by Jon Land
Cort Wesley didn’t bother descending into the tunnel. He wouldn’t find the air exchangers down there or a convenient route to wherever they had been taken, to a place that didn’t exist on any map.
Casa del Diablo . . .
Home, no doubt, to Emiliato Valdez Garza.
PART NINE
Reporter: I understand, Sir, that you carry a .45. Why is that?
Ranger: ’Cause they don’t make a .46.
83
SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT
“Me again, Padre,” Guillermo Paz said when the confessional hatch slid open.
The priest didn’t shrink away as he did the last time, instead he actually seemed to lean closer to the screen. “Welcome back, my son. What have you come for today?”
“I think I’ve crossed the line, Father.”
“What line is that?”
Paz started scratching at the confessional ledge with his fingernail, just like he had back in La Vega. The wood resisted his attempt to peel back a layer, maybe carve his name here too, but he kept trying. “Still trying to figure that out exactly. But it’s the kind you can’t step back over.”
“This sounds positive to me, my son. Like you have heeded His word.”
“That’s the thing. I think I finally understand what He wants me to do.”
“And what’s that?”
“Make a difference. Everything I’ve done before—let’s face it, most of it bad—never amounted to much. Always thought it was a matter of who I was killing. Now I realize I was asking the wrong question.”
“You should have been asking why.”
“You’re really good at this.”
“Thank you.”
“You sound like you’ve done some killing yourself—on the right side of things, of course.”
The priest scratched at his nose, cleared his throat. “I’ve seen war, my son. As a chaplain.”
“Held people’s hands as they died and all that.”
“Something I wished I never had to do.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“That the Lord was with them.”
“Implying He wasn’t when they got shot, blown up or whatever. How’d you live with that?”
“I’ve been reading Kierkegaard myself lately.”
“Really?”
“He argued that a divine command from God transcends all ethics. Such a distinction means that God does not create or impose morality.”
“Leaving it up to us as individuals to create our own.”
“Exactly. So God, according to Kierkegaard, cannot be blamed for the actions of man. And each man must choose his own course.”
Paz managed to finish the P and left the carving there. “I’m glad to hear you say that. It’s what I started realizing for myself.”
“Then you’ll be going home?” the priest asked, perhaps a bit hopefully.
“No, not ever. I closed that door when I refused to burn that village. Besides, my work here’s not finished yet.”
“I thought you said—”
“I did. This is different work, opening a new door. Kind of like starting over, from scratch.”
“I cannot absolve you of the sin that comes with killing, my son, no matter the who or the why.”
“Don’t need you to, Padre. Already absolved myself.”
“Then what can He do for you today?”
“More like what I can do for Him . . . and you. I just wanted to let you know I’m sending you something. What’s the biggest donation your church has ever received?”
“At the risk of sounding ungrateful, that is not for me to say.”
“No problem. My donation’s coming and it’s substantial. A lot of money came my way for this latest job. Now it’s yours. I just hope the source doesn’t bother you.”
“It would have after your first visit. Not now,” the priest said and listened to the big man let out a long sigh.
“You asked what I came for today, Father. I think it was to hear you say that.”
The priest took his time composing his response, had just started to speak when he realized the man in the confessional was gone. Only then did he realize what had struck him that was different, that he hadn’t been able to identify until now. The salty, sodden smell that had hung over the big man previously had been replaced by something less acidic and bitter. Not pleasant, but not altogether revolting anymore either.
“May the Lord be with you, my son,” the priest said to no one at all.
84
HOUSTON, THE PRESENT
Caitlin saw Cort Wesley Masters waiting for her at the foot of the escalator in the international arrivals terminal. A stoic, stationary figure amid the bustle unfolding around him. He seemed untouched by it, invisible, it seemed, to the masses.
At the bottom of the escalator, Caitlin draped her arms around his thick shoulders, embracing him. She hadn’t planned to do it, didn’t understand why she had. The long flights passed mostly stiff and without sleep in a coach seat, too many hours left to herself and her own thoughts after the difficult hours spent in Manama. Every time she managed to drift off to sleep on the flight home, she dreamed of Smith; always in different poses and postures, all of them equally menacing for their deception and undercurrent of violent explosion.
She felt Cort Wesley’s arms tightening around her, hard-packed hands stroking her back. “Guess I don’t have to ask how your trip went,” he said, sliding her away from him.
Caitlin wanted to kiss him, again not sure why. He represented something to her she didn’t yet comprehend, his powerful detachment transcending the upshot of the misery that had dominated her mind for the better part of two days now without respite. He was as strong as Peter was weak. He represented the “moving on” Smith had raised in Bahrain, letting go of a part of her life she clung to out of the false belief that her actions now could alter the past. Still, it took all her strength to pull away, to make her mind move elsewhere.
“How about yours?” Caitlin heard herself ask him.
“I think Garza is real.”
“Why?”
“Can’t say for sure. It’s like a smell that keeps showing up at different places. Something’s going on down there I can’t quite put my finger on. Level of organization can’t be explained any other way I can figure.”
“What about the manufacturing plant?”
Cort Wesley shrugged. “It’s there, all right. I just haven’t found it yet.”
“What did you find?”
“A town that don’t exist. Casa del Diablo.”
“The House of the Devil . . .”
“Interestingly enough.”
She started crying in the parking garage when they reached her SUV, let it out for Peter and Jim Strong and her granddad, and for whatever cancerous monster was eating up D. W. Tepper’s insides. There was no future she could see, only the past with nothing to be found there but pain.
Cort Wesley Masters took her in his arms and held her, Caitlin feeling like a little girl again in her father’s grasp, smelling the Aqua Velva with her face pressed against his beard stubble. When she moved, she thought it was to ease herself away but then she was kissing him, stronger than she’d ever kissed any man before. She waited for Masters to break it off and, when he didn’t, thought about ending it herself, but didn’t either.
Still holding her, she felt him jerk open the door with his free hand, the two of them tumbling into the SUV’s backseat. Caitlin ended up on top of him, reaching back to yank the door closed before kissing Masters again, harder and deeper. She felt his hands on her blouse, her belt, felt her own doing the same as if they belonged to someone else. Somewhere her mind gave the order to stop and pull back, but her body failed to oblige, responding to something she couldn’t identify that was foreign and welcome at the same time.
In the end the act itself didn’t match those moments leading up to it, though it left her fulfilled in a way she could not accurately describe. In the minutes they la
y intertwined, their bodies twisted to conform to the backseat’s confines, all the pain from both the past and the present didn’t hurt anymore. Feeling him inside her pushed it to the edges of her mind. Once there its significance, for however brief a period, was reduced to the point where it at least seemed that all her wounds could be healed.
For a man with such a well-deserved reputation for brutality, Cort Wesley Masters was a surprisingly gentle and considerate lover. He didn’t seem to care what she felt for him, even as his own passion over-flowed, knowing her actions were rooted deep within her, a place she didn’t comprehend and hadn’t come to grips with yet. She felt his callused hands caressing her through the whole of it, lingering after they were done and Caitlin was content to lie atop him with her head resting on his chest.
She stayed like that until a parking garage security guard rapped on the steamed-up windows with his nightstick, making both of them feel like wayward teens as they scrambled for their clothes. Caitlin cut the conversation short when she flashed the guard her Ranger badge and he backed off subserviently.
She let Masters drive, both of them silent until they’d reached the interstate heading back toward San Antonio.
“I’m guessing your trip didn’t go too well,” he said finally.
“Found what I was looking for, if that’s what you mean.”
“Actually, Caitlin Strong, that’s exactly what I mean.”
She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “I saw the room where they tortured Peter. Fucking bastards, I’m gonna shoot every last one of them.”
“Come on, gotta leave a couple for me there, girl. I imagine there’ll be plenty to go around.”
“Taking on the whole Mexican Mafia and the biggest private contractor the government’s got, I expect so.”
“No shortage of bad guys.”
“Nope, just good ones, Cort Wesley.”
“Not entirely, Ranger.”
Caitlin lapsed back into thought and Cort Wesley let her have her space, resisting the urge to reach over and take her hand in his.
“It’s my fault,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“What happened to Peter. He left because our marriage wasn’t working, because I couldn’t have kids.”
“Things ended between me and Maura Torres mostly ’cause we did.”
“I wish it was that simple for me.”
“Don’t need to go where you’re going, Caitlin Strong.”
“I think I do.” Caitlin’s eyes, dim and distant, fixed on him. “ ’Cause I lied. Told Peter the in vitro never took. Truth is I never tried it and stayed on the pill the whole time. I looked him right in the eye and lied, pretending to be sad about it. Something I gotta live with every day now.”
“Beats dying,” said Cort Wesley.
85
SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT
Caitlin and Cort Wesley drank coffee while they waited for her pictures to be developed. Thirty minutes, the clerk at the drugstore’s photo counter told her, forty at the most.
They sat across from each other in silence. Caitlin felt talked-out, thought-out and flat-exhausted. But she knew sleep wouldn’t come if she tried for it and, even if it did, she was afraid of the nightmares sure to be formed by the residue of Bahrain.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said finally. She was halfway through her third cup and the caffeine buzz had started to take hold, leaving her hands jittery and her teeth clacking together.
“That a question or a statement?”
“Feel free to weigh in.”
“Know why prison changed me, Caitlin Strong?”
“No.”
“It changed me ’cause the man I was when I went in wouldn’t have been able to last a month in there, never mind a lifetime. You find a way to deal but that’s not really living, it’s just getting by. So when I get out, all of a sudden the world feels like a whole different place. You figured me out really good before, knowing how I felt about Maura Torres. Took me a while to figure it out too. Keeping her and the boys outta my life was the hardest thing I ever done. Worst part of it all was thinking I was gonna be in prison forever and having the choice taken away from me.”
“What’s that have to do with Peter?”
“He’s in prison too, Ranger, only the walls are different ’cause they’re in his own head. When I was inside, I would’ve done anything to get out. I’m guessing he feels the same way. Whatever you can do to make that happen for him, you do.”
“And if it makes things worse?”
“Can’t be worse,” Cort Wesley told her. “That’s my point.”
“Yes, it can.”
“How’s that?”
“It was my fault,” said Caitlin.
86
SAN ANTONIO, EIGHTEEN MONTHS BEFORE
Caitlin and Peter sat in the kitchen drinking coffee while he waited for the car that would be taking him to Houston to catch his flight to Iraq.
“What I want to know,” he asked Caitlin, “is will you still be here when I get back?”
The frankness of his question had caught her by surprise. “I don’t know.”
“You’re not happy.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“That doesn’t matter. Whoever’s fault it is, you’re still not happy and that’s not right.”
“I don’t blame you,” Caitlin told him.
“This isn’t about dispensing blame.”
“I blame myself.”
“I’d rather you blamed me, Caity. I’d rather you blamed me because then whatever you’re going through would be easier to get over.”
“I thought going back to school would help.”
“You miss the Rangers.”
“It’s in my blood,” she conceded.
“And what you are, and you haven’t been the same person since you walked away.”
“Didn’t want to give them a chance to throw me out.”
“You don’t know it would’ve gone down that way.”
“Got a pretty good idea.”
“So go back. Find out for sure.”
Caitlin sipped her coffee. “That horse has left the barn.”
Peter dumped the rest of his cup out in the sink, peering out the window for the approach of the livery car’s headlights. “I come back, I don’t want it to be to you like this. I want it to be to the Caitlin Strong I met in that bar celebrating her father’s birthday.”
“Then you better go invent a time machine, Professor.”
“You want to be a Texas Ranger again,” Peter continued, ignoring her, “and until you get back to being that person, nothing else in your life is going to work. And that includes us, me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean exactly?”
“It means as long as I’m here, you’ve got an excuse to keep going to school, taking classes, pursuing a degree, even though you don’t enjoy any of those things. When was the last time you went to the range?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do, Caitlin. Yes, you do. I’ll bet you know when the last time you shot a gun was down to the hour and minute. All this is about punishing yourself and as long as I’m here it’ll keep being that. Me going away gives you the opportunity you need.” Headlights blared at the apartment building’s front and a horn honked lightly. “When I get back from Iraq, I want to hear that you took it.”
Caitlin walked him to the door, but not outside. They hugged and kissed each other lightly. She was back looking out the window, when the black Lincoln limousine pulled away.
87
SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT
Caitlin’s cell phone rang, D. W. Tepper’s number flashing on the caller ID and driving her out of her trance.
“Start your yelling,” she told him.
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“How ’bout with Harm Delladonne?”
“He’s talking about suing us for you putting his bodyguards in the hospital.”
&n
bsp; “Men were twice as big as me, four times when you consider the two of them. I was putting this son of a bitch on notice, Captain. Making a statement.”
“Making a mess is more like it. Stow your attitude at the door when you enter a public place on Ranger business from now on, miss. We got a goddamn travesty on our hands.”
Caitlin was squeezing her cell phone so hard, her hand hurt. “I found the place where Delladonne had Peter tortured in Bahrain. Make a nice slide show at MacArthur-Rain’s next board meeting.”
“We got a problem on that end. The Rangers been pulled off the whole goddamn case.”
“By who?”
“Governor. He called me this morning.”
Caitlin’s heart was beginning to hammer again. She could feel sweat forming on her brow, anger building up inside her like bile. “How’d you respond?”
“Told him to go fuck himself and get off MacArthur-Rain’s payroll. My suspension starts tomorrow. We’ll be able to hold things together for a while, least ’til the highway patrol gets settled in my office. Think I’ll shit in a drawer, see how they like that.”
“How long, Captain?”
“Couple days at most. After that, we’re on our own.”
“We?”
“Your daddy made me promise I’d always take care of you. Just standing by my word.”
Caitlin bit her lip, hesitating. “Gotta ask you something on that note, D. W.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Delladonne said both Jim Strong and my granddad were corrupt, that they took money from Mexican drug runners to let black tar heroin pass over the border. I need to know if that’s the truth.”
“You don’t need to know nothing, Caitlin. What you need is to forget you ever heard such a fool thing.”