up against her.

  Caitlin believed the latter to be the case, because Guajardo’s final act of vengeance would be this storm she intended to somehow rain down on the whole of the United States. The only thing she couldn’t figure was why. Everything else made sense in supremely monstrous, and chilling, fashion, Guajardo’s targets selected for clear reason. But taking on the entire United States, dedicating her considerable resources to what sounded like a thinly veiled major attack? That made no sense and wouldn’t make any until Caitlin figured out what exactly the country had done to Guajardo to so earn her wrath. She had hinted at plenty back on the game preserve named after her father, but not that.

  Caitlin had finally cooled off and her trembling subsided enough to make a call on her Bluetooth.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Jones answered. “What operation of mine have you fucked up this time?”

  “Can it, Jones. You still in Texas?”

  “Yup, picking up the pieces of the mess you made for me, Ranger.”

  “Get to San Antonio. We’re having a meeting as soon as I get back.”

  “Where are you and who’d you leave dead behind?”

  “Mexico, and I didn’t leave her dead at all.”

  “Her?”

  “Ana Callas Guajardo.”

  “You sure know how to pick them, don’t you, Ranger?” Jones asked after a slight pause. “What’s this about?”

  “Remember that color-coded warning chart Homeland used to use?”

  “Intimately.”

  “What comes after red, Jones?”

  * * *

  Her next call was to D. W. Tepper.

  “I need you to call Young Roger and get him to turn up everything he can on Ana Callas Guajardo. Tell him there’s no need to go gentle with this because we’ve got a direct liaison with Homeland.”

  “Jones?”

  “He has his uses, Captain.”

  “You were never a good judge of character, Hurricane.”

  “This particular storm’s got nothing to do with me, D.W.”

  “Before I go upsetting every applecart between here and Austin, it might help if I knew what we’re facing.”

  “Some kind of attack, Captain. An attack on the whole damn country.” Caitlin heard her phone beep with another call coming in and checked the number. “Jesus Christ, I think it’s her.”

  “Who?”

  “Ana Guajardo.”

  93

  MEXICO

  “You have a change of heart, Señora Guajardo?” Caitlin asked, feeling colder than she could ever recall in her life.

  “We left a few things unfinished, Ranger. You didn’t come here to warn me, did you?”

  “Not at all, ma’am. I came because I believe you’re behind the killings of those children in Willow Creek and the attack on that lacrosse game in San Antonio. And you knew exactly who I was when I showed up. Almost looked like you were expecting me.”

  “Point taken.”

  “And you must be calling to make your own.”

  “Getting this kidnapped boy back is very important to you.”

  “Yes, it is,” Caitlin said, starting to shake now.

  “I am not without power or contacts inside Mexico, Ranger. Perhaps I can prove to you how wrong you are about me.”

  “And how wrong is that, ma’am?” Caitlin asked, her words like marbles rolling around her mouth.

  “I believe I may be able to secure the boy’s release in three days, subject to certain conditions.”

  “What do you need me to do exactly?”

  “Nothing, Ranger, I need you to do nothing. You’ve clearly disturbed the interests of someone powerful and they took the boy to hold you back. So if you do nothing for, say, three days I believe, no, I’m confident, I’ll be able to secure the boy’s release. But you need to give me something to bargain with.”

  “I imagine that includes keeping what I suspect to myself.”

  “I believe we’re on the same page here, Ranger.”

  A pause.

  “Look at the two us, driven by our own ambitions and the legacy to succeed above all else.”

  Heat started to flush through Caitlin, pushing back the cold that had invaded her core. “Where you going with this?”

  “We’re both predators, Ranger. It’s what we live for. You with your gun, me with my iPad. We live to destroy.”

  “You’re only half right, ma’am.�
��

  “How’s that?”

  “I live to destroy people like you.”

  “And you’re paying the same price I am for doing it. That’s my point.”

  “Not really,” Caitlin told her. “You got anybody you’d kill to protect?”

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  “I didn’t think so. You got a brother who’s crazy and a father you likely pushed off a balcony. You’re a hunter, all right, and right now I know you’ve got a whole country set in your sights. Too bad I got you centered in mine. You made me an offer and now I’m gonna make you one: give it up or you’ll end up a casualty of your own storm.”

  “A boy’s life is at stake here. Do I need to remind you about that?”

  “You just did, because you’re scared as hell what’ll happen if I don’t get him back. How much you think you’ll be able to enjoy your victory with Guillermo Paz and Cort Wesley Masters on your ass?”

  “You forgot to mention yourself, Ranger.”

  “No, I didn’t, ’cause I’m already there. See, señora, a strong rain’s gonna be falling all right, but it’s gonna be falling on you.”

  Silence followed and Caitlin thought Guajardo was about to hang up, until she heard her sigh deeply. “You’re forgetting one thing about this puzzle you think you’ve put together.”

  “Am I?”

  “There’s still one last surviving relative of William Ray and Earl Strong, the Texas Rangers who actually destroyed my great-grandfather Esteban Cantú that day in Mexicali. Maybe these victims are being taken chronologically, starting with the children of the three generals, son of the Mexican cop who arrested my father, grandchildren of his deceitful business partner, and saving you for last. You ever think about that?”

  “I’m thinking about it right now. And maybe they left me off the list because they know I’m not a little boy or girl. Killing kids, no matter in what cause or name, is coward’s work, ma’am, an act of weakness no matter how the perpetrator wants to spin it. We still hang people in Texas, you know, and I’ll see that person swinging by a rope if I have to string her up on a tree myself.”