by Jon Land
Why hadn’t the boy called?
Any solace he took in Caitlin’s certainty, Paz’s dreams, or the assurances of Leroy Epps melted away in the face of that. It just made no sense, yet the alternative it presented was utterly unthinkable. Cort Wesley recalled listening to parents wax optimistic on the fates of their missing children even after some murderous pedophile had been arrested. Or continuing their futile search in the face of DNA evidence pulled from a pervert’s subbasement.
Cort Wesley circled his way around the buildings now, watched by Malcolm Arno’s private security force, dressed in dark green uniforms streaked with sweat, at every turn. He cataloged nothing else out of place, the fake grass remaining stuck in his head like a bad song he couldn’t vanquish. In the end he believed Dylan was still alive, here or somewhere else, because Cort Wesley knew he would still be alive, given the identical circumstances. A boy who could go toe-to-toe with a serial killer a year ago and escape from a man like LaChance in the Mexican desert wasn’t to be underestimated. Simple as that … or maybe not.
The possibility set Cort Wesley trembling.
74
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
“What is it you think I’m guilty of exactly?” Malcolm Arno asked Caitlin. “Or maybe you’re just going to take me down ’cause you want to, like your father did to mine.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Arno,” Caitlin said, having no trouble holding fast to her cool, “but your father was a fugitive from justice at the time of the shooting.”
Arno’s face began to liquefy again, his skin nothing more than cover for the different strains of pigment battling each other. It was like looking at a monster from an old-fashioned horror movie showing in black-and-white. And in that moment, Caitlin believed she understood his formless essence, as if the day Jim Strong had killed the Reverend Maxwell Arno had bled him of color forever. The darker portions seemed to be running over the lighter ones now, dominating them.
“And whose justice would that be, Ranger?”
“Do you really want me to answer that question, sir? Is that the way you want this interview to go?”
Arno crossed his arms over a flat, thin chest. “We can put the fact that your father had it in his mind to kill mine all along behind us.”
“That what you think?”
“Because it’s the truth. No other way it could possibly have been.”
Arno’s eyes were like his father’s as well, too small for his head. Set back in his skull as if they were trying to hide from the rest of his face. Caitlin watched as they seemed to slide forward, growing in the process.
“Your father was guilty of adultery, Ranger Strong,” he said suddenly.
“If you’re talking about his relationship with Beth Ann Killane, my mother had been dead for eleven years already.”
Arno’s eyes bore into her, expanding with each beat of his heart. “Gunned down by Mexican bandits.”
“Drug dealers, actually.”
Those eyes seemed to move forward across the desk without the rest of him. “Tell me, Ranger, did they rape her too?”
Caitlin realized her hand had strayed involuntarily to her SIG. Arno noticed it too, his eyes dipping low for her holster.
“Sir,” she started, “I’m not here to rehash the past.”
“But the past is what we have between us, I’m sure you’ll agree. Allow me to shed some light on it for you.…”
75
MIDLAND AND ODESSA, TEXAS; 1990
“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t let go of me. Promise me you won’t.”
“I promise.”
And, true to his word, Jim Strong had held on to Beth Ann Killane right up to the night before the raid. He’d considered removing himself from the task force more times than he could count, only to have his duty as a Ranger trump his apparent impropriety. The FBI course he and D. W. Tepper had taken at Quantico had warned against this precise eventuality, though not in so many words. All Jim knew was that Beth Ann was the first woman who helped him get through the day without dwelling on the murder of his wife, for which he still felt responsible. It wasn’t so much that she eased his guilt as offered it a vent.
The most uncomfortable moments with Beth Ann came not as a result of the task force, D. W. Tepper, or the coming raid, but one Saturday morning when he sat down at his usual corner table at Pancake Alley.
“Somebody I’d like you to meet, Ranger Strong,” Beth Ann had said, smiling tightly as she turned to a boy seated at the counter. “Danny?”
He laid the book he was reading down and hopped down off the stool. Spitting image of his mom, Jim reckoned, with a floppy nest of hair hung low over his forehead, wearing his jeans tucked into his high-top sneakers like most boys those days. He must have been two years older than Caitlin but didn’t look it. His face was still smooth, unmarked by acne, and Jim was almost certain he hadn’t picked up a razor yet. He knew the boy was pretty much growing up without a father around and blessed his own fortune that he’d been son to the great Earl Strong, who had ultimately taken to fatherhood with the same conviction and commitment he’d brought to Rangering. Jim wondered in that moment if he’d been spending enough time with Caitlin and resolved to spend more. Take her fishing as soon as this whole thing with the Church of the Redeemer was done.
“Nice to meet you, Danny,” Jim said, shaking the boy’s clammy hand.
“You’re a real Texas Ranger?”
“I am.”
“I’ve read books on the Rangers.”
“Well, we’re not nearly as mean as the writers say or as brave neither.”
Something in the boy’s eyes made Jim uncomfortable, as if he knew about Jim and his mom. Then he figured it was just his own guilt rearing itself up over the poor judgment he’d exercised in sleeping with a woman he had used for his own ends as a Ranger. It made him feel the kind of dirty no amount of showering could relieve, and having the woman’s boy standing there made him feel even worse. Danny Killane looked kind of sad and empty, the type of boy who lived inside his head more than out of it.
“Ranger Strong is the one who helped secure your pardon, Danny,” Beth Ann was saying and Jim immediately wished she hadn’t.
“That was you?” Danny asked him, eyes wide with gratitude.
“It was a pleasure to help justice get done,” Jim said, seeing the desperate need in this boy and wondering what exactly he was getting himself into. Until that moment he hadn’t really thought of his relationship with Beth Ann beyond the coming Ranger raid on the Church of the Redeemer. Once that came, though, they’d face some powerful issues, not the least of which was the fact that their entire relationship was based on the lie Jim had formed to solidify the poor woman’s dependence upon him. He wondered what Beth Ann would think of him once he told her the truth, but his Ranger duty kept him from doing anything of the kind until she’d given him what he needed on the Reverend Arno’s stockpile of guns.
I used this woman. I used her and her son.
So what did sleeping with her say about him? The presence of her son in that diner confronted Jim with the weakness and failing of his emotions bred of a life lived on the open road. It came part and parcel with being a Texas Ranger, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. There was a cost to be paid for that, though, and Jim was paying it now.
Still, he resolved not to let his conflicting emotions affect his management of the case and getting the raid ready to go just as soon as he got the intelligence he needed on Arno’s guns and final approval came down from Austin. On the former, Beth Ann waited until Danny had taken the bus home to join him at his table.
“I saw the guns,” she told Jim Strong.
He leaned forward, waiting for her to continue.
“Reverend Arno took me downstairs, to a part of the grounds I’d never seen before. He was directing me to a storage room where there were supposed to be song and hymn books I could use for the choir come Easter.” Beth Ann took a brea
th to settle herself before continuing. “We passed a door I could see was different from the others, like it was newer. Got a look inside and saw a pair of big men, the reverend’s bodyguards I think, stacking up these wooden crates that had just come in.”
“You see any guns, Beth Ann?”
She shook her head. “No, just those crates and plenty of others like them. I could only see a bit of the room, though, and didn’t want to appear too curious; you know, make Reverend Arno suspicious or something.”
“You did good there. What about the smell?”
“Smell?”
“Of the room with the crates. Anything stick out?”
“Well…”
“Anything at all, Beth Ann.”
“Oil.”
“Oil,” Jim Strong repeated.
“Not like motor oil, though. Sweeter, almost like the kind you use to cook with. You know what I’m talking about, Jim?”
“It’s gun oil. You found them for sure, Beth Ann. You see how the door was secured?”
“It was closed again when we walked past after fetching the song books.” She closed her eyes, as if to picture what she’d seen in her mind. “A big lock, the key kind, not combination.”
“Any idea where Arno keeps the key to it?”
“Well, he’s got a ring full of them he wears clipped to his belt. Lent them to me the other day, so I could look for more song books.”
“You think the key to the gunroom could be on it?”
“I suppose,” Beth Ann said and then stiffened with her eyes blinking rapidly. “You don’t want me to go inside, do you?”
“No, ma’am,” Jim said, thinking fast. “I want you to change the lock.”
* * *
He figured it was the perfect solution. Get the guns out of the Rangers’ hair without exposing Beth Ann to any more unnecessary risk. If trouble came to the Church of the Redeember, Jim Strong figured Arno would have men ready to sprint for the guns. They’d rush downstairs at the first sign of the Rangers’ incursion and find a new lock for which they had no key. Cutting through it would take time, enough for the Rangers to get both the church and the gunroom itself secured before Arno’s men could free up his arsenal.
Yup, Jim Strong had everything figured out, right up to the precise timing of the Rangers’ raid on the Church of the Redeemer complex:
Easter Sunday.
It made perfect sense, the only thing that truly did. All Max Arno’s followers and loyalists would be in the church, praying and singing while they awaited the reverend’s sermon. And Beth Ann Killane taking over as choir head made it all possible, while giving her call to roam the very cellar hall on which the gunroom was located. Crucial since Jim could in no way let her switch the locks until Easter morning itself. Doing so earlier risked betraying the raid to Arno, who would immediately suspect something of the like was afoot if a mysterious lock suddenly appeared to bar entry to his guns.
But not on Easter Sunday.
“That’s just five days away, Jim,” Beth Ann told him anxiously, after he’d gone over the plan with her.
Jim didn’t reach across the table and take her hands in a gesture of false comfort. Nope, he was done putting on shows and using his personal feelings for Beth Ann to facilitate her cooperation. Instead he looked her in the eye the way he would a young Ranger heading into his first tough assignment.
“You tell him you need more song books as close to the start of the morning service as you dare,” Jim explained. “And that’s when you slip the new lock into place.”
He could see Beth Ann hedging.
“To make sure nobody get hurts,” Jim continued. “Rangers are determined to leave our guns in our holsters on this one. But to do that we gotta make sure Arno’s men don’t show anything that makes us change our intentions.”
She swallowed hard. “My son’s coming with me on Sunday. I could leave him home.”
“Arno asked to meet him, didn’t he?”
“He did at that.”
“All the more reason to bring Danny then,” Jim said, realizing how horrible that must have sounded even as he said it. Made even worse by the fact that Beth Ann didn’t seem to gauge his true intentions, trusting him too much to realize he saw an opportunity that could bring the raid that much closer to success.
This time it was she who reached across the table and took Jim’s hands in hers. “I’ll do it, Ranger.” And she smiled.
* * *
With Easter just five days away, twelve additional Rangers slipped into town and rented the remaining rooms in the same Odessa motel where Jim Strong had been staying. One of these, an extra-large efficiency with an alcove that allowed it to be advertised as a suite, was turned into their de facto headquarters. As such, its peeling walls were papered with Beth Ann Killane’s drawings of the Church of the Redeemer complex. It was big and sprawling, spread out over a dozen acres, which made Easter Sunday an even more obvious choice given how it reduced that daunting scope to the dimensions of a single church building.
With that in mind, the Rangers spent much of the next four days practicing their raid in a nearby church that was vaguely similar in layout and size to the target of their Easter raid. They rehearsed every step and detail, starting with serving the warrant on Arno himself to make his bodyguards show themselves. Serve him right there on the pulpit in the middle of his sermon, spitting out his venom about hellfire and brimstone coming to take those not pure of heart, which the Rangers translated as willing to take girls barely of babysitting age as wives.
Jim had reflected plenty on what drew a stable woman like Beth Ann to such a place, settling on the obvious void her loveless marriage and lack of a purpose, beyond her son, had wrought. She’d been plunged back into the big open world after fourteen years of relative comfort and security. Not happiness—Jim could tell that much as plainly as he could tie his own shoes. Beth Ann had settled for the best she could take out of life and even that had ultimately betrayed her. So she’d turned to the church for belonging, acceptance, a place in the world she could define. Absent his entry into her life, Jim supposed being named director of the Easter choir would have been the highpoint of several lost years.
Thinking of things that way left Jim stiff with guilt until he rationalized he was doing this woman a favor. Making her face the fact that the Reverend Maxwell Arno was every bit as seedy and predatory as the husband who had left her so he could bang with impunity whatever hussies he could get his hands on. He’d renounced his son as a faggot, traded in his station wagon for a Mustang, and off he went, save for the occasional court appearance before a judge who’d once been his golfing buddy. Where else was a woman like Beth Ann Killane supposed to turn?
He’d make all this up to her, Jim swore to himself, once the raid was done, the church shut down, and the not-so-reverend Arno was in custody of the state. Since the whole sordid episode had brought them together, it wasn’t all bad, right?
* * *
As Jim Strong posed that very question to himself, Beth Ann was fighting to stay calm. The planned Easter morning service schedule had fallen hopelessly behind when the church couldn’t accommodate the crowd and had to set up auxiliary seating in a field off the church’s rear. Even worse, Maxwell Arno’s insistence on greeting all of his arriving parishioners kept her from borrowing his keys again to put into effect the plan Jim Strong had laid out for her. Reverend Arno finally entered to the cheers of his flock, Beth Ann forcing herself to interrupt his reverie long enough to ask for his keys in order to retrieve much needed additional hymn books.
“Don’t know what I’d do without you, sister,” Arno said, touching her shoulder.
“It’s my pleasure, Reverend.”
“Is your boy here?” he asked, eyes scanning the VIP area.
“He’s right there in his reserved seat,” Beth Ann said.
She thought Arno’s eyes may have narrowed in her son’s direction, but then they locked on her again. “Make sure you introduce us whe
n the service is done, sister.” And off he went after handing her his keys, as the organist began his portion of the service.
The lock Jim Strong had given her to replace the one on the gunroom door was rattling around the bottom of her shoulder bag, purchased at a secondhand store just off I-20. And, keys in hand, down the stairs she went to switch out the locks more than an hour after she was supposed to.
She had just reached the cool half-light of the church basement when the Rangers came in simultaneously through all four doors. Pistols and shotguns extended to make sure nobody did anything plenty would regret later.
“Texas Rangers!” D. W. Tepper bellowed hoarsely in his cigarette-labored voice. “Nobody move! You may breathe at your own peril!”
The first thing Jim Strong noticed was that the Reverend Max Arno wasn’t delivering his sermon, wasn’t anywhere to be seen with the service having not even gotten under way yet. The second thing he noticed was that Beth Ann was not where she was supposed to be according to her depictions of the building drawn to scale.
Which meant the Rangers had no way of knowing whether the weapons were secure or not. Which meant Arno could be on to the whole raid about to go down.
Jim got a powerful paranoid feeling that maybe Beth Ann had double-crossed him. Maybe fell to bended knee to confess her sins to the man she was supposed to help the Rangers bring down. Jim saw it all happen in his head, growing cold over the realization of how much sense the scenario made. He thought in that moment of how proud she was to have her son, Danny, watching from the VIP section but the boy was nowhere to be seen either.