Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  “You remember we had the locust problem down in Brownsville?”

  “I do. Your daddy strapped a flamethrower on his back and went at them himself.” Weaver hesitated, letting his mind drift. “I seem to remember you walking ’longside him.”

  “Until I sneezed and lit one of the rigs on fire. He took the damage out of my salary. Six whole goddamn months.” Tyree took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “What’d you think he’d make of what we’re doing here?”

  “I think he’d say you were fucking crazy.”

  Weaver grinned and Hollis Tyree grinned back at him. “Oh, you’re right there for sure. Where’s the money in it, he’d ask? Tell people we’re running out of oil and they’ll rush out to fill their tank. Tell them we’re running out of water and they’ll just look at you funny. But it’s true. The Southwest has already lost sixty percent of its irrigation supplies and Lake Mead is going down twenty feet a year. In twenty years, if we don’t do something, the whole Southwest is destined to become a wasteland. But folks won’t see the problem until they turn on their faucets and nothing comes out. That’s what this job’s all about, Weave, making sure something does come out.”

  The two men stood side by side in the dry wind, the generations bridged between them.

  “You trying to save the country, Hollis, or something else?” Weaver asked suddenly.

  Tyree looked toward him but didn’t answer.

  “It wasn’t your fault, sir.”

  “What, burning the rig?”

  “What happened to your kids down in Mexico.”

  Tyree spoke with his gaze on the rigs so Weaver couldn’t see his eyes. “You mean ’cause I spoiled the shit out of them instead of working them to hell like my dad worked me? You think they would have been better off if I’d made them spend spring break working on an off-shore?”

  “Hard to say now, under the circumstances.”

  “But they’re gone. That’s not hard to say, is it?”

  Weaver shrugged. “I best be getting back at it.”

  “I’ll tell Meeks about the guns, Weave,” Tyree said, waiting for the work foreman to take his leave before pulling the report he’d commissioned on the situation in Albion into the light of the sun, reading it as the morning breeze flapped the pages about.

  He read the first page of the report, the summary, again. The school-teacher who’d been stabbed with the scissors, Faye Magruder, was resting comfortably at home and expected back in the classroom in a matter of weeks. But similarly inexplicable incidents continued to plague the town.

  A man beat a paperboy senseless for tossing the morning paper on his wet lawn.

  Two women got into a major tussle in the aftermath of a PTA meeting. One remained in the hospital after the other tossed a mug of scalding black coffee into her face.

  A local cop shot a man in the leg during a routine traffic stop.

  On the surface these could have been regarded as isolated incidents, the product of bad luck and tough times and nothing more. But Tyree knew better. These incidents told him so.

  Tyree walked along the freshly paved road he’d laid atop the desert floor to allow smooth passage for his construction and rigging vehicles. It glistened in the warming sunlight, the smell of tar still plain and thick in the air. The road had the look of a vast black ribbon stretching from one end of the world to the other, almost eerie in its desolation with only Tyree-sanctioned vehicles traversing it since it didn’t go anywhere else.

  The drilling rigs swallowed up the land on the west side of the road, the community required to man those rigs dominated the east. That community consisted of a nest of trailers housing the offices and communications facilities, arranged in rectangular fashion like an old-fashioned army fort. Beyond them, trailers unused and left over from any number of natural disasters, purchased for pennies on the dollar from FEMA, dotted the barren landscape. These trailers housed the field’s workers, mostly three or four in each.

  His grandfather had left Sweetwater long before Hollis III was born, so he had no actual memory of what that town had looked like back when the oil boom hit. What he knew, he knew only from pictures and, again, the comparisons were striking. Right down to the prefab buildings that had been hastily erected to take care of the men’s needs, including a store that sold food and sundries on credit, a bar, and a restaurant. It was his security man Meeks who suggested bringing in the women, warning in a none too cryptic fashion the upshot if Tyree failed to provide this basic need as well. They occupied a building identical in all respects to the prefab church, except for the wooden crucifix missing over the door.

  Meeks had arranged for the camp’s private security force too. Regulators, he called them, every bit as mean and as tough as the Pinkertons from which Meeks was descended who enforced the law on the gold claims of George Hearst, cementing his fortune and legacy.

  Nothing had changed, Hollis Tyree mused. From Hearst in the nineteenth century, to his grandfather in the twentieth, to himself in the twenty-first, things had remained remarkably the same. Only the object of the strikes was different, since both Hearst’s and his grandfather’s strikes had been about making money, while his was about spending it. Tyree had once figured he could spend a million dollars a day for a thousand years and still not go through his entire riches.

  He stopped over a bespectacled man assiduously taking soil samples a few feet away. “Morning, Dr. Lamb,” Tyree greeted.

  “Sir?” Lamb asked, startled.

  Lamb’s voice was nasally and on closer inspection Tyree realized one of his eyes was blackened, his nose swelled up on the same side.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Pardon me?”

  Tyree pointed toward his own eye. “Your face. Looks like somebody busted you up. Your nose is the size of a grapefruit.”

  Lamb forced a laugh. “That? Well, sir, it’s rather personal. If you don’t mind . . .”

  “Not at all.”

  Lamb, looking out of place in his shirt and tie, stood up and tried to brush the stubborn desert dust, damp with mesquite, from his knees, as his thinning hair blew about in the stiff breeze.

  Tyree flapped the pages so Lamb could see what he was holding. “Explain to me exactly what’s happening in Albion without the fancy jargon.”

  “Well, those aquifers we found here are down so deep nobody knew they were there until this latest generation of seismic equipment told us so,” said Lamb. “By all indications the contents of one of the aquifers we struck leached into the ground wells serving that town.”

  “We poisoned their water. That’s what you’re telling me.”

  “Not according to the results of the field report.”

  Tyree flapped the pages he’d been reading before him. “You mean this? Seems a little vague to be considered conclusive.”

  “It’s a complicated situation,” Lamb told him. “We’re testing for an unknown mineral or toxin. Could be anything or nothing.”

  “No, it couldn’t be nothing.”

  “Let me rephrase: nothing we’re aware of.”

  “Huh?”

  “Mr. Tyree, the aquifers we’ve struck in your fields here date back tens, even hundreds of thousands of years. It could be there’s something in them that for all intents and purposes can’t be identified because we’ve never seen it before. But chances are the toxin, mineral, or whatever is isolated to one specific area. I’m expecting this latest batch of samples I’ve been taking will produce something more definitive.”

  “You’re saying we can keep a lid on this. Button up the contamination by just capping the site in question.”

  Lamb nodded.

  “EPA gets wind of this before we get it handled, a whole lot of people are gonna go thirsty down the road. So you call that lab of yours, Doctor, and you tell them they better light a fire under their ass. That clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lamb told him, breathing noisily through his mouth.

  “Where exactly is Albio
n as the crow flies, Lamb?”

  “Twenty miles due west. Eight thousand residents, give or take.”

  Tyree found his gaze listing in that direction. “Like prairie dogs . . .”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Nothing, Doctor,” Tyree told him.

  24

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “Water,” Caitlin said, when Captain Tepper had finished.

  “The new oil, some folks in the know say.”

  “So we got a town sprouting up in the middle of the desert of Tunga County where they made the find.”

  “Old-fashioned tent city, I hear tell, or trailers in this case. Not much different from eighty or so years ago when your granddad cleaned up Sweetwater after they struck oil.”

  “He used to tell me the story all the time when I was a little girl, along with another about his father William Ray Strong coming upon a bunch of murdered pioneers when he was riding with George W. Arrington and the Frontier Battalion.”

  “I don’t recall that one.”

  “By a creek bed somewhere in what we call Tunga County today.”

  Something in D. W. Tepper’s expression changed, growing pained and sad.

  “Something wrong, D. W.?”

  He seemed to snap out of whatever had struck him. “Got another PET scan scheduled for later today. Docs can’t find a single thing wrong with me and I never felt worse in my life. Hell, I’m thinking about taking up smoking again.”

  “You’ve looked the same for as long as I’ve known you.”

  “Guess I was old when I was young and even older now that I’m old.” Talking that way turned his gaze nostalgic and reflective. “You had lots of favorite stories, as I recall.”

  “That one my granddad used to tell me about Sweetwater was something special.”

  “Hollis Tyree’s grandfather was constable at the time. He was the one sent the wire that brought Earl Strong to town.” The pained look resurfaced, gone before Caitlin could question Tepper about it again. “An oil strike on his spread gave birth to the family fortune. His grandson’s a billionaire now. But it was his dad who bought up that land in Tunga County years ago with no purpose other than to make sure no one else did. Geological survey revealed the aquifers maybe nine months back and Tyree’s crew set up shop pretty much the very next day.”

  “Lots of men.”

  “As I’ve heard told anyway.”

  “Explains the prostitutes called up from Nuevo Laredo. A whorehouse on wheels, inside a rank panel truck driven by this Macerio, or whatever his goddamn name is. Maria Lopez was on her way there when she fled.”

  Tepper caught the look in Caitlin’s eyes, his own flashing concern.

  “You stay away from that place until we make better sense of this. That clear?”

  “I notice you didn’t warn me to stay clear of Nuevo Laredo, Captain.”

  “ ’Cause I know it wouldn’t do any darn good.” Tepper glanced down at his gnarled fingers in search of a cigarette that wasn’t there. “You just keep your gun in your holster, Ranger.”

  Caitlin flashed Tepper a smile. “ ’Less somebody draws theirs first, Captain.”

  25

  SWEETWATER, TEXAS; THE PRESENT

  Guillermo Paz was climbing the steps of the Sweetwater Public Library when he saw the squad car slide to a halt in a no-parking zone at the curb. Paz watched a deputy climb out, having trouble closing the door and putting his hat on at the same time. His uniform was caked with brown dust kicked up from the mud that seemed ready to swallow the town, so much so that Paz noticed the town’s residents had uniformly painted their front steps the same dirt-brown color.

  “Good afternoon,” the deputy said, approaching him.

  “Buenos dias, ayudante.”

  “You mind speaking English?”

  “Not at all, Deputy. Is there a problem?”

  The deputy stopped ten feet from Paz as if he’d struck an invisible wall. “Someone from the diner called. Said a customer had just been in they never saw before.”

  “So this is your way of welcoming visitors to your town.”

  “The customer spooked them pretty bad.”

  “I have that effect on people sometimes,” Paz told him, his feet placed on separate steps.

  The deputy chanced a few more steps forward. “So what brings you to Sweetwater?”

  “Research. I’m writing a book on the oil boom of the 1930s.”

  The deputy relaxed a bit. “Folks in the diner said you were asking a lot of questions. That’s what spooked them. You don’t mind me saying, sir, you don’t look much like an academic.”

  “You don’t have to be to write a book these days. I had relatives who worked the fields here in Sweetwater. The tales have stuck with me ever since I was a boy.”

  “So you’re Mexican?”

  “I am.”

  “Excuse me for saying you don’t sound Mexican.”

  “My father was from Venezuela, descended from a long line of Indian warriors. I apologize if I bothered anyone, ayudante.”

  “You got some ID?”

  Paz pulled the well-worn billfold from his pocket and extended it forward. Watched the deputy approach him tentatively to take it, extending a hand the way a man might raise a stick toward a hornet’s nest.

  The deputy opened the wallet, compared Paz’s face to the picture, and handed it back to him.

  Paz stuffed the wallet back in his pocket. “I’m especially interested in the Texas Ranger who cleaned up your town after it was invaded by a collection of bad men, the likes of which hadn’t been seen in these parts before and haven’t been since.”

  “You’d be talking about Earl Strong.”

  “I would.”

  “Library’s got lots of photos and news clippings from the era.”

  Paz let his shoulders slump, feigning disappointment. “I was hoping to speak to someone who actually lived through it. That would speed up the process considerably. Allow me to move on that much faster.”

  The deputy weighed his words. “Well, sir,” he said, still having trouble meeting Paz’s eyes, big and dark as eight balls wedged into his face, “there’s one man still here now who was alive then, named Robert Roy Parsons. He was just a boy at the time, had a job at the local saloon where Earl Strong first showed his guns.”

  Paz thought of his own boyhood, much of it spent in just such a place working for the local crime boss known as Carnicero, Spanish for “butcher,” thanks to his proficiency with all manner of blades. But Paz was good with a knife too, and stabbed Carnicero as he sat grinning on a bar stool after refusing to give Paz the money due him to take care of his pregnant mother. To make his point Carnicero had bent Paz’s finger back until it snapped, so Paz used his other hand to ram the blade deep into his chest. The crime boss was bleeding to death on the floor when Paz reached into his pocket and extracted only the money he was owed. He fled his slum community of La Vega after giving the bills to his mother.

  “Where can I find Mr. Parsons?” Paz asked the deputy.

  “Same place as all those years back, ’cept he owns it now.”

  Paz noticed a squad car already parked across the street from the Sweetwater Saloon when he got there, the same deputy behind the wheel pretending to busy himself with other things.

  “Call me R.R.,” Parsons greeted, surprising Paz with a firm handshake for a man near ninety years old. He was tall, straight spined, and surprisingly robust for a man of that age, moving about nimbly without the tentative nature Paz was accustomed to seeing in old people. He had a full head of white hair, a pleasing manner, and welcoming spirit more fit for the age he’d grown up in than the one in which he was living now. “Deputy told me you might be coming. Seemed a bit spooked.”

  “I lied to him,” Paz admitted.

  “Come again?” Parsons asked, eyes narrowing.

  “I told him I was here researching a book. Truth is I’m here on a matter of life and death.”

  “Sounds s
erious.”

  “It is,” Paz said, picturing Caitlin Strong in his mind. “A person I care about is going to die, unless I find what I’m looking for.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I don’t know yet. I was hoping you could help me.”

  Parsons pulled back a bit, putting as much distance between him and Paz as the wall would allow. “Deputy said it had something to do with Texas Ranger Earl Strong.”

  “Everything,” said Paz. “I don’t think the deputy has much appreciation for history.”

  “Well, sir, then it’s a good thing I do, considering I lived it.”

  “You remember Earl Strong, then.”

  “Like he was standing in front of me instead of you. I followed him around like a puppy from the first night he showed up in this very same joint. Of course, it was a much different place in those days.”

  “So I imagine.”

  Parsons thought for a moment and took a long look at Paz, having to crane his neck to look him in the eyes. “What do you say we get ourselves a table.”

  The Sweetwater Saloon was more of a restaurant now, with a nest of tables rimmed by wood-frame booths along the walls. And centered amid it all, set back near the kitchen, was a horseshoe-shaped bar outfitted with a quartet of televisions. It would be another hour before the place opened for dinner, meaning Paz had Parsons all to himself for at least that long. The old man had chosen a table against the far wall, a nearby window overlooking the street beyond where Paz could see the deputy’s car was gone.

  “That bar,” R.R. Parson told Paz, “was built from the same wood as the original. Couldn’t bring myself to discard anything with that many memories soaked in, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do,” Paz replied, wondering if Carnicero’s blood still stained the floor of the bar where he’d killed him.

  “Floor’s the original too. Every pair of boots that clacked against it came with a story, and I like to think people still get a sense of that, even if they don’t realize it.” Parsons reached up and lifted from the wall a framed picture of a man wearing the badge of the Texas Rangers over his starched white shirt, holding a Winchester rifle in hand. “This here’s Ranger Earl. What was your name again?”