Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  STRONG JUSTICE

  STRONG JUSTICE

  A CAITLIN STRONG NOVEL

  Jon Land

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

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  For the Texas Rangers.

  “One Riot, One Ranger.”

  True then. True now.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Those who’ve been with me through the long string of tales that cover twenty-seven years now are used to me using this page to thank those who’ve either helped me tell them better or made it possible for me to tell them at all. Lots of the usual suspects here, my appreciation stronger with each book for the names you’ve seen before and will see again.

  These aren’t great times for the publishing business, but that hasn’t slowed the support of the Tor/Forge Books family headed by Tom Doherty and Linda Quinton, dear friends who publish books “the way they should be published,” to quote my late agent, the legendary Toni Mendez. Paul Stevens, Patty Garcia, Karen Lovell, Phyllis Azar, and especially Natalia Aponte are there for me at every turn. Natalia’s a brilliant editor and friend who outdid herself on this one. Publishing a book is definitely a team sport, and I’ve certainly got a great one behind me.

  An answer to any question, meanwhile, remains only a phone call away thanks to the now retired Emery Pineo, my former junior high science teacher and still the smartest man I know. Thanks also to Mike Blakely, a terrific musician and writer in his own right, for help with all things Texas. Dylan Gregory helped out with some of the gun stuff, and Laura Aames provided terrific insight into Kilgore, Texas—the model for the town of Sweetwater you’re about to encounter.

  Speaking of Kilgore, it was the wondrous Sandra Brown who gave birth to that entire subplot featuring Caitlin Strong’s grandfather Earl in an e-mail to me a couple years back about the legendary Ranger, Manuel “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas. Many of you will wonder if the Texas Rangers really did go to war with Al Capone’s Outfit out of Chicago in the 1930s. Well, truth be told there’s no evidence to say they did, but none to say they didn’t either. And since The Outfit never did take up roots in Texas during the oil boom years . . .

  Well, you be the judge. But first you’ll have to turn the page, prepared to meet some old friends and some new ones as we begin.

  P.S. For those interested in more information about the history of the Texas Rangers, and to see where a lot of my info comes from, I recommend The Texas Rangers and Time of the Rangers, a pair of superb books by a great writer named Mike Cox, also published by Forge.

  Justice consists not in being neutral between right and

  wrong, but in finding out the right and upholding it,

  wherever found, against the wrong.

  —TEDDY ROOSEVELT

  PROLOGUE

  THE RANGER’S PRAYER

  O God, whose end is justice

  Whose strength is all our stay,

  Be near and bless my mission

  As I go forth today.

  Let wisdom guide my actions,

  Let courage fill my heart

  And help me, Lord, in every hour

  To do a Ranger’s part.

  Protect when danger threatens,

  Sustain when trails are rough;

  Help me to keep my standard high

  And smile at each rebuff.

  When night comes down upon me,

  I pray thee, Lord, be nigh,

  Whether on lonely scout, or camp,

  Under the Texas sky,

  Keep me, O God, in life

  And when my days shall end,

  Forgive my sins and take me in,

  For Jesus’ sake, Amen.

  —Pierre Bernard Hill,

  Texas Ranger chaplain

  WEST TEXAS PLAINS; 1881

  “Smell that?” Texas Ranger captain George W. Arrington asked from the top of the hill he’d pushed his horse up to better search for water.

  William Ray Strong sniffed the air, catching an aroma that reminded him of a rank buffalo carcass left to spoil on the range. “Yes, sir, I do. Dead bodies for sure.”

  “It’s coming from the settlement over by that creek bed,” Arrington said, eyeing the horse-drawn wagons surrounding a small nesting of tents and tables.

  “Pioneers?” William Ray raised.

  “This far out? Not likely. You see anybody moving?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Me neither. You may have caught the Frontier Battalion at the close of its days, son,” Arrington said, referring to the combination of Texas Rangers and local militiamen founded to track down the Apache and Comanche making war along Texas’s expansive frontier known as the Panhandle. “But it looks like we got ourselves something that needs tending to.”

  William Ray turned his horse to follow Arrington’s stallion back down the hill. The eight-man Texas Ranger detachment William Ray had just joined had been looking for water for most of the day now, an effort that seemed hopeless with nothing but the arid plains before them. But then the ground began to harden underfoot, the nature of the country changing dramatically as they climbed this short hill to find a dry salt lake off in the distance. Arrington told William Ray that in the West Texas desert such lakes often held freshwater in the form of streams or creeks on their western sides.

  Arrington lapsed into silence and William Ray rode alongside him all the way to the edge of the camp where the smell thickened until it was all the air seemed to carry. The legendary Ranger captain dismounted and led his company forward with guns drawn.

  The first bodies came into view with the buzzards swooping down from all angles to pick at the dead flesh. All but Arrington covered their mouths with bandannas as they approached, the most wizened ones holding their rifles extended.

  “No need for that, boys,” Arrington told them as he strode into the makeshift settlement, scattering the buzzards. “Whatever happened here’s long done.”

  “Renegades, you figure, Captain?” one of the men asked.

  William Ray watched Arrington kneel by one body, move on to another, and then a third before responding. “None I’ve ever seen. These wounds ain’t from arrows or tomahawks and the bodies ain’t been stripped. Nope, somebody cut these folks down as they stood.”

  “Put up a heck of a fight by the look of things,” William Ray heard himself say before he could stop himself.

  “You see a single defensive posture or rifle in evidence?”

  “No.”

  Stepping over a blood patch, Arrington moved to a wagon and pulled a Winchester from its rear.

  “There you have it,” he said, tossing William Ray the rifle.

  “It’s full,” William Ray told him, sniffing the barrel. “Ain’t even been fired.”

  “Dozen men, eight women, six children,” the company scout, a half-breed who called himself Bear Claw reported. “Whatever happened here happened quick, sometime yesterday by the look of things.”

  “How long you figure they been here?” Arrington asked him.

  “Six, eight weeks at least. Wait out the heat with all the water they needed. Found a map indicates they came from the north.”

  “Must not’ve known this was still Injun country,” another member of the
company said, spitting tobacco.

  “This wasn’t Indians,” Bear Claw said, staring up into the sinking sun as if it might hold the answer. “Wasn’t anyone near as I can tell, being that I can’t find a single track either coming or going.”

  “Any idea what that leaves us with exactly?” Arrington asked him.

  “Mishotunga,” Bear Claw muttered.

  “In English, please.”

  “Mishotunga means evil spirit in Comanche. It’s said that such a spirit haunts the land in these parts, seeking vengeance on those who violate it.”

  Captain Arrington’s expression soured. “Evil spirit, eh?” He found a barrel full of water and dunked his head into it, coming out with his hair twisted into tight gnarls with the texture of twine. “We’re gonna bury the bodies, water the horses, and set ourselves up our own defenses,” Arrington told his men. “Make sure we’re ready when whatever it was that did this comes back.”

  SAN ANTONIO; 1984

  “Another, Grandpa, another story!”

  Earl Strong shifted his granddaughter, Caitlin, from his left knee to his right, wincing from the effort. “So which one you want to hear next?”

  “Sweetwater!”

  “Again?”

  “Again! How you cleaned up the town way back when.”

  Suddenly Earl didn’t feel the pain that clung to him almost all the time these days. He might not have looked eighty-five, but mirrors could be terribly deceitful things.

  “Way back when, little girl,” he chuckled.

  “Sweetwater, Grandpa, Sweetwater!”

  Earl settled back in the easy chair, eight-year-old Caitlin’s head nestled against his chest smelling like the first flowers of spring. He loved telling his old tales of the Texas Rangers, just as his father, William Ray Strong, had done with him.

  “All right, little girl,” Earl started, “it was like this. By the time I rode the train into that town . . .”

  SWEETWATER, EAST TEXAS; 1931

  . . . Sweetwater had been struck hard and fast by the oil boom. The poverty resulting from the drought that killed the cotton crops had barely receded when the Great Depression hit. Then black gold stitched a thick swatch of desperate hope across the state of Texas through Ranger, Cisco, Breckenridge, Burkburnett, Eldorado and Amarillo before finally spilling out of the ground in Sweetwater.

  Overnight, Sweetwater had swelled from a farming klatch of five hundred to a boomtown of ten thousand wildcatters, speculators, and Depression-starved laborers desperate for work. Cities made of tents instead of lumber sprouted across mud-soaked fields in clear view of the wooden oil derricks climbing for the sky. Before long, these tent cities overflowed onto land both public and private. The most popular place to settle was the courthouse directly across the street from six town businesses, their rear walls sliced away to allow six wells to be sunk into the ground. Canvas flapped where two-by-fours and windows had been just days before.

  Constable Hollis Tyree, as close to a lawman as there was in Sweetwater, had to step across sleeping bodies blanketing Courthouse Square’s grass every morning on his way to work. The incessant spring rains had turned Sweetwater into a vast mud pit that added to the rancid stench of unwashed men in air already choked with the tarry smell of ground oil. It had been enough to make Tyree gag on more than one occasion, leaving him to wonder if there were somewhere else he’d be better off being.

  Tyree was a banker by trade who’d only become constable after drought and the Depression had killed his bank, since the job allowed him to keep the home and stretch of land that had been in the family for generations. But the boom made him severely regret that decision. The crowds and clutter he could handle well enough, along with the constant clanking of the churning derricks that sucked the black gold from wells that littered Sweetwater like giant rabbit holes. With those crowds and clutter, though, came an ornery lot of thieves, prostitutes, gamblers, and gunmen swarming into the town. Hollis Tyree had never seen a more unsavory assortment of humanity, utterly indistinguishable from the oil field workers who became victim to all manner of robbery and scam.

  He’d never been trained as a lawman or even carried a gun, leaving him out of sorts and ill-equipped to deal with the complaints from residents and ruffians alike. Watching Sweetwater literally dissolve before his eyes, Tyree finally sloshed across the mud-soaked road into the Western Union telegraph office, its windows boarded up after some gunplay got out of hand.

  “Where you want this sent?” Fred Hatchings, the operator, asked him.

  “Don’t know for sure, since I never had a call to send one like it before,” Tyree replied. “Governor’s office, I suppose.”

  “Town’s going to hell, Hollis,” Hatchings said, beginning to tap his fingers across the telegraph keys.

  “True enough, Fred, but it ain’t there yet.”

  A return wire from the office of the governor said to expect help on the noon train on Wednesday, help in the form of none other than the Texas Rangers. Tyree was there to greet the train and stood anxiously on the depot’s plank platform, eyeing the few men who disembarked. Not one wore the cinco pesos badge or Stetson of the Rangers. He lingered, hoping against hope that the saviors of Sweetwater would emerge last. But the last man off was as scruffy and unshaven as all the rest, though Tyree sensed something different about the stranger when he passed. Something about the way he carried himself, enough to make Tyree suspect he was some kind of regulator or professional gun hired by speculators to police their fields. Instead of things getting better with the coming of the noon train, they may have gotten appreciably worse.

  Tyree was making his rounds Friday night when a chair tossed through a window drew his attention to the local saloon that had been bought out for a song by a greedy land baron. He entered to find a man being beaten with a splintered chair leg.

  Tyree drew his nightstick. “That’ll be enough there,” he said, as bravely as he could manage.

  “Says who?” demanded the big man holding the chair leg.

  Tyree made sure his constable badge was in plain view. “The law.”

  A hefty portion of the saloon broke out into spontaneous laughter.

  “The law got a name?” the big man asked, still grasping the chair leg.

  Tyree saw how the squared-off top section had splintered and gulped down some air. “Constable Hollis Tyree.”

  The big man dropped the chair leg and brushed back his jacket to reveal the gun holstered on his hip. “Well, we caught this dung heap here cheating at cards and done deputized ourselves to dispense justice. Sound fair to you, Constable Tyree?”

  “I’m afraid it don’t.”

  The big man took a step closer to him. “Pardon my rudeness. The name’s Rawlins, Jack Rawlins.”

  Tyree felt the breath bottleneck in his throat; a collective gasp coursed through the saloon.

  “Guess you’ve heard of me,” continued Rawlins.

  “Heard of a gunman went by the name Fast Jack Rawlins some years back.”

  Rawlins tipped his cap. “That’d be me, Constable. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” He grinned, before his face hardened into a sneer. “Now be on your way and let us handle this.”

  Tyree held his ground, trapped between thoughts and intentions. If he walked out of the bar now, he might as well keep walking until Sweetwater was behind him. If he stayed, they’d likely be carrying him out instead. He’d heard lots of stories about what the old west in these parts had been like. Just never figured he’d be living in it.

  “Look here, sir,” Tyree started, finding his voice and then losing it again when the clack of boot steps across the floor froze him.

  He watched the tight crowd part to allow a man to sift through, Tyree recognizing him as the stranger who’d been last off the noon train on Wednesday. But he looked taller, his shoulders straight instead of hunched, his dark eyes filled with the kind of menace Tyree wondered if he’d misinterpreted on first glance.

  The stranger stopped twe
nty feet from Tyree, leaving Jack Rawlins centered between them.

  “You’re under arrest, Jack,” he said.

  “Says who?” Rawlins sneered.

  As the entire bar watched, the stranger pushed back both sides of his great coat to reveal a pair of pearl-handled revolvers holstered on either hip and a dull badge pinned to his vest.

  “Texas Rangers in general. Ranger Earl Strong, Company D, in particular.”

  Another gasp rose through the crowd, as whispers were exchanged.

  The sneer slipped from Jack Rawlins’s expression, replaced by nothing at all.

  “Guess you heard of me,” Earl said. “Now listen to me, Fast Jack, you got a couple of choices here, some that’ll get you dead and some that won’t. You think you’re good enough to take me on, let’s have at it. Otherwise, slip your gun out and drop it to the floor. There ain’t no third option, by the way.”

  The moment froze, nobody in the bar moving an inch. Tyree used the time to study Earl Strong’s face—leathery, yet surprisingly young. The dispatches and magazine articles that followed his many famed exploits pegged his age in the early thirties, though his gravelly voice and harsh, dark eyes suggested a man of considerably more years or, perhaps, no measurable age at all. Earl “Strong-as-they-come,” as some called him, was thinner and lankier than in his pictures, the muscles wrapped over his frame sinewy and lithe. His narrow waist exaggerated the breadth of his shoulders and at that moment those shoulders looked preternaturally broad.

  Hollis Tyree watched Jack Rawlins smirk and shrug.

  “Guess we got no call for violence between us,” he said, lifting his pistol slowly from its holster.

  “No, Jack, we don’t.” Then, once Rawlins’s gun was deposited on the floor, “And that goes for the rest of you too. Pistols out and on the floor before you for Constable Tyree to confiscate and inventory.”

  Earl Strong turned back to the assembled mass that had frozen in place, letting his eyes hold briefly on Jack Rawlins.