Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel
Page 15
“I hear Cort Wesley Masters is the toughest of all. That true?”
“Far as I know, it is.”
“And how far is that?”
“He’s in jail.”
“He was released.”
“Oh.”
“You’ve seen him. He’s been here. Old friends catching up, maybe sharing a beer.”
“You want me to get you one?”
The big man came closer, angling himself to keep Asuna pinned behind the Dodge’s hood. The spread of a work light dangling overhead caught his wild black hair and sun-darkened skin. His eyes glimmered in the dim light. Cat’s eyes, Asuna thought. Reveling in this, the enjoyment bleeding from his pores.
Asuna ran his gaze across the big man and the others, standing before him in no particular hurry to get anything done. That scared him the most, how casual they were, men who’d clearly done this kind of thing before. The big man came right up to the front fender of the truck now, close enough for Pablo Asuna to smell the oil from his hair. Another smell hung over him too, one that reminded Asuna of hunting trips with his father in Mexico; the stench of dead birds carried in a sack through the blistering sun.
Asuna considered his options, weaponless with the T-shirt bulging over his fat belly squeezed up against the big truck’s hood. “I’m not telling you a goddamn fucking thing, poncho,” was the best he could come up with.
He thought of the first time he’d met Cort Wesley Masters. The goddamn gangs moving in everywhere, wanting him to strip stolen cars for them. Told Asuna they’d punch holes with their dicks in all the women in his life unless he followed their orders. Asuna told them to fuck off. They were choking him with a belt hose when Cort Wesley walked in looking for an oil change. He shot the two gang-bangers dead, then insisted on Asuna’s $19.95 special before they dumped the bodies in the nearest landfill.
The big man let out a deep sigh that sounded more like a growl. “I killed a priest in Venezuela and things haven’t been the same since. But life goes on, you gotta agree with me there. But I just don’t have the patience for this carajo anymore.” Asuna watched the big man slide a bit closer to him. “So I have a question for you. About our friend.”
“Masters ain’t my friend, poncho.”
The big man ignored him. “You don’t have to tell me where he is—”
“That’s good, ’cause I don’t know.”
“—you have to tell me where I can find his children.”
39
SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT
“Step out of the car real slow now,” Caitlin Strong ordered, pistol angled straight through the driver’s window. “You wanna keep your hands where I can see ’em while you do it.”
The man in the black Mercury remained rigid, risking a single glance her way when Caitlin thrust his door open. He started to climb out, having trouble angling himself properly with his hands raised in the air. He wore an ill-fitting shirt tucked into the waistband of polyester trousers that had gone wet in the seat and crotch from sitting too long.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” he insisted.
She shoved the man up against the rear door and frame, patted him down. “What is it exactly?”
“I worked with your husband. I worked with Peter.”
Caitlin spun him around, no weapon to be found on his person.
“At RevCom,” the man completed, facing her now. Both he and his car reeked of stale perspiration. Fast food, wrappers and crumpled bags were strewn about the interior. “I saw you there today.”
“You recognized me?”
“We met once—well, twice actually. The second time was Peter’s funeral.”
“You were there?”
“Briefly.”
“Should’ve stayed for lunch.” Caitlin holstered her pistol. “You can put your hands down now.”
The man lowered them to his sides. “I was afraid I’d end up just like him if I did.”
“How’s that?”
“Dead, and he’s not the only one either. There are others. Three to be exact. All part of Peter’s project team.”
Caitlin glanced past him toward his car. “Get in.”
“Where we going?”
“Nowhere.”
“What’s your name?” Caitlin asked when the Mercury’s doors were closed. The sun moved enough to shield the car from its sizzling rays that had left the black interior scorching. Spared the heat for the next few minutes anyway, Caitlin watched the way the splintered sunlight framed the man’s pale, milky complexion.
“Albert Johannson. From Wisconsin, if you’re wondering why I talk this way.”
“Tell me about RevCom.”
“There is no RevCom.”
“I’m talking about my husband and these other three men you just mentioned who were part of his team.”
“Two men,” Johannson corrected. “The fourth was a woman.”
“They worked with Peter.”
Johannson nodded, his skin turning a pinkish shade that was the first sign of a burn. “On the same project.”
“You too?”
“Then I’d be dead too, wouldn’t I?”
“Lose the sarcasm, Mr. Johannson.”
“It’s called being scared out of my mind.”
“Even though you weren’t working on the same project.”
“All of RevCom was poisoned, Mrs. Goodwin,” Johannson said, not noticing Caitlin tense at being called that. “They shut the place down as soon as Peter and the others disappeared. One day it was open and the next day the doors were locked and the place had been emptied out. . . .”
“Eighteen months ago now. So what are you still doing here?”
“Let me finish. My bank accounts had been emptied and closed, my credit was nonexistent. Even my cell phone was deactivated. They didn’t steal my identity, they erased it.”
“Who’s ‘they,’ Mr. Johannson?”
“That’s why I’m still here. Trying to find that out. Watching, waiting around for someone to show up I recognize from RevCom. DynaTech’s a sham. Part of the same damn oufit. I’m sure of it.”
“Watching and waiting around for eighteen months,” Caitlin noted.
“Off and on, yes. Not as much since I’ve started to build my life back up. Starting from scratch again. You have any idea what that’s like?”
“Some.”
“I’m . . . sorry.”
“So am I. For you.”
The sun returned from its brief respite, burning through the windshield and adding more heat to the already flushed feeling that filled Caitlin. “You’re telling me RevCom was responsible for all that happened, Peter and these three others.”
“Not RevCom. RevCom was a sham, a cover, a front. Someone much bigger was pulling the strings. And when something went wrong, they yanked the whole floor out.”
“But you’re still alive.”
“I was just software. Peter and the others were behind the I.T. Information Technologies,” Johannson added, as if Caitlin needed the translation. “The project was theirs all the way.”
She tried to fit the pieces together, her mind fighting the effort. Peter gets sent to Iraq, ends up being tortured in Bahrain around the same time RevCom gets shuttered. Something unexpected obviously to blame, something gone very, very wrong.
“All these suspicions and you don’t tell anybody ’til I happen to walk in the door?” Caitlin snapped at Johannson.
“I told you it doesn’t stop at RevCom. Who was I supposed to trust?”
“Rangers, for starters.”
Johannson frowned, the fear pushing through even that gesture. “I’m from Wisconsin, Mrs. Goodwin. The legends of the erstwhile Texas Rangers don’t carry much weight up there. And as for the local cops, state government, even the feds, whoever’s behind the deaths could have a pipeline into them as well.”
“What is it Peter was working on?” Caitlin asked him. “What is it got all these people killed?”
“Fire Arrow.”
SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT
Caitlin knew the phrase all too well, from a story she’d told Peter not long after they’d first met, trying to interest him in the lore of the Rangers.
In 1871, a small wagon train of pioneers moving across the frontier had the misfortune of ending up in Indian country during one of the many uprisings that riddled Texas during that time. The pioneers managed to repel the initial attack and form the semblance of a defense, quickly pierced by a hundred Commanche firing flaming arrows through the air. Their targets, after all, might be able to stay shielded from the arrows alone, but not from the fires they set. Poor bastards would have to emerge from their cover to fight the flames back, exposing themselves to a fresh barrage.
It happened that a Ranger detachment of five men scouring the foothills in search of the renegade tribes’ lairs came upon the onslaught after half the pioneers had perished. Half, though, were still alive and that was more than enough to spur the Rangers to ride abreast of one another straight for the Indian’s high-ground position of cover, firing their Winchesters and Colts to chase them back as flaming arrows streaked overhead.
A painting of that famed ride hung for years in the Texas statehouse and was currently on display in the Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco. The painting lacked a signature but was blessed with a simple title: Fire Arrow.
Peter had named his project after the first Ranger tale Caitlin had shared with him.
“What was Fire Arrow?” she asked Johannson.
“I don’t know.”
“You worked for the damned company, didn’t you?”
“But not on Fire Arrow, not directly anyway. I was just software.”
“And Peter was just cable television bandwidth expansion.”
Something flashed in Johannson’s eyes. “That’s what he told you?”
“It’s not true?”
“I can only tell you this, Ranger. Whatever Fire Arrow was, it had nothing to do with cable television.”
PART FIVE
In 1916, Rangers were given orders and wide powers to keep the hostilities in Mexico from washing across the river into Texas. Governor O. B. Colquitt wrote Ranger Captain John R. Hughes: “I instruct you and your men to keep them [Mexican raiders] off of Texas territory if possible, and if they invade the State let them understand they do so at the risk of their lives.”
—Mike Cox, with updates from the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum Staff, “A Brief History of the Texas Rangers”
41
CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO, THE PRESENT
Cort Wesley had been watching the estates lining the Sierra Madre mountain road for hours now, nobody coming or going and no end in sight. A late-afternoon breeze had come up, cooling the day at last but doing little to make him feel more comfortable. He’d wedged the Smith & Wesson back into his pants, no longer seeing the sense in holding it at the ready. Be a lot more comfortable if the magazines were empty now and he was hightailing it back to the border, leaving blood in his wake.
He was a man of action, not thought, and times like these left him too much time to think. The last few minutes those thoughts had turned to Leroy Epps, an old black man he’d gotten to know inside The Walls. Epps was a lifer whose eyes were going thanks to diabetes and who barely left his cell anymore. Their cells were near each other when Cort Wesley first checked in and on days the old man was up to it, he would help him to the cafeteria and sit with him for lunch. Normally the last to arrive were lucky to get scraps, but he’d arranged for Epps’s meal anyway to be put aside. They usually had a table, or half of one, to themselves, also prearranged. Just like dining in the finest restaurant, Epps mused once.
Another day his fading eyes stared across the table, studying Cort Wesley.
“Tell me ’bout your ilk, bubba?”
“My what?”
“Your ilk, the core of you. What makes you what you are?”
“Don’t rightly know if I can explain that, champ.” Cort Wesley called him that because Epps had held a share of the light heavyweight title for all of a single night before the boxing commission stripped him on a technicality and the lack of the right connections.
“Folks inside say you’ve killed a lot of men.”
“I have at that.”
“Any one of them not deserve it?”
“Guess that depends on who you ask.”
“What about the first one, bubba? How old were you?”
“Sixteen. Just got my driver’s license and was on a date. We’re walking back to my truck from the movies and these Spanish kids step out in front of us, flashing knives.”
“They want your money?”
“Never did say. First one comes at me, knife out, I don’t give him the opportunity. I just turned it around on him and stuck it in his gut. He died right there on the sidewalk before the cops showed up. My date’s father came and picked her up.”
“You figured he was gonna kill you.”
“That’s what I thought, yeah, champ.”
“But it didn’t bother you, one way or another.”
“Did what I had to. Why should it?”
“That’s your ilk,” Leroy Epps said, spooning up some half-frozen peas. “What makes you who you are. You’re steel to the core. Not cold, not hot, just steel. Nobody gets through. You see what I’m saying?”
“Eat your lunch, champ.”
“You let anybody through, it all comes apart. A man with your ilk can’t have questions. Line’s gotta be straight, bubba. No zigging or zagging, bobbing or weaving.”
Cort Wesley had never understood what Epps meant until now, until Caitlin Strong came into his life. He wasn’t talking about a physical line, so much as a mental one. No distractions, hesitations or doubts. Woman like Caitlin Strong gets into your head and nothing feels the same anymore. It wasn’t so much the doubts, as the thoughts and questions after the fact. Wondering if she’d look at things the same way he did, maybe see him differently if she didn’t. The three men he’d gunned down in that bar, for example. Cort Wesley was sure she’d disapproved of his actions and that made him rethink the whole incident in his head.
Line’s gotta be straight, bubba. No zigging or zagging, bobbing or weaving.
Leroy Epps had died just before Cort Wesley’s release. Too bad, since there wasn’t a person in the world he wanted to talk to more. Ask the old man about his ilk now, how a woman like Caitlin Strong might affect it. Everything was fine until The Walls, when his thoughts kept turning to the sons he’d never met. First thing out what’s he do but go and spy on them. Since then his mind has been all about them and Caitlin Strong, everything else having to push past one or both to get considered. Cort Wesley figured maybe that was what brought him to Chihuahua: if Garza was inside one of those estates hidden behind walls and nests of cypress trees, he’d have something fresh to think about.
His throwaway cell phone beeped, signaling he had a voice message. Cort Wesley checked the screen. He had eight missed calls and four messages, all from Caitlin Strong.
Something grabbed him tight upside the chest as he pressed the key to play his messages, anxiety already mounting when the single signal bar disappeared before he could hear them. Instantly his attention broke from the phantom Garza back to Caitlin Strong. He wanted to think about her smile, the neat lines of her legs and butt inside her jeans and the way the bottoms of them curled perfectly over her boots.
But all Cort Wesley could think of was what she had called him eight times about, as he hustled back to Pablo Asuna’s Ford.
42
EAST SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT
Caitlin pulled up to the auto repair shop amid a sea of revolving lights. Seemed like everyone was pitching their hat into this ring, including San Antonio police, sheriff’s department, and the Rangers. Ranger Berry had told her Captain D. W. Tepper needed her at a crime scene on the east side of town without going into detail about the horrific nature of whatever that crime was.
She saw Tepper waiting for her outside a service door on the near side of the closed garage bay with a row of six windows across its top. He was chomping grimly on a matchstick wedged into the corner of his mouth.
“Got you down here because the victim’s a known associate of your friend Cort Wesley Masters,” Tepper explained when she reached him. “Man’s name is, was, Pablo Asuna. Small-time operator mostly, ’cept for his association with Masters. You need to see what was done to him.”
Tepper lifted the crime-scene tape for both of them to pass under and through the door. The smell assaulted Caitlin instantly, a terrible mix of oil, blood and death. A body covered by a plastic forensic sheet lay on the floor alongside a souped-up truck.
“Never seen anything like this in my life before,” Tepper was saying, “and I lived a long time.”
They crouched over the body and Tepper pulled the sheet back.
“Oh my fucking God,” said Caitlin.
“Was my first thought too. Looks like somebody peeled the skin off both his hands with that truck’s fan belt. Enjoyed themselves so much they decided to do it to his face too. Truck was still running when the first responders arrived after somebody called 911 claiming they heard screams.”
Caitlin turned away. Tepper covered the body up again.
“What I’d like you to tell me,” he said, “is that it wasn’t Cort Wesley Masters that did this.”
Caitlin watched a forensics team lifting a massive footprint from a patch of oil halfway between Pablo Asuna’s body and the door. She shook her head. “Asuna was his friend, like you said.”
“I said associate, Ranger. You said friend.”
“What size are those shoes?” Caitlin asked, moving toward the massive impressions left in the oil stains.
“Sixteen.”
“Then it wasn’t Masters.”
“Could be he brought the giant with him.”