by Jon Land
Caitlin slowed the truck to a crawl, the windows open now to let in the smell of sun-baked dust and char coming from a wood fire somewhere about. Up close, the town was much darker than from afar, as if Garza had turned roof-mounted lanterns on to act as a beacon for them. There was also a loud droning hum, like a giant pack of buzzing mosquitoes in the air. Generators in all likelihood, massive ones concentrated mostly in two large, faded wood-frame buildings diagonally across from each other on the lone street. Strangely, the moon that had been prevalent mere minutes ago had disappeared from the sky, even though she could see no cloud cover in evidence.
Maybe this really was the House of the Devil. . . .
The truck’s headlights sprayed light on random multistory buildings that looked like flophouses or cheap hotels.
“Where Garza must house his workers,” Cort Wesley noted grimly, following Caitlin’s gaze. “Peasant labor. My guess being that the only way any of them leave here is either in a box or with a promotion up the food chain.”
“The former much more likely.”
“Yeah.”
Rival headlights blared at them suddenly from the far end of the street. Caitlin brought the truck to a halt and killed the engine. In the slots between the glare, she could see a number of armed men flanking a white-suited figure holding each of Cort Wesley’s sons on either side of him. A fedora was tipped low over his forehead, cloaking the rest of his face in shadows.
“Garza,” Cort Wesley said, half under his breath, opening his door as Caitlin opened hers.
They emerged from the truck together and moved into the spill of its headlights dueling with those of the vehicles parked farther down the road behind Garza and Cort Wesley’s sons. Heat mist rose from the engine block and wafted forward, adding to the murkiness of the night. Caitlin trailed it upward and caught sight of the gunmen on the rooftops and in the windows. Dozens of rifles aimed downward on them, reducing their margin of error to zero.
“That’s close enough,” Garza said in nearly perfect English. The spill of their headlights caught his white teeth wide with a smile. “Have the genius climb out now too.”
Caitlin moved to help Peter from the cab’s rear, watching him wince as he extended his feet and let them touch the ground. His muscles had cramped from the long ride and he needed her support just to draw even with Cort Wesley, still crimped up and listing to one side.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, outlaw,” Garza continued, “about both of you. Are the two of you really as good as I hear?”
“Depends on your definition,” Caitlin told him.
“I’ve never killed an el Rinche before.”
“Do that tonight and you better find another planet to inhabit, you know what’s good for you.”
Garza took his hands from his pockets and showed them his empty palms. “This doesn’t have to end that way. I’m a man of my word, Ranger. Which is more than I can say for the two of you.”
Caitlin and Cort Wesley exchanged a quick, uneasy glance, wondering if their whole plan had gone to hell.
“You’re both carrying pistols. Would you be so kind as to toss them well out before you?”
Caitlin and Cort Wesley complied, both breathing a sigh of relief. Their pistols lifted through the air like horseshoes, kicking up dust into the cool night air when they landed.
“That’s better. Now we can do business. Send the genius forward and I’ll send your sons forward.”
“You’re not gonna let us walk out of here,” Caitlin charged, her voice echoing slightly through the town’s emptiness.
“Yes and no, el Rinche. The outlaw and his sons will be free to walk out of Casa del Diablo. If they can survive the desert, they get to live.” Garza curled his upper lip toward his nose in the semblance of a snarl. “You can live too if the genius decides to talk. If he doesn’t, he’s gonna watch my men slice you up one piece at a time. You can send him this way now.”
Peter pushed himself forward between Caitlin and Cort Wesley. She reached out and grasped his shoulder, pleading with her eyes. But he shook his head slowly, shrugged her hand off and hobbled on into the five rows of headlights. Through the haze Caitlin could see Dylan and Luke start forward as well, the older boy with an arm tucked over the younger one’s shoulder, helping him on.
In that moment Caitlin thought of lying on her back in the West Texas Chihuahuan Desert with Charlie Weeks, certain she was going to die. But this gave helplessness a whole new meaning. There was nothing she could do, absolutely nothing. She felt like a fool for betraying D. W. Tepper and hated herself for betraying the legacy of Jim Strong and all the others who’d come before him, a proud lineage done a terrible disservice by her in the Mexican wilderness. All because she had put her trust in someone she had no reason to trust at all.
That’s when the roar of a powerful engine drew everyone’s attention to the head of the street. A pair of high beams flashed on and a black SUV ground to a tire-squealing stop a hundred feet behind their truck.
Caitlin glimpsed Garza raise the low-hanging tip of his fedora and cup a hand over his eyes, squinting to better focus on a huge, long-coated figure who climbed out of the SUV, the springs recoiling in relief at his exit. From his size and anomalously agile gait, she recognized him as the giant she’d dueled with at Maura Torres’s house.
“What are you doing here, Colonel Paz?” Garza yelled to him, his words echoing in the cool night air. “Did Delladonne send you?”
Guillermo Paz stopped well back of the pickup truck, sheathed in the spill of his SUV’s headlights. “Come to finish what I started.”
“That’s no longer necessary.”
“Yes, it is.”
And that’s when the first blast sounded.
100
CASA DEL DIABLO, THE PRESENT
About time, Caitlin thought.
She hit the ground hard as Cort Wesley rushed out toward the point where his sons and Peter were about to converge. Above her, high to the right, a raised portico on which a trio of gunmen had been perched had been blasted into smoky splinters, no trace of the gunmen anywhere to be seen.
Caitlin rolled onto her back, thinking of the weapons stowed on the truck’s rear-seat floor, as the giant yanked back the sides of his long coat and whipped out a pair of shaved-down assault rifles with duct-taped banana clips. The clips gave him sixty shots from each instead of thirty, the shaved-down assault rifles looking like toys in his grasp. He opened fire on both sides of the street simultaneously, shredding windows as well as the men poised behind them. His aim was uncanny, making Caitlin think of young Luke Torres, son of Cort Wesley Masters, shooting every bad guy in sight in the Texas Ranger video game.
“Do you know who this is?” the Spanish-accented thick voice asked after she answered the call in Company D headquarters, as Cort Wesley looked on.
“No.”
“Think back a few nights. Think about my eyes.”
And then she remembered the giant rampaging through Maura Torres’s home, impervious to the bullets she poured his way. Meeting his gaze in that one moment had stuck with her ever since, enough to have her dialing down the air-conditioning every time she thought of it. Listening to his quiet breaths on the other end of the line, Caitlin was sure she could smell that odor like spoiled meat again.
“I want to help you,” he’d told her. “My way of squaring things.”
“With who?”
“Not really sure about that yet.”
“How ’bout why?”
“Haven’t got that answer either.”
“And I’m supposed to trust you?”
“Close your eyes and pretend you can see mine again.”
In spite of herself, Caitlin complied.
“You believe me now?” he asked her.
“Shoot him!” Garza was yelling. “Shoot them all!”
In that instant, more RPG fire sizzled like Fourth of July firecrackers twisting for the sky. Massive chasms dug in the buildings coughed shards of g
lass and wood fragments into the air to shower back down on the street, filling the night with the smells of scorched lumber and flesh. Caitlin thought she might have heard screams but they were drowned out by the now constant cacophony of gunfire tracing both up and down from the center of the street.
More figures, much smaller, lurched out from positions of hiding to join the giant in raining fire on the forces of Emiliato Valdez Garza. Caitlin took advantage of the chaos to scrabble through the onslaught of bullets and gun smoke toward the arsenal stowed in the back of their truck.
Cort Wesley took Peter Goodwin down first, hitting him high and hard enough to spill him forward into Luke and Dylan. The four of them crumbled with Cort Wesley on top shielding the other three. Goodwin’s bones felt brittle as bark, the jarring impact seeming close to breaking them free of his flesh.
“Ranger!” Cort Wesley yelled.
“Coming!” Caitlin Strong yelled back at him and he twisted from the clump to see her dashing forward with twin M-16s in hand through the rattle of bullets kicking flecks of dirt and rubble against her boots and jeans.
On the other end of the street, Cort Wesley was dimly aware of Garza’s men encasing their boss in a protective bubble that withered with falling bodies as more fire raged from the giant and his men. They were tiny compared to the giant, darting and dashing through the smoke and mist.
One knelt and fired an RPG into the largest building on the eastern side of the street, the one from which the loudest hum of generator music had emanated. The upper part of a wall exploded on impact, a miss mostly but enough to reveal the bright lighting of what could only be Garza’s chip manufacturing plant beyond. The small man was reloading his launcher when a barrage of fire from an adjacent roof cut him down from behind.
“Masters!” Caitlin Strong screamed, tossing him one of the M-16s.
He rolled off Peter Goodwin and his boys, angling to fire on the circle of men enclosing Garza. But the man in the white suit was gone, only his low-hanging hat rolling across the kicked-up gravel in his place.
In that moment, Guillermo Paz was still unsure exactly what he was doing. Even as expended shells danced from his twin assault rifles, even as the bodies tumbled from his bullets like pop-up figures in an arcade game, he was trying to make sense of it.
He had never considered himself a thoughtful man until recently when the blurred realities of good and evil began to tug at him. He had confessed as much to priests in two countries now but their words had brought him little solace. His solace, instead, was to be found in the bullets that had defined and determined his life. And in the spill of heat and deafening bursts, the mire of moral murkiness began to recede.
He finally grasped the meaning he had glimpsed in Caitlin Strong’s eyes that had changed him. In protecting those boys she’d shown a side of herself that Paz realized he longed for. He needed to find the same singular meaning in himself, to see in his own eyes what he had glimpsed in hers. Kierkegaard himself had said as much, and finally Paz knew what he had to do to be true to the philosopher’s words:
Destroy the woman’s enemies, those who had stolen his mission and in so doing determined their own fates.
“I want to help you. My way of squaring things.”
That was Paz’s test, to get the woman to trust him. Do that and he’d be free to move to the next level, take the next step and see where it brought him.
The assault rifles clicked empty simultaneously. Paz stopped to reverse the magazines, feeling bullets smack up against his body armor like BBs against flesh. He resumed firing and reached the truck that had delivered the woman and the others here. Paz had planned everything with the five dwarfs he had left, the location of Casa del Diablo well known to him thanks to President Chavez’s business dealings with Garza.
Paz saw his evolution crystallized before him, saw the steps he needed to take to fulfill it. He wanted to know the woman’s strength, feel that strength, share that strength.
“And I’m supposed to trust you?”
“Close your eyes and pretend you can see mine again.”
Paz felt a bullet take him low, just over the knee, and another sneak under his flak jacket and burn into his side. Still, he kept walking, killing as many men as he could see.
“You believe me now?”
101
CASA DEL DIABLO, THE PRESENT
Caitlin followed the circle of men enclosing Garza down a plank sidewalk fetid with mold and storm backwash. Workers spilled out of the assembly plant in a constant stream, fleeing in all directions and making it impossible for her to find a sight line to Garza with her M-16, a rifle she’d never once fired anywhere but the range. Finally she discarded it, slowing to snatch pistols from the belts of two of Garza’s soldiers in its place.
She ran with both pistols clacking away in her hands, firing through the gaps in the sea of workers rushing from the plant. One of Garza’s guards went down, then another, by which time Caitlin had stooped to replace her empty pistols with two more. When only three of his guards remained, the shrinking circle veered left through the doors of the factory, pushing past a stream of exiting workers garbed in surgical masks and latex gloves.
Caitlin pressed her shoulders against the wall alongside those now open doors. Part of the wall two stories up had been taken out by an RPG, smoke and flames continuing to belch out from inside. She could feel the heaviness of the structure in stark contrast to its ramshackle appearance. Casa del Diablo, headquarters of Garza’s vast criminal empire, had been built to look weathered, old and thus innocuous. A ghost town. But that was just another sham to cloak the truth within.
His men, those who made and packaged his drugs, worked and lived here. But Casa del Diablo wasn’t just about drugs; the hum of machinery and sudden wash of clean, cool air from inside the building in which Garza had taken refuge told Caitlin this was likely where the Cerberus chip had been manufactured and where the Fire-Arrow chip was being produced even now.
This place had killed Charlie Weeks and ruined Peter’s life. In all the stories told by her granddad, of lying in wait your whole life to make the bad guys pay, she finally saw a just ending for herself.
She waited for the last of the plant’s workers to emerge, shedding their sterile garb as they fled, and then twisted through the doorway firing, finding herself inside a massive multileveled floor brightly lit by the haze of white, glowing fluorescent bulbs. The air-conditioned chill cooled her steaming skin and she scanned the area in search of Garza and his men to no avail amid the long rows of bench seating where workers had been assembling the Fire Arrow chip Peter had designed. Her ears struggled against the blare of a high-pitched fire alarm activated by the numerous explosions that had pierced the now smoke-filled plant from the street.
A few more steps inside brought her to the heavy machinery that packaged and sealed the chips’ shipping containers. Motion flashed to her right and Caitlin hit the floor hard, barely avoiding the salvo of bullets fired on her from everywhere at once it seemed, while just over her head conveyor belts rolled in a continuous arc, lugging boxes ready for shipment.
Caitlin crawled about the floor as more fire chimed overhead, clanging into the heavy machines and ricocheting off the reinforced walls. More men than she thought inside, obviously, having failed to account for the guards already on their posts.
But Garza was among them, and if the phantoms of her past were to be slain, and the ghosts vanquished, she had to finish this here and now.
Cort Wesley cared only for his sons. In those long, endless minutes they were all that mattered, and he kept them covered with his body while firing his M-16 defensively in an expanding arc at Garza’s soldiers who spilled out of the buildings in what seemed like a constant stream.
“Keep down!” he yelled when Dylan raised his head, Cort Wesley smelling the fear rising off the boy.
The gunfire slammed his eardrums, his mind filling with a rage that shortened his breaths and left him screaming inside. He couldn�
�t kill everyone behind the deaths of Pablo Asuna and Maura Torres, but he could kill plenty here in Casa del Diablo. He saw Maura with every sweep of the M-16’s barrel, with every clack of expended rounds, realizing in those moments how much he had missed her in their years apart. He should have gone up and knocked on the door instead of remaining on the street in Asuna’s old Ford. Had driven off promising himself to do it another day, which now would never come.
Missed opportunities. But not now, not again.
Cort Wesley yanked a spare magazine from beneath his jacket and slammed it home, missing nary a beat of bullets or fury pouring outward. He dragged Peter Goodwin in closer, aware that the big man and his much smaller troops had lost the element of surprise that had won them the first round. Around him, fires in the surrounding buildings crackled and hissed, throwing flickering light that occasionally flamed bright onto the chaos.
“Come on,” he said suddenly, dragging his boys up to their knees. “The truck, we’ve got to make it to the truck!”
“I . . . can’t,” Goodwin managed.
“I’ll carry you if I have to, just get ready to move!”
Cort Wesley wasn’t thinking of the truck for escape now, so much as cover. Big heavy steel sides in the tailgate that would hold against small arms fire, the exterior doors too if he could get them inside the cab. He got his boys up first, shielding them as best he could while lifting Peter Goodwin bodily to his feet. He looped an arm around the hobbled man’s shoulders to hoist him along, Dylan and Luke close against him while he rotated the M-16 in his free hand, clacking off quick bursts of bullets.
The giant and his men caught his advance down the street and offered covering fire. Two more RPGs whizzed overhead, blasting men literally into the air on impact. Cort Wesley continued on through a fissure in their fire, emptying the last of his bullets into a pair of Garza’s onrushing soldiers and then swung the butt around one-handed, cracking it across the face of a third.