by Jon Land
24
GALVESTON, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
Judge Walter Weems stepped out of his house into the scalding air. April in Texas shouldn’t have been this hot, much less this early in the morning, and he was sweating by the time he entered his garage, his beloved Cadillac Deville Sedan centered comfortably in the dual bay.
He climbed in and stowed his briefcase on the passenger seat, having completed his review of the briefs from opposing counsel on a host of motions filed in the past few days. It was amazing any justice ever got done at all, given the unconscionable delays. But justice had to be done here. A defendant named Sylvester Rodart had allegedly blown up a woman’s health center, killing two nurses, a doctor, and a nineteen-year-old girl there only for a consultation. Forget “allegedly,” since Rodart’s high-powered attorneys weren’t disputing the facts in evidence at all, choosing instead to argue justifiable homicide. Not just because of all the fetuses snuffed out inside what had been the clinic, but also those that would ultimately follow. Rodart’s team wanted to introduce pictures of aborted fetuses into their defense, the subject of the briefs weighing down this entire case.
Truth was Weems had already decided to rule for the prosecution’s motion to exclude, and pretty much everyone knew that, based on the rulings he’d already issued on this case. The photos were inherently prejudicial, immaterial, and downright exploitative. Weems had caught hell in the press for following the law on this case and a movement was rising up against his reelection on those grounds, led by the Texas Tea Party folk he detested with all his being. Let the bastards do whatever they wanted. He was seventy-three, just about ready to spend more time with his grandkids anyway. Take his wife on their first real vacation in twenty years, while the whole damn country went to hell.
Weems closed the Deville’s door, wishing he’d remembered to leave the windows open. He was certain he’d dragged the stink of the courthouse into the car with him the day before, had bagged his suit as soon as he got home instead of just balling it up for the dry cleaner. Listening to Rodard’s lawyers wax eloquent on their client’s heroic character in the service of God honestly made him feel dirty, and Rodart himself had a stench like rotting catfish rising off his skin and clothes strong enough to infest the entire poorly ventilated courtroom. The man was so oily his flesh actually shined under the lights, as he sat there day after day at the defense table with a smirk painted over his features. Weems wanted to take a fire hose to him to wash the man clean, but had settled for an early adjournment.
Weems stuck his key in the ignition and turned, already reaching up for the rearview mirror that looked strangely out of place.
BOOM!
The wash of flames that devoured him seemed to come through the air-conditioning vents, Judge Weems’s last thought being there was something was very out of place indeed.
25
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
Malcolm Arno had emerged from his private home on the grounds only after the morning news shows reported the death of Judge Walter Weems in what was already being called a homicide. Arno couldn’t wait for the on-scene reports from the judge’s house where the remains of his body had still not been recovered.
He loved the morning, the cool bite to the air before the heat rising off the Texas desert set in. Instead of things smelling burned and baked, the sweet scents of chaparral and mesquite washed in from the scrub brush and bramble blowing across the desert floor—at least for a time, before the sun scorched the day and the scent of ground oil rubbed itself into the air.
Once, a long time ago, Midland had been a small town dominated by farming and ranching. That all changed with the 1923 discovery of oil in the Permian Basin, when the Santa Rita Number One well began producing in Reagan County, followed shortly by the Yates Oil Field in Iraan, Texas. Seemingly overnight, Midland was transformed into the hub of the West Texas oil boom, not nearly as widespread as that of the East, but even more plentiful on a per acre basis. A second boom period began after World War II with the discovery and development of the Spraberry Trend, still ranked as the third largest oil field in the United States by total reserves. And the legacy of black gold wasn’t finished with Midland either, not by a longshot. Another boom period occurred during the 1970s, thanks in large part to the energy crisis doubling and then tripling the price of oil. Malcolm Arno had often heard it said that Texans should thank not God, but Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter for their riches. And he knew that even today the Permian Basin produced one-fifth of the nation’s total petroleum and natural gas output.
Arno had heard old oil workers say that they could never get their nostrils or lungs free of the oil slick that coated their nasal passages and throat to the point that they tasted and smelled its rich, tarry scent long after they’d left the fields. It was the same here in Midland today. By afternoon, once the sun hit the top rung of its ladder, the air would carry the permanent texture of oil, like a brand. The same stench the old oil workers complained about being forever imbedded in their lungs clung stubbornly to the air. You couldn’t see it and it might not show up in any trace metals and minerals, but it was there all right, reeking its way through the hottest points of the day.
Not now, though, not in the morning refreshed by the night’s taking the air back for a time. Arno stopped near that outlying building set farthest back on the Patriot Sun grounds, recognizable from the darker shade of roof since it had been laid well after the others. He nodded at the two guards who respectfully nodded back, making a show of stiffening themselves at their post. The soundproofed walls hid all but a few muffled sounds from within, and Arno enjoyed listening to those sounds for the comfort they provided. Testament to his power and plan, a symbol of his ability to go beyond his father’s work and seize the mantel Reverend Max Arno hadn’t lived long enough to take.
“Mal?”
He’d been so preoccupied he hadn’t even noticed Jed Kean coming up right alongside him.
“Good morning, Mal.”
“That it is, Jed, thanks to you,” Arno said, slapping the big man in his back. “Glad to see you made it back from Galveston safely. Gonna be a fine day.”
“Better even than you think,” Keen said, grinning from ear to ear.
“You got my attention, Jed.”
“How’d you like to settle an old score?”
“Got plenty of those, don’t I?”
Kean slid a little closer to Malcolm Arno and laid a powerful hand gently on his shoulder. “None bigger than this one.”
PART THREE
In 1875 Leander H. McNelly, the toughest, meanest Texas Ranger of them all, was in the middle of a raid into Las Cuevas, Mexico, to retrieve stolen cattle when the U.S. Secretary of War sent him a cable telling him to retreat. McNelly sent back a telegram telling him to go to hell.
—Lonestar Legends
26
CENTRAL MEXICO; THE PRESENT
“So what do you think, Padre?” Guillermo Paz asked the young priest who’d just arrived at his compound.
“Impressive,” he nodded, looking up into the big man’s eyes. At six feet tall himself, the priest wasn’t used to looking up at anybody, but Colonel Paz had him by what looked like a foot, maybe a few inches less. The Colonel wore camouflage fatigues over boots that looked bigger than circus clown feet. His hair was long, black, and shiny with grease. His uniform top seemed painted onto a torso shaped and layered like banded steel. Colonel Guillermo Paz, the priest thought, looked as if someone had drawn him as a character in a comic book or graphic novel and then lifted it off the page. “Especially under the circumstances.”
Paz had begun the tour of his makeshift training base in the recently erected “church.” Just a tent basically, filled with folding chairs, a plywood altar, and makeshift confessional with curtains instead of doors and a mini blind separating the priest from his confessor. It might not have been much, but Paz regarded it as the showpiece of the camp. Once the site had been chosen, nestled close enough to the m
ountains to disguise its presence from the air, Paz had begun making the arrangements for weapons, ammunition, cots, bedding, water, power facilities, and living accommodations. The process had gone remarkably smooth. Paz was convinced that the next phase of his life had been “preblessed” by God himself. Acquiring the living accommodations had even been a snap once Hollis Tyree, a billionaire Paz had never met yet was intimately acquainted with, supplied the camp with a whole series of FEMA trailers salvaged from a certain mothballed worksite up in Texas’s Tunga County.
His “recruits,” meanwhile, had been selected for him, culled from regular army, Zeta Special Forces, a few foreign national volunteers, and numerous civilians who’d talked their way here with no clue what they were getting themselves into. They had no idea that Colonel Guillermo Paz, formerly of the Venezuelan secret police and once one of the most feared assassins in the world, only trained soldiers if there was war in the offing for them.
“Hey, Padre,” he said to the young priest, “what do you say we take the new confessional out for a spin?”
Once inside, Paz settled his vast bulk onto a simple stool that creaked under the strain. He was immediately grateful for the curtain since it allowed his legs to spill out onto the floor beyond. He wasn’t worried about being interrupted since his troops had only shaken their heads at the church’s construction. They didn’t understand that the best soldiers needed to believe in a higher power. Otherwise their task was pointless and unguided.
Paz waited for the young priest to take his place and the mini blinds to peel open. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one year since my last confession.”
“A long time, my son.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been on the run for a while. Looking for my place in the world, you might say.”
“And have you found it?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? Kind of a unique situation we’ve got, I’m sure you’ll agree. But the reason I wanted to talk to you was I had a dream about my Texas Ranger last night.”
“Your Texas Ranger?”
“Long story, Padre.” Paz looked for something to carve his name into, settling on the plank floor and going to work with the heel of his boot on the P. “Let’s leave it for another day. Suffice to say for now that she changed my life and I saved hers in return. In this dream she was right here in Mexico for the beginning of another war.”
“War?”
“Figure of speech,” Paz told the priest, having a difficult time cutting his boot heel through the plank in a discernible pattern. “You believe in witchcraft, Padre?”
“No, my son.”
“You should. My mother had the gift of the bruja and I must’ve inherited it from her. It wasn’t a dream last night so much as a vision. There were guns and blood with Caitlin Strong right in the center of it all.”
“Caitlin Strong?”
“My Texas Ranger.”
“A woman…”
“Thing is, Father, that dream brought it all home to me. The purpose for this army I’m building out here. The war we’re going to be fighting.”
“I wasn’t told anything about a—”
“I brought you here,” Paz interrupted, “because I want my soldiers to understand it’s a lot easier to fight with God on your side than on the other’s side.”
“God does not choose sides, my son.”
Paz finished the P as best he could and started in on the A, switching from his right boot to his left. “No offense, Padre, but that’s a crock of shit and you know it. God does take sides and I’m living proof of that, since he chose mine. I started listening to him lots better the day I left my own country for the last time, realized home isn’t a place so much as a state of mind. You ever read Aristophanes?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“He wrote ‘A man’s homeland is wherever he prospers.’ Well, I’ve been prospering pretty much since I first met my Texas Ranger. But I thought our time together was finished, until I had that dream last night. Her standing with guns ready again.”
“About to wage war,” the priest said, his voice cracking.
“For sure. It’s gonna be big and bloody, and I need to get my army ready quicker than expected. I never cared much for causes until I crossed paths with her, but those causes keep bringing us back together.”
The priest hesitated, Paz listening to his suddenly labored breathing. “Would you like to give your confession now, my son?”
“Just did, Padre,” Paz told him. “Because with all the killing that’s coming, it pays to get started a little early.”
27
SAN LUIS POTOSÍ, MEXICO; THE PRESENT
The address Sandoval gave Caitlin in San Luis Potosí was located down an alley adjacent to the famed San Francisco church in the city’s downtown section, formed around open-air plazas and dominated by colonial architecture.
“Why here?” Cort Wesley asked her from a plaza that sat diagonally across from the head of the alley. “Why not hide this place around the skyscrapers outside the city center with a million people to use as camouflage?”
“Because it would stick out too much and upset the kind of people you can pay off to maintain it here.”
Cort Wesley had been standing in the sun but his face was red and hot from more than that. The Mexican police, led by Major Batista of the federalés, had first refused to release him to Caitlin’s custody and even refused to let her see him.
“How far you wanna push this?” Caitlin asked.
“Why, señorita, I’m not pushing at all, just doing my job,” Batista had said smugly, grinning. “You should rethink your attitude.”
“It’s not my attitude you should be concerned about,” Caitlin said, leaving it at that.
Batista finally relented an hour later. From the humbled look on his face, Caitlin guessed he’d received another phone call from Sandoval in anticipation of just such a tactic. To save face, he insisted on confiscating Caitlin’s pistol—hardly a problem since she carried a pair of backups in hidden compartments tucked inside her SUV. Cort Wesley looked none the worse for wear, just more pissed and frustrated than the previous night. Strangely he didn’t look tired, although Caitlin couldn’t imagine him sleeping a single wink.
“Tell me something good, Ranger,” he greeted.
Caitlin did just that, explaining the information Sandoval had provided that would take them to San Luis Potosí. Once on the road, she handed him a .40 caliber SIG that was a sister version of the standard Ranger issue nine-millimeter pistol. Since arriving in the city, they’d both walked down the alley twice, cataloging everything while not stopping or lingering too long anywhere near the address of the building in which Sandoval had indicated Dylan was likely being held.
Cort Wesley had just returned from his pass down and back the smoothly layered stone walk, and Caitlin could see his skin seeming to crawl with a slight quiver.
“Don’t worry, Ranger, I didn’t storm the place and I didn’t shoot anybody, least not yet.”
“That’s a load off my mind,” Caitlin said, her meaning clear as she held his stare.
“You want me to say I’m sorry for killing Maria Lopez’s murderer?”
“How’d it go down?”
“How do you think?”
“That you gave no thought to the fact you could be throwing your life away.”
“Right then I didn’t care.”
“That’s the problem, Cort Wesley. You should have, instead of easing your own guilt over never taking Dylan down here to visit the girl.”
Cort Wesley shook his head. “Look who’s talking.”
“Come again?”
“I’m talking about taking justice into your own hands. Specialty of both of us now.”
“Difference being at least I’ve got the option of making an arrest.”
“Not in Mexico you don’t, Ranger. Or maybe you forgot your previous trips down here, like the one that took you out of the Rangers for a spell.”
&
nbsp; “Difference being none of that led to an extradition request.”
“Could have, on multiple occasions.” Cort Wesley held his hands out before him in a conciliatory gesture. “Look, right now let’s just get Dylan. We can deal with all the rest of this later.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Wearing his hair trimmed shorter disguised the increasing graying at the temples and further exaggerated the breadth of his already wide shoulders. Today Cort Wesley’s neck looked rigid and knobby with muscle that seemed to run in layers under his shirt, vibrating in rhythm with his pulse.
Caitlin turned her gaze down the alley. “What’d you make of the place?”
“Building’s got three stories and a basement. Starts and finishes flush with the structure on either side, like they were all connected at one point. Near as I can tell there’s entrances in both front and rear and maybe through the basement if it’s still joined up to the others on either side of it.”
“You make that blind man across the way?”
“Tin cup and all,” Cort Wesley nodded. “A spotter for sure.”
“I didn’t make anybody else.”
“Me either, Ranger. Could be one in a third-floor window but I didn’t linger long enough to look. No security camera or guns in evidence, and that’s a relief.” He stiffened. “Now how we gonna get ourselves inside exactly? I’m happy to go in with guns blazing, but I don’t know what you promised that Mexican friend of yours.”
“That we wouldn’t…”
“Figures.”
“So long as he could supply us with what we needed to avoid it.”
“And did he?”
Caitlin smiled.
28
SAN LUIS POTOSÍ, MEXICO; THE PRESENT
In public restrooms just down the street from where they’d left the SUV, Caitlin and Cort Wesley changed into the dark blue Mexican federalé uniforms provided by Sandoval.