by Jon Land
He shrugged. “Can’t explain how I knew it. Guess I’m starting to know you as well as myself.”
“Starting?”
“You know where my middle name comes from?”
“John Wesley Hardin would be my guess.”
“Last of the great Texas gunfighters and outlaws.”
“Until Texas Ranger John B. Armstrong shot him and his men down in a train.”
“True enough, Caitlin Strong. My dad had five sons with three different women, but he only named one of them after an outlaw, like he already knew how I was gonna turn out. How you suppose that can be?”
“I really couldn’t say, Cort Wesley.”
“Just like I can’t say how I knew you got yourself into a scrape today. Maybe it’s something different in your eyes or the way you’re carrying yourself. Maybe I smell something on you—gun smoke, blood, whatever—my conscious mind can’t quite register. All I know is what I know. Just like I know I put two slugs into Macerio.”
“We won’t find him north of the border, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin said and pulled a folded-up piece of paper from her pocket. “Maria drew me a map of where to find where they had her stashed in Nuevo Laredo.”
Cort Wesley regarded the childlike drawing scrawled in Magic Marker still fresh enough to bring its scent off the page. “Then what are we waiting for?”
Gazing at Maria’s crude map made Caitlin think of something else, a picture forming in her mind that chilled her blood.
“Where you going?” Cort Wesley asked, when she bounced up from the table.
Outside, Caitlin found Captain Tepper talking on his cell phone. He snapped it closed as soon as he saw her coming.
“What’s on your mind, Ranger?”
“Those bodies of Las Mujeres de Juárez, four hundred or however many.”
“What about them?”
“I need the locations where they were recovered along the border with accompanying dates.”
“We’ll get right on it. You wanna tell me your reason?”
Caitlin shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I did, Captain.”
45
YUCATÁN PENINSULA, MEXICO; THE PRESENT
“I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon,” Colonel Montoya said to the two men walking alongside him through the dense foliage of the southern Yucatán peninsula.
The jungle was thick to the point of being almost impassable. Montoya walked confidently, as if his feet had memorized the narrow route through the dark green flora, multiple varieties of overhanging trees, and garden plants turned feral by the rich soil and nutrients found nowhere else in the world. A bittersweet smell that reminded Montoya of fresh mulch and ivy clung to the air, growing stronger with the heat.
“Something has changed,” Vincente Carillo Guzman explained, fighting to keep the low-hanging branches off him as if they were snakes ready to snap. Guzman was head of the Sinaloa drug cartel based in northwest Mexico; in the estimation of many, the richest man in the entire country. He was wearing khaki-colored cargo pants that looked stiff and clean enough to be freshly purchased from one of the American catalog companies in which he owned substantial stock.
“An opportunity that is in our best interests to seize now, Colonel,” added Fernando Leyva, chief of the Juárez cartel. He was short and squat, a man forever at war with his weight. He wore light trousers but a black shirt that had gone shiny in the places where the sweat had soaked through. His combed-back hair looked matted to his skull.
Leyva had been at war with his Sinaloan counterpart for years, leading to the unprecedented surge in violence throughout the country, especially his base in Juárez. The resulting mobilization by the army had cramped their previously unfettered criminal enterprises, while curtailing the sales and distribution efforts of both cartels. Montoya’s Zeta Special Forces commandos had initially led that effort and now supervised the uneasy peace brokered by the colonel himself. Consolidating the two previously warring cartels under a single unstoppable unit had set the stage for his greater plans, although even Montoya found himself wondering what it was that had brought the two of them together to see him in the jungle.
Montoya felt mosquitoes fat with blood buzzing around him. He swatted one that landed on his forearm, leaving a thick stain behind. “Only the females bite. I’ve always wondered why. I want to show you something,” he said and pushed through a final patch of thick brush immediately before him.
Montoya led the way through the patch toward the ruins of the Mayan temple, passing the pillar where the American college students had been tied the day before. He led the two men up the stairs inside what remained of the stepped pyramid, instantly welcoming the dark and cooler confines, the still-whole roof forming a shield from both light and heat. “I discovered these ruins myself. My Mayan ancestors offered sacrifices in this very spot. In return they were granted glimpses of the future they managed to record.”
Guzman and Leyva accompanied Montoya to the far wall where the light streaming in through the open front proved sufficient to reveal the first in a sequence of ancient drawings etched intricately into the stone structure. Surrounding each individual drawing were the imbedded letters, known as glyphs, of the ancient Mayan language. Montoya ran his eyes over them, his lips moving silently as if he were reading the words almost reverently to himself.
“This place is where the past and future intersect,” the colonel said finally. “I had archaeologists brought down here to clear these. They’ve still got a ways to go, but I wanted you to see what’s been revealed so far.”
The sequential panels of drawings all pictured bloody battle scenes featuring a big bullheaded figure leading one army against another. The drawings were detailed to the point of including blood splattered over the warriors on both sides, though far more was displayed on the larger army being vanquished by the smaller.
“The blood you see depicted is real,” Montoya explained. “My ancestors baked it over an open flame, so it would harden to an enamel-like texture once brushed into place.”
Guzman and Leyva took turns swatting at more mosquitoes that had followed them into the temple and turned their gazes from the smaller army’s square-headed leader to Montoya and then back again at the first panel.
“The resemblance is uncanny, Colonel,” Guzman noted.
“An incredible likeness,” agreed Leyva, as if not to be outdone.
“An army to the south triumphing over a much larger force to the north,” said Montoya. “I’d call it fate. It’s all here on this wall; the future of man, the future it is my responsibility to make. Twenty-twelve, the year the future ends according to the Mayan calender, marking the onset of the End Times, at the close of the final Katún, the Time of No-Time. I am the bringer of that time, as foretold on these very walls.”
Montoya swung all the way around to face the two men. “The profits our arrangement has produced have allowed me to buy the rest of the soldiers I need, all loyal to me now instead of Mexico. They’ve become my guerrillas and soon they will infiltrate U.S. cities and unleash a war like none the Americans have ever known. They will not see us. They will not know where we are coming from. And we will fight them on our terms until their entire country is held hostage by fear.”
Guzman and Leyva exchanged a look, the first time Montoya had ever seen them so close without at least a dozen armed men backing both of them up.
“The opportunity that has brought us here,” began Guzman, speaking for both of them, “can aid that cause substantially.”
“Immeasurably,” added Leyva, turning his attention on the final uncleared sections of wall. “Flames, the world to the north consumed by them—that’s what I believe you’ll see revealed in the final drawings. That is what this opportunity offers, Colonel. The true End Times.”
Montoya caught a mosquito out of the air and squeezed it between his thumb and forefinger, wiping the blood off on his pants. “Keep talking,” he said.
46
NUEV
O LAREDO; THE PRESENT
“Tell me again what exactly we’re looking for?” Cort Wesley asked from behind the wheel of the Dodge Dakota pickup truck cruising along the darkened, ruddy street lined on both sides with decrepit buildings. Occasionally, lights flickered through jagged holes that had once held windows.
Caitlin glanced down at the crude, but surprisingly accurate map Maria Lopez had drawn of the slum-dominated outskirts of the city of Nuevo Laredo. Rangers had moved the girl, Dylan, and Luke to a nearby motel under twenty-four-hour guard until they got back.
“Birds,” she said.
“Birds?”
“A building with birds on it big enough to house a lot of people. If you wanna call that a house.” Caitlin looked up from the map at Cort Wesley. “Tell me again why we’re driving a stolen truck?”
“Borrowed.”
“Okay, borrowed.”
“This is Nuevo Laredo, Ranger. We don’t want anybody we piss off to have a license plate or vehicle description to track.”
True to Cort Wesley’s word, most of their route thus far had been concentrated in the area of La Zona, or Boy’s Town, a walled compound of five intersecting streets dominated by any number of brothels and cantinas that catered to both natives and Americans crossing International Bridge #1. Strangely enough, this was a relatively violence-free area of the crime-ravaged city.
“I still had any contacts,” Cort Wesley continued, “they’d be the ones to tell us where we can find this storehouse for stolen girls you’re looking for. Right now they’re just as likely to take a shot at us for being out at night.”
“I think we got our bearings crossed,” said Caitlin, eyes on Maria Lopez’s map again. “I think south is north and vice versa.”
“Meaning the other side of the slums.”
“Yeah. Gang territory.”
Cort Wesley smirked. “This is Nuevo Laredo, Ranger. Whole city’s gang territory.”
Caitlin had the same feeling moving from Laredo into Nuevo Laredo that she had when passing from El Paso into Juárez: mere yards apart in distance but encompassing an entirely different world in every other respect. More than a century before, Mexican cattle rustlers and thieves had crossed the Rio Grande here to do battle with Rangers and their deputies over the Texas border. The city then had formed the center of what was essentially a full-scale border war that had resulted in any number of violent gun battles leading to atrocities that haunted the Texas Rangers to this day. Vastly outmanned and outgunned, the Rangers had adopted a vigilante mentality that had nearly cost the legendary lawmen their very existence. Some went as far as to say that men like her grandfather and the equally great Lone Wolf Gonzaullas had almost single-handedly saved the Rangers’ future and preserved their legacy.
“Would’ve thought the place we’re looking for be closer to Boy’s Town,” Cort Wesley noted, cruising a fresh set of streets paved in flattened gravel that seemed to conform better to the markings on Maria Lopez’s map.
“I think the girls they bring here are used mostly for export.”
“Seems like a lot of export, Ranger.”
“Not just north of the border, Cort Wesley; south of it too. And east and west. These men look at young girls as slabs of meat with breasts and vaginas they can attach cash registers to.”
“That bad?”
“We’re so focused on drugs down here, sometimes it’s hard to see anything else.”
Cort Wesley slowed the truck, angling it suddenly to the right. “Well, I think I just saw the birds we’re looking for.”
47
NUEVO LAREDO; THE PRESENT
“That adobe-looking building over there behind the fence,” Cort Wesley said, pointing.
“Looks like an old school, bus and all.”
“See those things on either side of the front door?”
“Parrots,” Caitlin said, comparing what she saw to the scale of Maria’s drawing.
“Yeah,” agreed Cort Wesley, “birds. Notice the guard posted behind the bus?”
“The one who just lit a cigarette?”
Cort Wesley parked the truck on the side of the road. “You don’t miss much, do you?”
“Let’s go get what we came for,” Caitlin said, opening her door.
“What exactly is that, Ranger?”
Caitlin froze, the door half open. “Macerio if he’s inside. Where to find him if he’s not.”
Cort Wesley lurched drunkenly up to the fence gate, Caitlin making a show of trying to stop him from rustling it.
“Hey! Hey! You over there, let me in; I went to this school!” he called out in Spanish.
The guard awkwardly unslung the assault rifle from his shoulder and stormed forward, barrel twisted sideways and slightly upward—a trademark of poor training. “Get out! Go away!” the guard ordered.
“Just wanna show my girl here the inside. Come on, it’ll only take a minute.”
The guard forced his rifle barrel through a link of the fence and started to poke Cort Wesley with it. Cort Wesley responded by jerking the barrel all the way through until the guard was pressed against the links, while Caitlin jammed a gun flush against his cheek.
“How many other guards inside?”
“Three,” the man muttered.
“If you’re lying, I’ll shoot you in the face.”
“Four,” the man corrected. “Five including the one at the desk.”
“Now, hand me the key to this lock here.”
Cort Wesley clipped the guard’s crude walkie-talkie to his belt and donned his bulky jacket and cap, while Caitlin used plastic cuffs to fasten him to a fence post. A kerchief found in the glove compartment of the stolen truck made for a perfect gag.
“We got two cameras to contend with,” Cort Wesley told her. “You ready to do this?”
Caitlin mussed her hair. “Damn right.”
Cort Wesley took her by the shoulder and led her forward, making a show of getting rougher as soon as they came within range of the camera while keeping his face tilted low.
“¡Abra!” he said, hitting the door buzzer. “Open up!”
A click followed a buzz and the door snapped open. Cort Wesley shoved Caitlin inside ahead of him and righted the assault rifle on a fat Mexican man rising from behind a desk in the corner.
“Move a muscle and I’ll kill you. Just sit yourself back down.”
Arms raised in the air, the man did as he was told. He was wearing carpenter’s overalls and his desk was strewn with tools, screws, and nails. Caitlin noticed the smell of sawdust was heavy in the air as she approached him alongside Cort Wesley.
“We’re looking for a man named Macerio,” she told the Mexican. “Know him?”
The man just sat there, glance shifting between her and Cort Wesley.
“I’m gonna ask you again. Do you know a man named Macerio?”
The man swallowed hard, still didn’t speak.
“Let me try,” Cort Wesley said, as he came around the desk and grabbed a hammer. He hoisted it into the air and brought it down hard on the back of one of the man’s hands while covering his mouth to drown out his scream. “You don’t answer the lady again, I’m gonna start in with the nails. You scream when I take my hand off your mouth, I’ll start anyway.”
The man breathed heavily and noisily when Cort Wesley pulled his hand away. His eyes swam with fear and pain, his face now dripping sweat onto the desktop.
“I know him,” he grimaced. “But he is not here.”
“But he’s expected back, right?” Caitlin demanded.
“No, he will not be back. Please, that’s the truth.”
“I believe you. Problem I got is how it is you’re so certain.”
The man looked down, too late to stop Caitlin from seeing the truth in his eyes.
“You know he’s not coming back because you’re shutting this place down, right? That’s what the bus is for. Yes or no?”
The man nodded, still afraid to meet her gaze.
“Wh
ere are you taking the girls?”
The man didn’t respond, didn’t move, didn’t look up.
“Goddamn,” Caitlin started, realizing. She stopped when she felt a heat building inside her as if her very bones had caught fire, pushing flames out her pores. Electricity danced at the edges of her fingertips, forcing them to quiver before she grabbed hold of the fat man’s head and yanked it up so she was eye-to-eye with him. “They’re gonna disappear, aren’t they? Dumped in some mass grave out in the desert because all of a sudden this little fun palace has become a liability.” Caitlin jerked the man’s head backward hard enough to nearly spill him from his chair. “You son of a bitch. . . .” Then, thinking fast, “Four other men inside besides you, is that right?”
The man nodded rapidly.
“How many girls?” Caitlin followed.
Silence.
“How many girls!”
“Sixty.”
She pushed another walkie-talkie resting atop the desk toward him. “Tell the others you need them down here. Quick.”
When the man resisted, Cort Wesley grabbed a ten-penny nail and started to line it up over the back of his swollen hand.
“I will do it! I will do it!” the Mexican gasped, finally snatching up the walkie-talkie.
“Good choice,” said Cort Wesley.
The others came down the stairs together in single file, Caitlin and Cort Wesley easily boxing them in before they could try for their weapons. Then they herded all five men into a supply closet that still held empty composition books and boxes of chalk.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” Caitlin told them. “Anybody asks, tell ’em the Texas Rangers stopped by for a visit.”