by Jon Land
Pistol in hand again, he stepped inside and moved down the center’s darkened back hall, a familiar scent reaching him. Relatively thin in the air but present all the same:
Gun smoke. He’d grown up with that smell, knew it better than he knew his own sweat.
Cort Wesley bypassed the elevator for the stairwell, saw a man in black standing vigilantly before it. On post. A military man wielding a military-style submachine gun with a silencer.
What the fuck?
Cort Wesley figured he should turn tail and retrace his steps out of the building. Whatever was happening was none of his affair, and the last thing he needed was a run-in with the kind of guys who wore their body armor to bed. But the man on post before him wasn’t wearing any now; that much was obvious through his shooter’s vest with pockets and tabs for extra ammo.
Cort Wesley started to back up, pistol still palmed, when the man in black turned his way.
20
SURVIVOR CENTER, THE PRESENT
Clayton waved his men past him down the second-floor hallway, the four of them fanning out toward the six rooms on either side, eight of which were currently occupied. His intelligence did not include the precise room where Peter Goodwin could be found, because it didn’t matter. This wasn’t supposed to look professional. Kill one person and the questions start flying. Kill everyone and people tend to dwell less on the answers beyond somebody with a cause or a political point to make.
Clayton watched as his men peeled off into the first four doorways in the last instant before the shooting began.
. . .
Pffffft . . . pffffft . . . pffffft . . .
The sound broke Caitlin’s trance and for just a moment she thought she might have dragged it with her from her mind and memory.
Pffffft . . . pffffft . . . pffffft . . .
She recognized that sound, just as she knew such recognition was impossible. Had to be a television blaring suddenly, one of the torture victims on the hall switching on a movie after awaking suddenly or being unable to sleep. She chose to believe that because the alternative was unthinkable.
Pffffft . . . pffffft . . . pffffft . . .
Maybe not so unthinkable after all, Caitlin thought, hand dipping for her ankle holster.
The next instant found the SIG in her hand and the instant after she was at the door, back pressed against the near wall. She heard footsteps now, light and professional. The footsteps were closing, leaving her little time.
Pffffft . . . pffffft . . . pffffft . . .
Caitlin glanced out into the hallway and spotted the security mirror perched on the wall at the far end, giving up a view of three dark shapes twisting out of doorways with silenced smoking submachine guns in hand.
Her dad Jim Strong had always said he could teach her how to shoot with anyone, but neither he nor anyone could teach her instinct. The part of you that takes over your actions and determines their course without the intervention of rational thought.
So Caitlin was never actually conscious of lurching into the hallway with SIG rising. Her last conscious thought was of the positions of the three men as suggested by the mirror.
The first man turned out to be nearly upon her and she fired into his throat, showering the hallway with blood as he slammed up against the wall. The SIG’s roar came in sharp contrast to the silenced submachine guns, but she had the element of surprise on her side long enough to drop the other two men with a blistering series of six shots, missing with only one, which ricocheted off a red exit sign.
A fourth figure whirled out from the far end of the hall, a black blur amid the darkness. He was sighting in on her when Caitlin emptied the last of her clip into him, even as a fifth figure dove out from a room fifteen feet down.
Caitlin spun back into Peter’s room, feeling chips of the door frame chewed free by bullets shower her while more bullets thudded into the wall. The fact that they hit a stud was probably the only thing that saved her, her consciousness just now accepting the reality of what was happening.
She slammed Peter’s door shut and dove headlong for the chair upon which her handbag, with a spare magazine inside, rested. The door had a single view plate window at eye level but no lock on the inside.
Caitlin snapped the fresh magazine home and was about to say some words of comfort to Peter. But he had lain back in bed, staring at the ceiling without fear or even awareness of what was going on around him. What was there to fear from killers, after all, if you already believed you were dead?
Cort Wesley didn’t fire first, thinking he could still get out of this without gunplay. But a burst from the posted guard’s silenced submachine gun chased him into a doorway. He twisted the knob and, finding it locked, spun back out with Smith blazing.
The guard, of course, could never have expected such a maneuver, could never have expected him to be armed in the first place. Cort Wesley caught him dead to rights, putting round after round into the guard until he finally doubled over backward in a heap.
His own shots mixed with the echoing din of a fresh barrage coming from the floor above him. That more than anything spurred him on toward the stairs instead of back out through the door. Attracted to the sounds of gunshots and battle like a drunk to a shot and a beer.
Maybe God Himself had delivered this opportunity to him, providing justice in an unjust world. It was like getting a free shot, a bonus round.
Cort Wesley mounted the stairs softly, but quickly, jamming a fresh magazine home into his Smith, almost wishing it wasn’t going to be so easy.
21
SURVIVOR CENTER, THE PRESENT
The loud cracks of pistol fire from downstairs told Clayton his whole operation had gone to shit. Gunmen on both floors appearing out of nowhere. Phantoms dropping out of the sky.
The primary target was still perched behind a closed door thirty feet away, and Clayton signaled the lone survivor of his team to hold until he drew even. They’d take Goodwin’s room together, firing at anything and everything that moved. Spray sixty shots in a neat arc and take their chances from there.
Clayton backpedaled, keeping his gaze peeled back down the hall in anticipation of the first-floor phantom’s approach. The whole mess felt random, not orchestrated. He hadn’t walked into a trap so much as badly miscalculated factors he could not possibly have considered. The mission remained all that mattered; success and escape different sides of the same coin.
Clayton reached his surviving team member and together they slid across the wall toward the closed door of Peter Goodwin’s room.
Caitlin had pulled Peter down off the bed and pushed him beneath it. He didn’t question or protest, just looked confused and then terrified, flashback memories of pain inflicted in another room far away triggered.
“It’s okay,” Caitlin told him, gaze holding on the door. “I’m here this time.”
Peter stirred under the bed. She heard him whimpering.
The sound filled her with fresh anger and resolve. Caitlin had no doubt that whatever was happening now was connected to the terrible suffering he had endured. Add that to the awful reality that the men she was killing had slain the other innocent torture victims on the hallway, and it wasn’t too hard for her to find the same steely place inside her that had surfaced in Juárez and El Paso nearly five years before.
Caitlin saw a shadow cross the door’s view plate, counted out a long breath and opened up with her SIG. Four shots, blowing out the window just as the shape she’d spotted would have crossed it. She thought she might have heard a gasp, but wasn’t sure.
Then a fusillade of fire blew into the room, muzzle flashes lighting up the darkness through the shattered view plate. Caitlin rolled under the bed to join Peter, as flecks of tile and plaster smacked her face and arms.
Clayton watched his final man go down, clutching his head. Just a graze to the top of his skull, a lucky shot landed when he hadn’t ducked enough to get all the way beneath the view plate.
Clayton knew it wasn’t li
fe threatening, just as he knew the man was now useless to him and couldn’t be moved. Hesitating not at all, he put a single round into the back of his skull, watched him jerk once and still. Then Clayton snapped a fresh magazine home into his submachine gun and burst through the door firing.
Caitlin heard the soft clacks of the suppressed gunfire and felt the rattle of the bullets chewing up wall and window. Lying prone on the floor, she had her SIG aimed straight for the doorway now occupied by the gunman’s legs.
Caitlin fired and kept firing, rolling outward to steady her kill shot even as her target hit the floor looking like his legs had been yanked out from under him and hit the wall hard. She stopped rolling free of the bed and steadied the pistol on a figure heaving for breath over two legs punched full of blood-soaked holes by her bullets. He was struggling to resteady his submachine gun when she fired.
Click.
It happened to the best of them, her dad had always said, losing track of how many bullets were left in a gun. Lousy luck for it to happen to Caitlin now for the first time.
The gunman looked at her sneering, angling his submachine gun on line under the bed to kill Peter first. Caitlin yanked her husband’s terrified form out from beneath it, shielding him with her body, pushing both of them backward across the tile.
Clayton couldn’t believe what he was looking at, the surprise almost enough to drown out the pain from his ruined legs. A ghost from the past come back to haunt him. Be nice to finish the job he should’ve finished years before. Just pull the trigger and watch the problems then and now disappear in dual blood plumes.
Simple as that.
Caitlin had just launched herself at the gunman, hoping maybe the gun would jam or he was out too, when the shot rang out. Anomalous since the unsuppressed roar was that of a clunky 9 millimeter, like a Beretta or Smith & Wesson.
Halfway to the gunman, she realized his face had slumped to his chest and the right side of his head was lost in a blood pool of gristle and gore. Then she looked up toward a shadow stretched across the doorway.
Cort Wesley couldn’t say why he had done it exactly. It all happened so fast, the decision half made before he even steadied the gun from just beyond the doorway.
Did he know what he was doing, whom he was saving? Probably. Yes.
Did he understand why he’d come up to the second floor instead of fleeing himself in the first place? No.
So here he was, looking down on the Texas Ranger who had almost begged him to draw five years ago and then put him away on a frame. The Smith twitched in his hand, trying to think for itself.
Caitlin recognized Cort Wesley Masters from the floor, nothing she could do but freeze. Their eyes met and held, neither of them breathing. She glanced at his pistol, stopped somewhere between the floor and her.
Masters looked one last time at the man he had killed, then turned and walked off as the scream of sirens finally blared through the night.
22
SURVIVOR CENTER, THE PRESENT
Caitlin was sitting on the curb outside the center when Captain D. W. Tepper of the Texas Rangers pulled up in a three-truck convoy that sliced through the police, rescue and media vehicles parked everywhere, choking the street. She watched a half-dozen Rangers climb out, wearing their Stetsons and long coats to ward off a light mist that was dragging a cold front behind it, and move across the sidewalk.
Her hair wet with the light rain and clothes still damp with sweat, Caitlin sat shivering as the Rangers, some toting their 12 gauges, fanned out along the building’s front, looking like towering sentinels in the murky light spray from street lamps and headlights. Tepper entered the Survivor Center with three of the Rangers lugging evidence kits, only to emerge alone minutes later, boots kicking the mist aside as he made his way toward Caitlin.
He took a seat on the curb next to her, grimacing from the effort. “Governor wants us running point for a time,” he reported, lighting up a Marlboro. The match threw an eerie glow across his face, exaggerating its suddenly ashen tone.
“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 twenty-two folks eating their lunch. I was one of the first inside of the Branch David-ian complex in Waco, ran point on the investigation. And I scouted the Davis Mountains on horseback in ’97 when we went up against another whacko who proclaimed his land the Republic of Texas.” Tepper looked up and Caitlin gazed at the gaunt, leathery face beneath his Stetson. “What I just saw inside was bad as any of those.” He shook his head. “Two staff members, seven patients, and seven perps dead . . . looks like a goddamn slaughterhouse.”
“They weren’t whackos or nut jobs this time, Captain. And they were only after one of the patients.”
“Which patient would that be?”
“Peter Goodwin. My husband, Captain.”
Tepper looked at her and tossed his Marlboro into the gutter. “Man can’t enjoy nothing these days. Folks who run the center know that?”
“Nope.” Caitlin stopped and took a deep breath. “I suspect I wouldn’t have been on the case if they had and Peter be dead now for sure.”
“You gunned down all seven?”
“Just four.”
“Math’s off a bit.”
“Leader took out one of his own and Cort Wesley Masters took out the man downstairs and the leader.”
Tepper took off his Stetson and let the mist wash into his face. “Come again?”
“Shot the son of a bitch in the head as he was about to shoot me.”
Tepper slapped the water from his hat and fitted it back on. “Fine mess indeed.”
“Peter’ll need protection. Whoever sent these men’ll send more. That’s for sure too.”
“He’ll be at the hospital by now. I’ll post two men on twenty-four guard.”
“Rangers?”
“Only kind I know.” Tepper slid a bit closer. “We don’t have to talk about this here, you don’t want to.”
“Best to sort it out while it’s still fresh, Captain.”
“That’s quite a story,” Tepper said, when she was finished.
“Wish it wasn’t all true.”
“So you got no idea who did this to him.”
“Americans was all he said. But it’s a safe bet whoever they are, they’re the ones came for him tonight.”
“With guns blazing.” Tepper shook his head, hacked up some spittle he deposited in the gutter near his Marlboro. “Goddamn massacre in there’s what it is. The men you gunned down were pros, Caitlin, army types by the look of things. Mercenaries at the very least.”
“Kill the others to cover their tracks. I’m not there, nobody knows the difference.”
“ ’Cept you were and now we do.”
“Thanks to Cort Wesley Masters.”
“You sure he wasn’t with them, maybe had a change of heart?”
Caitlin weighed Tepper’s question. “He had a change of heart all right, Captain. I’m guessing he came here gunning for me.”
“Maybe he saves your life so he can take it himself later.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why?
“Can’t say exactly. Just a feeling I got.”
“San Antonio local boys tell me they got a bar on the east side all shot up with two corpses and one shot-up gang-banger inside. They make Masters for it.”
“Anybody talking?”
“Do they ever?”
Tepper cocked his gaze back toward the Survivor Center, the red wash of the police and rescue lights seeming to nest in the crevices lining his face. Cameras flashed and whirred, and reporters jockeyed for position on the sidewalk and street.
Tepper shook his head, looked as if he’d just swallowed something bad. He glanced back at Caitlin, then lifted something from his pocket and laid it down on the sidewalk between them.
Caitlin recognized it as her Ranger ID holder, Jim Strong’s actually, she’d left on the desk of
Tepper’s temporary replacement when she quit. “What’s this, Captain?”
“Your badge is inside, Ranger.”
“Only God can make miracles.”
“You made a deal to resign to spare the Rangers the embarrassment of an investigation. When I got back, I put it down as a leave of absence. I think it’s time the leave ended. Provisionally, ’course, so I can’t offer you a stipend, even money for gas or bullets.”
Caitlin opened her dad’s ID holder, caught the dull glimmer of her badge inside. “Why you doing this?”
“ ’Cause I know I can’t stop you from doing what you’re gonna do. That badge might open some doors that be closed otherwise, lend a little credence to your calling.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Caitlin said, and pushed herself up off the sidewalk.
Tepper tried to follow, failing until Caitlin lowered a hand to hoist him back to his feet.
“See,” he said, “sometimes we all need a little help.”
PART THREE
Texas’ deadliest outlaw, John Wesley Hardin, a preacher’s son reputed to have killed thirty-one men, was captured in Florida by Ranger John B. Armstrong. After Armstrong, his long-barreled Colt .45 in hand, boarded the train Hardin and four companions were on, the outlaw shouted “Texas by God!” and drew his own pistol. When it was over, one of Hardin’s friends was dead, Hardin had been knocked out cold, and his three surviving friends were staring at Armstrong’s pistol. A neat round hole pierced Armstrong’s hat, but he was uninjured.
—Mike Cox, with updates from the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, “A Brief History of the Texas Rangers”