Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  Earl slept with Molly Finlaw for the first time a month after he’d saved her in the alley. He’d fashioned a small bedroom out of a loft storage area in the local sheriff’s office. No room for a bed but plenty for a pair of twin mattresses Earl taped together.

  Having the touch and feel of a woman refreshed him no end but it was nothing, he wrote, like the night he’d spent with Juanita in the motel. He claimed he missed her more and more with each passing day. Even promised to return to the village of Majahual someday to knock on her door once again, but this time to take her away with him.

  But Caitlin sensed a boyish longing to her grandfather’s words. As some of the dried paper came away as grit in her grasp, she had the sense that even as he was writing out his promises, Earl Strong knew they’d never come to be.

  Juanita Rojas had written Earl about how depressed she was over her pending marriage to a handsome and shy young man named Jesus Nieves whose family had been coaxed by a mutual friend into allowing a marriage to a native Indian of lesser standing. Juanita prayed every night there’d be a letter the next day from Earl Strong, as her belly began to bulge and her husband reveled in the fact that he’d soon be a father, having no reason to suspect the baby wasn’t his. Sitting there in the church all these years later, Caitlin found herself feeling profoundly sad for this young woman who longed to see the letters from Earl her mother denied her. At least twice a month, she dutifully committed the daily goings-on in her life in correspondence her mother similarly never sent. Caitlin thought it was the saddest story she’d ever heard, although for his part her grandfather made out okay.

  Earl married Molly Finlaw six months to the day after they’d first met. A simple ceremony held in a small San Antonio church attended only by his fellow Rangers. The peak of the oil boom had passed, law and order returned to East Texas through more traditional means than the ad hoc methods necessity and stature had allowed him to employ.

  “I’m sorry, Earl,” Molly said, after repeated attempts to have their first child failed.

  “Maybe the fault lies with me and Rangering that have me everywhere but home most of the time.”

  She shook her head stoically. “I can feel the emptiness inside me. I know I’m barren and if you want to look elsewhere for the woman to keep your line going, I’ll understand.”

  Earl had never loved her more than in that moment. “Molly, you ever known me to quit anything in my life?”

  “Not once, not even close.”

  “Then why in the name of Sam Houston do you figure I’m fixing to start now?” He waited for her to smile, continuing once she did. “We’ll try as many times as it takes and if that don’t work, we’ll just keep trying.”

  And they did, resulting ultimately in three miscarriages. Earl put up as brave a front as he could around her, but on the road their failure to produce a child was tearing him up inside. He could outshoot, outfight, and outwit anyone he came up against, only to have this black mark come up against his manhood. No matter which of them was to blame, Earl would never forgive himself if the Strong line ended with him. In the face of all he had accomplished that had rightfully earned him a fame and reputation thought gone forever, Earl felt it would all be for naught if there were no one to whom to pass the legacy on.

  He tried to resign himself to the reality. Couldn’t. Tried to stop sizing up every man lesser than he, except for the fact that they had borne children. Couldn’t. Tried to reassure Molly that he was fine whatever God dispensed upon them. Couldn’t.

  And then one day, eighteen months into their marriage, a letter arrived from Juanita Rojas in Majahual.

  Caitlin dabbed at her moist eyes, reading on. Juanita had penned the letter on her deathbed after the typhus had taken hold. They kept her infant twins and one-year-old son she’d named Diego in another room to keep the germs from them, and when the fever allowed Juanita would listen to her babies’ cries, wishing she could be there to soothe them away. She was dying and she knew it.

  In penning her final letter to Earl Strong, she begged him to come and take their son. She had confessed the truth of his being to her husband whose family wanted no part of a half-American child, the offspring of a dreaded el Rinche no less. Juanita knew the infant would be given up to the church as soon as she passed and made her mother promise, promise, to instead let Earl Strong take the child to be raised in Texas, America.

  She died signing her name to the one letter her mother actually sent.

  “You understand why we must do this, señor,” Juanita’s father told Earl when he arrived.

  “I’m just grateful you’re giving him up to me,” Earl said, holding Diego the way Juanita’s mother had showed him. “And I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “You saved my daughter’s life, señor. For that you deserve this much. I assume you are un hombre de su palabra, a man of your word.”

  “Sí,” Earl said humbly.

  “Then I want you to promise me you will never tell the boy the truth of his birth and that, no matter what, you will never return to Costa Maya with or without him. The world will be told he died of the same fever that took his mother.”

  Earl realized he was rocking the baby gently, instinct having already taken over. “I promise to do your courtesy justice by giving him the best life I can in Texas, sir. I promise to hold his mother’s memory close to my heart, even if I can never share it with him.”

  Juanita’s father reached out and grasped Earl’s arm. “Promise me you’ll never let down my daughter’s child the way I let her down. Promise me you’ll protect him as I failed to protect her.”

  “Usted tiene mi palabra, señor,” Earl told him. “You have my word.”

  73

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “Diego is Spanish for James,” Caitlin said as she closed the cigar box, thinking of her father, the great Jim Strong.

  “I should have known it the first time I saw you,” Paz told her. “It was there in your eyes, but I didn’t know what I was seeing.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “I’m sorry I made you sad.”

  “You didn’t. I’m not.”

  “The tears say otherwise. They come from a person who just found out a good part of her heritage lies in Mexico, lifelong enemy of the Texas Rangers.”

  Caitlin swiped the tears from her face. “A long time ago maybe.”

  “But what would it do to that heritage if people found out your legendary grandfather bedded a Mexican woman in his charge who gave birth to your legendary father?”

  “That your intention, Colonel?”

  “Not at all. I wanted you to understand we come from the same Mayan blood, among the greatest warriors who ever walked the planet. I wanted you to understand what I saw in your eyes the first time they met mine that changed me forever. And that makes me sad too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s all I’ve thought about for nearly a year and now it’s done. And I’m afraid that I’ll end up going back to the man I was before.”

  “That man’s dead and buried, Colonel. You’re not the only one who can see things in people’s eyes.”

  Paz thought for a moment, his eyes still big when narrowed. “Do you think your father knew?”

  “Nope, not if Earl Strong gave his word to Juanita Rojas’s father. Nothing would ever make him break a promise.”

  “His own wife never gave him any children?”

  Caitlin shook her head and felt the tears brimming anew. “Six straight generations of Strongs, each having only the one child. Strange, isn’t it?”

  Paz shrugged. “My mother had six and couldn’t provide for any. As a boy I swore to do whatever it took to never be poor again. I wonder if I made the right decision.”

  “I don’t feel any different, Colonel.”

  “¿Perdón?”

  “I might be a quarter Mexican, but I don’t feel any different. And, thanks to you, I know the rest of a story my grandfather never could finish all the w
ay.”

  “There’s more,” Paz told her. “I just haven’t gotten to it yet.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Like you just said: I can see it in your eyes.”

  “I have these nightmares,” Caitlin said, not looking directly at him. “I’m a little girl outside in the rain at night. Alone mostly. Sometimes my father finds me under a tree.”

  “Not your mother.”

  “No. Maybe since she died when I was real young.”

  Paz smiled, the action so foreign to him that he seemed unsure of it himself. “Your grandfather would be very proud of you today.”

  “Sometimes, when I’m at the range where he taught me to shoot, I feel him adjusting my grip. Laughing when I miss and whistling when I put a whole magazine in the center black. Sometimes I can smell his aftershave.”

  “My mother spoke with spirits all the time. The last time I talked to her, she told me she was going to join them in three days.”

  “And did she?”

  “I came back for the funeral on the fifth.”

  Caitlin took a deep breath, blew it out slowly. “Guess you can be on your way now, Colonel.”

  “You still need me, Ranger. Your life is still in danger.”

  “This isn’t your fight, Colonel.”

  Paz looked away from her as if he were considering that option. She watched his huge chest expand and contract in rhythm with his breathing. Then he spoke suddenly, after Caitlin had begun to figure he wasn’t going to respond at all.

  “Your grandfather chased Al Capone’s boys out of Texas. Shot a bunch of them up in an old freight yard and sent the lone survivor back north on the next train.”

  “He did at that,” Caitlin nodded fondly.

  “Your Sweetwater is coming, Ranger,” Paz continued. “I believe that’s what brought me here now; to make sure you survive it. When you call, I’ll be ready.”

  74

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Macerio sat in the East San Antonio bar sipping watered-down tequila. The chemo had destroyed his tolerance, his stomach set churning by the mere smell of alcohol. Tonight was the first time he’d been able to keep it down, and earlier in the day he felt the first pricks of stubble atop his bald dome. The chemotherapy’s side effects, apparently, were finally tapering off and Macerio had come to this bar to celebrate.

  The place was crowded everywhere except in his general vicinity, the only two stools open being the ones on either side of him. People might have been stupid and insensitive to the world around them, especially with a truckload of booze dumped down their throats. But they still knew enough to keep their distance from Macerio, some inbred defense system activated by his presence.

  He figured the prostitutes who favored this bar would be arriving soon. He could smell the residue of their cheap perfume on the air from previous nights as if someone had burned the scent into his nostrils. Soon they would stroll in reeking of the stuff with a mask of makeup worn over their faces. Macerio would know they were here as soon as the stale air carried the stronger whiffs to him. And when one of them left with a stranger never to return again, people would say she’d moved on or say nothing at all.

  He would dump the body south of San Antonio near the border, continuing the bloody line he was stitching across this part of the world. Even if anyone realized what he was doing, discerned the ritual within it, no one would ever figure out why, the reason rooted thousands of years in the past back to a more noble time Macerio was committed to restoring.

  Las Mujeres de Juárez meant nothing to him. They were mere objects he took no particular joy in killing, their blood supplying the color he was adding to his world. Creating a literal and figurative bloodline the Americans would someday be loath to cross. Tonight he would add another to the list, extend the line.

  He went back to sipping his tequila, enjoying it soaking his throat without forcing vomit up in its wake. A brief breeze told him the door had been opened and the scent it carried told him by whom.

  Macerio grinned, then heard his cell phone ring, interrupting his reverie and his plans.

  PART EIGHT

  The operations of the companies will be directed, more than heretofore been the case, to the suppression of lawlessness and crime. . . . [Officers and privates] are expected to use unremitting diligence in hunting up and arresting all violators of the law and fugitives from justice wherever they may be or from whatever quarter they may come.

  —Texas Ranger General Order 15

  75

  TUNGA COUNTY; THE PRESENT

  Caitlin and Cort Wesley sat behind some brush on the knobby hillside overlooking Hollis Tyree’s worksite, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. The work before them, ongoing under the harsh glow of day-bright light arrays, was utterly different from just two days before and all wrong. Caitlin glimpsed Meeks and his private army patrolling the perimeter with assault rifles dangling from their shoulders. And Hollis Tyree himself seemed to be supervising the entire process.

  “Those machines were in storage the other day,” she said, handing Cort Wesley the binoculars.

  He pressed them against his eyes to better watch the process of huge swatches of land being dug out and cleared for the vacuum cleaner–like machines to be lowered in. From there, tons of earth and gravel were sucked up onto conveyors that funneled the contents into massive dump trucks with tires the size of small buildings. The dump trucks were lined up in a wide arc within the work lights’ spill, the process confined to the southeast portion of fields still dotted with the huge, truck-mounted water drilling rigs.

  “I worked enough construction in my time to tell you I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Cort Wesley. “But it seems akin to cutting tunnels out of shale from mountains rich in coal normally.”

  “Except Tyree’s taking it out of the ground.”

  “Drilling straight down instead of sideways. Principle’s the same, with one crucial difference. Tell you one thing, whatever he’s doing now has got nothing to do with water. Makes me think . . .”

  “What?” Caitlin prodded.

  “They’re filtering the stones and refuse out before the dirt hits the conveyor. Makes me think of mining for gold.”

  “Gold? You think that’s what all this is about?”

  “Not in these parts, Ranger, no.”

  She watched Cort Wesley go back to his binoculars as a white panel truck drove up to the gate built into the newly erected chain-link fence enclosing the lower portion of the property.

  He looked over at Caitlin, tensing. “I think our serial killer just got here.”

  76

  TUNGA COUNTY; THE PRESENT

  Macerio’s orders were to get the women. Plans, and priorities, had changed. The precise nature of his instructions were cryptic but clear enough: the women were not to return to Mexico alive.

  He’d like to take a knife to the lot of them, a dozen for the price of one left on the border to lengthen his bloodline even more than planned. But that wasn’t what tonight was about. Tonight he had a job to do and doing it right meant doing it quick and sure. Get them outside the truck to stretch their legs and drink some water and machine gun the lot of them. Choose the right place and all anybody would find once the sun, heat, and coyotes got to them would be bones, not more of Las Mujeres de Juárez.

  As he approached the worksite, though, he saw everything was different since he’d last been here. Different machines, different job description. Priorities had changed. Clearly.

  He watched the guards drag open the gate and drove the truck through, already planning where he would pull over once his charges were inside.

  77

  TUNGA COUNTY; THE PRESENT

  Caitlin parked her SUV a quarter mile down the freshly paved access road well north of U.S. 90. She chose the spot for the thick nest of balled-up sagebrush pressed up against a rock formation just off the road. Perfect camouflage for the SUV, leaving Cort Wesley and her to figure out wha
t to do from here.

  “If the son of a bitch ends up staying there,” Cort Wesley said, “we can make a fire and roast marshmallows.”

  “He’ll be coming. Of course, what exactly we do about that remains an open question,” Caitlin told him.

  “Leave that part to me.”

  Macerio felt the hollow thump beneath him, the truck suddenly listing hard to the right, and knew one of his tires had blown. He cursed his bad luck, then figured maybe there was a way to make it work for him.

  The shoulder along this part of the road fell off steeply into an irrigation ditch. The blown tire would give him an excuse to have the young women pile out to be killed en masse, a bullet or two for each. He’d order them to the rim of the shoulder, do the deed so their own momentum would take them over the side into the shallow pool of collected muck and water. The bodies would remain out of sight for some time and a hard rain in the next few days would conceal them for even longer.

  Macerio steered the van off onto the soft patch adjoining the fresh pavement. Then he climbed out and jerked the truck’s cargo door up, liking the way the girls’ eyes glistened in the dark.

  “¡Todos fuera!” he ordered. “Everybody out! “¡Apúrate!”

  . . .

  Moonlight revealed the truck to Caitlin and Cort Wesley from several hundred yards away.

  “Here we go,” she said, unclipping her badge and dropping it into a cupholder.

  “Don’t like the idea of me sitting here, pretending I’m asleep,” Cort Wesley said again.

  “He recognizes you, we lose the advantage.”

  “You walking right up to a hardwired killer with your SIG out of sight. You call that an advantage?”

  He’d found an ample supply of screws and nails in a toolbox stored in the back of Caitlin’s SUV. Cort Wesley hammered enough of those nails and screws into the thickest branches he could find and then laid them across the road in a pattern certain to snare at least one of the truck’s tires and maybe two.