Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  Cort Wesley discarded the pistol and retrieved the piece of paper Frankie Jr. had let fall to the rug. He stepped over the shards of shattered glass and watched Frankie rise from his position of hiding, twin patches of urine staining his linen trousers.

  “I take checks, Junior,” Cort Wesley said, tossing the bill back at him. “And you should take better care of your father.”

  9

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “I don’t wear the boots you gave me to school,” Dylan told Caitlin, as they sat down at the lone canopied table on the patio of Starbucks’s Riverwalk location on West Crockett Street. “I saw you looking before. They’re cool, but not for school.”

  Caitlin found herself embarrassed by him noticing. “Tell me about Maria.”

  Dylan looked up from the pedestrian traffic crowding past the Hard Rock Café directly below. “She was brought up here against her will.”

  “You said she was kidnapped.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dylan nodded. “On her way home from school one day maybe six months back by men in a van. They blindfolded her and took her to this place where she was held prisoner, forced to do things until they drove her across the border with some other girls in the back of a truck with no windows. Said she almost roasted to death; could feel her skin ready to melt from the heat.”

  Dylan sipped his iced cappuccino, his lips coming away speckled with froth. Caitlin had suggested they talk over ice cream, which had drawn a caustic stare from him. He’d ordered the medium size with an extra shot, still no more caffeine than the energy drinks boys his age seemed to live on these days. He fell silent briefly and turned his gaze on a tour boat cruising past the Montezuma Cypress trees that rimmed this part of the channel.

  “How old was Maria when she was kidnapped?” Caitlin asked him as she watched a night heron swallow a crawfish whole on the other side of Riverwalk. The day’s blistering heat had already melted most of the ice in her cup of iced coffee, in spite of the stiff breeze that had blown welcome cloud cover over the sun.

  “Her English is about as good as my Spanish, but it was just after she turned fifteen.”

  “Your age.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that too. Yesterday, Maria says, these men she’d never seen before came to the place where she’d been kept prisoner and picked a dozen of the girls including her out of a row. Stuck them in the back of a panel truck and headed north. Way she described one of them made my hair stand on end, Caitlin.”

  Funny how she liked how Dylan said her name, confident enough to use it now like a man but still sounding pretty much like a boy. Mostly he was starting to sound like Cort Wesley, not just in pitch but also tone, the way he held his words and the confidence with which he spoke them. Dylan had his late mother’s dark brooding looks and his father’s intensity and magnetism; it was no wonder girls flocked to him like pack rats. Caitlin had been there when his mother, Maura Torres, was killed and had saved Dylan’s life, along with his younger brother’s. The bond forged between her and the two boys that day was the strangest and strongest she’d ever felt, different certainly from her feelings for Cort Wesley but just as deep.

  “And when I saw him,” Dylan was saying, “I can tell you her words didn’t do him justice.”

  That was enough to snap Caitlin all the way alert again. “Wait a minute, you say you saw this man?”

  “Just after I met Maria. She was hiding out around my school.”

  “Smart girl. Easy to hide among other kids.”

  “Well, it didn’t work. She stuck out.”

  “Why?”

  “Her clothes didn’t fit. Looked like she’d plucked them off somebody’s clothesline or something. Turned out she stole them off a rack at a sidewalk sale.”

  “Okay,” Caitlin said, leaning forward as Dylan took a sip from his cup that left foam on his upper lip, “where does the man you said made your hair stand on end come in?”

  “He was the one in charge when they picked out the girls and brought them across the border. I saw him outside my school while I was talking to Maria. She came up to me first, asked to borrow some money when I was walking up to bus my lunch tray. I’d just handed her a five when I could tell something spooked her. Then I noticed the guy.”

  “Describe him.”

  “Weirdest-looking man I’ve ever seen,” Dylan said, voice wavering slightly at the mere memory. “Had a head that looked pumped full of air, hair that didn’t fit his scalp, and shiny skin.”

  “You say shiny skin?”

  “That’s right.” The boy nodded. “I don’t know how else to say it. He was wearing a sleeveless vest with no shirt and he had muscles bulging everywhere, enough to make my dad look small. But that wasn’t the real strange thing.”

  “What was?”

  “He had something clipped to his belt that ran into his arm like—What do they call those things they stick in you when you need fluids?”

  “An IV.”

  “That’s it. He had one of those. Thin, clear plastic tube. I’m sure of it.” Dylan hesitated. “Don’t you wanna know what happened next?”

  “I already do. You grabbed the girl and ran.”

  “Hopped a bus to East San Antone where I figured we could lay low ’til I got things sorted out.”

  Caitlin’s gaze narrowed a bit. “How’d Maria get away in the first place?”

  “Well, they crossed the border last night and headed north across the desert. Panel truck the girls were jammed into stopped so they could get some water and go to the bathroom since they’d been cooped up in there ever since they left Nuevo Laredo.”

  Nuevo Laredo . . .

  Caitlin felt her neck hairs stand on end. “Can you reach her, Dylan?”

  “I gave Maria my cell when the cops showed up. Knew they’d chase me instead of her. They always chase the boy, not the girl.”

  Smart kid, Caitlin thought, handing Dylan her BlackBerry cell phone. “Call her.”

  10

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “She’s not answering,” Dylan said, uneasy. The phone was still pressed to his ear, shaggy hair covering the casing.

  “Try again.”

  Dylan dialed again to no avail but held fast to the BlackBerry.

  “So Maria got away when they pulled over.”

  “It was early this morning. She waited until they left again, then started hitchhiking and got lucky after ten minutes or so. Driver left her off a few miles from my school and she just happened to walk near it around lunchtime. How the hell the weird guy find her, Caitlin?”

  “This kind of thing’s more common than you think.”

  “What kind of thing’s that?”

  “Young Mexican girls being forced into prostitution. It’s a kind of slavery, and more of it goes on than any of us can imagine.”

  “That’s goddamn sick!”

  “All that and more, son. Thing is, the wranglers—”

  “Wranglers? I thought they were called coyotes.”

  “Not the ones responsible for shepherding kidnapped girls like this across the border.”

  “Sounds like cattle.”

  “And it pretty much is. Anyway, the wranglers like this weird guy figure at least a few of the girls will try to run off at some point, so they outfit all of them with locators, GPS beacons no bigger than a quarter, to track them once that happens.”

  “That’s how he found her at my school,” Dylan concluded, his eyes starting to drift anxiously.

  “Be my guess. What’s wrong?”

  “Means he can still find her, no matter how well she hid.” Dylan raised Caitlin’s phone back to his ear. “I’m gonna try her again.

  “She’s on Hacienda,” Dylan said, relieved Maria had answered this time. “Says she’s mostly just been walking up and down the street.”

  “Good. Tell her to take off her belt.”

  “She changed clothes.”

  “What about her shoes?”

  “Kind of like sandals. They loo
ked pretty beat up.”

  “Have her ditch them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because wranglers usually plant the locators in belts or shoes, sometimes both.”

  Caitlin listened to Dylan relay her instructions, in a combination of Spanish and English. She could see the boy getting red in the face in frustration when the girl had trouble understanding him, looking so much like his father right at that point it almost scared her. Then his expression lengthened suddenly, his deep-set eyes growing uncertain as he cut off his words midstream. Suddenly boyish again and fearful.

  “What’s wrong?” Caitlin asked him.

  Dylan lowered the phone to his shoulder. “Maria says that guy’s back.”

  11

  EAST SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Macerio kept his eyes on his transponder, honing in on the position of the small flashing light now almost dead center on the screen. He looked up at the street and tried to impose a mental grid over it to pinpoint the girl’s position. She was close, very close.

  Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep . . .

  He’d turned the volume down so passersby would think he was simply text messaging someone. He could feel the dark metal hot in his hands, superheated by the sun that reddened his skin on contact and left his nerve endings raw and inflamed. The side effects of the drugs were to blame for that along with the hair loss that left him wearing an ill-fitting toupee he’d taken off a man he’d killed in Chochilla. This double-sided tape Macerio bought in a drugstore was supposed to make the toupee stay on, but sweating inevitably loosened it and he’d been doing a lot of that lately.

  Macerio’s father and grandfather had both died of cancer before they were forty-five. He never expected to live that long, but crossing forty left him reasoning that he hadn’t survived so much violence to let himself be stricken down as his relatives had. So he sought out an oncologist named Nobrega who practiced at General Hospital on Paseo Triunfo de la Republica in Juárez.

  “I want you to give me chemotherapy.”

  “But you’re not sick,” the doctor told him, mystified.

  “I will be, just like my father and grandfather. I can feel the cancer growing inside me now just as it did them. I want the chemotherapy to kill it before it kills me.”

  “I cannot do this,” Dr. Nobrega insisted.

  Macerio pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and started peeling off hundred-dollar bills.

  “This isn’t about money,” the doctor said. “I must follow protocol or risk losing my license.”

  Macerio took a picture of Nobrega’s family from his desktop and dropped it on the floor. Then he looked up and met the doctor’s gaze, grinning. “Nice-looking kids.”

  Macerio started the treatments the following day. The side effects were much worse than he’d been expecting. To combat some of them, especially the weakness, lethargy, and loss of appetite, Dr. Nobrega prescribed cortosteroids. When they proved to be of little help, Macerio replaced them on his own with daily injections of anabolic steroids. The weakness vanished and Macerio actually felt stronger than he ever had. So much so that he made Nobrega teach him how to rig the steroids to an IV that would keep them dripping into his body on a constant basis.

  That had enabled Macerio to continue working through the entire six weeks of his treatment. It had ended a month ago now, but most of the side effects, especially his lack of taste and sensitivity to the sun, had not abated. Even if they had, he doubted he would have stopped his IV treatments. The steroids had added fresh layers to his already heavily muscled frame, making him all the more effective at his work, especially with the women who fell into his charge. All told he had never felt better, taking great comfort in the fact that he had beaten the cancer before it had a chance to beat him. He didn’t like his ill-fitting, recycled hair or baby-sensitive skin, but those were things he could live with.

  Normally, neither Macerio nor his employers would’ve cared about the loss of a single puta destined to vanish into the streets or the immigration system. But he had special plans for this one. She had the look he liked: dark with almost Indian features and big, full eyes. Innocent and sensual at the same time. His employers would never miss her.

  But Macerio would.

  Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep . . .

  Straight ahead to the right, just a hundred feet away, Macerio judged, starting across the street.

  12

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Caitlin sped up to pass a rolling wreck of a car driving with its flashers on. She was just a few blocks from the corner of Rozan and Andujar, not far from a coin-operated laundry with big plate windows where Maria was hiding so she could have clear view of the street beyond. She felt Dylan tense next to her as she screeched into a left-hand turn and undid the strap on the holster holding her SIG Sauer.

  “You got another gun in your truck?” the boy asked her.

  “Couple of them.”

  “Maybe you should let me have one. I’m pretty good with a twelve-gauge.”

  “What do you think your dad would make of me doing that?”

  “He’s the one who taught me to shoot the twelve-gauge. My brother too.”

  “Luke? What in hell for?”

  “So if anyone ever comes gunning for us again, we’ll know what to do.”

  Caitlin nodded, feeling stupid and insensitive, a fifteen-year-old boy’s answer holding far more wisdom than her question.

  “We spot this weird-looking guy,” she told Dylan, “I just might do that.”

  Macerio stood in the shade of the alley, holding the dull, quarter-sized steel plate. He’d found it in the Dumpster near the girl’s sandals, which meant someone had told her to discard them. He’d searched the Dumpster while the afternoon sun baked his skin, ten minutes that left him feeling he’d been roasting in the fields for a whole day. His face came away red and raw from the effort, his weakened nerve endings so frazzled no amount of shade could relieve a sensation akin to someone scraping at his flesh with sandpaper.

  Macerio thought of his young, missing puta, one clever enough to shed the beacon that normally allowed him to track down his runaways with little effort. It happened, not often, but it did happen, he thought, as an SUV tore around the corner and flew past him down the street.

  Caitlin felt her front tire smack up against the curb directly in front of the coin-operated laundry, the SUV barely stopped when Dylan lunged out to meet a slim, dark-featured teenage girl wearing cuffed jeans that clung to her ankles. She watched the girl scan the street nervously as she lurched with Dylan back toward the SUV, had never seen more fear in any pair of eyes in her life.

  “¡Apure, por favor!” she wailed, ducking low in the backseat.

  “Hurry!” Dylan added and slammed the door behind them.

  Macerio watched the SUV tear off with its tires bleeding smoke and rubber, a very pretty woman with shoulder-length black hair behind the wheel, the boy he’d glimpsed earlier with the puta next to her in the backseat. It was unmarked, not law enforcement then, and watching it shrink in the growing distance made him want to find this puta all the more. Add her to the long list he kept tucked in his memory.

  Macerio knew that earlier in the day local police had arrested the boy he’d seen with the puta. Find him and he’d find her.

  13

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “He’s not behind us,” Caitlin told Dylan.

  The boy finally turned away from the SUV’s rear window. “Just making sure.”

  “You can sit up now,” Caitlin said to Maria. “You’re safe.”

  The girl remained hunched low until Dylan eased her upright and slung an arm around her shoulder to draw her in close. “She’s on our side. She’s going to help.”

  “My name’s Caitlin, Maria.”

  “Sí.”

  “I know you’re scared, but Dylan’s right, I’m going to help you. You need to believe that. You need to speak to me.”

  “Where’s that twelve-gauge?
” Dylan asked suddenly. “Just in case.”

  “It wouldn’t work against Macerio anyway,” Maria chimed in.

  “Macerio?” Caitlin repeated.

  Maria looked toward Dylan instead. “The man you saw.” Then, to Caitlin, “Back in Nuevo Laredo, when he entered the house, the older women, they crossed themselves and whispered to each other. They called him Demonio behind his back.”

  They came to a stoplight and Caitlin studied Maria in the rearview mirror. The shadows cast by the tinted windows made her look older, Caitlin suddenly feeling she was looking at a woman instead of a girl, a twisted dichotomy exploited by those who’d stolen her youth. Then Maria drew her hair back behind her ears, revealing the features of her gaunt face that tightened every time they slid past a pedestrian. A young girl again, innocent and frightened, hunkered low to avoid being seen from the street.

  “They told stories of how Macerio was fashioned from hard-packed clay and then a bruja witch said a spell and brought him to life,” the girl continued. “He has no heart, the older women say, and the magic liquid in the pouch on his belt gets pumped into his veins to keep him alive.”

  The light turned green and Caitlin started on through the intersection. “Let’s get you someplace safe.”

  14

  SHAVANO PARK; THE PRESENT

  Caitlin stood at the front window of the house where Dylan and Luke Torres lived with Cort Wesley in Shavano Park.

  “Your father tell you how long he was gonna be gone?” she asked Dylan, while Maria used the upstairs bathroom.

  “Until he got back I think was his exact terminology.” Dylan regarded her closer. “So what’s the problem?”

  “He could have let me know he had business to attend to. I could’ve checked in.”

  “He said to call you if we needed anything.”

  “Like getting sprung from jail or helping rescue a runaway girl?”