Strong at the Break

by Jon Land

  “How many guns Sandoval figure we’re looking at?” Cort Wesley asked, standing at the head of the alley again.

  “Half dozen at the most, and only a couple practiced enough to give us any trouble.”

  Their plan, what there was of it, was simple. The federalé uniforms would give them access to the building where they’d confront one or two of the prime guards. They’d instruct those men to bring them whoever was in charge. From there, without a keen insight into the building’s layout or exactly who they’d be facing inside, things would play out based on the moment, and Caitlin expected Cort Wesley could be counted on to keep his gun stilled until there was no other choice.

  They could assume that the old building, once a prominent hotel during Mexico’s nineteenth-century heyday, would still be broken up into a series of smaller rooms. Dylan would likely be in one, another dozen or so kids occupying others probably congested on a single floor. Lighting may have been a prime indicator in determining the precise placement, except that from the outside all the windows looked the same, and daylight stole anything that might’ve differentiated one room from another.

  “Your friend Sandoval say anything about drugs?” Cort Wesley asked, pulling the words from his own throat as if he dreaded the answer.

  “Not a word.”

  “’Cause isn’t that how they get kids like this to do their bidding, turn them into whores and sex slaves?”

  “The eastern European gangs maybe. But they’re operating the parlors themselves. The kids moved through Mexico are placed with consolidators and brokers for sale or placement with third parties.”

  “So they gotta keep ’em clean, feed them well. Hell, maybe they converted one of the floors into a goddamn spa.”

  Caitlin remained silent, watched the sweat starting to dapple Cort Wesley’s blue uniform top.

  “Consolidators and brokers,” he said, repeating her words suddenly.

  “Yeah.”

  Cort Wesley snorted out some breath. “I might just shoot every last one of them.”

  * * *

  Caitlin approached the entrance behind Cort Wesley and watched him pound the heavy wooden door with his fist.

  “Federal Police!” he said in Spanish, loud enough to disturb some tourists passing by. “Open up!”

  “We’re supposed to be here to collect a bribe,” Caitlin reminded, “not stage a raid.”

  “Must have forgot,” Cort Wesley told her and pounded the door again. “And I don’t think subtlety scores you many points with people like this.”

  “No one’s answering.”

  Cort Wesley drew the .40 caliber SIG Caitlin had given him. “Gotta figure they’d want to avoid a commotion.”

  “They’re gone,” a voice said from behind them.

  Cort Wesley and Caitlin turned to see the blind beggar seeming to stare their way.

  “They’re not answering because they’re gone.”

  “You saw them leave?” Caitlin prodded, starting across the alley’s smooth stone floor.

  The beggar took off his sunglasses, staring right at her as he winked. “I saw no one come. Since I got here this morning, no one comes. People always come.”

  Caitlin and Cort Wesley exchanged a worried glance. “Last night then,” he said, before she had a chance to.

  “You’re not federalés.”

  “No,” Caitlin acknowledged, “we’re not.”

  The beggar’s eyes were dull and dark, squinting against the sudden wash of light. He remained silent until Caitlin slipped a ten-dollar bill into his tin cup. Then he grinned, showcasing a front tooth lost entirely to a silver-shaded filling.

  “Last night then,” the beggar resumed. “They were still inside when I left after midnight.” He rattled his tin cup. “Business was good last night.”

  “What time did you get here this morning?”

  Silence.

  Caitlin dropped another ten into the cup.

  “I always get here at nine, in time for the first of the morning tour buses.”

  “You’ve seen them coming and going,” Cort Wesley said, suddenly looming over the beggar.

  “I sit here every day. And they come and go.” He shrugged.

  Cort Wesley yanked a picture of Dylan from a cargo pocket of his uniform trousers. “You see this kid come?”

  The beggar grinned, didn’t look at the picture.

  “You wanna eat that cup of yours, amigo?”

  “Then I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything, would I?”

  Caitlin stuffed another ten home.

  “More,” said the beggar.

  “Don’t push your luck,” Caitlin advised.

  The beggar finally took the picture from Cort Wesley’s grasp, squinting again as he regarded Dylan’s face framed by long black hair. “Last night, they brought him in.”

  Cort Wesley snatched the picture from his grasp. “He’s my son.”

  The beggar didn’t seem to care. “Then I feel sorry for him, señor, because he has gone to the devil along with the rest of the children brought here.”

  Cort Wesley crouched down, even with the beggar’s eyes. “Where’d they take my son and the others?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How much you want?”

  “The money doesn’t matter. I don’t know.”

  Caitlin eased Cort Wesley back a bit, thought her hand might come away numb from the current surging out from his nerve endings to his super-heated skin. Still, she managed to stuff a twenty-dollar bill into the cup this time.

  “How many children?”

  “Six to eight at a time. Never here very long. They come, leave after a few days or a week, while more come.”

  “How many men?” asked Cort Wesley.

  “Four, maybe five on average. It varies. By the day, the week.” The beggar stopped, then started again almost immediately. “But Gort was here last night. I saw him.”

  “Gort?” Caitlin repeated.

  “I call him that because he looks like the robot from the science fiction movie, the one in black-and-white, about the world standing still, big and bald. Except he had paint on his head.”

  Something scratched at Caitlin’s spine. “Paint?”

  “You know like a…”

  “Tatuaje?”

  “Yes, tatuaje! A tattoo!”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know, like an airport runway.”

  Caitlin felt a chill. “Or an arrow?”

  Recognition flashed in the beggar’s eyes. “Yes! I’m almost sure, almost.”

  Caitlin stiffened, feeling Cort Wesley look at her the way she’d just been looking at him, the electricity dancing off her skin now instead.

  “You know this guy, Ranger?” he asked her finally.

  “Kind of,” Caitlin answered, turning his way. “I shot him dead up in Canada.”

  29

  SAN LUIS POTOSÍ, MEXICO; THE PRESENT

  “He and his twin brother both,” Caitlin continued, still reconstructing the memories. Both her dad and granddad had told her gunfights slip away from you the same way dreams do. A mechanism of the mind to deal with the kind of violence that was part and parcel of a gunman’s life. “Their name was LaChance. Transplanted American Hells Angels out of Michigan who were part of a drug-smuggling operation on the U.S.-Canadian border to rival what’s coming out of Juárez.”

  “You’re telling me this big bald guy who showed up here last night…”

  “Same description, right down to the tattoo.”

  “So, what, you saying this guy’s a ghost?”

  Caitlin turned back to the beggar. “The big man—”

  “Gort.”

  “Gort. How often was he here?”

  The beggar frowned, trying to fix the answer in his brain. “Once a week, maybe twice. That’s why it was strange to see him last night, because he’d been here the night before.”

  “He showed up after the boy was brought in?”

  “Sí, Gort
came after I saw them bring the boy inside.”

  “But you left before Gort came out again.”

  “Then everyone was gone when I returned this morning.”

  Caitlin stuffed another bill into the beggar’s cup and moved aside, already wielding her BlackBerry.

  “Who you calling?” Cort Wesley asked her.

  “Expert on ghosts, one in particular,” she said, punching in the exchange for Royal Canadian Mountie Pierre Beauchamp.

  * * *

  “Bonjour,” Beauchamp greeted.

  “It’s Caitlin Strong, Mountie.”

  “Well, howdy there, Ranger,” Beauchamp said, doing his best impersonation of a Texas drawl.

  “How you healing?”

  “Be back at work soon enough, behind a desk anyway, but they tell me my days of riding a horse are done.”

  “I didn’t know you rode.”

  “I don’t. Just trying to make you feel more guilty, eh? They’re giving me a medal, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t. Congratulations.”

  “The final report of our raid makes me sound like Rambo. No mention anywhere of Mrs. Rambo, though.”

  “Less complications that way.”

  “I don’t imagine this is a social call.”

  Caitlin held her gaze on Cort Wesley as she continued. “Those LaChance twins have a triplet, Mountie?”

  “Yup. Goes by the name of Buck. Just as big and even meaner. We pinned a murder rap on him a year back and he hasn’t been seen in the province since.”

  “That’s because he’s relocated himself to Mexico, moving kids instead of drugs.”

  Caitlin could hear Beauchamp breathing in the pause that followed. “What the hell have you got yourself into this time, Ranger?” he said finally.

  “Damned if I know, Mountie. You get yourself better, you’re always welcome in Texas.”

  “I think I’ll pass on that, if you don’t mind. Fighting alongside you once is enough for any sane man. And, Ranger?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “How many are you going to gun down this time?”

  “As many as it takes, Mountie.” Caitlin ended the call and looked back at Cort Wesley. “It’s time we took a look at the inside of that building.”

  30

  SAN LUIS POTOSÍ, MEXICO; THE PRESENT

  “You got that look about you,” Caitlin said as they moved about the now abandoned building that had served as a way station for kidnapped children about to be sold as sex slaves.

  “What look is that?”

  “Way you’re holding your eyes and moving like you got an M-sixteen in hand instead of a pistol. Like this was Iraq instead of Mexico.”

  “Dylan’s principal raised that very same subject yesterday.”

  “You never talk about Iraq with anyone, Cort Wesley.”

  “And I didn’t with Garcia. He figured it out all on his own.”

  Caitlin stopped at the foot of the stairs. “How’s that?”

  “How’s not important. Point is part of it had to do with what happened after the war, the team I was part of hitching our wagons in the southern part of the country to help start a revolution aimed at toppling Saddam. Whole thing was CIA all the way, right down to the weapons drop. Then good ole Washington dropped the ball instead. Goddamn Bay of Pigs all over again and a bunch of innocent people got slaughtered on account of that.”

  Caitlin remained silent.

  “I never felt so helpless in my life, Ranger. Watching it all unfold made my skin turn inside out, and I swore I’d never feel that way again. Now I do, only worse.”

  “We’ll find Dylan, Cort Wesley.”

  Cort Wesley arched his back, sending a crescendo of crackling noises up his spine. “You don’t sound so sure of that.”

  “I’m just getting started,” Caitlin said and started up the stairs toward the second floor.

  The lock on the front door was rusty and old, easily picked with a simple credit card. The smell of air freshener, something flowery and sweet, had greeted them as soon as they got it open. Already dissipating to allow the stench of mold, wood rot, and stale body odor to reclaim the air.

  The first-floor furnishings were simple, confined mostly to a long, wide space that had once been the lobby when this building was a hotel. There were a few desks and tables strewn about with no particular rhyme or reason, as if someone had laid them down because there was space to do it. A thin layer of dust covered the tops of all, except for the parts that were covered by something else. Fast-food plastic, balled-up candy wrappers, soda cups layered at the bottom with melted ice, crumpled paper bags and cans of cheap beer with stray liquid roasting and stinking—all evidence of men on watch, on guard, living on nutrients purchased from any number of kiosks or eateries lining the plazas that dominated the city’s old downtown. Men who’d left in a hurry after making no attempt at all to disguise their presence.

  At this point Caitlin couldn’t have even said why she’d come inside with Cort Wesley in the first place, once learning the building had been emptied. She supposed it had something to do with getting the scent; that’s what her daddy and granddaddy had called it, and she recalled Jim Strong spending the better part of a day at the Church of the Redeemer compound after the Ranger raid had emptied it and Max Arno had gotten away. He had described it as feeling the place out. Touching, smelling, seeing, sensing. Fire up his instincts and let them turn the trick. Anyway, it must have worked. What else could have made him show up at the Tackle and Gun in Midland just a few hours before Arno and his son?

  So that’s why she was inside the place now. Getting the scent, hoping some fact registered in her subconscious that would lead her to Dylan.

  She’d been, what, three years younger than him that day Jim Strong had shot it out with the last remnants of the Church of the Redeemer? In retrospect, Caitlin figured her childhood had ended then and there. Wasn’t what she’d seen so much as taking Earl Strong’s old Colt from the glove compartment, feeling its cold weight as she climbed out of the truck into the parking lot, because in that moment she’d had every intention of using it if need be. She guessed that’s why her father hadn’t been cross with her, apologizing about their missed fishing trip and promising to start fresh again the next day, as if the very intention that had driven her from the truck could’ve been blotted out, erased from memory, that easily.

  Of course, things didn’t work that way. Caitlin didn’t feel appreciably different, any different really, after that day, but she was. She started going to the range more and more, abandoning the old Colt in favor of a succession of revolvers and semiautos that felt lighter and surer in her grasp. Finally settling on Smith & Wesson’s Model 59 Nickel 9mm Parabellum that seemed molded to her hand. It was the first double-action pistol with a double-stack magazine, featuring an alloy frame. A bit heavy at two pounds but perfectly balanced. Her dad gave her one on her fourteenth birthday, the trip that had begun in Midland finally coming to an end.

  “I can’t stand feeling helpless like this,” Cort Wesley said as they mounted the stairs carefully, pistols palmed. “Like back in Iraq, standing on the sidelines, not a damn thing I could do as the people I was supposed to help got massacred by the Republican Guard. I’m sorry I never told you about that before.”

  “Things we keep inside ourselves make us who we are, Cort Wesley,” Caitlin told him, thinking again of watching her father kill three men in that parking lot.

  The hotel was smaller on the inside than it appeared from the out. Just ten rooms on the second floor, five per side, all the doors open now but with padlocks affixed to the exterior frame and bars fastened across the windows. And where lavish furnishings of the time had once been were nothing more than bare cots with thin covers and buckets layered with human excrement and urine, filling the hall with a putrid stench that would become intolerable once the sun superheated the building’s interior.

  “They must’ve left in a real hurry,” Caitlin noted.

 
“Doesn’t look like something that was planned either, does it?” Cort Wesley added.

  Caitlin didn’t feel his question needed an answer, knew what was coming next before Cort Wesley resumed.

  “I think they broke this place up because of Dylan. He gets here, somebody calls LaChance. Then they’re in the wind.”

  She gave him a long look. “I never heard you sound scared before, Cort Wesley.”

  “I know my son, Caitlin. Goddamn hothead just like his old man. He goes off on somebody, maybe the guy overreacts. Uses a knife or a gun.”

  “Haven’t seen any blood anywhere and neither have you.”

  “It’s a big place, Ranger.”

  Caitlin looked inside another of the rooms, checking the bucket stinking in the corner with hand pressed over her mouth and nose. “And they got mules to clean up the shit. LaChance doesn’t get the call and hoist anchor just because somebody made a mess.”

  “What then?”

  “Let’s keep looking.”

  31

  SAN LUIS POTOSÍ, MEXICO; THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley checked every room on the second and third floors, holding his breath as he inspected the contents of each of the buckets.

  “Figure Dylan’s would be empty,” he explained, “considering he couldn’t have been here very long.”

  Caitlin moved into one of the third-floor rooms ahead of him, freezing in the doorway. “This is the one,” she said, as he came up behind her.

  Caitlin watched Cort Wesley’s emotions twisting his features into coils of rope. “How do you know?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing I can say exactly. You live with two Texas legends with more than seventy years of Rangering between them, you learn to trust your instincts.”

  Cort Wesley checked the room’s bucket. “Empty,” he said, as if to confirm her words, en route to a more thorough check of the room starting with the walls and floor. “If Dylan was here, he’d leave some sign to let us know.”

  Cort Wesley went back to his careful scrutiny. Caitlin joined him in checking the other side of the room from floor to ceiling, for what exactly she didn’t know.