Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  “You know there’s only one way this ends,” Cort Wesley continued.

  “My intention is to arrest his sorry ass. But make no mistake about it, gunning him down runs a close second if things come to that.”

  “It’ll come to that, all right. Men like Macerio don’t stick out their wrists for you to slap the handcuffs on.”

  “You did,” Caitlin reminded.

  Once the trap was laid, they drove back down the road a half-mile or so and parked the SUV far enough into the brushy flatlands to let the night conceal it. Neither said much while they waited for the panel truck to pass; they didn’t have to wait very long, just ten minutes by Caitlin’s count.

  By the time they came upon it angled on the shoulder, Macerio had already emptied the girls from the truck and was shepherding them around its front through the hazy spray of headlights barely making a dent in the ribbon of night ahead.

  Macerio figured he’d kill the girls first, then change the tire, though he flirted with the idea of having them change it for him. For all his attributes, Macerio detested physical labor, especially loathing the peasant lifestyle that often came with it. Both his parents had been migrant farmworkers, making the trip north across the border every spring to join the harvests that would finance their meager existences for months to follow. He started hating the work as soon as he and his brother were old enough to do it, and killed for the first time during the second blistering summer of toil.

  Macerio didn’t remember the girl’s name, just that she was flirtatious and big-breasted. They met in the middle of the fields, the girl reaching into his pants even before they started kissing. His pocketknife dug into her just as she found what she was feeling for. He had just turned thirteen at the time. He’d forgotten what he did with her body, but it had been years before he began drawing his line across the border.

  Macerio was just reaching inside the truck’s cab for the submachine gun tucked under the driver’s seat, when the bright bluish tint of an SUV’s xenon headlights caught him in their spray.

  78

  TUNGA COUNTY; THE PRESENT

  Caitlin snaked her SUV to a halt behind the truck on the shoulder, angled to keep it in the hold of her headlights. Cort Wesley’s head was already slumped downward in feigned sleep, Glock clutched firmly in his lap.

  “I’ll be watching as best I can,” he told her.

  Caitlin climbed out without acknowledging him, certain Macerio’s eyes would be upon her now. She’d already made sure her SIG was tucked in her belt well back of her hip under her jacket. No reason Macerio would expect it to be there or have any reason to look for it.

  “Hey, you need some help?” she called out to him, gravel spit from the path of her boots as she approached. “¿Necesita usted alguna ayuda?”

  “Todo está bajo control.”

  “Sí. Beuno.” Caitlin continued her approach, her gait that of the concerned, naïve Samaritan, no caution observed whatsoever to put Macerio on the defensive. “Permita que mí lo ayude a cambiar el neumático.”

  “I told you, I don’t need any help.”

  Caitlin stopped even with the back of the panel truck, no more than a dozen feet from the serial killer responsible for Las Mujeres de Juárez. She glimpsed the dozen or so teenage girls stealing anxious glimpses toward her from the road’s shoulder. She knew Cort Wesley would’ve shot Macerio down as he stood. If coaxed to talk, though, he could provide potentially crucial information about the truth of what was happening on Hollis Tyree’s land.

  “¿Señorita?”

  His voice brimming with suspicion now, Caitlin cursed herself for letting her gaze linger too long on his newly intended victims. She met Macerio’s eyes, saw in them the reality that she had lost the sense of innocence she’d been depending upon. Her SIG was well out of easy drawing range. She’d need to twist a hand well back under her jacket and jerk the pistol free before she even thought about aiming it. Fortunately, Macerio didn’t have a weapon in casual view either, creating a stalemate of sorts.

  “How about some water?” Caitlin asked him. “For the girls. I’ve got a full cooler back in my truck.”

  That drew Macerio’s gaze to her SUV, and she watched him tense at the sight of another form inside it.

  “They aren’t thirsty. But do you have a phone I can use? The batteries in mine are dead.”

  “Sure do,” Caitlin said, hand dipping into her pocket as she resumed her approach.

  Asking for the phone bought Macerio time. Time to continue reconciling the odd feeling he had about this woman with her utterly defenseless attitude. The presence of the girls might have accounted for that, but the way she walked and moved alerted him to something else. And she seemed to be listing slightly to the right, the way gunmen of old did to facilitate a quick draw of their weapons from that side. He also found it strange she hadn’t roused the man sleeping in her SUV’s passenger seat, or that he hadn’t roused himself.

  The woman’s boots graced the gravel of the shoulder, barely disturbing it. Macerio saw her extending the cell phone toward him, the moonlight catching her face.

  Her face . . .

  His mind flashed back to searching for his missing puta in East San Antonio, an SUV tearing away down the street.

  This woman had been behind the wheel!

  Macerio lurched toward her in the same instant that saw the woman twist her hips rightward even as a hand disappeared under her jacket. Macerio shoved the woman backward against the truck with one hand clamped on the gun and other digging into her throat.

  Caitlin felt her cartilage contract, the breath squeezed out of her faster than air from a balloon. The hair riding atop Macerio’s head had shaken forward, suddenly hugging his forehead over dark eyes blazing into her.

  She tried to fire but felt his iron grasp holding her gun hand at bay, blocking the trigger as she heard the thunk of the SUV door being thrust open and lashed out with a boot toward the big man’s knee.

  Cort Wesley was a damn good shot, but not a great one. And the bodies twisting before him in the night left him fearing where his bullet might end up once fired. He drove himself forward, gun raised and ready, the night pierced by wails from the Mexican girls disappearing into it.

  Caitlin felt the crunch of the big man’s knee splitting from muscle and tendon. He listed slightly to that side, the pain bursting from him with an ugggghhhh a moment before he slammed her skull backward against the panel truck.

  She felt the steel dimple at impact with her skull. The night brightened in a flash, then faded to a preternatural grayness, a misty shroud cast over her vision. She felt for her pistol only to realize it was gone along with the breath she’d forgotten where to find. Her lungs, starving for air, pressed against her chest, seeming to push against her thudding heart.

  Then . . .

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  . . . something like thunder clapped, what felt like rain and hail hammering her at the same time.

  Cort Wesley’s first three shots were misses—on purpose to get Macerio off Caitlin. The move had its desired effect, the big man leaving her to slump down the side of the truck, while he disappeared behind it.

  Cort Wesley threw himself into an all-out sprint, trying to sight in on Macerio through the darkness. His figure made for a dark speck against the moonlit night, then seemed to disappear altogether as it zigzagged beyond the figures of the girls fleeing as well.

  What the hell . . .

  Just like that, Macerio was gone, as if he had dropped into the prairie floor, leaving Cort Wesley nothing to shoot at.

  He stopped and crouched warily over Caitlin.

  “You get him?” she rasped.

  “Nope,” Cort Wesley replied, noticing the dark, shiny shape of a cell phone amid the gravel and dust. “But I got something.”

  79

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  Guillermo Paz unhitched the line fastening his safety harness to the San Fernando Cathedral’s steeple. The crumbling roof was
on the punch list the priest had given him to help pass the time, but he couldn’t reach enough of the storm-damaged tiles encumbered by the safety line.

  He’d never roofed before and, having grown up in a world where shanty homes were topped with corrugated tin tacked into cheap wood, he had no right to know what he was doing. Still, he’d fallen into an easy rhythm replacing the missing and broken slate tiles with fresh ones pulled from a stack uncovered in the church basement. The priest had explained that slate was a thing of the past, the only alternative to this patchwork being a total roof replacement even a historic landmark lacked the funds to manage.

  Paz had started up here when the afternoon sun began to cool and continued his work under the moonlight. He carried a hammer, chisel, and wedge in his tool belt to remove the broken pieces and a glue gun with which to fasten the new tiles into place.

  Paz worked as the night continued to cool, much more comfortable without the harness to contain him. Suddenly, though, the wind picked up, threatening to push Paz from his perch and topple him to the concrete below. The wind chilled him, carrying the promise of yet another spring storm. He looked off into the distance where it was brewing and sniffed the air, sensing something in the offing beyond wind, rain, and hail but equally calamitous.

  Paz smiled, setting back to wait for that storm to come.

  80

  TUNGA COUNTY; THE PRESENT

  The flashing lights seemed to stretch for miles, beacons in the Texas night. Highway patrol responders were first on the scene, reaching it in full understanding they were operating under Ranger auspices. Captain D. W. Tepper had coordinated everything from his home in Marble Falls after Caitlin’s call roused him from a dream in which he was peeling the paper off Marlboro Reds and eating the tobacco.

  “I’m giving up on those damn patches,” he explained. “I get off the phone with Austin, next thing I’m gonna do is flush the rest down the toilet. Nice work, Ranger.”

  Caitlin dry swallowed some air, the motion forcing a harsh ache through the cartilage Macerio had nearly crushed. She called Tepper back an hour later, the crime scene secure, the Mexican girls chased down, but no sign of Macerio whatsoever.

  “Got a cell phone he left behind, Captain,” she reported, “like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  “Touch screen, something like that?”

  “More like what an astronaut might carry in his suit. We figure out how to dump the numbers we might know a hell of a lot more than we do right now.”

  “This man goes up against you and Masters and gets away, I’m not sure I wanna know any more,” Tepper said, clearing the mucus from his throat.

  “Highway patrol chopper sweeping the area hasn’t found any sign of him and they won’t either. But we got all the girls collected, safe and sound. I swear, Captain, this man must be able to make himself invisible. Who knows, maybe he really is some kind of demon.”

  “Any thoughts on what you saw on Hollis Tyree’s land?”

  “They’re pulling something out of the ground, all right, and it’s not water. Something’s not right about the whole scene. How quick can the Rangers move on this, Captain?”

  “Tomorrow morning soon enough?”

  Caitlin found Cort Wesley seated in her SUV, regarding the crime scene with detachment, cell phone squeezed in his grasp.

  “Was about to call my boys ’til I remembered the hour. Something like this happens, I wanna be sure they’re safe, especially with Macerio still out there.” Cort Wesley cast his gaze back toward the cordoned-off crime scene area where technicians were still measuring off distances and dusting for fingerprints around the panel truck. “What you think his role in this is exactly?”

  “He comes back for the girls in his original capacity is all I can figure.”

  “They were outside the truck ’cause he was planning on killing them. That part of his original plan too?”

  Caitlin turned her gaze out into the night. “You wanna drive to Pearsall, check on your boys?”

  Cort Wesley kept his eyes on her, trying to figure out what she was looking at. “It’ll keep. Don’t want to take the chance of leading somebody there who might be watching.”

  Caitlin turned back toward him, started to speak, then stopped.

  “Not like you to be at a loss for words, Ranger.”

  “My throat hurts.”

  Cort Wesley moved close enough to smell her lilac-scented shampoo mixing with the dank, sour smell of sweat frozen in her pores. “You wanna tell me what’s really wrong?”

  Caitlin eyes emptied, her voice cracking painfully. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

  “Me neither,” Cort Wesley told her.

  81

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  They lay in bed awake for a long time after it was over.

  “Goddamn,” Cort Wesley said, holding Caitlin’s head against his chest and stroking her hair, “I feel like I’m back in high school.”

  “You mean ’cause we’re sneaking around like this.”

  “Beats not seeing you for two months. Question being what happens when we put our guns away again.”

  “You got your boys to worry about too.”

  Caitlin felt Cort Wesley stiffen beneath her. He stopped stroking her hair. “You never told me how your magic worked with Marianna Silvaro.”

  “Haven’t finished waving my wand yet.”

  She felt Cort Wesley’s powerful chest lifting and lowering with each breath, heartbeat starting to settle.

  “I read this essay Luke wrote for school about his dad’s best friend,” he said suddenly.

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “Tell him I said thanks.”

  Cort Wesley tried to wet his lips with his tongue. “Is he right?”

  “I don’t know, Cort Wesley. I’d tell you if I did.”

  “Know what?”

  “No.”

  “Feels like we’re married right now. Something I never knew before. Ever.”

  “Me either.”

  “You were married for a time, Ranger.”

  “But we never shared much, not the way you and I do.”

  “Besides a bed being your meaning.”

  “Especially.”

  Cort Wesley started stroking her hair again. “So how is it we lost two months?”

  “You already know the answer to that.”

  “I know what you told me. Doesn’t make it true.”

  Caitlin eased herself off Cort Wesley so she could look him in the eye. “That’s what you want, Cort Wesley, the truth?”

  “It’s what I just asked for.”

  “I was scared.”

  “Never seen anything that could scare you, Ranger.”

  “How about starting to figure I couldn’t live without you and the boys?”

  “Your answer being to just disappear?”

  Caitlin shrugged. Outside, the motel’s marquee pushed its flickering light through the room’s thin blinds, casting alternating red and blue streaks across Cort Wesley’s face.

  “Find a reason to anyway,” she conceded.

  “These missing Mexican girls.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Figuring I’d still be here when you got good and ready to come back.”

  “I was right, wasn’t I?”

  Cort Wesley smiled and wet his lips with his tongue. “I think Luke was the one who actually got it right. Said we loved each other and it was good because it made him miss his mom less.”

  “Oh, man . . .”

  “Also said you sucked at video games, especially one called Texas Ranger. Wrote he found that ironic. Eleven years old and he’s using the word ‘ironic.’ Hell, I don’t even know what it means.”

  “I don’t think anyone does really. One of those things you know when you see it, though.”

  Cort Wesley laid his hand behind Caitlin, easing her closer to him. “Like other things, I suppose.” He glanced at the red numerals of the clock radio on the nig
ht table. Beyond the drawn blinds, the motel’s marquee seemed to brighten, spraying backward letters through the flimsy material against the room’s walls. “What I gotta say is I don’t want you going missing again down the road. You start feeling wrong about things, take a walk or something. Or go to the gym.”

  “Maybe break another man’s nose.”

  “So long as it’s not mine,” he said, cupping a hand over the right side of Caitlin’s face. “So what do you say, Ranger?”

  “About that rematch you asked for?”

  “About not pulling another disappearing act.”

  “Nights like this oughtta make that pretty difficult, less something gets in the way.”

  “Like that old memory you can’t fix in your mind.”

  “Every time I’m close enough to touch it, it runs away again.” Caitlin glanced toward the window at the marquee flashing its way past the blinds. “Still got three hours until dawn. I fall asleep, there’ll be nightmares for sure. You mind staying up with me?”

  “Twist my arm,” said Cort Wesley.

  82

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “You look tired,” Captain Tepper said when Caitlin met him the following morning for breakfast at Denny’s just up from the River Center Mall near the Riverwalk.

  “I didn’t get much sleep.”

  Tepper eyed her quizzically, then let it pass. His plate of steak, eggs, and home fries had just arrived when she got there and he was in the process of adding ketchup to the mix.

  “Most important meal of the day, Ranger,” he noted, swabbing butter onto his two pieces of Texas toast.

  “It hurts to swallow right now.”

  Tepper looked up from his eggs. “You have the docs check out your throat?”

  “No need. It’ll heal.”

  “Hurt to talk?”