by Jon Land
“Really now?”
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” the man said. Earl noticed his eyebrows were so thick and bushy they seemed to grow together into a single long piece stitched across the bridge of his nose. “Because all we want is the girl back you’re keeping in the doctor’s office.”
“That all?”
“The bitch belongs to The Outfit and Mr. Capone takes his property seriously.” The man took two more steps forward, stopping just short of the steps to the porch where Earl was seated. “So you just stand aside, let us go inside and retrieve the bitch, and we can all go about our business.”
“Juanita Rojas.”
“Huh?”
“The girl’s name is Juanita Rojas. And she’s a young woman, not somebody’s property.”
“Not to me.”
“Then I guess we can’t just go about our business, can we?”
Earl heard the distinctive clack-clack of tommy gun bolts being jerked backward into firing position. These were drum-fired, not magazine fed, notoriously inaccurate, but at this distance the rounds could splatter him against the building.
“You stand aside, Ranger, let us take back what’s ours, and we can be on the morning train outta here.”
“But not back to Chicago, I imagine, not with all the great pickings for the gambling, whores, and liquor you boys want to control in camps like this.”
“That’s none of your affair.”
“This is my town now and anyone in its limits falls under my protection.”
The Chicago man sneered. “Even a Mexican whore?”
“Lincoln freed all the slaves, sir.”
“And me thinking it was just the niggers.”
That drove Earl to his feet. “I’m glad we had this opportunity to get acquainted. You can be going now.”
A twitch from the Chicago man had the tommy guns snapped upward, all four of them angled on Earl. “Not without what we came for. You really want to die today that bad?”
“Was just about to ask you the same question, Chicago. See that old general store ’cross the street?”
The Chicago man didn’t look or nod.
“You ever hear of the BAR?”
Again, no response.
“Stands for Browning Automatic Rifle. When Samuel Colt’s company couldn’t handle production, the Winchester Company took over manufacture of the M1918 version. Hell of a weapon, I gotta tell ya. Lightest machine gun to fire the .30.06 Springfield cartridges that can put a hole in a man the size of soup saucer.”
Earl moved to the edge of the covered porch’s top step, so the toecap of his boots eased over the lip. “I’m telling you this because I got two Rangers up in the storage loft of the general store armed with BAR M1918s.” Earl watched the Chicago man’s neck stiffen as he resisted the temptation to confirm the sight for himself. “Now, Chicago, you may be able to gun me down, that’s for sure. But you and your men will all be dead before I hit the ground, that’s for sure too. You ever seen what a BAR can do to a man? Lemme tell ya, it ain’t pretty. Cut him near in half. Makes those tommy guns of yours look like pea shooters, no offense to General Thompson neither.”
The men from Chicago exchanged looks with one another, a few risking a glance upward across the street. Through the streaming sunlight they could make out something dark and deadly poking out of each of the open windows.
“So, Chicago,” Earl asked, “how you wanna play this? It’s your call entirely. But that young woman recuperating inside this building, who you’d turn out to the awful smelling rabble who inhabit this town, ain’t going nowhere with you or anybody else. Truth be told, right now I’m of a mind to shut down the whole operation your Outhouse, or whatever it’s called, got going in the freight yard. You boys turn tail and leave town now and I just might let things be there and not put the lot of you on the chain.”
The Chicago man swallowed hard, his expression one of a bad meal coming back up.
“You can still be on the morning train for other parts,” Earl continued, “with no harm done at all. Got a piece of advice for you on that account: whatever town you climb off in, make sure there’s no resident Texas Ranger on patrol.”
42
WACO, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
Clara Beeks stopped, settling herself with a deep breath. “Yup, Earl Strong sure was something, he was.”
Paz reacted with a start, snapped back to the present time. He carried very few memories of his boyhood, most prominent of which was his mother rocking one of his infant brothers or sisters in her arms while she told him a story. That was the feeling he had right now, like he was a little boy back in the slum of La Vega, Venezuela, listening to his mother’s soft, sweet voice while wind rattled their shanty’s clapboard walls and rain drummed down on its tin roof.
“What about the Chicago men?” he asked, again much the way a little boy would. “Did they ever come back to town?”
“Well, sir, here’s where the legend and the facts become somewhat of a muddle. But you seem like quite a well-read man.”
“I am.”
“Then tell me, have you ever read or heard anything about the Chicago mob down here in Texas during the boom years?”
“Nothing at all.”
“There you have it then. But if you want to hear how things turned out direct from the horse’s mouth, then come with me.”
Clara Beeks led Guillermo Paz into the section of the Museum and Hall of Fame reserved for archival exhibits and document storage. She introduced him to another woman on duty there who retreated behind the locked door of a storage room, while Paz busied himself with a check of the documents, letters, and correspondence sealed within an L-shaped, wall-length glass display case. Each was accompanied by a detailed explanation of its historical context.
Paz felt Caitlin Strong behind that glass as well, not the woman exactly but the long tradition from which she had come. In those moments he came to realize she was no different from her grandfather in manner and sensibility. While the Texas Rangers had changed the way they operated with the times, they had not changed one bit at the core, upholding the tradition of men like Earl Strong every step of the way.
“Here we go,” he heard Clara Beeks say, turning to see her standing with a slim pile of old, weathered pages held fast in her hand. “This is a report written by Earl Strong to Ranger headquarters in Austin five days after he met the Chicago men for the first time. It details everything that happened from that point on, separating fact from legend.”
Paz looked down, feeling Earl Strong himself in the pages that smelled like old straw.
“Our copying machine’s down right now, but if you can come back around the close of business this evening, I’ll have a photocopy waiting for you. Say six o’clock. Just keep knocking on the main door until I hear you.”
“I’d appreciate that very much.”
Guillermo Paz approached the main entrance to the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum promptly at six o’clock, the parking lot now deserted save for a single compact car. He was about to knock when he saw the door was cracked open, shattered at the latch.
Paz drew his pistol and entered, easing the door closed behind him without making a sound. The scents of stale perspiration and oily, unwashed hair clung to the air, evidence that the Mexicans who’d found him in Sweetwater had trailed him here as well.
By the time he entered the records center where’d he last seen Clara Beeks, he smelled gun smoke as well. The old woman’s body lay on the floor near a still humming photocopying machine. Paz approached warily and eased her gently over. Clara Beeks’s sightless eyes gazed up at him, a jagged splotch of blood staining her white blouse, looking doubly bright when contrasted against the crumpled folds of her pink sweater.
Paz rose, heart hammering in his chest. He wished the Mexicans had laid in wait for him, wished he had the opportunity to make them all pay painfully for this. The fact that they hadn’t could only mean the old woman had made no mention of his expec
ted return. He looked toward the photocopying machine’s print tray and saw a nest of pages gathered there—Earl Strong’s report to Austin, no doubt, that Clara Beeks had promised him.
Paz turned back toward her body and felt the heat of anger raise sweat to the surface of his skin. His breathing picked up. The men who had killed Clara Beeks worked for the same Juárez cartel that had nearly cost Caitlin Strong her life in El Paso. Having missed him in Sweetwater, they had managed to track him here, and Paz felt a twinge of anxiety over the fate of old Robert Roy Parsons, owner of the Sweetwater Saloon.
Lots of accounts to be settled not too far down the line then, Paz thought as he gathered up the photocopied pages from the tray.
43
SHAVANO PARK; THE PRESENT
Caitlin Strong and Captain D. W. Tepper screeched to a halt outside Cort Wesley’s house within seconds of each other. They’d gotten the word about Cort Wesley’s violent run-in with the killer suspected of being behind the serial murders of Las Mujeres de Juárez while still in Albion where Tepper had met her to help sort out the aftermath of the supermarket shootings. Three dead in all, the little girl she’d rescued thankfully not among them.
Caitlin noticed Captain Consuelo Alonzo standing in the shade cast by the ice cream truck Cort Wesley had driven through his own house. He’d been cryptic in describing to Caitlin exactly what had happened. And based on the somber look on Alonzo’s expression, Caitlin figured Cort Wesley had been equally cryptic with her. She appeared to be coordinating the investigation between San Antonio local police and Bexar County’s sheriff’s deputies when she saw them coming.
“This is local jurisdiction, Captain,” she said to Tepper, ignoring Caitlin. “But I do appreciate the show of support.”
Tepper took off his Stetson, slapped it on his side, and took a long look at the ice cream truck parked halfway into Cort Wesley Masters’s living room. “I believe what we got here is a joint effort.”
“Did I miss something?” Alonzo asked, jamming her hands against her hips.
“The suspect involved is part of an ongoing investigation.”
“You talking about Masters, Captain?”
“I’m talking about the psychopath he chased out of his house with the help of twenty-one all-natural flavors.”
“Psychopath?” Alonzo repeated, unable to disguise the change in her tenor.
“Make you a deal: you tell me what your crime scene people got in their back pockets, and I’ll get more specific.”
“We’re working on a sketch of this psychopath of yours. Already ran his prints and came up with a blank. Lifted them off as big a knife as I’ve ever seen a man carry.”
Caitlin and Tepper looked at each other.
“We also got some residue of the contents of a plastic pouch your psychopath must’ve had rigged into himself with an IV. Mr. Masters claims he put two bullets from a Glock into the man and we’re going on the assumption that a third separated your psychopath from his bag.”
“We’re gonna need that big knife once you’re done with it,” Tepper told her.
“Time for you to get specific first.”
“It may have been used in a number of murders,” Caitlin said, even though Alonzo continued to ignore her.
“And how many would that be?”
“Four hundred. Maybe more.”
That brought Alonzo’s hackles down and took the stiffness from her spine. “We talking about Las Mujeres de Juárez here?”
Caitlin waited for D. W. Tepper to respond.
“That’s what we need the knife to tell us, Captain,” he said.
44
SHAVANO PARK; THE PRESENT
“I didn’t go looking for the trouble this time,” Cort Wesley said in the kitchen after the sun had set, only a skeleton police crew and Captain Tepper left behind.
A tow truck had winched the ice cream truck from the living room, more chunks of plaster and split beams crumbling when it finally came free. Cort Wesley had given his account of what had happened three times to three different cops and sat in while the same cops took detailed statements from both Dylan and Maria. The boy had grown furious when those cops impugned his father’s character and somehow tried to imply things had not happened exactly as reported, suggesting that the man named Macerio was actually an associate of Cort Wesley’s and had shown up here after they’d had a falling out.
“I don’t want you folks to try and pin this one on me,” Cort Wesley had warned. “This interview is over,” he continued, laying a hand on Dylan’s shoulder to tell him it was time to go.
“We’re almost finished here,” the detective taking Dylan’s statement told him.
“No, we’re finished now.”
He’d sent Dylan upstairs with Luke and Maria, then joined Caitlin in the kitchen once the detectives had moved back outside the house.
“You might not have been looking for trouble,” she said, “but it found you all the same.”
“Just like it keeps finding you. Ain’t we a pair?”
“Don’t know,” Caitlin said, letting her eyes hold on Cort Wesley’s. “Are we?”
“Thought I asked you the same question yesterday.”
“In so many words.”
“How many are there? Tell me something: why you keep pulling away?”
“You see me sitting here?”
“I’m talking about when things slow down and there’s time to think. We get back from DisneyWorld and you’re off to Neverland like Peter Pan.”
“In which case, I must’ve used up all my fairy dust.”
“Way I figure, it’s gonna take more than magic to make my boys and me enough for you. You gotta feel like you’re protecting us, saving us.” Cort Wesley hesitated. “Tell me if I’m wrong.”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the best I can do, Cort Wesley. For now anyway.”
“How about this, then? Times that bring us closest are always over guns.”
“Maybe they just bring out the best in us,” Caitlin offered.
“Considered that, but I think it’s something else. I think they bring out the real person in each of us. Expose our ilk,” he added, paraphrasing a jailhouse philosopher named Leroy Epps he met inside The Walls. “You know, our cores.”
“That bother you, Cort Wesley?”
“I’ll tell you what bothers me, Ranger. It took a killer to bring you back into my life. Only good thing about the asshole getting away is maybe it’ll keep you around for a while.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“You see me laughing?”
Caitlin gazed out the window. “Macerio’s been getting away with killing for years. This is the first time we’ve been close to him.”
“He’s just the start of your problems now.”
“How’s that?”
“Frank Branca Jr. came to see me at the firing range today.”
“Firing range?”
“I was with Dylan.”
“You pick up his homework at school while you’re at it?”
“Guess I was too busy remodeling my first floor and he got his homework on the Internet. Classes do that now. You were a real, honest-to-God parent you’d know that.”
“Like you, you mean.”
Cort Wesley bristled, his dark, deep-set eyes chastising her. “Frankie Junior offered me a job.”
“Doing what?”
“Not quite sure of the specifics yet, just the general notion, which somehow involves Hollis Tyree III’s water dig in Tunga County.”
“How?” Caitlin asked, leaning forward.
“There’s something else on that land, Ranger, besides water. Frankie wouldn’t tell me what, but he wouldn’t be interested if it didn’t hold some kind of profit for him.”
Caitlin’s gaze suddenly went distant, her mind drifting to another place entirely.
“What?” Cort Wesley asked. “What is it?”
“Just
remembering a story my granddad used to tell me about his father riding with Ranger captain George Arrington. They found a bunch of pioneers all murdered and mutilated right around the spot where Hollis Tyree is digging.”
“Murdered and mutilated by what?”
“Never did find out. Whole thing became something of a legend, a kind of spook story of some angry Indian spirit taking its revenge after the pioneers violated the earth somehow.”
“You believe that?”
“I believe you’re telling me Hollis Tyree’s dug up something besides water. Connection bothers me.”
Something in Cort Wesley’s expression changed. Caitlin couldn’t put her finger on what exactly. It was like flipping the lights on in a familiar room, the scene looking entirely different for a reason no more complicated than a blown bulb.
“Tell you what bothers me,” he said finally. “What social services is gonna say about all this.”
“Well, driving an ice cream truck into your house doesn’t exactly qualify as a stable home environment. But maybe Marianna Silvaro doesn’t watch television.”
Cort Wesley flashed his cell phone at her. “She’s already called four times. Message says she’s going to submit her final report in forty-eight hours if there’s anything I want to add.”
“Doesn’t sound good.”
“No, it doesn’t. Guess I could pack up the boys and take off for a time.”
“You ever run from anything in your life?”
“Never.”
“Enough said, Cort Wesley.”
“First time for everything.” He looked at her closer. “Is that blood on your shirt?”
“Spaghetti sauce.” Caitlin felt the late-day sun burning her cheeks through the window. “Crazy man was about to shoot a kid in an H.E.B. in Albion because he thought spiders were breeding inside her.”
Cort Wesley blew some breath into a whistle. “That’s crazy, all right.”
“There’s more. The town sheriff mentioned an elementary school student stabbing her teacher in the hand with a scissors when the kids couldn’t go outside for recess. Another man got in a fight with the manager of the local coffee shop because the coffeepots were filled with blood. A woman played demolition derby in a used car lot when they didn’t get her air-conditioning fixed right.” Caitlin held Cort Wesley’ stare, reading the look in his eyes. “And I’ll tell you what’s craziest of all: how you knew I’d been in a scrape to begin with.”