by Jon Land
She fished through her shoulder bag for the similar padlock Jim Strong had provided her and tried to work the shackle through the loop of the hasp. It seemed a fool’s errand from the start, valuable time better spent on searching for the correct key wasted. Beth Ann started to lift her padlock away.
But she didn’t finish, the lock suspended in midair and her in mid-thought by the fact that quitting was something to which she was all too accustomed. She’d been beaten, battered, and disappointed so often by life that she’d come to accept failure as normal. This would’ve been no exception, except a Texas Ranger named Jim Strong had entered her life and filled it with new hope. He’d thrown a lifeline to her boy that she caught out of the emptiness. And on top of that his love had offered her a new beginning.
So instead of pulling Jim Strong’s lock away from the hasp, she continued to work the shackle and jimmy the lock currently in place, trying to find a gap, a point where she could squeeze Jim’s lock through. Her mind told her no, told her to give up. But her spirit, filled with new purpose and conviction, kept her going until the shackle popped through the hasp, grating against the original lock as Beth Ann snapped it closed.
Elation filled her. She’d done the deed, been true to the man she loved more than anything except the son he’d rescued from a certain hell. And that’s when she heard the breathing and boots kicking gravel against the hard-packed floor.
“I’m disappointed in you, sister,” said the Reverend Maxwell Arno, holding her son, Danny, by the scruff of the neck.
* * *
The Rangers moved about the church like clockwork, employing the same precision they’d practiced in the similar building they’d used as a mock-up for this one. They took control of the building in swift fashion unmarred by any resistance, a remarkable success except for the absence of their prime target as well as Beth Ann Killane. Barely a word was uttered in protest until the Rangers began separating the children from their families. At that moment yellow school buses, in accordance with the plan, would be pulling through the gate to spirit the children away to a nearby school where a phalanx of social services and law enforcement personnel were waiting to interview them. As of this point, no one knew for absolute sure what had transpired on these grounds but everyone was fearing, and assuming, the worst.
D. W. Tepper supervised the entire process, Jim Strong having lit out for a stairway he recalled from Beth Ann Killane’s drawings at the sound of the gunshot.
* * *
Danny looked so small in Reverend Arno’s grasp and only then did Beth Ann realize how big a man he was. As if he’d grown larger in the face of a fight the way some animals and reptiles do.
“I’m afraid I’ve still got the one you’re looking for,” Arno said, flashing a single key held on a ring in his free hand.
Then his eyes narrowed, hardening on the sight of what she’d done.
“Where’s the key to that second lock, sister?”
“I don’t have it.”
“You don’t really expect me to believe that.”
“It’s true. I don’t care what you believe.”
“What brought you to do this? Why have you betrayed me?”
Beth Ann swallowed hard, didn’t respond.
Arno, wearing an altogether different face that scared her more than any Halloween mask she’d ever seen, jerked Danny forward and back again. “The key for your son. That’s what I’m offering you.”
In endeavoring to save Danny from one terrible fate, she’d inadvertently sentenced him to an even worse one.
“Let my boy go,” she said, finding a strength deep inside herself she hadn’t known until she’d met Jim Strong.
“What was that, sister?’
“You heard me.”
Arno shoved Danny forward, taking a step with him. The thin light radiating from the naked bulbs swaying above cast his face in a composite of darkness and shadow, his slicked-back black hair still shining as if that were the only thing the light could find. A single cowlick hung down over his forehead, looking like an ink blotch.
“Consider your faith, sister,” Reverend Arno said with surprising calm. “Consider yourself in the eyes of your God.”
“Is it true what they say?”
“What who says?”
“Is it true the men of this church force themselves on young women little more than girls?”
“Who told you that?’
“The Texas Rangers. They’re upstairs right now putting an end to all the pain you’ve wrought.”
And that’s when Beth Ann saw Max Arno change. Maybe it was the light or a trick of her eyes tightening their focus in the standoff. But suddenly Arno’s face dissolved into a putrid mess of molten flesh that reformed into something dark and formless. Then the bulbs swayed again and his old visage was back, albeit with a hatred that flared his nostrils and curled his upper lip forward.
“What have you done?” he asked in a voice that sounded like the buzzing of a wasp.
Beth Ann saw the pistol flash in his hand, coming up—for Danny she thought until he leveled the barrel on her instead.
* * *
Jim Strong was hoping that the sound he thought he heard coming from the basement was an echo of thunder, maybe his ears misfiring or something. But in his heart he knew better. Jim had spent his life around guns and knew a shot when he heard one, no matter how muffled or lost to distance and barrier. He rushed down to the basement with his heart in his mouth, nothing else finding his ears until a boy’s soft sobs reached him.
Jim rounded a corner to find Danny Killane holding his mother’s head in his lap. He was stroking her hair gently, smoothing it from her face. His hand was wet with blood and his shirt splotched with it from a wound in line with her heart. The light from an overhead bulb framed her face with a radiant glow that made Beth Ann look more beautiful than Jim Strong had seen in their brief time together. Her son didn’t acknowledge him as he approached, struggling to catch his breath as the tears streamed down both cheeks, dragging grime the air had pasted to his face. The boy knew he’d lost the only person who truly loved him just as Jim knew he’d lost the last woman he’d ever truly love.
He knelt down on the other side of her body, waiting for Danny to look up before speaking.
“Which way they go, son?”
The boy pointed down the hall where the dangling light bulbs ended in a tunnel of blackness. Jim started to lift the walkie-talkie from his belt, then stopped. The boy didn’t need to hear what he had to say about setting up a perimeter, putting out an all-points bulletin, and the like. And the truth was he didn’t want Arno and his goons rounded up when they emerged on some distant corner of the property on a preselected escape route.
He wanted them, especially the reverend, for himself. His way. Old school. The way Earl Strong had done it in a bunch of Texas oil towns during the boom and later down in Mexico against drug smugglers and gunmen.
“I heard them talking,” Danny said suddenly, his Adam’s apple swelled from the hard swallowing. “Something about the Tackle and Gun.”
It was the name of a Midland store owned by a church member named Pearsley who Jim figured must’ve helped Maxwell Arno build the arsenal now stored behind the door Beth Ann Killane had kept safe. Jim had already resolved to share that information with no one at all and handle the stakeout all on his own. If he didn’t catch Max Arno there, he’d catch him somewhere else. But he had a hunch Arno would be showing up at the Tackle and Gun before the week was out. And other than that fishing trip he’d promised himself with Caitlin, Jim Strong happened to have the week free.
He wanted to say something to this poor kid who’d just lost his mother, but had no idea what. With a stranger it was easy to find the words because you weren’t afraid if they came out a little wrong. Today they needed to be perfect and, absent of that, Jim opted for silence until the boy looked at him, his tears stopped as if someone had shut off the faucet.
“You’re gonna get him, aren’
t you?” Danny Killane asked, a hatred like none Jim Strong ever wanted to see again filling his eyes.
“Count on it,” he promised.
“Promise me you’ll tell me when it’s done, after you do it. Promise me that.”
“I promise.”
81
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
Caitlin waited to make sure Danny Killane was done before speaking. “I remember him making a call on a pay phone before we left the Tackle and Gun, after Max Arno was dead. That was you, wasn’t it?”
“I could hear sirens in the background, so I guess it was. He called to tell me it was done. That’s all he said. I didn’t even have time to ask him if he was coming to my mother’s funeral the next day, but I’m pretty sure he was there anyway. Never heard from him again, though, and that kind of surprised me.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Killane.”
“Danny, please.”
In her head Caitlin still saw him as the floppy-haired boy her dad had first met in Pancake Alley, small for his age with just a hint of manhood teasing him, instead of a thirty-five-year-old who sounded beaten down by life.
“I moved in with my dad, which wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, except for the nightmares and him being gone a lot. I never went back to that diner where my mom worked. I wonder if it’s still open.”
“Where you keeping yourself these days, Danny?”
“Here and there. I know you, though, everybody does. A real gunfighter, a hero just like your dad.”
“I don’t think I really measure up to him on that account.”
“He’d be proud of you, Ranger.”
“As I’m sure your mom would be of you.”
Silence fell over the line, something as thick as wet tar settling between them.
“I’m the one got her killed,” Danny Killane said finally. “It wasn’t my mom Arno came down to the basement after, it was me.”
“Come again?”
“I followed her. He followed me. Use your imagination, Ranger.” Killane paused, the wet tar returning to the line. “I know what he wanted when he came down there after me. I saw it in his eyes and it was the sickest sight I ever saw in my life. I still see it in nightmares that come and go. They been coming a lot lately.”
“Where are you, Danny? Let’s meet. Pancake Alley’s still open in Odessa, right off I-Twenty. I can meet you there.”
But the man on the other end of the line, still a boy to her, wasn’t interested. “Your dad did the world a service by killing Max Arno in that parking lot, and I was glad I could point him in the right direction. I’m sorry you had to see it, but to those like me that he wronged and hurt, and there’s plenty of us, it was like putting down a rabid dog about to sink its teeth into a kid. His son’s no different. I should know.”
“How’s that?”
“I work the grounds for room and board. I got your number off Arno’s computer when he was out of his office. He’s got no idea who I really am. Thought about moving on a hundred times, since seeing him every day brings it all back. But something keeps me from leaving. Something else you need to know too: Arno’s got a boy stashed on the premises.”
Caitlin could feel the electricity dancing off Cort Wesley’s skin, resuming before he had a chance to speak. “Say that again.”
“I found him hiding out the other day with his hands cuffed behind his back. I cut the plastic off him and promised I’d come back, but I got started on the bottle and the night got away from me. Guess I’m not good for much, am I?”
Caitlin kept her eyes on Cort Wesley. “I believe you’re judging yourself too harshly. You deserve better than the hand you’ve been dealt, Danny. Can you tell me any more about the boy, like where they’re keeping him?”
“I could ask around.”
“Any notion you can provide at all?”
“This place is so big, there’s spots in it I’ve never seen. I work the grounds; that’s all. I’ll keep an eye and ear out, though. Call you back if I find anything out.”
“Don’t do anything stupid, Danny. Whatever it is that’s kept you with the Patriot Sun this long, make sure it doesn’t eat you alive.”
A pause followed, during which Caitlin and Cort Wesley could hear Danny Killane’s rapid breathing over the SUV’s speakers.
“This man killed my mother, Ranger. I think you know what’s kept me here.”
“Help me find that boy, Danny. It’s a better way to even things with Arno than anything else you can do. You need to trust me on that.”
“I’ll try. I promise I’ll try.”
“Arno and his father have ruined enough lives. I don’t want you or this boy joining them.”
“I swear the man’s the goddamn devil. All he’s missing is horns and a tail. How do you kill the devil, Ranger?”
“You leave that to me, Danny,” Caitlin said, feeling Cort Wesley’s eyes boring into hers. “You leave that to me.”
82
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
Malcolm Arno walked slowly up the center aisle of the nursery, stopping at each of the curtained cubicles to look in on mother and child. He had fathered all these infants, an even dozen born in the past year to girls delivered to him for the purpose of procreation and no other. It was the best way, the only way, to assure his blood and word lived beyond him.
As far as Malcolm Arno was concerned, his own life effectively began the day Texas Ranger Jim Strong murdered his father. And for the bulk of that broader existence Arno had considered how best to extract his revenge, often settling on Strong’s daughter as a target of just comeuppance. He’d lost track of her for the remaining years of his miserable youth, holding only her picture in his memory until she joined the Department of Public Safety as a highway patrol officer. This after graduating from Texas’s police academy at the top of her class and then joining four previous generations of Strongs as a Texas Ranger.
Her picture had been on the front page of the San Antonio News that day. Her father, the killer of Arno’s father, joined her in the shot, his face looking drawn and tired as heart disease ate away at him, making his death a foregone conclusion.
Arno had gone to Jim Strong’s funeral, lurking near the rear of the cortege behind even the press. Too far from the graveside to witness Caitlin Strong’s mourning, but taking vast satisfaction in the fact that he would pay homage to her passing as well after being the instigator of it. Her face in that parking lot, frozen in his mind forever with her father’s truck as a backdrop, had gotten Arno through any number of awful nights that wouldn’t seem to end, his misery lengthened by insomnia that plagued him until the Kean family finally took him in.
Arno hated the sounds and smells of the nursery building. Security priorities had rendered adequate ventilation difficult, the heating and air-conditioning systems battling for supremacy as seasons changed and the fickle Texas climate played havoc with the controls. When appropriate the children and their mothers would be moved to a dormitory-style facility that would nonetheless remain insular from the rest of the complex. Then, as the children grew, he would teach them personally, bestowing upon the smartest, most ambitious, and most deserving the bulk of his gifts to assure future generations would not suffer again as past ones had. His work had to go on and go forth. Of the twelve birthed so far, eight were boys—divine provenance serving him yet again.
He knew everything about Caitlin Strong that many did and plenty that almost everyone didn’t, including the fact that she’d taken up with an outlaw named Cort Wesley Masters. He saw Masters’s son Dylan Torres as the trump card he’d been waiting for all his life, an instrument of fate to make Caitlin Strong at last know the pain he had known since the day her father had killed his. This boy was older than the two of them had been that spring day in 1990, but he looked younger than his years, the symmetry close enough to justify his plans.
Arno wasn’t sure yet how it would come to pass, hadn’t worked that part out in his brain yet. He only knew that he wanted Caitl
in Strong to be there when it happened. Let her hold the boy as the life ebbed from him, let her feel him take his last breath as Arno had felt his father take his.
Someday the infants he heard cooing and gurgling, secure in their mother’s protection, would learn how terrible this world could be if they didn’t fight for their beliefs and hurt those who sought to hurt them. They’d learn that lesson from their father himself, learn from his own experience of how to deal with an enemy.
Starting with Caitlin Strong.
83
MIDLAND, TEXAS; THE PRESENT
“Why aren’t you turning around?” Cort Wesley said, the SUV still parked on the shoulder.
“You wanna go back in there with guns blazing?” Caitlin asked him. “Going up against all of Arno’s men, just the two of us, with no warrant or backup?”
“I’m running a little low on time here, Ranger, in case you forgot.”
“I haven’t, but that might be just what Arno wants.”
“You lost me.”
“It didn’t occur to you that the son of a bitch could be baiting a trap for us?”
“You heard Danny Killane’s voice. Man, he still sounds like a terrified fifteen-year-old kid.”
“If it really was Danny Killane. We can’t let Arno push our buttons or pull the trigger for us.”
“This coming from somebody who just puked off the four-lane on account of spending a few minutes alone with him.”
Caitlin looked across the seat. “If Dylan is there, what chance do we have of finding him in a place that big?”
“Better than the one we’ve got if we don’t try.”
“Oh, we’ll try all right, but not until things are lined up right.”
And then Cort Wesley realized. “You don’t want this to go bad, like it did for your father.”
“He deserved better after my mom was murdered. Beth Ann Killane was his last chance at that and Arno’s father took it away from him.” She looked at Cort Wesley again, slowing the SUV enough to hold his stare. “And, yeah, I don’t want his son to do the same to Dylan.”