Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  And with that she slammed the door.

  “You find the keys?” she asked Cort Wesley.

  He flashed an assortment pulled from the fat Mexican’s desk. “So what happens once we get them out of here, Ranger?”

  Caitlin started for the stairs, holding his gaze. “You know how to drive a bus?”

  48

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Captain Tepper called in additional support and custodial personnel to company headquarters to get the girls processed and take all their statements the next morning.

  “You’re an hour late,” he noted after Cort Wesley parked the school bus in front of the main entrance.

  “Decided to stop at a Denny’s on the way,” Caitlin told him.

  “Hope you’re not expecting me to pick up the bill.”

  “Restaurant was glad to perform a public service on behalf of the state of Texas. And the manager’s got some Rangers as regular customers.”

  “How’d you get them across the border exactly?”

  “Told the Border Patrol it was a field trip.”

  “And they believed you?”

  “They believed the Texas Ranger telling them that’s the way it was.”

  Tepper cast his gaze back at the girls disembarking from the stifling bus in favor of a shady spot beneath a pair of cottonwoods where a clerk was handing out bottles of water. “I called social services. We’re gonna need their help in figuring out what to do with these girls from this point.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “That they’d been rescued south of the border in a joint operation with Mexican authorities.”

  “Oughtta hold for a while. Long enough anyway.”

  “Long enough for what, Ranger?”

  “To find Macerio.”

  Cort Wesley was gone by the time two carloads of social services workers arrived, led by Marianna Silvaro, who was driving the lead car. She spotted Caitlin straightaway and lumbered over through the heat, her skin shiny in the sun. Thunder boomed in the distance and Caitlin smelled ozone in the air, a storm building for sure.

  “Mr. Masters hasn’t returned any of my calls, Ranger Strong.”

  “He’s had other matters to attend to, Ms. Silvaro.”

  “I appreciate you standing up for his character, Ranger, but my final report is due in less than forty-eight hours now. And after what happened yesterday it’s hard for me to believe his two boys are safe in his custody.”

  “What if I told you none of that was his doing at all?” Caitlin said, thinking of how Dylan’s rescue of a runaway girl had started the whole thing.

  Thunder rumbled again and Silvaro looked to the west as if to search for its source in the dark clouds forming well away from the sun. “I’d need more details.”

  “Afraid I can’t provide any more than my word, ma’am.”

  “And in any other case, Ranger, that would be more than enough to suffice. But not when the lives and safety of children are deemed to be at stake.”

  “Meaning they’d be safer with strangers or someplace where the sheets gotta be washed every day just to stop a kid from dying of dysentery or staph.”

  “That’s not fair,” Silvaro said, showing no signs of backing down, “especially coming from somebody who just ferried a busload of endangered children across the border.”

  “Take a good look at those girls, ma’am,” Caitlin said, and waited for Silvaro to do just that before resuming. “Because the man I saved them from is the same one who came after Cort Wesley Masters’s kids yesterday. Somebody should’ve performed an abortion on him outside the womb to spare a lot of people the kind of pain you don’t want to hear about.”

  Silvaro’s face wrinkled in distress. “Was that necessary?”

  “Ms. Silvaro, I’ve got great respect for what you and your department do. But right now your nose is stuck in something that would make any normal person gag from the stench. It’s a place people are normally happy pretending doesn’t exist. I’ve seen it and smelled it long enough to know you can’t possibly understand the kind of person it takes to survive the long-term exposure.”

  “I know there’s a point here somewhere.”

  “You want to ruin a man’s life, you should understand the circumstances first. And since you’re not ready to do that, I’m asking you to take my word.”

  “Your word?”

  “That’s right.”

  The wind picked up, blowing in the leading edge of the front that would shake trees and rattle buildings. Caitlin half expected emergency sirens to wail any second to warn people inside away from the windows and into their basements.

  “Just doing your job,” Marianna Silvaro was saying, “like I’ve got to do mine. You may not have meant to, but you just proved my case for me. Please have Mr. Masters call me so I don’t have to get a court order to remove the children from his custody.”

  “I’m not sure I wanna be the one passing him that news.”

  “Something happens to one of those kids, it’s on me now, Ranger Strong, and I take what I do seriously.”

  “So does Cort Wesley Masters, ma’am.”

  . . .

  “Think we finally got this under control,” Captain Tepper said to Caitlin, mopping his brow with the Stetson held by his side, as the first raindrops began to fall. “Oh, almost forgot,” he resumed, pulling a manila envelope from his inside jacket pocket. “Locations where all the bodies of Las Mujeres de Juárez were recovered along the border and corresponding dates. Ready to tell me what you’re looking for?”

  “Nope,” Caitlin said, holding the envelope even with her hip.

  Before them, a combination of Rangers and social services personnel under Marianna Silvaro’s direction were interviewing the rescued girls at small tables and chairs set up in the shade. Caitlin guessed their statements would be fairly uniform, pretty much mirroring that of Maria Lopez, although she suspected from the wan, lost expressions that a number had been held captive much longer than she.

  “Hopefully they can beat the storm,” Tepper continued. “All told, I’d call it a successful rescue.”

  “Rescue’s not finished yet, Captain,” Caitlin said, looking at him. “Still a dozen or so girls unaccounted for.”

  Tepper’s expression turned stern. “You’re not fixing to pay a visit to Hollis Tyree’s worksite in Tunga County, I hope.”

  “Did I say that?” Caitlin asked. “But it’s about time a resident Ranger stopped by, don’t you think? Can I borrow your truck?”

  Tepper handed her his keys and fastened his Stetson back in place, as he watched Caitlin slide off. He turned his attention briefly to the shady area beneath the cottonwoods, then back to Caitlin as she climbed into the driver’s side of his truck.

  “Man, I love that girl,” he said, jamming a cigarette into his mouth but stopping just short of lighting it.

  49

  WACO, TEXAS; THE PRESENT

  Guillermo Paz sat in the truck cab as rain pounded the windshield hard enough to threaten the glass. He held the photocopy of the report Texas Ranger Earl Strong had filed with headquarters a few days after he had faced down Al Capone’s men from Chicago tight in his hands. The cab was stuffy and the air stale, forcing Paz to crack a window even though it allowed a neat sliver of the storm inside. He was accustomed to taking several showers throughout the day, but the lack of one in more than a day now left him smelling his own rank sweat and skin oil that brought a light sheen to his face and arms. Made him feel like he should step out into the storm long enough for it to wash him clean.

  Earl Strong’s report was written out in longhand in the form of a letter, the penmanship surprisingly neat, as if Earl Strong’s words were as precise as his aim. By the time Paz took to reading the report yet again, he had practically memorized the words. Such a clear picture painted in his head of the gunfight that had made Earl Strong a true legend that Paz felt he was there standing alongside him. . . .

  Sweetwater, Texas; 1931<
br />
  Captain Franklin Kershaw

  The Texas Rangers

  Austin, Texas

  Report filed by Ranger Earl Strong

  Dear Captain Kershaw:

  This ain’t a pretty tale I have to tell you. I want to get that straight at the outset, and if anyone in Austin is looking to dispense blame for the events I am about to describe, all that blame should come down on me and me alone.

  First, I want to thank your office mightily for responding to my request for the BARs in a fashion timely enough, I fully believe, to save plenty of lives, mine included. That kind of firepower in the hands of those as practiced and skilled as us Rangers makes me feel the fifty or so of us left could fight the next big war all by ourselves and come out just fine. Don’t know who it is we might be fighting right now but whoever it is, I don’t reckon the battle could be any bloodier than the one just fought here in Sweetwater and that’s the God’s honest truth.

  Now, as I left off in my last correspondence, it was my fervent hope that those boys from Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit would hop the next train out of Sweetwater and head back where they belonged. But I guess I knew in my heart they had no aim of doing any such thing on account of them being gunmen of a sort, and a gunman never runs away from a challenge; he can’t, if he ever wants to face his bosses again, never mind himself.

  Point is if I had it to do all over again, I’d have put those sumbitches on the chain with the rest of the scum gathered in Sweetwater. See how they felt after a week of living in a space no bigger than their own person, crapping and pissing in a pail they had to share with another two men. Yup, that probably woulda fixed things for sure and, to speak the God’s honest truth, I believe I may have done what I did because I wanted the fight they was offering. I’d come upon so many lowlifes and bottom scum that I had found a place in my head that made me no better than them and that’s the God’s honest truth too.

  I say this to you here ’cause I believe it to be a concern for future Ranger deployments in these modern times. There’s too many of us reared on a frontier tradition where the enemies were more clear-cut and the fights didn’t call for so much pondering in their wakes. Back when my daddy and granddaddy were riding the range, their biggest problems were thieves, rustlers, Mexican bandits, and renegade Indians. They were guardians of a land still making its borders and just about all the battles they fought were about territory and ownership one way or another. Guess it’s still about that now pretty much, only the enemies and the weapons have changed mightily, Captain, and if us Rangers and the great state of Texas is going to survive, we’ve got to change too.

  But let me get now to the events that followed the Chicago men laying down their tommy guns and walking back to the freight yard with their tails between their legs. Coulda walked all the way back to Chicago for all I cared, but I knew they’d be back.

  What tricked me was my own pride on account of my figuring they’d come back for me. Was the night after the initial confrontation that Tim Bob Roy was on night patrol down the main thoroughfare when six of those Chicago boys ambushed him. They shot him in both legs and then took to him with clubs and mallets, and by the time Constable Tyree came and fetched me, his face was so mashed to pulp you couldn’t even tell he’d been a man.

  Now I’m not saying Tim Bob was the best man I’d ever known. He’d had occasions when he took a belt to his boys and a hand to his wife. Going home always left him hitting the booze hard because, truth be told, he was born for the range and was never happy away from it. But he was a damn fine Ranger who’d saved my life least as often as I’d saved his and I was proud to call him a friend. He was in Sweetwater, because, as you know, I requested his presence, so the responsibility for his murder fell on me.

  I wrote his family to that effect, glad in those long moments I didn’t have no wife or kids of my own. Always thought that’s why I never got scared of nothing, having nothing to lose and all. So I told Sandman Sanchez, who had a wife and two girls, to get on home and let me handle the finish with the Chicago boys. Of course, he wasn’t hearing a nickel of that. Said if he left Sweetwater then, you might as well sew a dress around him and give him a wooden pistol in place of his Colt.

  Now, and this is important, there was still the law to consider here, so Sandman and I collected statements from the witnesses we had, men who smelled so bad I paid a boy to swab down the floor and walls of our office to rid it of the stench. But they gave us the descriptions we needed and it wasn’t hard to figure the next step, since what other men in town were wearing wool suits and ties?

  So Sandman and me headed over to the freight yard on horseback the next morning. We stood outside the old train car the Chicago boys had claimed as their quarters.

  “Chicago,” I yelled, meaning their leader you will recall I referenced in an earlier letter. “Come out here, Chicago. This is Texas Ranger Earl Strong talking.”

  The door to the car opens to reveal the man with the eyebrows looked stitched together in his skivvies reeking of booze and cigarettes. “You fixing on putting me on your famous chain, Ranger?” he asks me, grinning up a storm.

  “Nope,” I said back. “That’s just for all manner of lowlifes and scum, the worst of which still rank far above the backstabbing, murdering likes of you.”

  So he grins at me. “You must have me confused with someone else, Ranger. I was here all of last night and have the witnesses to prove it.”

  “Who said that me paying you this visit concerns last night, Chicago?” He stiffened up and narrowed his eyes to slits, and right then I saw where this was going and, truth be told again, couldn’t wait for it to get there.

  “If it was up to me,” I went on, “I’d hang the lot of you here and now. But these are civilized times and the law has got to be upheld even for devil spawn pieces of dung like you. You Chicago boys come down here to my state with all your whores so you can get drunk and butt love each other all night long.”

  Now I know what you’re thinking, Captain, and you’re dead on right. I was indeed provoking the sumbitch because, like I said, I already knew what was coming. And there was no reason to put it off. By this time Sandman had backed up to our horses, indicating we might be talking a good game but in the end were prepared to turn tail and run against such lousy odds, especially with them Chicago boys tight inside a steel freight car. I saw a bunch of them in the window, including the glint of their weapons. Guess I didn’t get all the tommy guns after all, ’cause I was certain I caught a few of them being lifted into position behind the car’s cracked window glass.

  The one I called Chicago pushed his hairy arms up into the doorframe. “So you come to arrest me?”

  “I come to arrest all of you.”

  “And to think we were preparing to leave on the noon train just like you suggested, Ranger.”

  “I’m afraid that option’s off the table now. It falls on me to arrest the lot of you on the charge of murdering Ranger Tim Bob Roy. And, in case you didn’t know, we still hang murderers in Texas.”

  If Chicago was perturbed by that at all, he sure didn’t show it. “There’s more of us now than a couple days ago, Ranger. More guns too.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “But you don’t figure yourself for the damn fool you are, do you? You talk about Chicago like it’s a million miles away and we got no right to be here. This country’s a different place these days, all connected and interdependent. Chicago and Texas might as well be side by side on the maps they put in geography books. Los Angeles and New York too. Only thing separating such places is distance and that’s not really very much at all anymore.”

  “It might not be,” I told him back. “But right now you’re in Texas and I’m the law in Texas and I’m placing you and your men under arrest.”

  He must’ve figured I was playing right into his hands and, truth be told, he coulda been right. Once word got out that this Outfit of his had whipped the Texas Rangers, they’d pretty much own the boomtowns stretc
hed up through the east. But he was playing into mine too. Because once word got back to Chicago that the Rangers had whipped the best Mr. Al Capone had to offer, I don’t figure any more of them would be following.

  I see that now but, truth be told, I didn’t really see it then. All I saw in my head was Tim Bob Roy lying broken in the street with a face like bloody mashed potatoes. It was a fairly cool morning and the windows on that old rail car were all closed. I knew when the first glass broke what was coming and drew both my Colts, firing before the Chicago guns could to give Sandman the time he needed to rip his BAR from its saddle strap.

  I coulda shot Chicago himself first but kept my fire on the windows to chase his men back instead, which was when Sandman opened up with the BAR. And, let me tell you, it might be classified as a light machine gun but there’s nothing light about it when you start firing the damn thing.

  But here’s where the Chicago men went wrong. They figured they had the upper hand inside that railcar they must’ve thought to be like a bank vault. Figured they could cut Sandman and me down in a hail of bullets that would tear us apart. What they didn’t figure on was the BAR’s .30.06 shells pulverizing that steel and banging all around the car’s innards en route to somebody’s flesh.

  The screams started sounding ahead of their return fire, which was hapless as any I’ve ever seen. These boys might have thought they were tough, and probably were the way bullies are with those that are smaller and afraid to fight back in any meaningful way. They was used to gunning down men who didn’t have guns of their own or weren’t well skilled in using them, especially when somebody was firing back. But Sandman and I had seen the other side of enough gunfights to neither fear nor delay, and I can’t even now imagine what was going through those Chicago boys’ minds with a pair of Rangers standing clear in the open taking the upper hand on them.

  Sandman kept firing, turning that car into Swiss cheese, while I made my way around to the other side to deal with those who tried to run out the second door. My confession to you today, Captain, is that I shot all of them, each and every one fixing to do the same to me. As I best recollect, I took out five that way, which means Sandman covered the rest numbering six in all with the BAR.