Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  “And breathe. You don’t mind, it’s just coffee for me today.”

  Tepper pushed a forkful of eggs into the ketchup pile and swallowed it down. “Just heard from the highway patrol. Their sweep yielded nothing, as if Macerio just vanished into thin air, like you said. But a man was beaten ten miles down the road in a service station restroom and had his car stolen. You ask me, the man behind Las Mujeres de Juárez is back over the border already. That’s the bad news.”

  “What’s the good?”

  “Already dumped the contents of the cell phone you recovered from the scene last night. Should have a report on the killer’s calls in and out by this afternoon.”

  “We need to find out what Tyree was pulling out of the ground last night.”

  “Lieutenant Rollins is assembling the team now. Those fields will be in our hands before lunch.”

  “You mind going in without me?”

  “Now I’ve heard everything. . . .”

  “Need to do some digging of my own, Captain.”

  “Where?

  “Better if you don’t know, if that’s not a problem.”

  “The problem is you’re the only one we got knows the lay of the land.”

  “Cort Wesley Masters could draw that stretch for you blindfolded, you don’t mind taking him along.”

  “Would it matter if I did?” Tepper dropped his fork down on the table and laid his elbows on either side of his still-heaping plate. “What else is eating at you, Ranger?”

  Caitlin leaned back in her chair, suddenly needing some distance. “Did you know the truth about my father?”

  “Depends on which truth you’re speaking of.”

  “The one that starts with his given name really being Diego.”

  Tepper’s milky eyes narrowed enough to straighten the furrows on his brow. “Where the hell you hear something like that?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Paz?”

  Caitlin let the question hover in the air between them briefly. “He told me the two of us are descended from the same Mayan warrior tribes. He knows more about my lineage than I ever heard told before.”

  “And you believed him?”

  Caitlin nodded. “ ’Cause he finished telling the story my granddad never could, and now I understand why.”

  Something changed in Tepper’s expression. His upper lip quivered, his eyes going blank. “You’re talking about Sweetwater.”

  “How much of it is real, Captain?”

  “I wasn’t even born at the time, Ranger.”

  “But you knew Earl and Jim Strong better than anyone. You telling me neither one of them ever told you about Juanita Rojas and Costa Maya and how my father was conceived?”

  Tepper frowned. “Earl told me some, not all.”

  “Am I missing something here?”

  “Leave it be, Caitlin.”

  “I can’t, Captain. Maybe I want to, but I can’t anymore.

  D. W. Tepper looked the saddest she’d ever seen him, and that included at both her dad’s and granddad’s funerals. He glanced down at his eggs, steak, and home fries and shoved the plate aside.

  “All right,” he started, “but just remember I warned you. . . .”

  83

  JUÁREZ AND EL PASO; 1934

  Earl Strong didn’t see nearly enough of his son, Jim, in the boy’s toddler years. The demands on the Rangers grew, and no matter how many times he resolved to make things different, there was duty to uphold and a badge to honor. As his own father had told him, there was no compromise in being a Texas Ranger. You either were or you weren’t, and if you were it was your life. Plain and simple.

  Earl had barely known his own father, William Ray, and found he couldn’t live with the reality of that cycle repeating. His boy needed him. Problem was, the Rangers needed him more.

  “This drug trafficking is a shit storm of a mess,” Captain Tom Hickman told him at Ranger headquarters in Austin in 1934.

  “I’ve heard that said more than once.”

  “Well, I’m here saying it’s gotten worse. In the twenties we knew it was coming into Baja, California, through Tijuana. Marijuana mostly back then, which all changed when poor Mexican farmers turned to poppy growing.”

  “Where’s that leave us?” Earl asked, feeling his arm hairs starting to get prickly.

  “We got Mexican border agents telling us the farmers are beholden to opium traffickers known as gomeros for their very lives. Further complicating things is that these gomeros are in league with high-ranking Mexican government officials. We got some reports claiming that the mysterious head of the traffickers, a Chinese named Antonio Wong Yin, is a close compadre of both Governor Nazario Ortiz Garza of Coahuila and General Jesús García Gutiérrez, head of the state’s military.”

  “Sounds like a mess all right, Captain. What is it you need done?”

  “We need you to do what you did in Sweetwater, Ranger. Everybody knows you ran some pretty tough boys out of town there.”

  “The ones that lived anyway.”

  “Well, Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit is where the opium’s ending up. And most of it’s coming in through Ciudad Juárez into El Paso.” Hickman stopped there and regarded Earl tightly from across his desk. “You chased those boys out of Texas once, Ranger. We need for you to help do it again.”

  A few days later Earl and twelve Rangers of his choosing, including Sandman Sanchez, headed to El Paso to meet up with state detectives who became Texas’s first antinarcotic agents. These detectives had developed a decent enough network of informants to pinpoint the timing and route of shipments across the border where agents of The Outfit would be waiting at prearranged rendezvous points. Captain Hickman’s plan was to shut off the spigot at the source, but Earl figured the only way that strategy stood a chance of working was if The Outfit was similarly dissuaded from their current course of action.

  Hickman had arranged a base in El Paso he had stocked with more firepower than Earl had ever seen in his life. For a man used to taking only what arsenal he could carry on horseback, the sight of heavy machine guns, carbines, and 1911 model .45 automatics, tommy guns, Brownings, and even hand grenades was quite a sight to behold. But he was smart enough to know if this came down to a shooting war, they were bound to lose based on sheer numbers and the enemy boasting an entire country as safe haven. The thing to do now was the same thing he had done in Sweetwater: make a strong enough example on both sides of the border to influence these Chicago boys and their mules to rethink their intentions. Earl knew enough about opium to know the number of lives it had already destroyed, cementing his resolve to get this job done while Molly stayed home with Jim. Doctors had pretty much assured them she wouldn’t be able to bear children of her own, making her love Jim even more and leading Earl to be even more thankful God had brought Juanita Rojas into his life, however briefly.

  The first raids, conducted in conjunction with the state detectives, concentrated north of the border and were spectacular successes. Communication being what it was in those days made it impossible for the various drug-running teams dispatched by the Chicago Outfit to get word out of what was happening. Earl’s Ranger team arrested nearly a hundred runners without shooting a single man, waiting on each occasion until the shipment had been delivered so the Rangers could burn the opium for all to see.

  What Earl could not fathom, given the limitation of his frontier mentality, was the power of money to buy betrayal. The state detectives to whom Earl was beholden for intelligence were similarly beholden to Mexican informants for information. This time, unlike Sweetwater, the Chicago boys used their brains instead of weapons by paying a few of the same informants more.

  Two months into an assignment that left him sullen over missing his wife and son, Earl and his Ranger team were lighting out on foot through the southwest Texas desert saw grass to cut off yet another opium shipment when muzzle flashes lit up the night. Earl recorded them in the millisecond before two Rangers went down and a thi
rd doubled over, quickly sinking to his knees. He and the others pulled the wounded men into the meager cover provided by a dry rocky creek bed.

  They returned fire to the east, only to have fresh rounds bursting at them from their exposed western flank. Earl swore under his breath, cursing himself out for delivering his team straight into an ambush. The enemy had chosen this very spot for the placement of the creek bed as an obvious point of cover. And once the Rangers had sought refuge there they had opened up fire from a secondary front.

  Two more Rangers crumpled around him, one from a fatal headshot and another with a sucking chest wound that would see him follow before too very long. He had four wounded to deal with on top of that, but two of those could still fire a gun for the time being.

  “This ain’t working,” Earl told Sandman Sanchez fifteen minutes into the fight.

  “Say the word and I’m ready to take as many of these fuckers with me as I can.”

  “We’re not there yet and never will be, I have my say about it.”

  “What you thinking, boss?”

  “You know what I’m thinking.”

  Sandman shifted positions, grimacing. “Hope you don’t mind me coming along.”

  “Matter of fact I do, ’specially with that bullet in your leg you didn’t think I noticed. You just stay here and hold the fort. Get prepared to open up on the guns to the west soon as I deal with the ones to the east.”

  The gangsters firing at them from the high ground on both flanks were more killers than gunmen. First thing, Earl crawled on his belly along the rim of the creek bed, face pressed low to keep the lightness of his flesh from sight. A few hundred yards later, he rose to a crouch and scampered along the darkest patch of earth he could find.

  Earl had dragged a tommy gun along with him to aid his cause. Hard to handle, difficult to aim, and not much good from any real distance, except scattering everyone from its path. The gangsters were smarter than he’d thought, posting someone at the rear of their encampment to guard against Earl’s strategy. And he responded by hoisting his tommy gun in one hand and .45 Springfield in the other, blasting away with both as soon as the darkness gave him away.

  The gangsters scattered, rushing in all directions, as his fire cut enough of them down to force the others away from the cover of the embankment. Earl heard the echo of fire from Sandman and the other surviving Rangers resounding to the west, followed by return fire sent wildly into the night. He thought he detected screams resounding through the air as well, but couldn’t say for sure.

  By the time he made it back to the creek bed, the gangsters on both flanks had all either fled or been gunned down. But at dawn’s first light, three Rangers were dead with another almost certain to follow. Earl had barely gotten around to writing his report when he got word from Austin that Molly and Jim had been moved to a Ranger barracks for protection after The Outfit out of Chicago had threatened their lives.

  For Earl Strong, that proved to be the tipping point, taking him to a place in his being he’d never known before. Even putting men on the chain in Sweetwater and Gladstone had been undertaken with a degree of lawfulness and respect for rights. But here in the west Texas desert, all bets were off.

  Earl briefly considered heading north to Chicago to call out the men holding the strings that pulled triggers and spread opium through the country, before settling on a different strategy. He and the surviving Rangers changed their focus to the mules, their goal being to shut down the flow of drugs from Ciudad Juárez once and for all.

  “It’s frontier rules all over again,” he told his Rangers. “You all know what that means.”

  “We do,” Sandman Sanchez said, speaking for all of them as he leaned on his crutch.

  “Any man who hasn’t got the stomach for this kind of work should walk away with no harm done to his name or reputation. But I’ll tell you this, and mark these words, it’s gonna get ugly now.”

  They’d all heard the stories of the things Rangers of the past had done in the name of justice. The frontier era, and the numerous border wars that followed, came with an often-callous disregard for human rights. The lack of accountability was much to blame here, and Earl knew he had that same atmosphere on his side in the present.

  But in later years he never once told the tales of the weeks that followed. Of cross-border incursions and the blood-soaked ambushes of drug mules carrying their deadly product northward. There were hangings, with the bodies left suspended from tree limbs to be driven under by the next mules. There were mass graves dug and blood plumes spit into the air when the bodies were dumped in. There were bonfires fueled by burning opium bags that lit up the night.

  Earl had no stomach for such brutality, but also no choice, not after they’d threatened the lives of Jim and Molly. Still the depth of his deeds had begun to weigh on him, stealing his sleep, when the pleading eyes of a desperate mule strung up on a tree met Earl’s. Recognition flashed in both their gazes.

  “El Rinche,” the Mexican muttered, Earl knowing him as the father of Juanita Rojas and grandfather to his son.

  “Not you,” Earl heard himself say.

  “Please, spare my life. I will tell you anything if you spare my life. I will tell you where the poppies are stored now. Just let me live. This is blood you are talking to!”

  “Where?” Earl asked him.

  “Sauer and Company on Avenida Juárez, stacked in the basement. Bags and bags piled up since your raids have put everything so far behind.” The Mexican swallowed hard. “Please do not hate me.”

  Earl didn’t say whether he did or not.

  “You will let me live now, el Rinche?”

  “You can’t go home, sir, least not until this is finished.”

  “I understand.”

  “They’ll know you talked. They always do.”

  “I understand that too.”

  After the man disappeared into the night, Earl turned to Sandman Sanchez.

  “You ever been to Juárez, Ranger?”

  84

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “George Sauer was a merchant specializing in groceries, wines, liquor, and cigarettes,” D. W. Tepper continued. “Made himself a fortune during Prohibition by running liquor out of that very building in Juárez lined floor to ceiling with cases of bottled beer and booze. Whether he was in on the opium business, we’ll never know for sure.”

  “What happened?” Caitlin asked him.

  “Well, as I hear it told, after Earl and his boys were done there wasn’t a bottle left whole by their bullets and they’d burned every bit of the opium stored in the basement in the middle of the town square. The people, they say, came out and cheered them. It became a party.”

  “Not for my grandfather, it didn’t.”

  “No, it did not. Those months changed him in a way he never really recovered. Never quit rangering, of course, but his days of gunfighting were done. When Earl left Mexico, he left the past behind. Sauer and Company itself closed up immediately thereafter, but the building still stands in Juárez to this day. I once heard Coahuila governor Nazario Ortiz Garza himself was killed in the gunfight, but never confirmed it for myself.”

  “Nazario Ortiz Garza was Emiliato Valdez Garza’s great-uncle,” Caitlin told him, referring to the drug lord she and Cort Wesley Masters had faced off against in Casa del Diablo a year before, surviving thanks to the intervention of Guillermo Paz.

  “Guess that explains why the Strongs never exactly been on the Garzas’ Christmas card list,” said Tepper.

  “Thanks for filling in the gaps, Captain.”

  “Reason your grandfather and father didn’t, I suspect, was ’cause they didn’t want you to think less of Earl Strong.”

  “Why would I?”

  “On account of the fact that Earl thought considerably less of himself afterward. By the time I met him in 1960 or so he hadn’t fired his gun in a decade, the years having mellowed him a bit.”

  “Nice way to put it, Captain.”

/>   “Put what?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Tepper’s eyes looked dry and tired. “He wasn’t the man I was expecting, Caitlin. Problem with being a legend is things freeze around the time that make a man one. You meet that man thirty years later, you expect him to be the very same from the pictures and stories. Earl Strong was past sixty when I first met him, your dad and I having joined the Rangers at the same time. Thin as a rail with eyes that took you in without really caring about what they were seeing.”

  “You’re saying he never got it back after Juárez.”

  “I believe he just turned his life around to different concerns. Molly, your grandma, passed when Jim Strong was not much more than thirteen, so Earl took to fathering a lot more than might have been in his nature. Truth be told, I think he welcomed pulling it all back. I think he got his fill in Sweetwater, Clifton, the west Texas desert, and finally Juárez. You take nothing else from the rest of Earl’s story, take that.”

  “Because you’re afraid that’s what’s happening to me.”

  Tepper’s eyes seemed to moisten, his gaze growing stern but warm. “I believe you’ve already had your fill and then some. When Earl headed down to Juárez to finish things, I don’t think he ever expected to come back. Your dad showed me a letter addressed to him one day not long after Earl died. Earl had written it prior to the gunfight in Juárez, to be sent only in the event that he died. In it, he begged little Jim never to strap on a gun, never even think of becoming a Ranger.”

  “Because my granddad didn’t feel proud of it anymore. Is that what you’re saying here, Captain?”

  Tepper shook his head and ran a finger along the length of a deep furrow stretching from temple to jawline. “Let’s just leave things there, you don’t mind.”

  “And what if I do?”

  “You need to trust me on this, Ranger.”

  “On what?”

  “On the fact you’ve heard the whole story now. It’s done and gone, no more of it to tell.”

  “So long as it’s the truth, D. W.”

  “Close as we can come,” Tepper said, looking away so Caitlin couldn’t see his eyes.