Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  “Guess I am missing the point.”

  “He’s fifteen, Cort Wesley.”

  “I was sixteen when I killed my first man.”

  “More of a boy too, I seem to recall.”

  “The knife made him older, Ranger. ’Sides, I couldn’t tell, given I was more interested in protecting my girl at the time.” He hesitated, dropping his eyes almost shyly. “Same way I feel about you. You remember the last time we were together before you busted my nose?”

  Caitlin nodded. “That motel just off the interstate. The bed shaking every time a semi went by.”

  “Oh, is that what it was?” Cort Wesley said with a wink, his face quickly sobering. “You woke up screaming.”

  “Must’ve had a nightmare.”

  “Wasn’t the first time.” Cort Wesley leaned forward, holding the twelve-gauge barrel up on the porch floor. “And you never told me what they were about.”

  Caitlin’s gaze narrowed, as if she were trying to see something out of her range of vision. “I’m a little girl running from something in the rain. It’s night, I’m alone, and there’s someone after me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I ever remember anything else, you’ll be the first to hear.”

  21

  YUCATÁN PENINSULA, MEXICO; THE PRESENT

  Colonel Renaldo Montoya gazed down at the four Americans tied to the pillar before him. That pillar supported the lone surviving watchtower of the Mayan temple beyond that the colonel had discovered himself upon taking refuge in the jungle. The jagged remnants of its stepped pyramid structure were camouflaged by overgrowth and the protective canopy of trees that had outlasted the centuries. The ruins featured ornate gray-stone steps climbing toward the now open front wall that had once held the entrance. Like the Mayan culture itself, the temple was no longer alive, but neither was it dead, clinging stubbornly to life.

  “Buenos días,” Montoya said to the two boys and two girls who were shaking in eerily synchronized motion. Montoya watched the sacks pulled down over their faces expanding with each labored breath until he signaled his men to strip them off.

  The American college students looked up at him fearfully, lips trembling, eyes struggling to adapt to light again. Montoya noticed lines of tears staining their faces with streaks of grime, one of the boys trying to tighten his features into something defiant and strong.

  “My name is Colonel Renaldo Montoya. It is important to me that you know that, important that you know where you are. Look around you.”

  None of them did.

  “Look around,” Montoya ordered again.

  The four college students turned about, still reluctant to take their eyes off Montoya.

  “You came down on vacation to my world, eh?, the world of my ancestors. We call that trespassing, and now you must be punished,” Montoya continued calmly, standing stiff and sure as always.

  Montoya ran his gaze from one of the Americans to the next, only the defiant boy meeting his eyes hatefully enough to pass as brave. He had close-cropped, straw-colored hair and weight-lifting muscles that formed his bravado. The other boy was tall and lanky with a nest of matted sun-bleached hair and a surfer’s tan. The girls looked the same to him, uniform in their sniffling and sobbing. Montoya crouched down to face one of them, freezing her in midsob.

  “I do not mean the Mexican culture,” Montoya told them. “I mean my own, the Mayan culture. My ancestors, my olom, settled this country right here in the Yucatán, and for centuries our warriors of pure blood thrived until the Europeans came. For twenty years we fought back the advances of the Spaniards.” He slid over to the second girl, waited for her to look up at him before resuming. “Twenty years, and when we finally succumbed it was not to their spears and arrows, but the wretched diseases they brought with them. For centuries we endured in smaller and smaller patches of land, until the new Mexico decreed those were to be taken from us too, that Mayan independence was no longer to be tolerated.”

  With that, the colonel withdrew the nine-millimeter pistol from his holster and racked the slide back. “But I’m going to give you the opportunity my people were never given.”

  The colonel’s stubble-laced square head rode his shoulders with barely any neck in between. And what little neck there was stood stiff and immobile, thanks to vertebrae surgically fused together after a bullet nearly severed his spinal cord. His face was pitted with acne scars and a larger one that ran through his eyebrow all the way to his cheek, barely missing one of his two eyes so light a shade of blue to seem almost indistinguishable from the pupils. As a boy, the oddity had branded Montoya a freak. As an adult, he had come to see it as a gift that gave him the vision others lacked.

  “Please,” one of the girls managed, “don’t kill us.”

  “That is not my intention at all,” Montoya told all of them. “In times past, Mayan kings were expected to participate in our ritualistic sacrifices themselves. I have come up with my own version of that with you as my sib, my offering. Blood has been spilled in this very place before and so it will again.”

  Four of his soldiers looked on from the shadows with weapons steadied, as Montoya extended his pistol downward. “There are three bullets in this gun, one of them already in the chamber. Three of you must die. Do that and the survivor gets his, or her, freedom. Comprende?”

  Montoya moved from one American to the next, offering each of them the pistol. None offered to take it.

  “I don’t think you understand,” Montoya said sharply. “I’m giving you control of your destiny, a much better chance than the one given my people by the invaders who polluted our blood and victimized our people. The rest is up to you. How you decide who lives and who doesn’t.” He stopped in front of the weight lifter. “What, you’re not strong enough to go first; show your friends how it’s done?”

  The boy shriveled, slumping backward.

  “Now you know what it feels like to have your world stripped from you,” Montoya said and cast his gaze on the temple ruins. “What little land we had left, in Chan Santa Cruz, was invaded one hundred fifty years ago by a Mexican colonel named Pedro Acereto. He took three thousand men into the jungle and came back with only fifteen hundred. More soldiers came, then more and more, attacking from both land and sea, driving us into the swamps where pestilence and famine further decimated our people. And when we surrendered they slaughtered us and left our bodies to rot in the sun.”

  The colonel slid past the two girls and stopped in front of the surfer. “But enough of us survived to keep the old ways close in our hearts, even as we were reduced to little more than slaves, peasants, and now itinerant labor for you Americans and rich Mexicans who are no better. We pick your crops, clean up after you, keep our eyes from meeting yours in a display of subservience not befitting our warrior heritage. You represent those who’ve victimized us for generations now, turned those who founded this very earth into slaves fit for no more than tending it.”

  “We didn’t do shit to you, man!” the surfer managed, his voice cracking.

  Montoya continued to hold the gun out to him. “I should be a general, I should be commander of the Mexican army. But as a full-bloodied Indian, I’m looked down upon, shunned, considered inferior. Me, commander of the Zeta Special Forces, the best soldiers Mexico has to offer. Me, descended from kings who tore the beating hearts from the chests of their enemies, not even able to use my true family name of Chibirias that my grandfather had no choice but to disown. And now I’m going to tear the beating heart from your country.”

  The surfer took the gun from the colonel’s hand and for an instant, just an instant, Montoya thought he was going to turn it on him.

  Go ahead, he thought, try.

  Instead, though, the surfer’s eyes turned blank and he started the pistol upward, angled for the sky until he jammed it against his temple.

  “Fuck you, man. Fuck you!”

  The surfer’s hand was still trembling when he squeezed his eyes shut and pulled the trig
ger.

  Click.

  The gun slipped from the surfer’s grasp, plunked to the ground.

  Montoya grinned as he stooped to retrieve the empty pistol. He patted the surfer’s head almost tenderly and then moved down the line, meeting each of the other American’s eyes until they looked away.

  “My men will take you back to where they found you,” Montoya told them all. “Tell everyone that I’m here. Tell them I’m coming.”

  22

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “You wanna give me that again?” Captain D. W. Tepper of the Texas Rangers told Caitlin, leaning so far over his desk, she thought he might fall.

  His office was brightly lit now in comparison to the dimness he usually worked in to keep the heat down so he wouldn’t have to run the air-conditioning all day. But D. W.’s eyes had begun to go and he found himself unable to use the computer anymore without both the overhead light and desk lamp fired up. Today he was wearing a freshly starched white shirt, string tie, and pressed slacks over a pair of boots unmarked by scuffs. Last time Caitlin saw him dressed like that was her husband’s funeral a year before.

  “Nuevo Laredo, Captain,” she repeated. “I think I know where a whole bunch of these kidnapped girls are being held.”

  Tepper’s expression took on that of a man swallowing bile back down. “Thought I told you to give up on that. We got enough trouble handling what comes into our own jurisdiction.”

  “Once they’re sold as sex slaves, these kidnapped girls end up in a whole lot of jurisdictions.”

  “I got that much,” said Tepper. “It’s the rest I wanna make sure I heard right, you mentioning Las Mujeres de Juárez.”

  “I think I know who’s been killing them,” Caitlin told him.

  In the past thirteen years, since 1997, the bodies of over four hundred Mexican women, many of them unidentified to this day, had been found along the border with Texas in various stages of dismemberment, beginning in the area between Juárez and El Paso.

  The Rangers had been involved in the case off and on since then, but the lack of cooperation from Mexican authorities had stymied any efforts that might have otherwise proved fruitful. In addition to their own incompetence and apathy, the Mexican federalés and local officials had never been able to totally put aside their hostility toward the Texas Rangers, thanks to a past that had seen them on opposite sides of too many battles. Some still referred to the Rangers derogatorily as el Rinche, and Caitlin supposed the animosity had too much history behind it to ever go away entirely.

  Her own involvement with Las Mujeres de Juárez investigation dated back to 2003. She and fellow Ranger Charlie Weeks were looking for drug-running tunnels dug out of the desert floor east of El Paso when they came upon the body of a young woman that had been rolled down an embankment of a two-lane highway amid stray tires, broken bottles, and fast-food wrappers. She was naked save for a pair of lace-up sandals that must’ve been knotted too tight to remove. A pool of dried blood had painted the ground beneath the body, spreading outward from the woman’s rectum, where a sharp object later identified as a railroad spike had been wedged to shred her intestines while she was bleeding to death from a knife wound.

  It had surely been, the coroner reported, an agonizing death in keeping with the pattern already developed for Las Mujeres de Juárez. Evidence of torture and rape were present in virtually all the murders, Caitlin learned, in spite of which virtually no progress at all had been made on either side of the border.

  Until yesterday.

  “I’ll bring the girl in later to write up her statement,” Caitlin finished.

  “Seems to me you should’ve done so already.”

  “Figured it be best to get her status clarified first, Captain.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She may have evidence against the worst serial killer in history, along with a sex slavery ring south of the border that’s ruined thousands of lives.”

  Tepper’s face crinkled with concern. “I know that look, Ranger, and I know what you got in that mind of yours. But, like I said, south of the border’s not exactly our jurisdiction.”

  “Didn’t stop my granddad.”

  “Sure, back when he used to hunt dinosaurs in his spare time.” Tepper cleared his throat and shook his head. “You wanna tell me why you’re all over this sex slave thing like a pit bull on a poodle?”

  “That Mexican girl I picked up yesterday, Maria Lopez, said the kidnappers packed their victims into rooms tighter than a sardine can. She told me one of the girls choked to death on her own vomit and it was more than a day before they removed the body. That answer your question?”

  “It would if all this hadn’t started long before yesterday.”

  “Feels like something I gotta do, Captain, but I can’t tell you why exactly. Sometimes I have dreams about a girl just like these victims. She’s handcuffed to the slats on an old freight car somewhere. I don’t know who she is, but she always looks so sad. All I wanna do in the dream is help her, but I never can. I wake up in the morning glad I might be able to do better in real life.”

  “A dream?”

  “Feels like more than that, but, yeah, pretty much.”

  Tepper frowned. The light made the furrows in his leathery face seem even deeper, some more like crevices in which he was accustomed to losing the tip of a finger. He’d finally given up smoking six months back, leaving him with a dry cough instead of a wet, mucus-laden one. But his teeth were still stained brown and skin yellowed by the residue of a habit that had nearly killed him.

  “What if I told you to let it go?” he asked suddenly.

  “I’d tell you I couldn’t.”

  “Even if it was for your own good?”

  “Why would that be exactly?”

  Tepper looked away, as if afraid to let Caitlin see his eyes. “Wish you could just trust me on this.”

  “On what?”

  “You’re not your granddad, Ranger. And trust me when I say you don’t wanna be.”

  Caitlin felt one of her fingers start to dig around in her hair and yanked on it. “You’re talking in circles, Captain.”

  “Maybe you’re just not hearing what I’m telling you.”

  “Maria Lopez can help me break this case wide open,” Caitlin insisted.

  Tepper drummed his fingers amid the clutter of papers strewn over his desk blotter. “You really believe one man could be responsible for four hundred murders, Ranger?”

  “That’s what the evidence I looked at suggested. But too much of it had been compromised to be sure.”

  Tepper shook his head and stripped the string tie from his collar. “Just got back from a meeting of all Ranger captains in Austin where these Washington types talked their tongues off. We’re supposed to be on the lookout for Mexican guerrillas crossing the border, the hell you make of that. Listening to them go on and on was like giving myself a hot pepper enema.” He frowned. “Didn’t expect I’d be coming home to something like this neither.”

  “The girl says she overheard the wranglers saying they had just another twenty miles to go, heading north not far out of Uvalde on U.S. 90.”

  D. W. Tepper’s eyebrows rose, digging ditches out of the furrows along his brow. “North of Uvalde you say . . .”

  “Mean something to you, Captain?”

  Tepper nodded as if he’d prefer not having to. “You ever heard of a man named Hollis Tyree III?”

  23

  TUNGA COUNTY; THE PRESENT

  “Prairie dogs?” Hollis Tyree III asked, holding the gnawed-through husk of flexible rubber tubing.

  “Yes,” his foreman Weaver told him, as Tyree rolled the tubing about in his hands.

  “Prairie dogs,” Tyree repeated from the middle of what had been a desert just a few months before, now bustling with the activity of men, machines, and a city of bright white prefab structures that shined in the sun. “Costing me time and money. I don’t give a damn about the money, but the time’s something else a
gain. You got a solution?”

  “Well, we can’t use poison and they seem to have figured out our traps.”

  “Of course, being the geniuses that they are.”

  “Sir—”

  “Issue guns to the off-shift men. A bonus for whoever shoots the most of the little bastards. How about ten thousand? You think that might coax their aim a mite?”

  Before Tyree, the orange drilling rigs stretched as far as the eye could see, the modern-day equivalent of the oil derricks that had made his family rich in Sweetwater. Unlike those immobile, unwieldy structures, these were sleek and versatile. When erect, their truck-mounted housings stretched a hundred feet into the air, looking like shiny steel sentinels guarding the horizon. If a rig’s efforts yielded nothing, the workers simply lowered it mechanically back to the truck bed and drove on to the next ping on the geothermal map. Tyree’s scientists had spent six months plotting the locations, while his technicians supervised the design and construction of the rigs themselves. Interesting how eighty years after oil was struck in Sweetwater, many of the challenges remained the same.

  Except these fields had nothing to do with oil.

  Weaver was still standing before him, trapped between thoughts and words.

  “You got a problem with that, Weave?”

  “No, sir.”

  “See Meeks to arrange for the guns, then.” Tyree could sense the man’s reluctance. “How long you work for my father, Weave?”

  “Long enough to teach you the fields.”

  “Worked my ass off too, didn’t you?”

  “You wouldn’t have it any other way, sir, and you know it.”

  “Back then I called you sir. Liked it better that way. Remember what you called me?”

  “Number of things, as I recall.”

  “Punk, turd, lazy-ass, rich boy, and pond scum being among them.”

  “A few, anyway,” Weaver smiled.