Strong Enough to Die: A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  Both Caitlin and D. W. Tepper blocked his way.

  “If I was still in charge here, you’d be inside already,” Tepper told him. “But the governor’s boys are calling the shots now.” He shook his head in disgust, spit out another wad of mucus. “Fucking world’s goin’ to hell.” He looked at Caitlin. “Back in the day, your dad and I’d just draw our guns and let ’em try to stop us.”

  She smiled at him and touched his shoulder. “Jim Strong’s not here, but his daughter is. Say the word, Captain, and we go.”

  Tepper shook his head. “Nah, just blowing off steam, I guess. But I get the governor in a room anytime soon, we’ll see how much of the old days I remember.”

  A cell phone rang, then another: Caitlin’s and Cort Wesley’s at the same time. They raised them to their ears and hit the answer buttons in eerily matching fashion.

  “I assume you know who this is,” a Spanish-accented voice greeted them.

  “Garza,” they said almost together.

  “Let’s make this fast. You know what I’ve got and you know what I want. The Ranger brings her husband, the outlaw gets his sons back.”

  “Bring my husband where?” Caitlin asked.

  “Why don’t you tell her, outlaw?”

  “Casa del Diablo,” said Cort Wesley. “The House of the Devil.”

  “Hey, outlaw, you got any Mexican blood in you?”

  “Fuck you.”

  They both heard Garza chuckle. “I knew it, outlaw. Look forward to meeting you in person.”

  PART TEN

  A Ranger was at a formal dress affair in his tuxedo. He was sitting next to a gentleman at the dining table with his tuxedo jacket open. His model 1911 .45 caliber was obvious to anyone looking.

  The gentleman looked at the Ranger and said, “I see you are wearing your .45 . . . you must be expecting trouble.”

  The Ranger responds, “No, sir, if I were expecting trouble I would be carrying my 12-gauge shotgun.”

  95

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  D. W. Tepper looked at them, weighing what Caitlin had just told him in the shade off to the side of the yard. “You ever hear what Davy Crockett said when the Congress in Washington finally pissed him off? ‘You can all go to hell. I’m going to Texas.’ ” He coughed up more mucus but swallowed it back down. “That’s the way I feel right now. We’re gonna play this our way, Caitlin, the way Jim Strong would’ve played it.”

  “What about the governor?”

  “He can shit in his hat for all I care.”

  Tepper laid it out for them. A whole squadron of Rangers riding shotgun from a distance through the trip into Mexico. Make sure they had the means to match Garza’s firepower with their own.

  “Where’s this town that don’t exist at exactly?”

  “We don’t know,” Caitlin answered. “He hasn’t told us yet.”

  “Said he’d call us when the time was right, after we cross the border,” Cort Wesley answered, tightening his hands into fists over and over again as if wishing for something to punch. “Means he’ll likely be keeping tabs the whole way.”

  “Son of a bitch holds all the cards, don’t he?”

  . . .

  They knew Garza could be watching them at anytime and decided to make that work for them instead of against. First, D. W. Tepper used whatever influence he had left to arrange a private plane to take them as far as an airstrip just short of the border. At that point, Rangers would escort Peter Goodwin to the men’s room. Another Ranger, dressed in identical clothes, would be waiting inside and would emerge in Peter’s place, going on from that point in a vehicle that would be waiting.

  The vehicle would be equipped with a homing beacon that would allow the Rangers to track them into Mexico and beyond. Tepper had arranged for sixty Rangers and fifteen vehicles drawn from companies across the state to accompany that vehicle into Mexico, keeping their distance all the way to Casa del Diablo. Once over the border, they’d have no authority and no calls would be made to the Mexican authorities to grant them any. The whole thing was off the books and all of the Rangers contacted were told they could opt out if they so chose. None did.

  Just like the old days, as Captain Tepper had told Caitlin. Both Jim Strong and her granddad would have been proud.

  Inside Ranger Company D headquarters, she listened to the chatter, the planning, never prouder to be counted among these men upon whom civilized times had forced methods and manners without sacrificing the ideals and frontier heritage on which they were founded. And yet she knew Tepper’s plan was doomed to fail. Despite the intricate planning and precautions enacted, Garza would be prepared for exactly what the Rangers intended to do.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Cort Wesley agreed. “Question being, what does that leave us with?”

  Caitlin’s phone rang, both of them tensing as she stepped aside to answer it, Cort Wesley with too much on his mind to pay attention until she snapped the cell phone closed again a few moments later and walked back toward him.

  “As I was saying, Ranger, what does that leave us with?”

  “With one chance, crazy as it may sound.”

  Cort Wesley watched her slide her phone back into her pocket. “Something to do with that call?”

  “We’ll see.”

  He waited for her to say more, resuming himself when she didn’t, the hopeful look in her eyes telling him enough. “Don’t suppose we got much of a choice right now, do we?”

  “This or nothing.”

  Cort Wesley nodded grimly. “Then let’s go get my boys.”

  96

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “You don’t want to do this, I’ll understand,” Caitlin said to Peter in his hospital room. “After all you’ve been through, it’s nobody’s right to ask you to do any more.”

  “You want me to say no, Caity?” he asked her, grimacing through the pain that racked him every time he moved.

  “A big part of me does, yeah.”

  “Which part is that? Not the Texas Ranger, I’m guessing.”

  “Let me answer your first question a different way: I don’t want you to do this.”

  “What would you do if you were me?”

  “I’m not you.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Peter said, smiling slightly. It wasn’t much, but the simple gesture reminded Caitlin of the warm, gentle man she’d fallen in love with. “This may be my only chance to get back at the people who did this to me.”

  Caitlin remained silent.

  “I know we talked last night, but I don’t remember all the details. They’re slipping away, no matter how hard I try to hold onto them. It’s like trying to remember a dream.”

  “Not the way I’d put it exactly.”

  “I don’t remember anything about Bahrain,” he told her, the pictures she’d taken arranged neatly before him on the bed. “I look at the pictures, hoping for a spark, and sometimes I get a flash of something, but that’s it.”

  “That’s likely a good thing.”

  “If I can’t remember, I can’t deal with it. Then the rest of me will start slipping away again. You and I both know that.”

  “Doesn’t mean you have to go along with our plan.”

  “You and this Masters, a killer?”

  “I’d be dead now if it weren’t for him,” Caitlin said defensively.

  “I feel bad for his kids.”

  “They’re what all this is about now.”

  “I don’t go along for the ride, those kids are dead.”

  Caitlin shrugged, nodded.

  “I do and I end up back at MacArthur-Rain, doing their bidding.”

  “No, you won’t. Not if I can help it.”

  “Can you, Caity?”

  “Wish I could say I was sure, but I can’t. There was a time I never doubted anything. Now that I look back, I figure maybe that made me reckless, left me feeling sorry for myself when I should’ve been moving on. I’m not gonna make that same mistake again. I’m not go
nna lie to you or myself. We’re up against it this time for sure. But these men gotta go down. If I didn’t believe that in my heart, I wouldn’t let you go now any more than I should have let you go eighteen months ago.”

  They lapsed into silence, Peter’s gaze starting to waver until a fresh bolt of pain seared through his spine.

  “The two of us, we never really had a chance, did we?” he asked her.

  “Came into each other’s lives at the wrong time. Wasn’t either of our faults. We just didn’t know enough to recognize it ourselves.”

  “You bring me some real clothes?”

  “I did.”

  Peter started to climb out of bed, remembered his pain pills sitting by its side in a plastic cup and swallowed them down. He slid his legs around gingerly, feeling all the pain Bahrain had left him to suffer.

  “Then let’s get to it, Caity.”

  . . .

  “Gonna be hell to pay once your captain gets wind of things,” Cort Wesley said outside the king-cab truck he’d rented, after they got Peter settled in the spacious rear seat, no easy task considering the toll even the slightest exertion took on his battered frame. Watching him walk in a hobbled gait, thanks to the strain from the awkward positions he’d been forced to assume, almost brought tears to Caitlin’s eyes and strengthened her resolve even more.

  She looked from Cort Wesley to her cell phone. “Captain Tepper will be calling soon as we miss the rendezvous. He’ll alert the border patrol once he’s onto us.”

  “There’s plenty of places we can cross neither him nor anybody else knows about.”

  “Let’s hope so,” said Caitlin.

  97

  THE MEXICAN BORDER, THE PRESENT

  “I shoulda known,” D. W. Tepper said, when they finally pulled over so Caitlin could return his call from a gas station pay phone.

  “You said it yourself, Captain.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “That we’d do this the way Jim Strong would have. Well, that’s what I’m doing.”

  “Am I missing something here?”

  “You are, sir.”

  Silence and static filled the line. For a moment, Caitlin figured she’d lost the connection. Then D. W. Tepper’s voice returned.

  “I don’t abide what you’re doing, Caitlin, but I understand it. Problem being if you don’t come back, I don’t know how I can live with myself. Not that I got much living left in me, anyway. . . .”

  Caitlin took a deep breath, steadying herself. “This is about more than me now, D. W.”

  “Two Rangers got killed over this yesterday, lest you forget.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. They’re in my thoughts too. You gotta trust me, D. W. I know what I’m doing.”

  She heard him take a deep chortling breath. “You have any idea how many times Jim Strong said that to me?”

  “Was he ever wrong?”

  “Not even once.”

  “There you go, then.”

  “Can you tell me what it is you got up your sleeve? Can you tell me that much anyway?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I did, Captain.”

  They took turns driving, night having fallen by the time they reached the border. Peter slept restlessly in the backseat, shifting and shaking, his dreams haunted by the men who had broken his body and mind. He needed a constant stream of painkillers just to take the edge off the agony, further marring his sleep with whimpers and moans, as if he were responding to nonexistent voices.

  Cort Wesley was behind the wheel when night fell and the border came and went with nothing to advertise its presence. Just saw grass, chaparral and endless rolling hills growing out of the dust-soaked flatlands. They ran the air-conditioning on high but kept the windows cracked open to let the outside smells of sage and weak cinnamon inside the cab to keep the air from getting stale. More miles came and went, the road surface growing increasingly uneven before seeming to vanish altogether.

  Then both their cell phones rang.

  98

  MEXICO, THE PRESENT

  “I’m impressed,” said Garza, “you coming alone.”

  Caitlin and Cort Wesley exchanged a wary glance. “You a man of your word, Garza?” she asked him.

  “Guess you’re going to find that out firsthand. Just keep heading south. Make your destination between Torreón and Saltillo.”

  “That where we’ll find Casa del Diablo?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Man’s eyeballing us at night in the middle of nowhere,” Cort Wesley bemoaned, shaking his head.

  “Welcome to the postmodern world,” said Peter, stirring in the truck’s rear seat.

  “Mister, I just spent five years inside slab concrete walls where the television got two channels. Postmodern and me aren’t exactly compatible.”

  “Get used to it. Traffic cameras, security cameras, ATM cameras, cameras at the bank, the supermarket, your picture taken every time you make a credit card transaction. Carry a cell phone and anyone can find you at any time. Turn on your computer and somebody’s following what movies you’re renting, what books you’re buying and what sites you’re visiting on the Internet. Privacy’s done, finished.”

  “I’d like to tell you something,” Cort Wesley said.

  “Please.” Peter beckoned to him.

  “I wanted to thank you. It’s a brave thing you’re doing.”

  “I remembered something else,” Peter told them both. “Wrote it down so I’d have something to hold onto. That last night in Houston after I quit the project, I went to sleep figuring I’d be back home the next morning. Then I wake up with a terrible headache in a small, steamy, hot room with bright lights in my eyes. First thing I remembered so far about Bahrain.”

  “Delladonne never got shit from you,” Caitlin told him. “Threw animals more fit for the zoo into the mix and still couldn’t get what he wanted. You beat him, Peter, you beat him with your brain and your will.”

  “Other three members of my team weren’t so lucky.”

  “But who knows how many other lives you saved in the process?”

  Peter held his gaze out the window into the empty darkness beyond. “I don’t want to remember any more of what they did to me, Caity. I look at those pictures from Bahrain and I don’t want to remember what happened in that room. I’d rather slip away again.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Peter turned back, regarding both Caitlin and Cort Wesley. “Two of you got something planned. You wouldn’t be walking into this otherwise.”

  “We’ll see,” said Caitlin.

  Their cell phones rang again four hundred miles past the border, midnight having come and gone, the sky turning from black to gray, the moon starting to slip out from behind the clouds.

  “You’re getting close now,” Garza told them. “There’s going to be a gravel road up ahead two miles that runs along the Sierra Madre. Take that road and keep the mountains on your left. Casa del Diablo’s not too far away at that point. Hey, el Rinche,” he said, using the old Mexican slang for “Ranger,” “you there?”

  “I’m here,” said Caitlin.

  “There’s going to be a whole new war starting soon. Not limited to Texas, though. Call it a full-scale invasion. You’re going to need a million Rangers to win this time, el Rinche, you can bank on that.”

  “I wanna talk to my boys,” Cort Wesley told Garza.

  “I understand you’ve killed a number of my associates over the years, outlaw. You sure you’ve got no Mexican blood pumping through you, not even a little? Think hard now.”

  “Put my sons on, boludo.”

  Garza chuckled lightly on the other end of the line. “They’ll be on speaker, you get any ideas.”

  A pause was followed by a crackly voice clearing its throat, then, “It’s me. Dylan.”

  Next to Caitlin in the passenger seat, Cort Wesley’s hands were trembling. “He treating you boys all right, son?”

  “Not really, no. But he hasn�
�t hurt us. We’re okay mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  “We’re scared.”

  “Got call to be, son, but not for much longer. On my way to get you right now and all this is gonna be a bad memory come the morning.”

  Silence.

  “You still there, boy?”

  “I’m here,” Dylan said, choking back sobs.

  “Tell your brother what I told you.”

  “He’s here. He heard.”

  “Just a little longer now. We’re almost there.”

  Click.

  Caitlin watched Cort Wesley staring out the window into the moonlit night beyond, the air rich with the sweet scents of mesquite and sagebrush.

  “This better work, Ranger.”

  99

  CASA DEL DIABLO, THE PRESENT

  They continued down the gravel road, keeping the hulking shape of the Sierra Madre on their left the whole time. The mountains shrank in the growing distance, as the road angled to the west deeper into the Mexican wasteland.

  Casa del Diablo appeared first as a speck of light that gradually grew into a dim swatch carved out of the dark night. It was like looking at a half-developed picture, the town before them not fully formed. Emerging from shadow toward a low-wattage substance.

  Drawing closer, they realized the road had curved subtly back to the southeast. Combined with the western bent of the Sierra Madre in these parts, the result was to make the mountains the border for Casa del Diablo’s entire western flank and part of its southern. Any form of ground attack could be easily repelled and a strike from the air could succeed only in daylight and even then at its own peril, based on the defenses Caitlin expected Garza had set in place.

  Caitlin hadn’t seen an electrical line for a hundred miles, meaning power here was self-generated. The gravel road’s approach spilled onto a single main avenue that bisected a series of buildings of varying sizes on both sides of it.