by Jon Land
She looked toward the front door, replaced, frame and all, with a steel security one after the gunfight that had claimed the life of Maura Torres, Dylan and Luke’s mother. Maura had been shot as she opened the door, Caitlin getting there a moment too late to save her but just in time to save her kids. She imagined she could smell the blood in the air, see it pooled on the floor and speckled across the walls. Caitlin was about to say something else to Dylan but the sight of Maria padding down the carpeted stairs silenced her. Her feet were bare and dirty. She’d uncuffed her jeans and tousled some kind of shiny gel in her hair that Dylan clearly noticed as well. Caitlin had seen more than her share of girls not much older than Maria who’d been beaten and broken down from their years as a virtual sex slave. But Maria’s tenure had not yet sapped the innocence or hope from her eyes, in contrast to those whose gazes were neither sad nor fearful; just empty and dead.
She stopped at the bottom, holding the banister. “I want to go home. To my family.”
“They live near Nuevo Laredo?” Caitlin asked her.
“No. A small village outside Mexico City. A few times I tried to steal men’s phones so I could call them. It didn’t work, and they beat me.”
“Can you describe the place where they kept you for me?”
Maria clutched the banister tighter. “Sí, a building with many rooms and many girls in each of them. They would leave us in there for days at a time with little to eat and drink and nowhere to go to the bathroom. It smelled so bad, some of the girls got sick. If you were lucky you got a corner to yourself and you could push your face against the wall. If you were lucky.”
Caitlin hesitated before posing her next question. “Do you remember where this building was?”
“Sí,” Maria nodded.
“And you can tell me where to find it in Nuevo Laredo, where I can find the rest of these girls?”
Maria nodded again.
“Had you seen this man Macerio before last night?” Caitlin asked Maria.
“A few times when he came to drop off other girls. Or choose one to take with him.” Maria’s eyes lowered and held on the bottom step. “None of those ever came back.”
Caitlin stiffened. “How many?”
“I’m not sure.”
Caitlin shivered, felt a cold draft slip up her shirt and chill her spine.
“Caitlin?” Dylan said.
“Las Mujeres de Juárez,” she muttered.
“What’s that mean?” Dylan asked her, “the Women of Juárez.”
Caitlin tried to ignore him. “You have any notion of where they were taking you?” she asked Maria instead.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Dylan persisted.
But Caitlin held her gaze on Maria until the girl finally responded.
“Not when we left and we couldn’t see anything in the back of the truck. It was so dark and the ride was so bumpy. One of the girls got sick, and then another. The smell got so bad, we all got sick, and finally they pulled over. Let us out and gave us water.”
“Any landmarks?”
“I remember road signs for someplace called Uvalde and, after I ran off, San Antonio.”
“Sounds like U.S. 90. Runs along the southern part of the state, hugging the border for a ways.”
“Maybe. And I remember something else. After they let us out the back of the truck, the stink was so bad one of the men said to the other it was a good thing we only had twenty miles left to go.”
“Twenty miles.”
“Sí.”
“You look hungry,” Caitlin said, feeling guilty over not realizing it before.
Maria nodded. “Very.”
“I’ll see what’s in the fridge, make you a sandwich.”
Dylan headed into the kitchen. “I’ll do it.” Then, to Caitlin, “I’ve tried your sandwiches. You put too much stuff on them.”
“That’s the way my dad made ’em for me.”
Almost to the kitchen, Dylan stopped and turned back and around. “Yo, Caitlin.”
“What?”
“I really do like those boots.”
Caitlin felt her insides slacken at the simple comment, something feathery floating through her gut when the front door to the house opened and Dylan’s younger brother, Luke, entered. His eyes passed over Caitlin, falling on Maria.
“Who’s she?” the boy asked.
15
SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT
Cort Wesley saw the two San Antonio cops standing at the end of the Jetway and knew they were waiting for him.
“Well, lookee what we got here.” One of them grinned, as he drew closer. “A genuine celebrity. Wish I’d brought my autograph book along. Jerry,” he said to the other one, “you got your memo pad handy?”
Jerry handed one over. “Here you go, Bib.”
Bib flipped it open as he and Jerry followed Cort Wesley into the terminal. “Lookee here, says a man meeting the description of one Cort Wesley Masters was involved in a hotel shooting earlier today in New Orleans. You think we should question him on that, Jerry?”
“I do.”
Cort Wesley stopped, centering himself between the two cops to keep both of them in his field of vision at any time, as more passengers continued to file past them.
“You shoot anyone today, Mr. Masters?” the one named Bib asked him. It could have been a nickname, based on the fact that this cop had a uniform shirt stained with enough food types to have made wearing a bib advisable.
“Not that I recall, Officer.”
“But you don’t deny being in New Orleans.”
“Well, that is where the flight I just got off came in from.”
“You don’t scare us at all, Masters,” Bib insisted, straightening his spine as he redonned his mirror shades.
Cort Wesley looked at his reflection cast wider to the point of making his lean, angular face look fat and his gray eyes look black. Neither of the cops was enough of six feet two to look him in the eye, though Jerry seemed to be balancing himself on his toes at times to make it close. He appeared to be Hispanic, meaning the name was probably short for Gerardo or something. The flow of disembarking passengers had stopped, leaving them with the gate all to themselves.
“We just thought this might be a day for the record books,” Jerry said, back on his toes, “what with an opportunity to see two members of the Masters family behind bars at the same goddamn time.”
“Guess he hasn’t heard about his son yet,” added Bib. “How he got himself nabbed on drug charges and spent some time in lockup.”
Cort Wesley stood there calmly, while inside his stomach churned with stale airline peanuts and soda mixed with melted ice.
“Good thing the boy got sprung ’fore the jailbirds had their way with him,” Jerry taunted.
“Yup, pretty kid like that be a good candidate to have his ass plowed wide as Interstate 75. I heard social services was ready to put your kids someplace where there ain’t no killers in the house, Masters. This oughtta speed the process up considerably.”
Bib was still grinning when a lurching step by Cort Wesley brought them face-to-face.
“I can see your partner’s hand on his gun in your sunglasses, Officer Bib.” Cort Wesley could smell the dried sweat rising off him, along with the odor of fast-food onions that had clung to his uniform since lunch. “And I’m here to tell you I could leave you dead and have your weapon in hand ahead of Officer Jerry being able to draw and fire. Either of you ever shot a man made out of more than white cardboard? I have, back in the Gulf War, and it’s a lot harder than it seems, ’specially the first time. So if you got call to arrest me, slap on the cuffs and lead me out. If you don’t, I’m gonna do you boys the favor, just this once, of forgetting you spoke of my son in that manner. So we got ourselves an understanding, or not?”
Cort Wesley checked the reflection in Bib’s sunglasses, Jerry’s hand frozen over his holstered pistol as if it were painted on the air there. Then he backed off, close enough to both cops to m
ove on either if it came to that. But Bib looked down and Jerry finally eased his hand away from his pistol, flexing his fingers to push the blood back into them. The stale sweat stench had gotten much worse while Cort Wesley had been face-to-face with him, turning his stomach sour anew.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said and walked off.
PART TWO
As strange as it may seem in some quarters, the Texas Ranger has been throughout the century a human being, and never a mere automaton animating a pair of swaggering boots, a big hat, and a six-shooter all moving across the prairies under a cloud of pistol smoke. Surely enough has been written about men who swagger, fan hammers, and make hip shots. No Texas Ranger ever fanned a hammer when he was serious, or made a hip shot if he had time to catch a sight. The real Ranger has been a very quiet, deliberate, gentle person who could gaze calmly into the eye of a murderer, divine his thoughts, and anticipate his action, a man who could ride straight up to death.
—Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense
16
JUÁREZ, MEXICO; THE PRESENT
Guillermo Paz crossed himself before entering the Templo Bautista Jesus de Nazareth church, placing him in the right mind-set for the purpose that had drawn him here today.
Construction on Templo Bautista Jesus de Nazareth had been completed in recent months as part of continuing efforts undertaken by Casas Por Cristo, a charitable group dedicated to building homes and churches for poor families to help ease the blight threatening to consume the entire city. Paz liked standing on the banks of the Rio Grande and gazing across it toward El Paso, thinking of Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong, who’d haunted his thoughts for a year now.
Paz threw both of the church’s double doors open to accommodate his vast bulk. The doorframe itself stood seven feet in height, Paz barely clearing it in his boots. Inside, the church still smelled of raw lumber and recendy poured concrete. The plywood pews had yet to be varnished or stained, the concrete flooring the very same shade as the building’s dull exterior construction. But it was the windows Paz noticed the most; clear instead of stained glass and fronted by inlaid bars that created streaming checkerboard grids across the floor and walls when the sun passed through them.
The confessionals were located to the right, in an alcove off the building’s apse. Just one, it turned out, that had been richly stained in stark contrast to the unfinished rows of wood beyond. Paz swiped a finger across the surface, half expecting it to come away sticky. But the touch revealed wood weathered and worn, leading him to believe the confessional itself had come from another church, perhaps one of several shut down by the escalating violence that had claimed the lives of some priests too devoted and stubborn to flee.
Paz opened the confessional door and squeezed himself inside atop the built-in seat. Immediately a panel slid open, revealing the shadowy form of the resident priest’s face.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been over a year now since my last confession.”
“Why so long, my son?”
“I thought I was past it, that I had outgrown the need to take comfort in the words of strangers.”
“Do you see God as a stranger?”
“Well, that’s a good question, and I go back and forth on it. A year ago He and I were pretty tight. Not so much lately, though.”
“Have you strayed from His path in that time?”
“This is Juárez, Padre, the capital of strays. That’s why I came here: for the familiar scent.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“Gun smoke, Padre. I figured this was the perfect place to lose myself for a while. Can’t argue with me there, considering a couple thousand people got killed here last year alone, just the ones we know about. There’s always work for a man like me in a place like this.”
“So you’ve come here to confess those acts?” the priest said, voice cracking. He tried to clear his throat, failed, and tried again.
“No, I’m fine there. I think you got me wrong, what it is I’ve been up to. Sure, I thought there might be a place for me in the violence. Given my history and all, what better place than one where you can smell blood in the air? Literally. But I wasn’t in Juárez for more than a couple hours when a guy at the next table over in a cantina got machine-gunned through the window. His blood sprayed up all over me and I realized, nope, this isn’t for me anymore.”
“And yet here you are, my son, all these months later.”
Paz took a deep breath, began peeling away the finish on the wood forming the ledge before him with a fingernail. It had become a habit since his childhood; to carve his name into the confessional, leave his mark behind along with his words. But there’d been a very long gap between carvings.
“You know the many barrio bajos that litter the city?”
“Juárez has become a world of slums, my son.”
“The homes there are built of pallets and cardboard. The lucky ones are wrapped in tarpaper for insulation and topped with tin roofs. So I passed one of these barrio bajos on my way out of the city and I see a drug gang standing around one of the shanties after lighting it on fire. You ever see tarpaper burn, Padre?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“It goes fast and takes everything else with it,” Paz said, finishing the straight line in the “P” and going to work on the loop at the top with his nail. “You ever hear the screams of people as they’re burned alive, smell their flesh roasting?”
The priest shivered. “No again, my son.”
“You know why the gang burned those people, Padre? Because they could. No other reason. They just could. I followed the drug gang to their headquarters and you know what I did?”
“Is that what you’ve come here to confess?”
“No, but I’ll tell you anyway: I did the same thing to them they did to that family living with tarpaper walls. I grew up in a place just like it in Venezuela, a village named La Vega. There was a church at the foot of the hill where a priest like you taught me to read and write before he was shot down in the street. So the last few months I’ve been living in these barrio bajos, trying to make sure no one else gets roasted alive.”
“Ángel de la Guarda,” the priest muttered in disbelief. “The Guardian Angel . . .”
“I see you’ve heard of me, Padre.”
The priest’s voice became lower, hesitant. “I . . . I did not think you were real.”
“Well, here I am.”
“The people do not believe you are human. They believe you are an avenging spirit sent to protect them.” The priest’s tone changed, becoming almost reverent. “If you’ll excuse me for saying, it sounds like you were on the other side of such things once.”
Paz was working on the “A” now, switching to a different nail. Amazing how important leaving his mark in other ways on places had become for him. “And for a long time too. That all changed just before I came to Juárez.”
“Is that what has brought you to me today?”
“Sort of,” Paz told him. “Because I can’t let it go.”
“Can’t let what go, my son?”
“This woman, a Texas Ranger. I thought I’d gotten her out of my head, Padre. Then I read about how she saved a big Mexican government official in an intensive care ward at an El Paso hospital from Juárez gang-bangers like the ones who roasted those people alive. I’ve been too angry to sleep, angry over these drug gangs nearly costing the Ranger her life. So yesterday I found one of the biggest drug stashes in Juárez and burned it.”
Paz could hear the priest’s breathing pick up. “You’re a wanted man now. Burning their drugs is much different from killing a few of their dealers. The cartel will hunt you to the end of the earth.”
“Let them, Padre. Truth is, I’m headed out of here anyway. Got business elsewhere.”
“Regarding this Texas Ranger?”
Paz went to work on carving the “Z,” trying to do it in a continuous motion without raising his nail off
the wood. “I think I became Ángel de la Guarda because I wanted to be like Caitlin Strong. I need to know why I feel what I feel for her. There was something in her eyes . . . I thought it was just the passion lacking in my own. Now I think it was something else, the thing that brought us together in the first place.” Paz stopped and took a deep breath. “I think she’s in danger . . .”
“So are you.”
“. . . and I think it’s my job to save her.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know, not yet anyway. It’s something from a long time ago—that’s what I’ve figured out.”
The priest thought briefly. “You being here in Juárez, being Ángel de la Guarda, was your penance for the man you left behind. The new one forged in his image seeks kindred spirits in the way the old one could not. Perhaps in saving this Ranger’s life, you’ll also save your own.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Paz said, finishing up the “Z” and brushing the wood flakes free from his handiwork.
“You are doing God’s work, my son.”
“When you spend your whole life with the devil, Padre, it’s nice to join the other side for a change.”
17
SHAVANO PARK; THE PRESENT
Caitlin was sitting on the porch when Cort Wesley pulled into the driveway, lunging out of the truck the moment it came to a halt. He mounted the steps and stormed toward the door, barely aware of her presence until she took up a stance before him.
“Get out of my way, Ranger.”
“Some things you need to hear before you go inside, Cort Wesley.”
“You mean besides what a couple San Antonio cops told me at the airport?”
“Stand still and catch your breath.”
Cort Wesley hadn’t realized he was breathing hard. “I don’t see you in, what, two months, and now you’re telling me what to do?”
“On account of Dylan needing me to get him out of jail, yeah.”
“Back up.”