Strong Justice

by Jon Land

  Now it was Terrell Scuggs who swung toward Dylan. “They had two kids moved as far away from their daddy as physically possible. Damn, even our heifers and hogs know enough to keep their distance.”

  “Ask him about his wife, son,” Bo Dean demanded, poking the air with his Remington. “Had the good sense to walk out on his sorry ass ’fore he could mess up her life as much as his own.”

  “Where’s your girl?” Scuggs asked Dylan.

  “Taking a shower.”

  “Reminds me of a story. Know the dumbest man I ever arrested?”

  “Oh shit,” moaned Bo Dean. “Here we go again. . . .”

  “High school janitor decided to drill himself a hole into the girls’ gym locker room,” Scuggs continued to Dylan, paying Perry no heed at all. “Two of them, actually. One for his eye and one for . . . well, you get the idea. Anyway he sticks old Mr. Friendly into the lower hole and presses his eye against the upper one and, low and behold, turns out the dumb son of a bitch had drilled into the boys’ locker room instead of the girls’. Know what the kicker was?”

  “Can I take things from there?” asked Bo Dean.

  “Be my guest,” Scuggs invited.

  “His boner got stuck in the hole. Tough arrest, wasn’t it, Terrell?”

  “Was that much and more, Bo Dean. You try saw cutting through wood looking at a man’s privates the whole time.”

  The door opened and Dylan watched ex-Ranger Clinton Samuels shuffle out, readjusting the hearing aids that protruded from both his ears.

  “Phone ain’t working,” he said, sweeping his gaze about the expanse of grounds making up the ranch’s front.

  “You check your ’lectric ears there?”

  “Don’t even need them to know if there’s a dial tone or not.”

  Dylan went for the cell phone in his pocket.

  “Coverage is hit or miss in these parts, son,” said Scuggs. “Remember?”

  Bo Dean Perry started his wheelchair toward Dylan. “Wait a minute, you telling me you left that thing on?”

  Dylan looked down at his cell phone. “So?”

  “Oh boy . . .”

  Dylan cupped his hand over his eyes, staring into the sun. “Cop car’s coming. Hauling ass down the access road.”

  Bo Dean Perry squinted, trying to see it as best he could. “What color is it?”

  “You’re as blind as a goddamn bat.”

  “Don’t need to see much of a man to hit him with my Remington, Terrell.”

  “Black and white,” Dylan told him.

  “Sheriff’s cars been all white for two years now.”

  Dylan felt something change in the air in that instant, static jumping about as if an electrical storm was coming.

  “There’s an old irrigation tunnel runs out from the barn to the edge of the property,” Terrell Scuggs told him. “You get your brother and your girl and hightail it outta here that way.”

  “Entrance is under the horses’ water trough,” Bo Dean added.

  “Get yourselves in there and don’t look back. We got your back, son.”

  Dylan looked from one Ranger to the other, all of them nodding.

  “Now get moving,” ordered Bo Dean Perry, “and let us do what Rangers do.”

  90

  YUCATÁN PENINSULA, MEXICO; THE PRESENT

  Colonel Montoya sat in the uppermost tier of seating that overlooked the ruins of the ancient ballcourt he’d unearthed here in the jungle. Down below two teams of four of his soldiers battled amid the weed-infested grounds for control of the nine-pound, solid rubber ball using only their hips. The winner would be the first team to push the ball through a stone goal barely large enough to accommodate it ten feet off the ground.

  The game was as old as Mayan culture itself, played for sport as well as ritual. Montoya had personally taught it to the troops who’d accompanied him to the jungle to instill discipline in them as well as an appreciation of history. The game was also a superb conditioning tool, lest his soldiers grow slow and lazy here amid the fetid heat bred of the tropics.

  Many games would end with both teams bruised and exhausted, no goal having been scored. To the uneducated and unfamiliar, the task looked impossible. But with the proper practice, discipline, and dedication, one team would emerge victorious. Montoya watched now as the rest of his soldiers cheered their counterparts’ every move, much as the Mayan people had for the warriors who took to the court in centuries past. Cheering for both winners and losers, hoping for the ultimate prize to be awarded.

  Montoya loved the thud of the ball striking the stone walls and ricocheting back outward. The players might not score but they would collapse in exhaustion in trying to, both then and now. His would be the last people standing when the End Times came at last. And as the last to stand they would be the first to rise to claim the new world fashioned from the remnants of the old. It was all written in the glyphs on the temple walls, along with a likeness of a man who could only be him.

  As the ball smacked stone, just missing the goal, Montoya saw how his entire life and work had been building to this moment. His strange eyes and distressing appearance having toughened him up for the Special Forces while leaving him with a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life. To Montoya the many he butchered were no different from those who had shunned him as a child. He had learned to live without feelings in service to a higher power and greater cause.

  Smack! banged the ball, rubber slamming against stone.

  Montoya could not think of one true friend he’d ever made or one woman he’d taken without forcing himself upon her. Now he would take Mexico itself back, a new society forged in its place further fortified by bringing America to its knees. He knew his own commanders were skeptical. But they did not know what Montoya knew, did not fully comprehend the signs drawn on the walls of the temple ruins or the message they imported.

  He was what the ancient Mayans had called Chahuku, or Bringer of Thunder. And now the leaders of the cartels he had unified had furnished the final piece he needed to succeed. That was their purpose in this, why they’d been brought to him by the same Mayan deities that had given him eyes that could see what others couldn’t and a nose that could smell blood on the air long after it had been shed. Soon it would be time to head north, to Juárez, where the end would begin, and the seeds of the new world, his world, would be laid.

  Smack!

  Montoya knew this was all prelude, preamble to the new order that would dawn with the fall of the old. It did not mark the end, but rather a time of transition from one age to another, the close of what the ancient Mayans had called the Long Count. Those who accepted this reality would prosper from it; those who resisted would fall.

  Down below on the ball court, a player launched the heavy ball airborne with a powerful thrust of his hips. It soared on line with the goal and passed straight through, much to the delight of his troops watching. Had this been olden times, they as the winners would be rewarded with the greatest prize possible. Not treasure or glory, but welcomed as gifts to the Mayan gods who valued such human sacrifices as the ultimate honor.

  Even without such ritual, tonight the same gods would be happy. Smiling down upon Montoya in appreciation of his efforts to return Mexico to the Mayan people so they could serve those gods once more.

  The ring of his satellite phone disturbed Montoya’s reverie, jerking him back from the past. It sounded and felt all wrong for a moment better celebrated just as similar ones had been a millennium ago. But the news he was waiting for could change all that.

  “Yes?” Montoya said into the phone.

  “We have the trucks,” said Fernando Leyva of the Juárez cartel. “The shipment will be in Juárez this afternoon.”

  Montoya gazed up at the sun, which in that moment looked exactly like the depictions drawn by the early Mayans as a fire in the sky.

  “I’m on my way,” he told Leyva.

  91

  PEARSALL, TEXAS; THE PRESENT

  Dylan p
ushed himself through the tunnel’s darkness, Luke’s soft whimpers claiming his ear. He’d put his brother between himself and Maria so he wouldn’t be able to fall behind. Maria’s wet hair still smelled of the flower-scented shampoo. Every time the rancid stench of the irrigation tunnel’s sour water and spoiled mud nearly overcame him, he’d catch a whiff of lilac and kept moving.

  Finding the tunnel had been easy, entering it not terribly hard either. Things had gotten tough when the gunshots started just as the last of the light vanished from their path. Dylan knew dark and this wasn’t dark; it was black. In the nothingness around him, every meager and minor sound was exaggerated. Meanwhile, the clack of gunfire continued to reach him as dull whaps to his consciousness.

  “Dylan,” he heard Luke whimper.

  “Just keep moving,” he said back to his brother.

  “Dylan,” came the whimper again.

  “Yo le ayudaré,” Maria said to Luke behind him. “I’ll help you.”

  “Dad’s gonna be real pissed,” Luke sobbed.

  That made Dylan think of not being able to call him without a signal, which made him think of the damn cell phone he’d left on, giving away their position to whoever had showed up in the fake cop car. He twisted onto his side in order to pull it from his pocket in the narrow confines of the irrigation tunnel. Switched it on without bothering to check for bars he knew wouldn’t be there.

  The glow off the phone’s face was what he was after. It cast a narrow ribbon of light ahead. The tunnel was no less cramped and no less long, but it was less scary now and he could feel Luke moving more easily with Maria’s help.

  Dylan could no longer hear the booming reports of Bo Dean Perry’s Remington shotgun. He couldn’t take that as a good sign and tried to block it from his mind as best he could, focusing on the tunnel ahead and nothing else. His only world right now was the fetid muck clinging to his clothes and skin like garbage spun through a blender. He hated the smell of himself, but it told him he was alive and that it was his job to get his brother and Maria out of this.

  His father didn’t talk about the war he’d fought in much, and right now Dylan found himself wondering if he’d been in similar plights.

  “We’re almost to the end,” he said suddenly, holding his cell phone out as far as he could.

  “How do you know?” Maria asked him in English.

  “I just do.”

  Problem was he didn’t know what would be waiting when they got there.

  92

  WASHINGTON, D.C.; THE PRESENT

  Caitlin sat in the Reagan National departure area, waiting for a callback from Captain Tepper before her flight was called. She’d been tapping her foot so long it had started to cramp up, and she ended up pacing in front of the bank of windows overlooking the runways to pass the time.

  Cort Wesley’s text explaining what he’d seen in Tunga County, and the report about the ambushed truckers, had come in while she was still seated across from Jones in the gym café.

  “Macerio sees what’s going on in Tunga County last night,” Caitlin told him, “and notifies his brother. Goddamn Hollis Tyree played right into Montoya’s hands. Delivered whatever the hell’s in that dirt straight to him.”

  “I can have a team scrambled in less than twelve hours,” Jones told her before they parted. “We’ve been looking for an excuse to send the Eighty-second Airborne into Mexico for over a year now.”

  “Any of your satellites got tape feed of southern Texas?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Pull them, Jones, and look for a half dozen dump trucks the size of earth movers heading toward Mexico early this morning. You think you can handle that?”

  Jones looked insulted. “Ranger, our birds can spot a ping-pong ball from twenty thousand feet. Six dump trucks ought to stand out like lighthouses.”

  It was Jones’s call that came in first.

  “Bad news,” he told her. “Our birds had eyeballs on your dump trucks almost right up to the Mexican border. Then they flat-out disappeared.”

  “This anywhere in the vicinity of the Chihuahuan Mountains?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “I assume they teach you to read maps at secret agent school, or maybe you skipped that lesson. Thing is, the Chihuahuans are rich in iron ore deposits. I know ’cause they always played hell with my compass when I went camping up there with my dad. I imagine that same ore could play hell with your satellite imaging, mess it all up. If I know that, Montoya, or whoever’s directing those trucks, probably does too.”

  “Those trucks were making a beeline to Juárez, Ranger.”

  “Just get the cavalry ready to travel, Jones.”

  Caitlin had barely hung up from that call when her phone rang again.

  “D. W.?” she said before the first ring had ended.

  “It’s Lieutenant Jim Rollins, Ranger Strong. I got Sergeant Steve Berry next to me on speaker.”

  “Where’s Captain Tepper?” Caitlin asked, feeling her insides starting to twist.

  “His truck got shot up smack in the middle of an intersection right after you talked to him, Ranger. Mexican gunmen, near as we can tell. He’s hurt pretty bad. A mess, but holding on like the tough old coot he is.”

  “Oh damn,” Caitlin heard herself say. It felt as if she were standing outside her body, looking down on a woman looking totally out of place here in her cowboy boots and Stetson amid the suits of Washington.

  “He said you were headed to Houston.”

  “He was supposed to call ahead for me, arrange a sitdown with Hollis Tyree.”

  “It doesn’t appear he had the opportunity. If you want, I could—”

  “No, don’t bother. I don’t want to give Tyree a chance to be somewhere else when I get there now. Men like him been known to run from a fight instead of facing it. You telling me the truth about D. W. holding on, Lieutenant?”

  “I am, ma’am. None of his wounds are life-threatening, but that don’t mean he’s out of the woods.”

  “Thing you gotta know now,” picked up Ranger Sergeant Steve Berry, “is that we dumped that Mexican sack of shit Macerio’s cell phone records and came up with a bunch of numbers that don’t exist.”

  “Dummy exchanges,” Caitlin noted.

  “But we were able to get a fix on the general position of their origins from . . . What you call it, Jim?”

  “Triangulation.”

  “Triangulation something or other. Macerio didn’t place a single call himself,” Rollins continued, “but every one he received came from either somewhere smack dab in the middle of the Yucatán jungle or inside Juárez.”

  “Juárez,” Caitlin repeated, feeling a chill slide up her spine like frigid water on a hot summer day.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Juárez . . .

  There it was, Caitlin thought, the past and present converging, the path of her life about to collide with that of her grandfather who had fought the last great battle of his career in the same godforsaken place.

  “We could dispatch a team down there,” Ranger Berry was saying, “but they wouldn’t know what to look for.”

  “Don’t worry,” Caitlin said. “I know someone who does.”

  93

  SAN ANTONIO; THE PRESENT

  “I’ve been waiting for your call,” Guillermo Paz told her.

  “I need your help, Colonel.”

  “I know.”

  “A Mexican colonel named Montoya’s about to launch a guerrilla war on the U.S. We think he’s based somewhere in Juárez. His people are likely to be hiding something they moved out across the border in dump trucks.”

  Caitlin heard Paz take a long deep breath on the other end of the line. “The peasant people believe this Montoya is a Mayan god reincarnated to destroy them.”

  “His brother’s even worse. I think he’s the serial killer behind Las Mujeres de Juárez.”

  Silence filled the line, only Paz’s breathing breaking it.

&nbs
p; “My mother was a kind of witch,” he said finally. “She used to tell me about monsters who disguised themselves with human skin to perpetuate their evil.”

  “That certainly sounds like Macerio.” Caitlin allowed herself a deep breath. Her throat actually hurt more than it had last night and she could barely swallow water, never mind food.

  “I’ve never seen one up close. I look forward to finding out if my mother was right.”

  Caitlin swallowed some air, even that painful for her. “When you told me my life was in danger . . .”

  “Was this what I was talking about,” Paz finished for her.

  “Was it?”

  “That’s what brought me here, Ranger. I see that now.”

  “Thank you, Colonel,” she said, past the dryness.

  “No, thank you.”

  94

  PEARSALL, TEXAS; THE PRESENT

  The end of the irrigation tunnel spilled out at the rear of the old Rangers’ ranch, stealing the view of their house from Dylan as he helped Luke and Maria up out of the hole. The three of them were covered in muck and grime and smelled like a sewer. But to him Maria was still beautiful, especially when she finally let herself smile after letting out a deep breath.

  “I forgot my Play Station,” Luke said, wiping the mud from his face with an equally grimy sleeve, managing only to spread it around.

  A large white-tail deer munched on saw grass at what had once been a fence line, Dylan holding his gaze upon the buck as he fished his cell phone back out of his pocket. A single bar rose, fell, and rose again, and he dialed his father’s number, praying to himself he’d pick up.

  “Hello.”

  “Dad?”

  “Dylan? What’s wrong, son?”

  “We’ve had some trouble. We’re okay. But we need help.”

  “You hear me, boy? Dylan?”

  “I said we’re in trouble. Can you come get us? Where are you?”

  “Say that again. I thought I heard you say something about trouble. Talk to me, boy, come on.”