by Jon Land
85
TUNGA COUNTY; THE PRESENT
Cort Wesley drove his truck in the middle of the Ranger convoy. He rode with the windows down, enjoying the cool of the morning air not yet marred by the windswept desert dust that could crack flesh or paint it a dull sandy brown.
He hadn’t slept at all the previous night, not even after Caitlin finally nodded off in his arms just before dawn. Cort Wesley spent those long minutes feeling strangely content and secure, wondering what it would be like to do this in his own home with his boys sleeping peacefully instead of being watched over by three geriatric Texas Ranger legends.
Not that home was his favorite place in the world right now either. The hole he’d plowed had been plugged by a construction crew that used to pay “tribute” to the Brancas in return for city contracts. They’d done a decent job of patching up the mess, the smell of fresh lumber heavy in the air and sawdust residue clinging to the furniture and walls.
In prison, all he could think of was getting away from a life reduced to a six-by-eight-foot box. Once out, though, he’d realized how much more control over his life he’d had in the smaller confines, everything reduced to basic simplicity. Leroy Epps, the aging, diabetes-riddled, ex-boxer lifer who’d taken a liking to Cort Wesley from the start once told him he didn’t mind not getting out anymore because the world scared him more. At least inside, Epps said, he knew where everything was.
Cort Wesley always missed Epps most in his more deeply contemplative moments, lying with his arms entwined around Caitlin Strong as the first light of dawn finally swallowed the motel’s flashing marquee, being a prime example. Which was why he wasn’t surprised when his imagination conjured up the smell of the talcum powder Epps used to disguise the stench from his decaying skin. Cort Wesley turned to his right and saw the old man seated on the motel room’s lone chair, legs crossed to better enable him to pick at the scratchy sores dotting his exposed ankle.
Leroy Epps looked back at him and grinned.
“Just like old times, ain’t it, bubba?”
Cort Wesley eased Caitlin from him and sat up on the bedside. “Not from where I’m sitting, champ.”
“What you done got yourself into now?”
“You once told me a man can change himself, but not the world made him who he was.”
“I did at that.”
“I’m just figuring out what that meant.”
“On account of your boys, no doubt.”
“Complex matter.”
Epps switched to his other leg and leaned forward a little. “Bubba, you seen the crap. I seen you realize it’s a lot simpler than you think.”
“I think my oldest boy’s fixing to follow in my footsteps and that scares the hell out of me.”
“Not as much as something else, though.”
“Champ?”
Epps flashed his once white grin now marred by teeth gone brown on their way to rot. Long red lines had leaked across the whites of his eyes, looking like spiderwebs etched in blood. His eyes drifted to Caitlin, glistening playfully.
“You and the Ranger seem to be doing just fine.”
“Knew we’d be getting around to that.”
“You blame me for bringing it up?”
“Not if you mind me changing the subject.”
“Take your time.” Epps winked. “Got nowhere else I gotta be right now.”
“What do you want me to say, champ?”
“That you messed things up with the mother of your children and you’re doing your share of thinking on how not to repeat the same mistake with the Ranger gal.”
Cort Wesley chuckled.
“What’s so funny, bubba?”
Cort Wesley glanced at Caitlin sleeping peacefully. “I think I’m an idiot for thinking this has a chance to work between us.”
“Same thing you said about Maura Torres.”
“And I was right, champ.”
“Making you feel, what, like you got license to be right again?”
“I chased a man off who was about to kill her last night. Second time I missed killing the bastard.”
“So I heard.”
“Figured you would’ve been watching.”
“Was sitting in with Robert Johnson at the time, trying my hand on the drums. Know that story about him selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for the blues, bubba?”
“Sure.”
“He confessed to me it wasn’t true. He went there all right, but the devil never showed. Robert didn’t have a car so he busied himself waiting for the bus over the next six hours strumming his guitar in rhythm with the world around him. That’s how the blues was born, no help from Satan at all.”
“There a point to that?”
“Lots of legends ain’t what they’re cracked up to be, bubba, but that don’t make ’em any less true. Give my best to your boys, will ya?”
At that, Cort Wesley lurched up in bed, roused suddenly from his dream. He looked at Caitlin, who was just starting to stir, and then at the room’s lone chair to find Leroy Epps was gone.
. . .
The day already seemed much hotter by the time the Ranger convoy headed into the last stretch down the freshly paved road leading to Hollis Tyree’s land in Tunga County. Speaking to his boys during the drive had calmed him a bit. They both sounded good, except for the fact that the batteries in Luke’s handheld video game had died and Dylan had emerged from his room the night before to find one of the old Rangers planted in a chair directly in front of the door to Maria’s room.
The image made Cort Wesley smile now, surprising himself with the brief respite from the turmoil of his thoughts. Then Hollis Tyree’s worksite came into view, and what he saw brought it all back and then some.
86
WASHINGTON, D.C.; THE PRESENT
Caitlin took the treadmill next to the big man jogging up a storm, thinking of how Cort Wesley told her to just go to a gym. The man wore a sleeveless workout shirt wet with sweat at the midriff that looked ironed onto his skin and glowed slightly beneath the bright lighting. This time of the morning, at the Sports Club/LA adjoining the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a treadmill was there for the taking while reservations would be needed later in the day.
“Hello, Mr. Smith,” she said to the CIA agent she’d met in Bahrain the previous year.
“It’s Jones here in Washington.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m a man of mystery, what can I say?”
Caitlin set her speed to the same pace as his and quickly fell into the same rhythm, as Jones frowned condescendingly. He was slightly less tall but even broader than she remembered, his hair grown out into a dark nest of waves. Only thing the same were eyes that looked more like marbles wedged into his head in their utter flatness. It was like looking at a shark through the glass of an aquarium.
“I move too fast for you, Ranger, don’t bother trying to keep up.”
“I’ve taken up boxing,” Caitlin told him. “You wanna go a few rounds, let me know. Gotta warn you, though, I’ve got a habit of breaking noses.”
“Already had enough of the shit kicked out of me. See, I helped this lady out back in Bahrain well under the radar. Turned out I helped her uncover some things she wasn’t supposed to. So here I am, back in Washington.”
Caitlin’s lungs had started to heat up, but she wasn’t about to cut her speed until Jones did. She’d welcomed the long flight earlier in the day the same way she welcomed the drives through the emptiness of Texas from one Ranger assignment to another. Time spent alone with her thoughts, sorting through the muddle of truth making up her feelings. Cort Wesley Masters had been the topic for her mind on this day. She kept nodding off on the flight, one dream of him and his boys following another, sometimes in sequence. She wondered what her seatmate made of her waking up with a smile on her face.
“And that got you sent home?” Caitlin said to Jones. “I’m truly sorry.”
“Actually, I was reassigned ba
sed on need, my expertise required over here more than there.”
“Care to enlighten me, Jones?”
Jones turned toward her while continuing to run. “You know I can’t do that, any more than I can explain whatever it is you think you got going on.”
“Come again please?”
“You look winded there, Ranger.”
“Just say what you’ve got to say.”
“Got nothing to say. Hollis Tyree’s clean as they come in our book. Gives money to all the right causes, if you know what I mean.”
“I asked you about his land. Anything you could find out for me that could explain how folks are getting poisoned in a town twenty miles away?”
“I look like the EPA to you?”
“This is too big for them. Tyree’s people took over that town I’m talking about. I almost had to shoot it out with a few of his fake deputies.”
“Lucky for them it was just almost,” Jones told her with a grin.
“Add to that the fact that there’s a serial killer named Macerio, who’s been drawing a line of bodies across the Texas-Mexico border for fourteen years, connected somehow and I thought a call to the cavalry might be in order.”
Jones hit the red emergency stop button on his treadmill and watched the rubber grind to a halt with his hands on the support arms. “You say his name’s Macerio?”
Caitlin stopped her treadmill too. “I did.”
“What’s your security clearance?”
“Don’t believe I’ve got one.”
Jones draped a freshly laundered towel over his broad shoulders. “You’re about to.”
87
TUNGA COUNTY; THE PRESENT
“What you make of this, Masters?” Captain Tepper asked Cort Wesley as they walked about the section of Hollis Tyree’s fields that had been dug up the night before.
“Don’t have a clue. I only know what Caitlin and I saw last night and what I’m seeing now. Just doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’ll say.”
The site, bustling with frantic activity under the spill of sodium vapor work lights just the night before, had been abandoned. No trace of any people Cort Wesley could see, the remnants of their presence visible only in the long rows of reconstituted FEMA trailers and prefab office spaces, the doors to many of which banged up against their frames in the wind. Discarded heavy equipment, including the loaders, excavators, and conveyors, littered the near grounds, already gathering dirt and dust as the unforgiving desert sought to consume them. Farther out, the long line of towering water drilling rigs stood empty and unmanned for as far as the eye could see.
A few hats blown free of heads had gone unretrieved. Some stray plastic water bottles rolled about as if in search of a refuse container. A family of prairie dogs scrabbled about the hard earth.
But the workmen had left without taking their belongings from the trailers and the offices looked to have been abandoned in midstream as well. Work orders, schedules, and requisition slips still hung from clipboards tacked to the walls and the phones were still functional, powered by the same underground cables that fed electricity to the camp.
Whatever Tyree had been after last night, he must have found plenty of it to boot. And now it was gone and so was everyone who’d been working these fields.
“Dump trucks, Captain,” Cort Wesley said suddenly.
“Come again?”
“There were six of them, big construction-sized rigs. You find them, you find whatever’s behind all this.”
“You say six, son?”
Cort Wesley nodded. “Why?”
Tepper hocked up some flem and spit it on the ground. “Because the bodies of six men identified as truckers were found about fifty miles from here just before dawn. Looked like they’d been ambushed, their rigs hijacked.”
“So whatever it is Caitlin and I saw being pulled out of the ground . . .”
“Long gone by now,” said Tepper.
88
WASHINGTON, D.C.; THE PRESENT
Caitlin sat across from Jones at a table in the Sports Club’s Sidewalk Café. It wasn’t crowded, but he seemed distinctly uncomfortable amid the floor-to-ceiling windows. Caitlin took a sip from a smoothie that tasted like a McDonald’s shake, the flow of sweat from her pours abating at last.
“I’m not the only agent sent back stateside from a Middle East post in the past year.”
“Your little private world downsizing, is it?”
“More like a change in priorities, Ranger. Men like me are sent where the bad guys are. We trail them like hound dogs, to use a metaphor you’re probably more comfortable with. Your captain tell you about the trip he made to Austin recently?” Jones asked her suddenly.
“How’d you know that?”
“Because I was one of the presenters. Recall the subject?”
“Something about new domestic terrorist threats.”
“From Mexico in particular, specifically a colonel named—”
“Renaldo Montoya,” Caitlin finished, recalling her last phone call with Commander Fernando Lozano Sandoval from Thomason Hospital.
Jones leaned across the table as if he were going to grab her. “Seems like you know a damn bit more than you’ve been letting on, Ranger.”
“I do my homework too, Jones.”
Jones weighed her words. “How much do you know?”
“Nothing besides the fact Montoya got pissed off and disappeared after his being an Indian froze his career path. Took his hostilities out on American tourists, making him a wanted man.”
“A wanted man everyone in Mexico’s too afraid to catch. Montoya took with him a whole bunch of the Special Forces Zetas he commanded when he disappeared. Word is he’s joined forces with the Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels, supplying them with his Zetas to use as enforcers in what’s become a forty-billion-dollar-a-year industry. Smart money says he’s planning a coup he’s financing in large part through the drug trade. Even smarter money says Montoya may be planning a guerrilla war inside the United States.”
“What’s water in Tunga County got to do with that?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“Well, the first time I was at Tyree’s development, they were drilling for water. But last night something else entirely was going on.”
“Describe it.”
“Looked to me like they were mining something out of the ground. Sucking up dump trucks full of earth in a suddenly cordoned-off area.”
“Looked official?”
“Very. And Macerio was there to pick up some young Mexican women who’d outlived their usefulness servicing the workers.” Caitlin leaned across the table to better meet Jones’s stare. “You still haven’t told me where he fits into all this, why mention of his name almost threw you off the treadmill.”
“Because he’s Colonel Montoya’s brother.”
PART NINE
After getting the lay of the land, so to speak, Bigfoot Wallace moved from Austin to San Antonio, which was considered the extreme edge of the frontier, to sign up as a Texas Ranger under Jack Hayes. In them days, Texas was as wild as the west could get. There was danger from the south from the Mexicans, danger to the west and north from the wild frontier filled with Indians and desperados, and to the east the settlements still had problems with the Cherokee Nation. General Sam Houston himself had appointed young Captain Hayes, a hero from the battle of Plum Creek, to raise a company of Rangers to defend San Antonio. Hayes had high standards for his men. They were the best fighters in the west, and they had to be, considerin’ the fact that they were often outnumbered fifty to one. A man had to have courage, good character, good riding and shooting skills and a horse worth a hundred dollars to be considered for the job.
—“Bigfoot Wallace and El Muerto,” as retold by S. E. Schlosser, American Folklore
89
PEARSALL, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
“What kind of gun is that?” Dylan asked Bo Dean Perry.
Perry swung his wheelch
air around to face him in the noon light. “Here give it a hoist,” he said, handing Dylan the funny-looking shotgun.
Dylan nearly doubled over from its weight, couldn’t believe a crippled man confined to a wheelchair could wield it so effortlessly.
“It’s a Remington Over-Under twelve-gauge with four screw-in chokes. That there’s a walnut stock you got your hand on. Receiver’s plate nickel with a blued barrel and single trigger. Takes three shells in the chamber.”
“Heavy.”
“Something you get used to. Your dad ever take you hunting?”
Dylan frowned, handed the old man back his gun. “Nope. Said he lost his taste for it after the Gulf War. Said after you spend enough time hunting men, hunting animals isn’t something you got much call to do anymore.”
“I grew out of my teen years in Korea and did a stretch in ’Nam myself.”
“How’d you get hurt? Somebody shoot you when you were a Ranger?”
Bo Dean grinned. “Never stop being a Ranger, son.”
“An active one I meant,” Dylan said, his voice mixing between tones in search of the right one.
“Nothing so dramatic as a gunfight. Was a drunk driver crossed the median and plowed into me on the interstate. I wasn’t even on duty. Told the first responders everything was fine. I was just a little stuck. Didn’t know it at the time that my legs had been crushed and my spinal cord severed.”
“You filling this boy’s head with your crap, Bo Dean?” came the booming voice of Ranger Terrell Scuggs, a still-strapping sort who wore his .357 magnum revolver Western style in an old-fashioned holster. His boots clip-clopped across the porch and he was eating from a bowl of milk-rich cold cereal. Corn flakes, Dylan thought.
“Thing about Ranger Terrell Scuggs, son,” Perry told him, “is that he ain’t smart enough to know how dumb he is.”
“Screw you, you old fart.”
“My wife didn’t pass, I wouldn’t be living here on this ranch with your sorry ass.”