by Jon Land
“Shit,” Jim said under his breath, just loud enough for Tepper to hear. “This could be going to hell fast, D.W.”
“Name the play, Ranger.”
That was when a single shot rang out, muffled by the cavernous bowels contained beneath the church, and Jim Strong realized a bad day had just gone to hell altogether.
76
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
“Where were you while all this was going on?” Caitlin asked Malcolm Arno, captured in a dull blur now as if her eyes were having trouble focusing.
“Upstairs. I was part of the choir. I slipped out once the trouble started. Your Rangers didn’t pay much heed to a boy. Met up with my father at a place we’d arranged in the event of an emergency.”
Caitlin tried to lock in on his eyes but couldn’t find them. “Guess this qualified, from his standpoint. ’Cept he could still be alive today if he’d just gone peacefully, either Easter Sunday or at the Tackle and Gun.”
“You really believe that?”
“You got another opinion?”
“Ranger Jim Strong wasn’t just staking out that parking lot. He’d caught wind somehow we were coming. He came there to kill my father like I told you.”
“I seem to remember him offering your dad and his bodyguards a chance to live. They drew first. Like I told you.”
“Because they knew what was coming.”
“A Texas Ranger gunning down three men in cold blood.”
“That’s right.” Arno leaned forward across his massive desk. “You know, I always knew this moment would come, you and me face-to-face again. Guess you could say we’ve both come a long way to get here.”
“This place has the feel of a fort, Mr. Arno, like you’re fixing to fight a war.”
“I’m already fighting it, Ranger Strong. A war against the intrusions of a government that have gotten more and more pervasive, a war for freedom. What the Rangers did at the Church of the Redeemer might have been the beginning, symbolically anyway. You’d find a significantly different outcome if you tried that here with the Patriot Sun.”
“Your father was no patriot, Mr. Arno, and neither are you.”
“You have no idea what I am, Ranger.”
Caitlin found his eyes again, liquid pools of black. “That a threat?”
“I could ask you the same question. Are you like your father? Did you come here to throw down and take me on?”
“I was hoping to avoid that, sir, but there is that evidence linking your outfit to the assassination of the judge in Galveston.”
“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned evidence without being specific.”
“We’re just having a friendly chat here. That’s why I didn’t come with a warrant to search the grounds to see if you’re stockpiling weapons like your dad did.”
“That what you think, Ranger?”
“I think you’re a dangerous man, a lot more dangerous than your father was. I think you are seriously deluded about this country and see enemies where none exist.”
When that produced no rise out of him, Caitlin continued in spite of her promise to D. W. Tepper to go easy and not show her whole hand.
“I believe you’re up to something here connected to so many bad things, I can’t even begin to innumerate them. I think your father was running a cult that was just a few steps short of drinking the Kool-Aid and go out the way those folks in Jonestown did. But you’re out to take far more with you than just your own flock. Only beef the Rangers and the state really had with your father besides the tax thing was the polygamy and complaints raised about men having sex with girls wearing cigar bands for rings on their fingers. But you, you’re a whole different piece of work, Mr. Arno.”
Arno grinned, the pearly white of his teeth running with black. “Then I’d ask you again, Ranger. What are you really doing here?”
Caitlin bit her lip, punishment for already giving too much away, showing too many of her cards. “My job.”
“Your calling.”
“That’s right.”
“As I am doing mine. Both of us following in the footsteps of our fathers. You remember the first time we met?”
“I do, sir.”
“What did you think when you looked at me covered in my father’s blood?”
“I felt sorry for you.”
“I don’t want your pity.”
“I’m not giving it to you anymore.”
Arno leaned back, seeming to size Caitlin up anew. “Were you there when your own father died?”
“By his bedside in the hospital when his heart finally quit.”
“How’d it feel?”
“How do you think?”
“I don’t think, Ranger, I know. Take what you felt and multiply it by a hundred and you’ll know what I felt. You want to know why I built this place? You want to know what I’m doing here? Making it so no other child has to experience what I did when the government invades our lives just like the Rangers invaded my father’s church. I don’t kill judges, or abortion doctors, or anybody else who doesn’t share my view of the world. But people like you, and what you stand for, are responsible for the people that do. And your father was a goddamn murderer kept from the electric chair only by the badge he wore on his shirt.”
Caitlin stood up slowly, sure to keep her gun hand swaying well free of her holstered SIG. “What happened to your mother, Mr. Arno?”
The question drew a flutter from Arno’s eyelids, uncertainty claiming his face for the first time. “She died giving birth to me.”
“That’s what your father told you.”
“Because it’s the truth.”
“No, it’s not. I did some checking before I came out here. Your mother was a drunk who ran off with a car salesman when you were two years old. On top of everything else, I guess your father was a liar.”
Arno’s features finally congealed, looking as flat and expressionless as a marble bust. Caitlin had thought the truth about his mother, and his father’s lies about it, might get a rise out of him. But he actually looked calmer, even placid.
“I will pray for her soul.”
“You a man of God now too, sir?”
“No, just a man who believes in Him, His word, and His work enough to believe I am doing it now, as my father did before me. Sparing me the pain of my mother’s true plight makes me think no less of him.”
“Guess that does explain why his taste started running toward young girls after that, doesn’t it?”
Arno’s expression didn’t change, didn’t flare, just remained empty and virtually impassive.
“I wonder what else you inherited from him,” Caitlin continued, unable to stop herself, “besides the same twisted ambition.”
For a moment it looked as if Arno had no intention again of responding. Then his mouth opened, the words that emerged sounding like somebody else’s.
“From the time I laid eyes on you in that parking lot, I knew the world wasn’t finished with us yet. I’m glad for this chance to set things right, I truly am.”
“My father put yours out of business, Mr. Arno, and my intention is to do the same to you.”
Arno started to laugh, then stopped. “Look around you, Ranger. I’ve got an empire here and friends planted so high over you and the Texas Rangers you can’t even see how screwed you are.”
Now it was Caitlin who smiled. “The problem being that I’m a bit older than the girls you’ve been stealing down in Mexico. By the way, I got it on good authority that part of your business is about to be shut down, I guess you could say permanently.”
Caitlin backpedaled for the door, watching Arno rise deliberately and squeeze the edge of his desk so hard his hands turned scarlet red. “Am I still a person of interest, Ranger?”
Caitlin left her eyes on him, feeling the lip of the doorway under her boots. “I’ll be back to see just how much. Thank you for your time, sir,” she said, fitting the Stetson back atop her head.
PART EIGHT
Take two men of equal size and arm them with identical weapons. Call one … a deputy sheriff and the other a Ranger. Send each out to stop a mob or quell a riot. The crowd will resist the deputy, but will submit to the authority of the Ranger. There is something in the name “Ranger” that makes the wildest cowboy become completely dedicated to his duty the moment he takes the oath of office. He needs no blowing of bugles or flying of flags to make him carry on. He might be out in the chaparral far away from doctors or ambulances and if wounded he would probably, as one old Ranger put it, “lie out there and sour.” Nobody would know but he and God, yet he will not flinch from the responsibility.
—W. W. Sterling, Trails and Trials of a Texas Ranger, 1959
77
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
Dylan had never felt more stupid in his life. He spent a solid day stinking in his own sweat and dreaming of getting his hands free, only to get all of himself caught this time.
He sat in the windowless room they’d stowed him in the night before, outfitted with a steel door instead of bars. The walls were painted cinder block and Dylan thought he could still smell the sharp lacquer scent. The room featured a jail-style toilet and a cot Dylan decided to forgo in favor of sitting in a corner with his arms curled over his knees, rocking back and forth like he was a goddamn little kid.
Escaping in the desert and having the presence of mind to stash himself in that truck had filled him with a sense of exhilaration sufficient to get him through a miserable ride. His hands might’ve been bound but he wasn’t a prisoner per se as he was now. All the thinking and sawing in the world wasn’t going to get him out of a cinder-block cell. Nope, things might have been as bad as they could get down in Mexico, but they were even worse now.
Thanks to what he’d seen in that building he’d crawled up into. Because of whatever the hell was going on here, enough to make him wonder if the LaChance guy’s truck had bypassed Texas altogether and driven straight to hell. Because that building had been full of the last thing in the world Dylan had expected to find:
Babies.
Infants really, residing in cribs alongside twin-sized beds occupied by the women who must have been their mothers. Well, not women exactly—girls was more like it, maybe as old as him but maybe not. A chair to sit in, a bed to lie in, and a crib. Ten or so sets lined each side of the building’s floor, divided by the same kind of plastic draping that separated one patient from another in hospital rooms. Dylan thought he remembered seeing some small, wall-mounted televisions, but the sudden wash of light had flooded his eyes and big hands latched on to him before he could be sure.
So now he sat rocking himself from tears, reflecting on what he’d done wrong. What his father would’ve done different. There wasn’t much even in retrospect. He’d thought everything through, only to have the misfortune to enter the absolute worst building possible.
“There’s a reason why it’s placed on the outskirts,” he could hear his dad say now, “and that’s the reason why you wanna choose another.”
Sure, he almost said out loud in response, but where was that advice last night?
A couple of brutes wearing dark green uniforms had tossed him in here straightaway, roughed him up a bit mostly because Dylan fought them out of frustration. The door had slammed shut and he heard a lock slung into place. Not long after he heard steps echoing along the concrete hall beyond, the door thrown open by a big man, just as big as LaChance, who remained in the shadows.
“Sit up, boy.”
Dylan pushed himself up onto the cot, laying his sneakered feet down on the cold floor.
“Tell me your name or I’ll hurt you bad,” the man said.
“Dylan Torres.” Spoken this time without any threats about who his father was or what he was going to do to the man’s private parts.
Even in the shadows Dylan could see the man do what looked like a double take. He’d seemed to be on the verge of another question when he just stood there in dead silence for a long few seconds before closing the door.
The scariest part of the night followed soon after, the door opening again to reveal the same man in the company of a smaller one who took a step forward into the light cast by a single naked bulb recessed in the ceiling. Dylan sat up on the cot again and the man, who was wearing a bathrobe, just looked at him without saying a word. That was what was so scary, the way he looked, more like leered. Like he was sizing up Dylan as some kind of potential prey … or something even worse.
The boy felt his bowels turn to ice, glad for the toilet now and knowing he’d need to use it as soon as this man was gone. But he didn’t leave right away. He stood there, stare lingering as if to revel in what lay before him. Dylan ended up closing his eyes. Except doing that actually made things worse, the man’s stare cutting holes in his flesh like he had battery acid for eyes.
Dylan had shuddered, then shivered.
“Get him a blanket,” the man in the bathrobe said to the other.
And then he smiled, showing just a glimpse of teeth. It lingered just like his stare, long enough to make Dylan forget how to breathe until the man backed up through the door and it resealed behind him.
78
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
“He’s got Dylan,” Caitlin told Cort Wesley as soon as she climbed back behind the wheel of her SUV.
Cort Wesley looked across the seat at her, Caitlin’s eyes rooted on Arno’s office window though the windshield, certain he was watching her too. “How can you know that?”
Caitlin gunned the engine and fired up the air-conditioning. “Because I couldn’t get a rise out of him.”
“Normally you can get a rise out of anybody, Ranger.”
“Not Arno. I remember a story I heard once about a half-assed gunslinger who faced down one of the best guns in the west in a saloon. Thing was he knew the other guy’s gun was empty, giving him an advantage nobody else knew he had.”
“So why we leaving?”
“Because staying can’t do us any good. There’s those truck tires alerting me to something I need to check out.”
“And the grass.”
“What about it?”
“Can you get your pal in Washington to run a satellite scan of the whole spread?”
“He’ll be able to point out the fillings in the people’s teeth. Why?”
“Just have him do it. He finds what I expect, you’ll know why.”
Caitlin reversed slowly, studying the freight carriers one last time before banking the wheel right and proceeding off the grounds of the Patriot Sun. Cort Wesley had lapsed into silence, sitting with his broad shoulders square to the road. He was breathing rapidly for a man who looked otherwise calm.
“I never see my son again,” he said finally, his eyes looking like black holes, “I’m gonna take a flamethrower to that place, Ranger. Roast Arno alive.”
Caitlin jerked the SUV over to the side of the road. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”
79
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
She climbed back inside after vomiting up a breakfast grabbed at a fast-food restaurant halfway between Midland and San Antonio. Cort Wesley handed her one of the breath mints he’d been downing and the wintergreen rid her mouth of the putrid taste.
“Never met a man in my life who made me sick to my stomach like that,” she said, accepting another mint. “I swear Malcolm Arno had oil seeping out his pores. I even smelled it in his office.”
“It’s the territory. Sticks to the air like gum to the underside of a school desk.” Cort Wesley’s eyes swept the empty stretch of prairie on both sides of the SUV. “This land used to be nothing but fields when my grandpa was a wildcatter.”
“The Masters as an oil family?”
“Just well paid labor, Ranger. We were never much for owning stuff.”
“Too bad.”
The car’s radio cut off and a phone rang over the Bluetooth system, taking over the speakers. Caitlin answered with a touch of a bu
tton on the steering wheel.
“Yeah?”
“Ranger Strong?” greeted an unfamiliar voice, slightly hushed unless this was just a bad connection.
“Who is this? How’d you get this number?”
“My name’s Killane, Ranger, Daniel Killane. I believe your father and my mother were acquainted. I believe he was there the day she died.”
80
MIDLAND, TEXAS; 1990
“Shit,” Jim said under his breath, just loud enough for Tepper to hear. “This could be going to hell fast, D.W.”
“Name the play, Ranger.”
When the muffled shot echoed like a dud firecracker, a cold dread filled Jim Strong like none he’d felt since the call eleven years ago from Austin telling him to get home fast. He couldn’t have known then that Beth Ann Killane had taken Max Arno’s keys and descended into the old root cellar dug beneath not just the church, but extending via a tunnel that ran under the entire grounds. Branching off like spider veins into a network of possible escape routes.
Beth Ann walked through the thin light toward the gunroom door that was shinier than all the others lining the basement hall on a single side. Even as she shifted Arno’s keys from her left hand to her right, she failed to consider how long precisely it would take to find the right one that opened the gunroom. Too long for sure. She owned two watches, one broke and the other had a dead battery. But the clock in her head told her that the Rangers’ raid would be under way by now, and if she didn’t act fast, it could turn to a shooting fight before too many more minutes had passed. She thought of her son sitting in the midst of it and felt the grip of fear and panic on her insides. She didn’t freeze up the way she did when her husband screamed about how she’d choked his life off and he had to leave or risk being suffocated by boredom.
Beth Ann tried a few keys, as many as a dozen before noticing how much play existed in the oversized hasp through which the big padlock had been fitted. Maybe, just maybe …