Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  Watching him suffer was almost too much for Caitlin to bear, but that only strengthened her resolve to do something about it by reaching Peter when everyone else had failed. Toward that end, she held up a picture of the two of them together, one of the last taken before he left, tucking her emotions as far away as possible. Her former commander in the Texas Rangers, D. W. Tepper, had asked to meet her for coffee this afternoon and she contemplated that reunion to fight back the now familiar clog forming in her throat.

  “Do these people look familiar to you?” she asked her husband.

  “The woman’s you.”

  “What about the man?”

  “No,” Peter said, shaking his head. “I don’t know him.”

  “Anything else strike you about the picture?”

  “They seem happy. Nice couple. Do you have any others?”

  “Not with me.”

  “What about pictures with their kids?”

  “They never had kids. They talked about it, but they never had any.”

  “Why?”

  “Couldn’t quite get things right. Complicated story. Do you have a story, Peter?”

  “No. No story. Nothing at all.”

  Caitlin had read and studied enough about the victims of torture to know this kind of post-traumatic response, the very denial of self, was all about living in a fear indescribable to anyone who hasn’t experienced such horror. The fear never really went away, every second of consciousness spent by the victims reliving the moments of the terrible pain inflicted upon them. The mind’s only available responses were to forget in a kind of retrograde amnesia or to deny existence itself, in which case there can be no fear because there’s no person to suffer from it.

  Peter, suddenly fidgety with agitation, stuck a hand into the pocket of his bathrobe and came out with a shiny quarter. Clutched it tightly in a clenched fist until the hand darkened with blood flow. But the rest of him seemed to ease.

  “What are you doing?”

  “They gave this to me somewhere else I was before I was here. Told me it was about value.”

  “Whose?”

  “His.”

  Caitlin decided to take a chance. “Where were you before that?”

  “Before what?”

  “Before you got the quarter.”

  “Somewhere else.”

  “What about when you were worth more? Do you ever remember being worth more?”

  Peter didn’t answer, just held to his tight grasp around the quarter.

  “Do you know where you are now?”

  “With you.”

  “I mean do you know what state you’re in now?”

  “It doesn’t matter because I don’t exist.”

  “Texas. You’re in Texas.”

  That seemed to register a little.

  “You used to live here.”

  “I live here now.”

  “I meant in Texas. Then you left.”

  “Where’d I go?”

  “Iraq.”

  “Ugly, bad place.”

  “You remember?”

  “I guess I heard.”

  Caitlin rose and slid a laptop computer she’d placed on a portable stand over and positioned it in front of Peter. She’d already turned it on and logged in.

  “You know what this is?” she asked him.

  “A computer.”

  “Do you know how to use it?”

  Peter didn’t say anything, but he laid the quarter down on the stand and let his fingers stray noncommittally to the keys. Caitlin didn’t press things, figuring this amounted to progress on several different fronts. She watched as he tapped out a few letters, seeming to be soothed by the tinny clacking sound. More fingers joined the first few.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Just what you’re doing.”

  Peter kept typing, faster now. Caitlin couldn’t tell if there was any context to it and didn’t want to distract him by positioning herself somewhere she could see. She watched as he studied what was appearing on the screen closer, intent and perhaps even enjoying himself. Then just as suddenly as he started, he stopped and gently eased the stand away from him. The wheels squeaked slightly against the tile.

  “I want to go back to his room now.”

  “Whose room?”

  “His.”

  “Can you tell me his name?”

  Peter grew fidgety again, reaching into his pocket for his quarter and getting more agitated when he couldn’t find it. Caitlin lifted it from the laptop stand and handed it back to him. Again he clutched it tightly in his fist.

  “I want to go back to his room now,” Peter said, rising tentatively on his weakened legs.

  “I’ll get your wheelchair,” Caitlin followed, adding, “Peter.”

  Peter didn’t respond or acknowledge her. Settling painfully into the wheelchair, while Caitlin stole a glance at the screen to see what he had typed.

  12

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Captain D. W. Tepper of the Texas Rangers rose from a booth in a coffee shop just down the street from the Survivor Center when he saw Caitlin enter.

  “Now, ain’t this a sight that’d make your daddy proud,” he said, embracing her tightly. “You were still in my command, I could get written up for that hug.”

  “Guess we should thank God for small favors then,” Caitlin told him, clearing her throat in the hope it might make her voice sound more normal around a man who was a part of her life now finished. Her glimpse at the computer screen had revealed only gibberish, Peter having typed nothing more than random letters with occasional words mixed in. Progress for sure, but not the magic clue she’d been hoping for.

  “Amen to that, I say.”

  Tepper sat back down and Caitlin slid into the booth across from him. Tepper raised his cup of coffee to his lips as she settled herself, and she could see the arthritis that had nearly ended his career with the Rangers had worsened. He’d been tall and lanky for as long as Caitlin could remember and he looked just as lanky today, though a bit less tall. Tepper’s close-cropped hair had exchanged more salt for pepper, but he wore his ever-present string tie, western shirt and cowboy boots that inevitably announced his approach with a distinctive clamor. His fingers, all stiff and puffy, made Caitlin think of her dad dying of heart disease before a similar condition had descended on him. She could smell the captain’s aftershave as soon as she reached the booth, Aqua Velva she thought, same as Jim Strong.

  “Yeah,” Tepper said, as if reading her mind, “I miss him too. Jim Strong was a hell of a man.”

  “No better than you, Captain.”

  “Different, though. And you can call me D. W. now, Ranger.”

  Caitlin smiled, the irony of his statement not lost on her. “Rather keep calling you Captain, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.”

  Tepper commanded the San Antonio company of Rangers, one of six active in the state, each comprised of twenty-five or so men since the state legislature had increased the membership rolls from 120 to 134. One hundred and thirty-four men patrolling a state bigger than most countries was a tall order, but nothing new for the Rangers. It had been that way since the beginning, Caitlin knew, in both legend and fact.

  “What I mind is being out of the country when your daddy died,” Tepper continued, face twisted as if his coffee tasted bad. “Then I’m still over in that cesspool they call Iraq when you had your troubles, so I wasn’t there to watch your back. Your dad always warned me not to keep re-upping in the Reserves. I listen to him, maybe things are different today.”

  “Hope you’re not blaming yourself, Captain.”

  “I ain’t good at much, Ranger, but I’ve seen enough trouble to know how to keep me and mine steered clear of it.”

  “There wasn’t anything you could’ve done at the border that night for me and Charlie.”

  “Not talking about that night. Talking about after. That night ain’t why you’re not riding with the Rangers no more
. After is.”

  A waitress came over and Caitlin ordered coffee before responding to D. W. Tepper. “I did what I had to do, Captain.”

  “Yup, just like your dad and granddad would’ve done. Difference is they come from different eras, like me. Things weren’t too complicated then. Matter of fact, long as you could handle a gun, they weren’t complicated at all.”

  Caitlin recalled that Captain D. W. Tepper had taught himself to shoot with his left hand to stay in the Rangers after the arthritis turned his right one bad.

  “You got back from Iraq four years ago, Captain. What is it you wanna talk to me about today?”

  “You quit the Rangers, nobody makes a stink about what went down. Everything tied up in a neat little bow. I get back and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

  “Too late, like you said.”

  Tepper watched the waitress set a mug down in front of Caitlin and refill his before leaning slightly across the table. “I need to get my hands around what happened in Mexico, Ranger. Need to know what it was made you throw everything away.”

  13

  JUÁREZ, MEXICO, 2004

  Caitlin had spent six weeks in the hospital and then eight more in rehab. Rehab was the toughest, getting her strength back from all the trauma and inactivity and trying to take pleasure in mastering simple tasks like climbing a set of stairs without having her breath desert her. Amazing all the things she’d taken for granted. When she started rehab, she couldn’t even hoist a gun, never mind aim and shoot it. Caitlin started with one-pound weights, quickly progressing down the long row of chrome dumbbells in the physical therapy center. Eventually returning for long sessions by herself, after the scheduled ones were done, jacking up weights and punishing herself on the StairMaster machine. Because it wasn’t enough for her to get back to “acceptable functionality,” as they called it; she needed to get back to 100 percent; no, a 110 if she was to make good on the promise that had helped get her this far.

  That promise went all the way back to that night in the desert, listening to a truck tear away through the sand and grit while she and Charlie Weeks lay in a sinkhole bleeding all over each other. She memorized the sound of that truck, imagining the surviving gunmen, one of them an American, hauling ass back into Mexico. She knew she’d clipped at least two of them to go with the three she and Charlie killed. But their escape clawed at her until she couldn’t sleep no matter how many drugs they shot her up with. She couldn’t sleep again until she resolved to finish what she and Charlie had started in the Chihuahuan that night.

  That meant tracking down the drug mules who’d gotten away.

  She was still officially on medical leave when she packed up her dad’s old truck and headed south, flashing her silver Ranger badge cut from a Mexican cinco peso for ID at the border. The guards looked at her face, didn’t ask for her name or make any further notation. Just waved her through and through she went into Juárez, Mexico.

  The fact that she had entered the home base of an infamous band of killers and drug runners known as the Juárez Boys didn’t matter much at that point. She was armed only with her SIG strapped around her ankle. Before climbing out of her truck at the General Hospital on Paseo Tri-uno de la Republica, though, Caitlin clipped the holster to her belt.

  Mexican hospital personnel were loath to provide information to American authorities even with documentation, never mind without it. But Caitlin had something going for her, two things actually: she spoke fluent Spanish and the Texas Rangers remained a name that still struck fear into the hearts of many Mexicans. That tendency dated all the way back to the Mexican War of the mid-nineteenth century just after Texas had secured its independence and been granted statehood. She remembered many of the bloody tales her grandfather had told her of Rangers riding in the company of army regulars, many of their encounters both north and south of the border having forged the fearsome reputation that Rangers carried to this day, especially in Mexico where they were referred to as el Rinche.

  Inside the hospital, it took two clerks and a supervisor to finally come up with the names of two Mexican natives who had shown up at the hospital just about the same time Charlie Weeks was pronounced dead. Both were suffering from gunshot wounds considered nonlife-threatening. The men had given false names that were corrected when an astute physician’s assistant handed wallets containing their actual identities over to the charge nurse.

  Their names were Rodrigo and Jesus Saez, brothers apparently who shared the same address in a downtown apartment building on Avenue Vincente Guerrero. They weren’t home at the time but their talkative mother, an obese woman who used tequila to treat her diabetes, was more than happy to tell Caitlin where to find them on the promise that she made them pay her back the 1,000 pesos they owed her.

  Caitlin found the brothers running a basement cockfight six blocks away. She waited until the basement emptied out, leaving her alone with them late into the night. One of the brothers was cleaning up the blood and chicken shit while the other counted out the night’s haul.

  Rodrigo and Jesus . . . she had no idea which was which and didn’t care. They didn’t see her until it was too late. Caitlin had her SIG out and fired two shots before either brother could even cry out, one bullet for each in the leg just over the knee. Huge tissue damage which meant lots and lots of pain. She bound their arms and gagged them, while they writhed on the ground crying tears of agony. Only time in her life she’d done harm to someone who wasn’t trying to do likewise to her. Even then the feeling of shooting two unarmed men left a taste in her mouth like the burn of sour bile. But she’d gone too far to go back.

  “Remember me?” she asked in Spanish, standing over them.

  Rodrigo and Jesus Saez looked at her fearfully and shook their heads. In the light spilling from the naked bulbs strung overhead, the sweat beads on their faces shined like pearls.

  “Don’t expect you would,” Caitlin continued, “it being so dark and all that night in the West Texas desert, so let me refresh your memory. Be about five months ago now. You ambushed me and my partner who had the bad fortune to die—bad for him and bad for you, since I lived.” Caitlin fished some photos from her wallet and began tossing them at the Saez brothers. “Some pictures of the family you ruined, Charlie Weeks’s family. Three daughters, eleven grandchildren who’ll never see their granddad again thanks to you. So you boys want to have grandkids of your own, you best tell me what you were up to that night and who was behind it. Okay?”

  Neither brother nodded. Caitlin shot the brother on her right in his other leg and then crouched over the one on the left. The bad taste in her mouth didn’t return. “You Jesus?”

  The man shook his head, gesturing with his eyes toward his brother who was now bleeding from both legs, thrashing about with eyes bulging over his gag.

  “So he’s Jesus. That makes you Rodrigo.”

  A nod.

  “Good. Now that we’re getting somewhere, let’s have a talk, you and me.” She yanked the gag from his mouth and watched his eyes widen, weighing the options he was about to be given. “Who were you boys working for that night?”

  Rodrigo said nothing, panting with fear.

  Caitlin pressed the still hot barrel of the SIG flush against the leg she hadn’t shot yet.

  “Please, señorita, if I tell you I will be killed!”

  “And if you don’t, you’ll be crippled. Not much of a choice, I know, but it’s the best you’re gonna get tonight and it ain’t gonna get that good again by a long stretch. Now, who were you working for that night?”

  Caitlin made sure Rodrigo could see her finger tighten ever so slightly on the SIG’s trigger, watched his eyes swim with fear. Then she let him see her eyes, let him see she would do it.

  “Emiliato Valdez Garza!” Rodrigo almost shouted, naming the reputed head of the Mexican Mafia that ran drugs across the Texas border bound for all over the country. Most in the Rangers and the Department of Public Safety Narcotics Division were convinced Garza
was no more than a made-up Robin Hood-like legend to deflect attention away from the true leaders of the Mexican Mafia and to win the hearts of the Mexican people in the process.

  “He’s not real,” Caitlin said.

  “He is, señorita, you must believe me!”

  “You’ve seen him, met him?”

  “No one meets or sees him, but he’s real.”

  “And you know this because . . . ?”

  “The friends of mine he has killed because they failed him.”

  “Like you.”

  “No, señorita, our work was complete when—” Rodrigo stopped abruptly, realizing he had said more than he should have.

  “Keep talking.”

  “Please, señorita, your gun, it’s hurting my leg.”

  “It’ll do a hell of a lot more than that if you don’t finish what you started to tell me.”

  “We had already made our delivery.”

  “You were on your way back,” Caitlin said less surely, realizing she and Charlie must’ve had it wrong the whole time.

  “Back home, sí.”

  “Where’d you drop off your drugs?”

  “Not drugs.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “Not drugs!”

  “What then?”

  “Don’t know. Crates, boxes. Something inside them that wasn’t drugs.”

  Caitlin pushed the barrel of the SIG down harder. “You telling me my partner died for counterfeit sneakers or T-shirts?”