by Jon Land
“Masters works alone and it couldn’t have been him anyway.”
“What I’d like you to tell me next is how exactly you can be so sure of that?”
“Because he’s in Mexico.”
“Interesting fact to come by.”
“You want to know how, just ask.”
Tepper’s expression stiffened. “When you’re under my command again, I expect to be told things without having to ask, Ranger.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Rather you didn’t do nothing to be sorry about. A few nights back, Masters saves your life, vanishes, and now you happen to be aware he’s in Mexico. What am I supposed to think about that?”
“Someone framed Cort Wesley in the desert that night five years ago. He wants to know who, Captain. So would I, because whoever it was got Charlie Weeks killed and was behind the attack on the Survivor Center sure as I’m standing here.”
They stepped back outside and retreated into the shade.
“Past is done, Ranger,” said Tepper. “You don’t let it go, it’ll eat you alive.”
“This isn’t about the past, Captain.”
“Don’t make me regret letting you work your husband’s case.”
“I won’t, sir.”
“Because this is blowing up fast. First a bunch of military types take down a torture center and now God know’s who, or what, skins a man with a fan belt.”
“Shit,” Caitlin said, going cold.
“What?”
Caitlin started off, trailed by Tepper’s gaze as he mouthed a Marlboro in place of his matchstick. “Ranger?”
“Something I gotta check out, Captain,” she said, jogging back to her truck with a spare cell phone coming out of her pocket, “something I gotta check out now.”
43
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS, THE PRESENT
Guillermo Paz sat in the driver’s seat of the van parked diagonally across the street from the home of Cort Wesley Masters’s former girlfriend, Maura Torres. He wasn’t particularly nervous about being spotted, since the van was standard cable television issue, stolen just a few hours earlier from the depot after Pablo Asuna provided the address in Shavano Park.
Man held out until Paz went to work on his face, wedging it down against the fan belt and watching flecks of skin and blood fly off like sawdust spilled from a circular saw. Asuna screamed himself hoarse before gasping out the answers to Paz’s questions.
He was waiting for two of his dwarfs to show up now to snatch the kids. He didn’t particularly care what they did with the woman, Maura Torres. She meant nothing to Paz because she meant nothing to Masters.
When he’d arrived in the van, a dozen kids maybe had been taking turns on the half-pipe. Paz tried to identify Masters’s sons based on resemblance to the pictures he’d seen and realized he’d gotten both right when they went inside the stucco-style house. Nice house, nice yard. Not the kind of work he was used to for sure.
Paz checked his watch, figuring it would be just a few minutes more before the two dwarfs he was awaiting arrived.
Caitlin tossed her cell phone onto the SUV’s passenger seat, watched it bounce once and settle. Cort Wesley Masters wasn’t picking up, and the only person who could tell her where she could find his boys was lying on a repair shop floor with his face peeled off by a fan belt.
By a man with size sixteen feet.
She should have asked Captain Tepper for a shotgun. Going up against a giant with a small army behind him, based on the other footprints found at Asuna’s garage, with just her SIG might not prove all that wise.
Of course, that assumed she’d be able to find the house where Masters’s two sons lived in the first place. All he’d mentioned was Shavano Park, something about a cul-de-sac and a skateboard half-pipe. Lots of cul-de-sacs in Shavano Park but not too many half-pipes, and the kind of neighborhood Masters would’ve wanted his boys growing up in was likely in the town’s northwest corner where the best schools were.
Listen to me judging this guy.
But she’d detected the pride and reverence Cort Wesley Masters harbored for his sons in his voice. He had let his guard down around her and Caitlin was still trying to discern what that meant.
Caitlin continued cruising the streets, recalling the grid from her days with the highway patrol. Pictured a human giant striding with two men on either side of him toward two boys riding a half-pipe on their skateboards.
Yup, should have brought a shotgun.
She saw a couple of teenage boys riding bicycles just ahead and slowed to wave them down. Made sure they could see her Ranger badge over the sill of the window.
“You boys wouldn’t know anybody around here with a half-pipe would you?”
They didn’t but a few blocks later, two girls sitting in the last of the late-afternoon sun pointed west.
“Three streets over,” one said.
“Two boys, right?”
“The older one’s hot,” the other told her.
Caitlin jammed the truck’s accelerator down.
. . .
“Masters, it’s Caitlin Strong. Something bad’s going down up here. Your friend Pablo Asuna is dead. I’m heading to the crime scene now. Call you again as soon as I can.”
Cort Wesley played the message as soon as he got a bar on his signal indicator that disappeared before he could call Caitlin Strong back.
“Fuck!”
He almost smashed his throwaway cell phone against the old Ford’s dashboard he’d already shredded, but then he’d be helpless to reach the Ranger no matter how strong the signal got. He knew whoever had killed Asuna did it to get to him and could only hope it was someone making a point instead of pumping Pablo for information. Having arranged for money to be provided to Maura Torres and his boys, he was the only man on God’s green earth who knew the address.
Cort Wesley got cold just thinking about that. Buckets of sweat were pouring off him, soaking the car’s cracked upholstery, his blood feeling as if it were boiling off inside him. He wasn’t used to anybody doing anything for him, much less needing someone’s help. He could drive a hundred miles an hour and still never get there in time, leaving Caitlin Strong as the only chance his boys had to stay alive.
44
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS, THE PRESENT
Paz saw the car with San Antonio police markings heading down the street in his sideview mirror. As the car drew closer to the house across the street with the half-pipe in the front yard, he recognized two of his dwarfs in the front seat, each wearing khaki SAPD uniforms. Again, Paz didn’t know whether they were authentic or not.
Unless they had exited through the back, Dylan and Luke Torres were still inside, had been ever since their mother had poked her head through the door and yelled out at them. Something about homework. The other kids who’d been riding the half-pipe dashed away on their bicycles.
Paz had never ridden a bicycle, that seeming strange to him for some reason now. Then he turned his attention back on the police car coming to a halt directly in front of Maura Torres’s house.
Caitlin saw the two SAPD officers heading up the walk, breathing a sigh of relief. They had just passed the half-pipe and were climbing the front steps when she ground her SUV to a halt behind their cruiser. She leaped out and jogged toward them, noticing they were wearing work boots under their khaki trousers, just as the front door opened and Maura Torres leaned out toward them.
Work boots . . .
Caitlin remembered screaming No!, remembered drawing her SIG in the same instant one of the cops was drawing his sidearm.
He fired.
She fired.
Maura Torres was blown back inside the house.
The cop’s head rocked sideways, smacking him into the other one who was drawing his gun too.
The second cop shed the body of the first and twisted.
Caitlin sighted in on him and fired. Four shots.
Boom, boom, boom, boom . . .
Like thunderclaps forewarning an
early evening storm.
The bodies of both cops crumbling then, front door to the house still open, Cort Wesley Masters’s older boy Dylan lurching into it from inside. Caitlin saw the confusion on his face, the shock claiming his features, his childhood ended then and there.
Thud, thud, thud . . .
Caitlin swung toward the sound of footsteps pounding pavement and saw the giant charging across the street, a submachine gun steadying in each of his hands.
45
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS, THE PRESENT
Madre de Dios!
Paz cursed himself for stowing the submachine guns under his seat instead of alongside it. If he’d done that this would’ve all been over by now, the precious seconds lost never to be regained.
He couldn’t believe the sight of the tall woman, made even taller by the white Texas Ranger Stetson, loping across the front yard, pistol out and firing. Clack, clack, clack.
One of his dwarfs shot and then the other.
He was out of the car by then, but too late by a hair again, because the woman had spotted him, her pistol coming round just as his submachine guns were coming up.
Caitlin fired as she ran, her aim thrown off at the last by the dive that took her sprawling into Dylan. Both of them went down even with Maura Torres’s body as automatic fire stitched the air above them.
Firing her last two shots at the giant, she dragged Dylan all the way inside and kicked the door closed behind them. Snapped a fresh magazine home even as twin fusillades tore up the wood and sent bullets bouncing in all directions.
A mirror cracked. A vase exploded. Something fell off the wall.
A boy screamed.
Caitlin saw Luke, Cort Wesley’s younger son, standing there over his mother in plain view of the window and left Dylan long enough to take him down at the legs. She heard the sizzling hiss of bullets overhead, the wall in line with where Luke’s head had been punched with holes.
Caitlin realized she had dropped Luke directly atop his mother’s body, the sight too horrible to consider while her mind flashed back to Charlie Weeks dying slowly in her arms as bullets flew everywhere that night in the West Texas desert too. But this wasn’t the Chihuahuan and help would be coming soon enough if she could hold out that long.
Caitlin rose into a crouch and grabbed both boys by the shoulders, dragging them toward the first wall break toward the kitchen. She’d just rounded the corner when a massive booted foot kicked in the shot-up front door. It cracked at the frame and Caitlin caught her second glimpse of the giant who had thought nothing of feeding a man’s face to a truck engine, their eyes catching for the briefest of moments.
Wild, shiny hair. Burnt-brown skin. She thought she could smell a stink rising off him like fish oil and dried mud.
A swinging door led into the kitchen. Caitlin pushed the boys through it, then slotted the bolt, hitting the floor with the sons of Cort Wesley Masters pressed beneath her.
Paz fired twin bursts through the swinging door that suddenly wasn’t swinging anymore. A single thrust of his shoulder would tear it free of its hinges and open the way for him. But he stopped his motion as quickly as he started it.
The woman Ranger was behind the door, waiting, begging for him to do just that. She’d be hunkered down low, below his expected fire burst with Cort Wesley Masters’s kids protected by her frame.
Paz crouched low, steadied both his submachine guns even with the wood seam of the flimsy door six inches off the floor. He screamed as he burst through it, wood shattering all around him as he sprayed his fire toward the Ranger to finish the job.
Except she wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere; Paz was left frozen by an indecision he could never quite recall feeling before.
Caitlin fired through the glass of the French doors leading onto a stamped concrete patio and then to the backyard beyond. Impact threw her trajectory off, not much but enough to make the rounds miss the huge target who’d come crashing through the door into the kitchen. He stayed low, beneath her sight line, and she backpedaled toward the storage shed she’d ordered Dylan and Luke to hide behind, firing off more rounds through the glass.
Her SIG’s slide locked open just as she reached the boys, slamming her final magazine home and waiting for the fresh thump of the giant’s steps thrashing across the soft backyard turf. Cort Wesley’s sons were seated with their backs pressed against the shed, trapped between sobs and heavy rasps. Luke, the younger one, had his arms curled round his knees, rocking slightly. Dylan, the older one, was staring straight ahead, sniffling, eyes filled with hate and an intensity that reminded her too much of his father.
Caitlin looked at them and saw Cort Wesley, his spirit and soul tucked into smaller packages soon to seethe with the same violence that had so dominated his life. She wished she could take the boys in her arms and shield them from the horror that had now come irrevocably into their lives. Men like the giant who’d killed their mother and Masters himself were more like forces of nature whose deeds and actions polluted the lives of those around them no matter how much others tried to dictate otherwise. To his credit, Cort Wesley had tried to protect his sons from the kind of violence that had been visited on them today. In the end, though, his futile efforts had made them as much prisoners of his very being as he was.
The younger boy, Luke, pushed up against her and Caitlin drew him closer with her free arm.
“I wanna go see my mother,” Dylan started, looking at the gun held in her other hand. “See maybe if . . .”
His voice drifted off along with his hope. Caitlin let him have the silence, listening to the sirens screaming in the distance with pistol clutched tightly and ready in case the giant was still out there.
46
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS, THE PRESENT
Caitlin wouldn’t let go of Dylan and Luke until D. W. Tepper arrived on the scene. She’d kept them away from ceaseless badgering by the local cops and kept them out of sight from the crime-scene technicians starting work on the body of their mother.
Captain Tepper finally climbed out of his truck with an unlit Marlboro dangling from the side of his mouth and a wan expression deepening the furrows in his leathery skin. He stopped briefly to consult with the local detectives and forensics techs, then continued on again. Night had fallen, but the blaze of headlights, portable lamps and television camera Day-Glo bulbs made it feel like day. Caitlin and the boys clung to what passed for darkness, watching Tepper emerge from the brightness. He gestured for her to join him and Caitlin left the boys huddled together against the side of the house, never taking her eyes off them.
“You wanna tell me ’bout them?”
Tepper followed the line of Caitlin’s gaze to Dylan and Luke.
“Those are Cort Wesley Masters’s sons,” she said, just before her phone rang.
“Rangers are gonna send a chopper there to pick you up,” Caitlin said, after telling Cort Wesley where to drive.
“Texas Rangers sending me a chopper. That’s one for the ages.”
She backed off a bit more to make sure his sons couldn’t hear her. “Your boys need you, Cort Wesley.”
“They don’t even know me.”
“Right now, that’ll have to pass.”
“Man who did this, you ever seen him before?”
Caitlin thought of the look in the giant’s eyes, the smell that rose off him. “I’m not even sure it was a man.”
“Come again?”
“Never mind. Just thinking to myself. I shot two of his men. Their bodies might tell us something once we get ’em IDed.”
“Sounds like a paramilitary team. Clayton and company’s replacements.”
“They knew you had kids, Masters, and they knew Asuna would know where to find them. Your normal gang enemies aren’t nearly that resourceful.”
Caitlin listened to his breathing on the other end of the line.
“They see their mother get shot?” he asked finally.
“Leave it ’til you get up here.”
&n
bsp; “Just answer my question.”
Caitlin didn’t.
“That’s what I thought,” she heard Masters say before his phone clicked off.
47
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS, THE PRESENT
Three hours later into the night, a Ranger SUV pulled up and Cort Wesley Masters climbed out. His sons were still munching on their leftover McDonald’s and Caitlin left them to finish, while she met Cort Wesley off to the side of the yard where they couldn’t see him. He was breathing fast and sweating through his shirt, his face red with so much rage Caitlin thought the veins in his temples might be ready to burst.
“I want to see Maura.”
“You can’t.”
He glared at her. “You wanna be the one to stop me?”
“Medical examiner already took the body away.”
“What’d they do to Asuna?” he asked, after sweeping his eyes about as if to take in the scene.
“You don’t want to know right now.”
Cort Wesley’s skin was shiny with a thin layer of sweat. His breaths seemed to be growing faster and harder, like a bomb ticking down to triple zeroes. “Two people know me best in the world and look what happens.”
“You still got your sons.”
Masters looked at Caitlin as if just noticing she was there. “Guess I got you to thank for that.”
“Just like I got you to thank for the Survivor Center the other night.”
Their eyes held, neither sure what to make of the other’s gazes.
“You need to talk to your boys,” Caitlin said finally.
“Got something to tell you first.”
“You’re putting this off.”
“I found the warehouse where those crates came from five years ago. Man inside remembered the shipment, couldn’t say what was inside.”