Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  But the drive also stoked memories of Pablo Asuna and Maura Torres, two people he was close to who’d been murdered because of their association with him. Caitlin Strong had been more right than she realized about his feelings for Maura. They’d been little more than kids at the time, and she wanted no part of him, keenly aware of where he was headed. He promised her he was ready to give up that life and move on to another, if they settled down. They did but, as it turned out, he couldn’t and Maura threw him out halfway into her first pregnancy.

  Cort Wesley was there when Dylan was born and came around regularly until a pair of bangers from the Mexican Mafia showed up looking for him. Maura stuck a shotgun in their faces and told them to get lost. She’d just learned she was pregnant with Luke at the time. First thing Cort Wesley did was take care of the bangers. Second thing was to move Maura up to Shavano Park and swear off seeing her again, even when Luke was born. And he’d stayed true to his word until the day after he got out of The Walls and found himself parked across the street from the house he’d bought for her with Branca crime family money.

  Cort Wesley’s status and reputation earned him a single bunk in The Walls. He awoke one morning a few months into his stay to find a note taped around a shank fashioned of a filed-down toothbrush with bedsheet strips wrapped around its handle. The note anonymously ordered him to murder an alleged prison informant on penalty of Leroy Epps being executed if he failed to comply. Cort Wesley had hoped keeping to himself would be enough to get the other inmates to steer clear of him. But he’d erred in striking up a friendship with the aging Epps, who seemed genuinely interested in what he called Cort Wesley’s moral “rehabitation.” Cort Wesley had visited Epps in the prison infirmary when his diabetes got bad, distressed to see how the whites of his fading eyes were stained permanently red now from leaking blood.

  In any event, the note quite correctly stated that Cort Wesley wouldn’t be able to protect Epps twenty-four hours a day. The informant in question was Billy Traggar, a scared shitless white pretty boy in The Walls for accidentally killing an undercover cop in the commission of a drug deal. Kid had a wiry frame, wore his hair in a ponytail and floated from group to group in search of one to make his stretch inside as tolerable as possible. When none of that worked, he began accumulating dirt on his molesters and abusers to trade for a transfer to the protective custody wing.

  Cort Wesley’s response to the note ordering him to shank Billy Traggar was to contact Warden T. Edward Jardine to spill all the dirt the boy had intended to, thereby eliminating any need for his death. Passing the information on came with two additional caveats: that Billy be transferred as agreed and that Leroy Epps be allowed to share Cort Wesley’s cell. In the closed society of prison, he had violated two sacrosanct rules in the convict code of conduct: first by becoming a rat and then by mixing with a man from another race, as cell mates no less. But Cort Wesley cared nothing for any code that would threaten the lives of both an old man and a poor mess of a strung-out kid.

  He had bucked the long-entrenched system and found himself cast too often in later months as protector of the weak and infirm to the point where no hit could be ordered inside The Walls without his approval. The inmates with hopes of release knew he was a soldier for the powerful Brancas who could get to them once freed or their families now with a simple phone call. So in trying to lie low he had actually ended up becoming the de facto head of the toughest criminals and lifers the state of Texas had to offer.

  Maybe it worked, maybe it changed him, because Cort Wesley considered himself a lifer at that point too. The rules that had worked for him outside didn’t carry over to the inside and, just as plainly, he needed to find new ones to redefine what was going to pass for the rest of his life. When word came down that a DNA test had exonerated him for the murder of a Texas Ranger in the stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert that reached over into West Texas, he was already too far along in the process to go back to being the man he used to be. Maybe getting that Smith & Wesson 9 millimeter and heading over to the Survivor Center to find Caitlin Strong was about claiming it back. As things turned out, though, it became more about giving his old self up for good, his moral “rehabitation,” as Leroy Epps had called it, at last complete.

  But the tests kept coming. First, Maura’s death plopping his boys down into his life, then his feelings for Caitlin Strong and now this trek to Mexico to please her as much as to make amends to Maura Torres who had him figured from the beginning and ended up paying the ultimate price for daring to love him. He imagined what Leroy Epps might say about that now, imagined the old man sitting next to him in the passenger seat of Caitlin Strong’s SUV, smelling the talcum powder he layered on himself to hide the sour scent of skin turned bad by diabetes.

  “How you be, bubba?”

  “You tell me, champ.”

  “Good, from where I’m sitting. How you see it?”

  “Truth is I had a shot with Maura Torres. When I walked away from her, I never thought there’d be another.”

  “Something changed.”

  “This Texas Ranger. I look at her, I see a future, something I never really considered much before, ’specially when we were inside since there weren’t any prospects for one.”

  “Something to seize sounds like to me. Man, what I wouldn’t give for a ceegar right now. . . .”

  “I don’t want to fuck things up again, champ.”

  “More than you be hurt by that this time, bubba. Got kids in the mix, something I never made time for myself.”

  “And ain’t that a hoot!”

  “I had it to do again, that be the first thing I’d do different. Let that be a lesson to ya, bubba. Just ’cause Maura Torres wasn’t the right one doesn’t mean you turn aside from the possibility. This Ranger gal might be just the thing to round out that ilk of yours. You know it and I know it, so let’s just leave things there.”

  Cort Wesley grinned just before the old man’s image vanished from the passenger seat. But for a long stretch into the drive that followed, Cort Wesley continued to smell the sweet scent of talcum powder, making him wonder maybe, just maybe . . .

  77

  BAHRAIN, THE PRESENT

  The list Smith had come up with took them to the neighborhood of Umm Al Hassam, a middle-class enclave on the capital Manama’s southern coast lined with a mixture of old villas and the kind of newer apartment buildings that fit the profile of the site where Peter had been tortured. The problem was that it was three miles from Bab Al Bahrain where he had been found, farther than the condition of Peter’s shoes and feet had indicated.

  “There are four buildings that best fit our profile,” Smith explained on the drive over. “They cater to lots of businessmen who may only use the apartments for a few days every month, if that. Kind of places people stay out of one another’s way, don’t mix much because they literally might not speak the same language. What other criteria can we use to narrow things down?”

  “Peter was found wandering in the souq nearly nine months ago, probably because the site was shut down suddenly. New administration taking over and all.”

  “Right.” Smith snickered.

  “So we’re looking for a place where the occupants vanished suddenly, probably leaving the furnishings behind.”

  “Might not be as strong a clue as you think.”

  “Why?”

  “Because these kind of situations call for long-term leases, not month-to-month.”

  “How are those leases paid?”

  “Up front normally to minimize the paper trail. Wire transfers into the leasing company’s account. They get their money, they don’t look any further.”

  “There you go then, Smith. Something else to go on.”

  “Experience in these matters does have its benefits,” he told her, not drawing a rise this time.

  “Ready to tell me your real name, Mr. Smith?”

  He nodded slowly, seeming to relent. “Okay, it’s Jones.”

  Their questioni
ng of each of the four buildings’ landlords focused on apartments with southern exposure to the bright Bahrain sky during the time of the day when the sun was strongest. In all there were six apartments contained in three of the buildings that fit the criteria perfectly. Access to each was accomplished by simply handing the superintendent an envelope. Multiple apartments meant multiple envelopes.

  Of the first four, three were furnished as normal apartments and the fourth wasn’t furnished at all. The fifth apartment proved to be something else entirely.

  “This isn’t the standard building lock,” the superintendent said in excellent English. “My key will not open it.”

  “So the tenants broke the rules,” Smith said.

  “Indeed they did.”

  “What can you tell us about them?”

  The superintendent consulted his clipboard. “It’s leased to an investment banking firm in London.”

  “Name?”

  “Phillotson Capital Partners.”

  Smith looked as if that was all he needed to hear, reaching into his pocket to emerge with yet another envelope. “Tenants are required to provide access in an emergency, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Smith handed him the envelope. “This is an emergency.”

  78

  NUEVO LAREDO, THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley had the list of the three locations where high-output air exchangers had been shipped in 2002 through 2003 open on the passenger seat. He crossed the border with a short line of vehicles and opened the SUV’s windows to warm the chill he’d begun to feel.

  The first address on the list in Nuevo Laredo had been converted into a sugar refinery with the air exchangers shipped in 2003 nowhere in evidence.

  “Computer manufacture?” the manager said to him. “Sure. This was a Gateway assembly plant until they were purchased by Acer a few years ago. We bought out their lease.”

  “What about their equipment?”

  “They took pretty much everything with them. The building wasn’t much more than a shell when we moved in.”

  “I’m talking about huge rectangular machines attached to what would have looked like blowers and fans with lots of piping and ductwork hanging about.”

  “Yes,” the manager said, “I remember them being removed. I remember because they were so heavy and cumbersome, they had to be disassembled first.”

  “What’d you do with them?”

  “Junkyard.”

  Cort Wesley’s next stop was two hundred miles southwest in Monclova, actually the foothills on the outskirts of the town in a gated building under heavy guard. The umbrella of overgrowth hanging down from the surrounding trees and brush would have rendered the building virtually invisible from the air, and he also noticed the roof had been painted green to further disguise its presence.

  Cort Wesley felt his neck hairs stand on end. If this wasn’t the place where Garza, or somebody else, had manufactured the Cerberus chip for MacArthur-Rain, it was the site of something equally nefarious. Cort Wesley was in no position to storm the building alone, nor would that have been the most prudent strategy under any circumstances. He considered reporting a relative of his inexplicably disappearing from the site, or being under some kind of duress. If this were the kind of place he suspected, though, the Mexican federalés and other authorities would have been paid to look the other way no matter what.

  Cort Wesley considered creating a distraction, but the most effective here—fire or some kind of explosion—would be impossible to effect unless he got much closer. He figured there would be guards patrolling the perimeter outside the fence as well and, almost on cue, he noticed one dressed in a khaki uniform and cap standing at the edge of the heavy brush. Standing a post instead of patrolling, which suited Cort Wesley’s needs equally well.

  He took the man by surprise effortlessly and, under gunpoint, forced him to change into his clothes. Once dressed in the man’s uniform, Cort Wesley slung his submachine gun over his shoulder and pressed his knife against the man’s lower back. Very simple matter to drive it home, if the guard did not cooperate fully.

  As expected, having a prisoner in hand gained Cort Wesley swift access through the main gate and an easy approach through the remainder of the outside security right up to the building. An uneasy moment followed where the guard at the entrance eyed the similarly uniformed Cort Wesley with as much suspicion as he eyed the apparent prisoner.

  “Take him to the boss,” he said finally, thrusting open the door and gesturing with his submachine gun for both of them to enter. “I’ll get a hole dug.”

  With the door closed behind him, Cort Wesley found himself in a sprawling warehouse-style space filled with the pungent stench of alcohol, preservatives and other harsh chemicals he could not identify. Peasant workers garbed in surgical masks and pocketless smocks sifted through huge piles of white powder while others labored near complex machines that looked like modern versions of moonshine stills. A constant hum droned loudly, courtesy of the ceiling-mounted recirculators and floor-standing air exchangers.

  Cort Wesley realized he had stumbled upon one of the mythical Garza’s massive drug dens, nothing whatsoever to do with chip assembly. The guard wearing his clothes must have sensed his distraction because he chose that moment to break away.

  “Help me! He’s a—”

  That was as far as the man got before the knife Cort Wesley threw lodged in his back. The attention of all turned his way, and Cort Wesley responded by whipping the dead guard’s submachine round from his shoulder and letting loose with a spray. He angled his fire upward at first, shattering a portion of the fluorescent lighting overhead, which sent glass raining down on the workers.

  He aimed his next spray for the largest congestion of chemicals, instantly coughing up hot, orange flamed fires and spilling any number of caustic chemicals over anyone unlucky enough to be near. Screams rang out, trumping both the air exchangers and the heavy thump of panicked footsteps rushing for the door against the determined efforts of the remaining guards to stem the surge.

  Cort Wesley led the charge outside, crashing through the door with the dead guard’s bandana pressed against his mouth to feign exposure to some awful loosed chemical. That sight was enough to make the outside guards back off, concern for their own safety turning them hesitant to respond by blocking the path of their fleeing fellow guards and peasant labor.

  Cort Wesley slipped past them in an advertent stagger, heading straight for the main gate through which a number had already fled. He pretended to collapse in the nearby brush, only to quickly regain his footing and continue on to Caitlin Strong’s SUV parked off the road up the hill with ample brush for cover.

  He leaped inside and screeched away. Just one more address left ahead to go with the chaos he was leaving behind.

  79

  BAHRAIN, THE PRESENT

  Caitlin and Smith entered the apartment after the building superintendent had used a selection of tools to remove the lock altogether. It wasn’t easy and once open they could see the door had been replaced as well with one of the heavy, soundproof variety.

  Even though the apartment was blisteringly hot from the lack of circulation and switched-off air-conditioning, Caitlin felt chilled to the bone. All the blinds were drawn, the only light coming courtesy of the thin shafts emanating from the hallway.

  She had entered the agonized world her husband had known for months. And, one way or another, it was her fault.

  “So,” Peter asked her, “what do you think?”

  “What do I think?”

  “Repeating the question is just a way of delaying giving an answer. You can’t tell me you haven’t thought of it yourself.”

  “Having a baby? Actually, I haven’t.”

  “It’ll be a boy.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “You told me you were the only Strong firstborn ever to be a woman. Odds are in our favor, Caity.”

  She forced a smile. “I get my first report ca
rd and you spring this on me. . . .”

  Peter wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Come on, I’ll help you with your homework. I’m pretty smart, you know. Think about it. Kid with my brains, your toughness.”

  “You saying I’m not smart?” she quipped at him.

  “Nope. That I’m not tough.”

  “You would like me to wait?” the building superintendent asked in English.

  Neither Caitlin nor Smith replied. The apartment felt stuffy and smelled of disuse. But the pungent scents of powerful antiseptic cleaners hung in the air. Already starting to dissipate with the opening of the front door, the stench remained strong enough to turn Caitlin’s stomach and make her even queasier. She had wrapped her arms about herself upon entering and now felt powerless to return them to her sides. She watched Smith move to a light switch and flip it on.

  Ambient, recessed bulbs cast murky lighting downward, making enough of a dent in the front room to reveal a series of cots still covered in hastily draped bedcovers. Caitlin imagined them smelling of stale sweat shed by men posted here on a rotating basis, the thought of a shower in such confines never even entering their minds. And, true to that assumption, her inspection of the single bath revealed hand towels and soap but not a single bath towel.

  There were two bedrooms, the first of which was totally empty, the only evidence left by the previous occupants here being scratches and weight impressions dug into the light-wood flooring. The former occupants had clearly fled in a hurry and had made little effort to disguise that fact.

  “Locals would be my guess,” Smith noted. “More watchdogs than anything. The pros must’ve left them in a lurch. So they abandoned the place, took whatever was in this room maybe to cover their own asses, maybe to sell. Like video equipment, televisions.”