by Jon Land
“No, because it doesn’t change anything, including the fact that given it to do all over again, you would.”
Cort Wesley turned and stared at Caitlin from the passenger seat until the SUV hit a pothole deep enough to rattle both of them. “Too bad you weren’t around to talk me down.”
Caitlin stifled a laugh. “So it’s my fault now?”
Cort Wesley slumped a bit in his seat, staring out the windshield instead of at her. “You could’ve turned that task force down.”
“But I didn’t and look where that got me.”
He turned toward her, veins in his neck pulsing. “Ended in gunplay. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, Ranger?”
“I didn’t go up there looking for that, Cort Wesley.”
“Didn’t you? Come on, you going north, me going south—the only difference was you had a badge and I didn’t.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, right. You killed, what, four of those bikers yourself?”
“You say it like I had a choice.”
“I only shot one drug dealer.”
“I honestly don’t see what your problem is.”
“With you thinking a badge gives you license to think you’re any different from me. Truth is, at the core we’re both just gunfighters cut from the same cloth. We can’t get away from it and there’s no sense in trying.”
This time it was Caitlin who looked toward Cort Wesley. “That’s a load of crap.”
“Is it? We might as well start putting notches on our guns, Ranger.”
Caitlin started to smile, the gesture more reflective than anything.
“What?” Cort Wesley asked, watching her.
“In Washington, Jones said almost the same thing. I think I’m starting to get his point, that our natures allow people like him to use us for their own gains. It’s a weakness, Cort Wesley, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise.”
“This is about Dylan now. We’d be wise to keep that in mind.”
“When the shooting starts, you mean.”
They passed under an overpass, enough dark shadows cast to turn the windshield into a mirror, and Cort Wesley thought he saw old Leroy Epps sitting in the backseat shaking his head before swigging down some root beer.
“What are you looking at?” Caitlin asked him.
“Nothing,” Cort Wesley said, turning back around toward the front.
“He’s still alive, bubba,” came the voice of Epps from the backseat.
“You hear that?” Cort Wesley asked Caitlin.
“Hear what?”
“Nothing.”
“Pay attention to me here.”
“Leave me alone.”
Caitlin looked over at Cort Wesley, then followed his gaze into the backseat.
“I’m talking to you, bubba.”
“I did so much dumb shit when I was Dylan’s age,” Cort Wesley said, instead of responding to Leroy Epps. “Any one of a hundred things could’ve gotten me killed. Take your pick. Dylan does one and we’re looking at a nightmare you don’t wake up from.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What if it’s true?”
Caitlin squeezed the steering wheel tighter. “I watched Mexican druggers murder my mother when I was four years old and can’t remember a thing about it no matter how much I try.”
“There a point to you raising this now?”
“Sometimes I think me being so willing to use a gun is all about not having that memory. Like the violence of that night found a place in my soul and dug itself in. Every time I pull my gun what I’m really trying to do is dig it back out.”
“I still don’t see the point, Ranger.”
“Both you and Jones call me a gunfighter, but neither of you was there when I stepped out of my dad’s truck at the age of thirteen with my grandfather’s Colt to stand with him against Max Arno. Ended up freezing to the gravel.”
“You were just a kid.”
“There’s the point, Cort Wesley. So is Dylan. You and me, I don’t think we ever really were. He thinks he’s like us but he’s not. That’s not your fault and it’s not really his either. He watched his mother die just like I watched mine. Only having hold of the memory hasn’t stopped him from plugging the hole inside him just like I do every time I draw my gun.”
“That will only mean something to me if we find him,” Cort Wesley said, his voice scratchy with defeat and resignation. “If he’s still alive.”
“He’s alive, and we’re going to find him.”
“She’s right,” Leroy Epps said from the backseat, and this time Cort Wesley just closed his eyes, as Caitlin’s phone rang.
71
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
“Any news on the boy, Ranger?” Guillermo Paz asked, the din of his voice sounding metallic over the SUV’s Bluetooth system.
“Not yet.”
“He’s still alive. I dreamed of him last night. I never dream of anyone who has passed. But there was a lot of crying around him.”
“Crying?” Caitlin said, looking at Cort Wesley.
“I don’t know what to make of it. It’s just what I heard, Ranger.”
“Is that what you called to tell us?”
“Us,” Paz repeated. “The outlaw is with you?”
“He is.”
“Good. Because the reason for this call concerns him. He needs to know that the people who took his son and so many other children will be gone by the end of the day, each and every one of them.”
Caitlin and Cort Wesley remained silent, still regarding each other.
“Fifteen locations like the one in San Luis Patosí scattered all over the country. I’ve dispatched my soldiers to each. They’re going to burn the buildings to the ground with the victimizers still inside.”
“You got the locations from Sandoval.”
Paz said nothing.
“The army you’re building is for him.”
It seemed Paz was still going to say nothing until, “That’s what he thought, me too. Now I realize I’m building it for me. I’m going to make sure all the children are returned safely to their families. But, don’t worry, it shouldn’t take too long.”
“Why would I worry?”
“Because my army will be poised and ready when you need me, Ranger.”
“It’s not gonna come down to that this time.”
“Yes, it is. It always does.”
“You sound like that’s what you want.”
“It’s who I am, Ranger. It’s who you are.”
Caitlin felt something like an emery board scratching down the surface of her spine. “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do, Colonel.”
“Not you, the battles you choose to fight.”
“Maybe they choose me. You ever think about that?”
“You just made my point for me.”
“I didn’t make any point at all. I just want to get the boy back, that’s all. That’s enough.”
“It’s never all,” Paz told her. “And it’s never enough either.”
“What do you mean exactly?”
“Figure it out, Ranger.”
“I don’t like games, Colonel.”
“Do you like chess?”
“It’s a game, isn’t it? What did I just say?”
“Because I’m starting to wonder if philosophers like Dawkins and James were right, that we are just pawns of the universe. Why else would you and me keep being thrown together?”
“I have no idea,” Caitlin told him.
“I’ll tell you something else, Ranger. Good and evil are more than just abstract concepts.”
“And which side do we come down on, Colonel?”
She could hear Paz chuckle softly. “You’ll have to ask the devil that one.”
“I think I may be on my way to meet him right now,” she said, eyeing Cort Wesley.
72
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
“I appreciate you seeing me, Mr. Arno,”
Caitlin told the man seated on the other side of the massive desk.
Malcolm Arno rocked in his chair, studying her without speaking. “You remember the last time we met?”
An old-fashioned clock hung on the wall, marking time with a steady click of the seconds as they passed. Staring at Malcolm Arno, Caitlin had the sense that the length between each became longer, as if time itself was slowing to a stop. The office lighting was dull, casting Arno’s face in an uneasy mix of shadows and light sneaking through the windows looking out over the Patriot Sun complex. If she didn’t know better, she’d say his skin was actually a blend of tones constantly running into each other with the mix unable to hold. As if Arno wasn’t a finished product, a work in progress instead. Formless, wearing what passed for physicality as a Halloween costume. More liquid than solid.
“We didn’t exactly meet, did we, sir?” Caitlin asked Arno, his face continuing to shift in and out of the light and dark.
“I suppose not,” Arno conceded. “Your father killing mine…”
“Mine gave yours every opportunity to surrender.”
“Freedom is not something a man like my father relinquishes easily.”
“Implying he knew he was guilty, that the Rangers were right in what they did.”
Arno leaned forward so fast his chair’s back wheels lifted off the hardwood floor and landed back down with a thud. “Is that so?”
“Innocent men don’t draw down on Texas Rangers.”
“Am I to assume by your statement that the Texas Rangers themselves were without sin?”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“Yes, you do. I’m speaking of your father. He didn’t come to that parking lot to arrest my father, he came there to kill him.”
* * *
Caitlin and Cort Wesley had waited fifteen minutes at the guard station before their vehicle was escorted onto the grounds of the Patriot Sun by a man named Kean. Caitlin parked in a designated area amid several large trucks. She introduced herself but not Cort Wesley, leaving his and Kean’s eyes to linger uncomfortably on each other. She didn’t notice if he even regarded the Ranger badge pinned to Cort Wesley’s shirt.
Kean was leading her past the big freight trucks toward the complex’s main offices, when Caitlin stopped suddenly and crouched.
“Something stuck to the sole of my boot, sir,” she said by way of explanation and then pretended to pry the nonexistent object free to better inspect the truck’s tires. Something about them had grabbed her eye, but she couldn’t figure out what at first glance. Caitlin felt Kean growing anxious, though not suspicious yet, and bounced back up, her curiosity satisfied. “Appreciate your patience,” she told him, and they had continued on their way.
* * *
“With all due respect, sir, that’s a load of crap,” Caitlin told Malcolm Arno. “We were on our way fishing when Jim Strong got it in his head to check out the Tackle and Gun. Bad timing on your father’s part.”
“Perhaps the same could be said for your coming here today, Ranger.”
“You think I’ve come here to kill you, Mr. Arno?”
“I suspect if that were the case, I’d be dead already, wouldn’t I?”
Caitlin didn’t humor him with an answer. “You got call to hold the Rangers in disregard, me in particular. If you’d prefer to deal with someone else—”
“No,” Arno told her, “you’ll do just fine. As you said, I’m just a, what, person of interest?”
“That’s right.”
“Based on what exactly?”
“An anonymous tip that someone here in your hierarchy procured the explosives that killed that judge in Galveston. Something called PETN.”
“That sounds like a rather flimsy rationale to disturb a man’s peace.”
“Well, sir, I don’t disagree with you there. But we’ve got to check it out all the same.”
“A bit intrusive, wouldn’t you say? An example of exactly the kind of interference in private affairs people like me are trying to shake. Is that why I’ve been targeted?”
“Targeted is the wrong choice of words in this case, sir. Otherwise we would’ve come with a search warrant.”
“Like the Rangers did that Easter Sunday on the Church of the Redeemer, you mean. Tell me, Ranger,” Arno continued, leaning his whole body forward now to join his eyes, “would your father have gunned mine down right there on the premises had they met that day instead?”
“If he intended to do harm to him or others, absolutely.”
“On Easter Sunday,” Arno said, shaking his head slowly. “Nothing seems wrong, even sacrilegious about that to you?”
“The date was chosen, as I understand it, to minimize resistance and thus preclude any loss of life.”
“Sounds like you’re reading from a field manual, Ranger.”
“I’m reading from history, sir.”
Arno’s head looked as if it were on a kind of tumbler, going from side-to-side again, mixing the light and dark as it did. Caitlin shifted in her chair, suddenly discomfited by how the room’s dull light, combined with a cloud that had crossed over the sun, left Arno looking as if he had no face at all she could discern.
“Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here, Ranger?” he said through lips that didn’t seem to move, like he was a ventriloquist letting the air swallow his words.
“I believe I already did that.”
“You’re lying.”
“And you’re mistaken.”
“Am I?” Arno leaned forward, his features congealing again as the streaming sunlight returned to the windows. “Your father lied to you about that fishing trip and you’re lying to me now. You didn’t come here about explosives at all.”
“Then why don’t you tell me what I’m doing here, sir?”
Arno settled back, his chair creaking. “You want this to end the same way it did for your father in that parking lot.”
“I’m getting tired of people telling me what I want.”
“Your father wanted to kill mine. Nothing was going to stop him.”
“You forgetting about those two gorillas drawing first, Mr. Arno? You forgetting about my father giving yours every chance to give himself up even afterward?”
“You really believe that?”
“I was there.”
“So was I. And you didn’t see the look in your father’s eyes.”
“Why don’t you describe it to me?”
Arno grinned tightly, smugly, his face growing formless once more. “Look in the mirror.”
“You saw what you wanted to see then, sir. You’re doing the same thing now.”
Caitlin realized she could no longer hear the loud clicking of the clock, as if time had frozen along with Arno’s features, the intermixed splotches of light and dark locked as they were.
“Why don’t you tell me what you see now, Ranger?” he asked her.
“A man I’m going to bring down,” she told him. “One way or another.”
73
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
Cort Wesley strolled about the grounds, not being obtrusive but not shying away from the stares of others either. It was strange having a lawman’s badge pinned to his lapel. There was ample precedent in the annals of Western history and lore dating all the way back to Wyatt Earp’s infamous friendship with Doc Holliday. More modern times had seen Rangers and small-time bootleggers and marijuana smugglers join forces to fight back both Indians and border bandits since they were a detriment to the interests of both.
Still, he found it interesting the way people looked at him, their stares mixed between reverence, revulsion, and something like fear. He’d spent a good part of his life before the army and even more after it on the other side of things, easily recalling the unease that accompanied an unexpected encounter with Johnny Law. Cort Wesley much preferred the middle where he’d been residing since leaving The Walls and having the responsibility for raising his boys thrust upon him.
All tha
t was gone now. He’d choose any side that got Dylan back to him and right now that side was the Texas Rangers, both literally and figuratively. So he walked about playing the part. Started out by checking the same truck tires Caitlin had to see if he could figure out what had grabbed her attention. There was a strange jagged pattern cut into their surface, as if all four of the truck’s outside tires had rolled over something sharp that hadn’t quite managed to carve them up. Funny thing was the patterns were nearly an identical match. Even funnier was the tires on the other similar truck showed exactly the same wear in virtually the same places.
And there was something wrong with the grass; not wrong, so much as just not quite right. It was okay here at the center of complex, soft and supple—good ole Arkansas Blue even though it was medium green in shade. The name was actually a reference to its reliability in any climate, its true “blue” nature. But the grass farther out in the recreational fields, beyond a series of drainage culverts built to prevent flooding in the massive spring storms that plagued the state, looked too bright and too green. And when Cort Wesley finally strode out there, the feel of it beneath his boots told him why:
It wasn’t grass at all, but some kind of man-made turf. The fake grass laid down in trays used on professional and college sports stadiums. Fabulously expensive to use on this much land and totally unnecessary with an assortment of seeding that tolerated the Texas climate just fine. This just didn’t make any sense he could see.
So what would a real lawman make of it, what would Caitlin Strong make of it?
She’d look at Cort Wesley and say, Only reason they laid field turf was because they knew real grass wouldn’t grow.
Okay, Ranger. Why’s that?
Something they did to the land or soil maybe.
That explanation didn’t play right with him. I’m not buying that, Ranger. I can see them working farmland over there on the far edge of their sprawl. This is something else.
Like what?
Cort Wesley didn’t have an answer for her or himself. He kept walking in the hope one might come, but what he really wanted to find was some sign that Dylan had been here just like the “D” carved into the wood floor down in San Luis Patosí. He knew finding something like that within a complex as big and spread out as this was likely a pipe dream and an absurd one at that. And so was his certainty that Dylan would have doubled back from his pursuers in the Mexican mountains to take refuge in a monster truck registered shell-style to the Patriot Sun. He had to believe that because it was all he had, and the alternative might indeed be that his son was being picked at by buzzards in the desert heat of a godforsaken country Cort Wesley hated with all his heart. Colonel Paz believed Dylan to be alive because he’d seen him in a dream. If Cort Wesley had been able to sleep more than a wink in the past three days, maybe he’d have the same dream and be similarly reassured.