by Jon Land
Cort Wesley could hear the screams echoing from behind the missing windows, more like loud guttural grunts of shock that often followed the mashing of bone and muscle by 5.56mm slugs. The muzzle flashes continued to pour from in and before the building, the shooters turning from dull shapes to actual men as he drew closer with his eyes adjusted to the darkness now.
Cort Wesley felt several smacks to his torso and sides, the flak jacket saving him from all but a bullet that actually cut a crease through his right ear and left a stinging pain for residue. He could feel a lump of dislodged skin flapping as he ran, the pain further charging his adrenaline-fueled body. He jerked the magazine out, spun it around, and slammed the second home in less time than it took him to take a breath. Then, maybe fifty feet from the building, he simply stopped dead in a black patch of ground ignored by the moon, and started firing off single shots until the return fire stopped altogether.
Figuring more of Arno’s soldiers could be laying in wait, baiting a trap, Cort Wesley advanced slowly with the tip of the M16’s barrel cutting the air before him, avoiding the slew of bodies he’d dropped. The entrance to the unfinished building was a swinging, barely hinged door. He spun through it to find no one waiting and mounted the unfinished wood-plank stairs toward the fourth floor where Danny Killane had indicated Dylan was being held.
Cort Wesley had entered that special zone in which senses heighten to an almost precognitive level. Sounds became sights, telling him who was where, his shots sure to be an instant ahead of theirs. But those senses yielded nothing for him until he crashed through a fire door that turned out to be just leaning in place and dropped in his path. There, in the center of the hall, a man in uniform sat on his knees with his hands in the air.
“Please! Don’t shoot! I surrender, I give up!”
Cort Wesley approached, wary of the open doorways on either side of the hall. He stopped with his M16 angled low.
“Where’s the boy?”
“Gone.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know! I swear it!”
“Does Arno have him?”
“Arno? Why would he…”
Cort Wesley continued holding the rifle on the man who swallowed hard.
“Don’t kill me.”
And finally Cort Wesley tilted the barrel slightly upward. He knew the man was telling the truth, just as he knew Dylan had been here. It wasn’t the scent of his clothes or hair gel, nothing like that, so much as an inexplicable residue of presence, the same way Cort Wesley knew his son had taken his truck without permission upon climbing into it himself.
“Looks like this is your lucky day, hoss,” he told the man still kneeling before him. “But you better hope it’s my boy’s too, or I’m gonna gun down every last one of you.”
108
MIDLAND, TEXAS; EASTER SUNDAY
Malcolm Arno saw it all coming apart. In trying to be the antithesis of his father, he had fallen prey to the very same proclivity of letting his weaknesses consume him. His obsession with Caitlin Strong had proven to be his undoing, just as a vastly different one had been his father’s. If he had left well enough alone, if he hadn’t ordered Masters’s son brought here to make the daughter of Jim Strong suffer, the Patriot Sun would have been spared the wrath being visited upon it now.
So much lost, squandered. For some reason, though, Arno still wasn’t pondering how to hold it together, how to get out of this in one piece and continue his stewardship of a movement flourishing all over the country. The Tea Partyers might be weak, insignificant larks, but the same vitriol they displayed fueled the groups beholden to Arno, his cause, and his money. He would arm them with guns like those contained in the shipment squandered up north, just as he would arm the right candidate with enough money to bring the true America into the mainstream come 2012.
Only he didn’t care about any of that anymore. All he cared about was causing pain to Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong, to see the agony stretched over her face as she had glimpsed it on his the day her father had killed his. If there was a future for him and the movement to which he’d dedicated his life, it would come after that.
Arno stormed up the stairs of the central office building that coordinated an empire bigger than anything he’d ever imagined. His office door was open and he surged through it so out of breath that he had to drop his hands to his knees to quell the hammering of his heart. Once he’d caught his air, he moved to the closet and threw open the door to reveal the huddled, bound form of Dylan Torres nestled on the floor. Huffing in his breaths, staring up at him with pure hatred. His bandaged finger, cuffed behind him with the others, had bled through the gauze and soaked the back of his already filthy jeans. Arno was glad for the gag in the boy’s mouth since he couldn’t stomach any words from him right now, afraid they’d move him to choke the life out of the kid here and now even though Caitlin Strong wasn’t around to bear witness. He continued to glare downward, relieved the stirring had not returned in a place inside him he neither recognized nor acknowledged.
For another brief moment, as he stood over Dylan Torres’s frame, logic settled and Arno wondered if he might yet be able to spin this whole mess to his advantage. He had friends in places so high they could see God on a clear day, friends who understood the impact he could have on their mutual pursuits and weren’t about to let him go down. But then the emotions that had been simmering ever since that day in the parking lot of the Tackle and Gun resurfaced. He reached down and yanked Dylan Torres out of the closet, jerking him to his feet. He could see the inside of the door was peppered with scuffs, indentations and fissures indicative of the boy trying to kick himself free.
Arno pulled a ceremonial reproduction of a Bowie knife given to him by the governor from a wall mount and stuck its tip against Dylan Torres’s throat.
“Fight me and I’ll kill you, I swear I will,” he said in a voice muffled by the hate surging through him, as he steered the boy toward the doorway. “Now let’s go.”
109
MIDLAND, TEXAS; EASTER SUNDAY
Caitlin lost track of Malcolm Arno, but not Guillermo Paz. She’d glimpsed enough of his men’s eyes to know he’d culled them from the most violent the Mexican Special Forces had to offer, all at the bequest of Fernando Lovano Sandoval with the complicity of none other than her friend Jones in Washington.
Most of Paz’s men were concentrated in the courtyard fronting the meeting hall and cutting all the way through the main gate. She’d followed them attacking the soldiers of the Patriot Sun in relentless fashion without mercy or compunction. And Caitlin had lost count of how many fallen bodies she’d spotted or stepped over in her pursuit of Arno.
True to Paz’s plan, his soldiers had managed to capture both guard towers and had turned the 7.62mm miniguns on the Patriot Sun soldiers beyond the walls charged with repelling the frontal attack that never came. The nonstop cacophony of churning fire from the six rotating barrels burned Caitlin’s ears and left her picturing the men outside fleeing that fury if they were smart, or falling to it if they weren’t.
Caitlin saw Paz himself dashing across the courtyard, veering toward her position so fast he didn’t notice a Patriot Sun soldier steady a rifle on him from behind a shack advertising free lemonade. He ran with an assault rifle coming up, steadying on a spot beyond her.
She spun her SIG on the gunman taking aim at him.
Paz fired.
She fired.
The gunman with a bead on Paz dropped dead to the earth, just as did a Patriot Sun soldier ready to shoot Caitlin from the gap between the two nearest buildings.
Paz ejected both magazines from his A4 assault rifles and slammed fresh ones home.
“The boy?”
“He wasn’t where we thought. Cort Wesley’s headed back now.”
“We’ll find him, Ranger. In my dream an eagle swept from the sky and scooped him to safety. My dreams are never wrong.”
Caitlin gazed back out from the two buildings she’d taken cover
between. “Arno’s men are running for their lives, Colonel.”
Just as she said that, though, one figure emerged into the center of the courtyard dragging another.
“Oh, shit,” said Caitlin.
110
MIDLAND, TEXAS; EASTER SUNDAY
Malcolm Arno slid through the night dragging Dylan before him, knife tip pressed as far into the boy’s neck as it would go without punching a hole. Ground mist swallowed both their feet, Caitlin catching glimpses of the boy’s sneakers, which were dirty with mud.
“Caitlin Strong! Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong, you come out here! I got something that belongs to you.”
“Tough shot,” Paz said, trying to measure one off.
“Leave this one to me, Colonel,” Caitlin said, easing his hot barrel down with one hand while the other holstered her SIG.
Paz looked almost offended and swallowed hard, as she advanced into a thin spray of light to make sure Arno could see her.
“Right here, Mr. Arno.” Her hand was poised close enough to her SIG to draw it fast without appearing threatening. But even if she managed to hit Arno like this, reflex would drive the point of his blade the rest of the way home and Dylan would bleed to death for sure.
Arno’s eyes sought hers out. Caitlin had been on the scene of prison riots a few times and had assisted local authorities in the apprehension of escaped mental patients a few more. And the eyes of the man now standing before her with Dylan’s life balanced at the end of his Bowie knife were as mad as any she’d ever seen.
“Come closer,” he said, a thin smear of blood appearing under the blade’s tip.
Caitlin did as she was told.
“Stay back!” Arno ordered the big man she’d shot in the wrist inside the meeting hall. He’d stepped out of the shadows holding a pistol in his off hand, the other one wrapped in a torn shirtsleeve, breathing hard through his mouth. “This is between the Ranger and me, Jed Kean. Isn’t that right, Ranger?”
“Sir, I’m not going to say anything to humor you and that’s all I’ve got in mind right now. So I’m just gonna keep quiet.”
“Sir,” Arno repeated, mocking her. “Mister … Your father called mine sir. I believe he called him reverend too. Are you Rangers supposed to do that, show a man reverence before you gun him down?”
“Let the boy go, Mr. Arno.”
“You can stop now.”
Caitlin did.
“This is how far apart we were in that parking lot, Ranger. Right when our eyes met after your father killed mine.”
“They both made their choices.”
“And now I’m making one too. Evening the score. Killing this boy, taking his childhood the way your father took mine. Making your life a study in misery as long as it lasts.”
“Your father was a sick man, Mr. Arno. I don’t believe I’m telling you anything you don’t already know.”
Arno was squeezing the hilt of the knife so hard his hand was trembling. Around him time had stopped, the world frozen solid. The shooting had ended, the remnants of Arno’s surrendered forces with their hands in the air being watched by Paz’s handpicked soldiers for whom taking lives was no different from picking fruit off a tree.
“I’m making a point here!” Arno yelled, his voice echoing through the cool night. “I’m gonna kill the boy, Ranger, and you’re going to kill me. And tomorrow the groups that follow me, the people intent on taking back this country, will have their martyr. Their war will go without me and I’ll be smirking at you from the grave. Because in the end I’ll be the winner and you’ll have nothing.”
Caitlin heard the swift pounding of boots across the ground and turned to see Cort Wesley drawing parallel with her ten feet on the right, his M16 raised and ready.
“Cort Wesley!” she started as Arno twisted Dylan more toward him to deny Cort Wesley any chance at a shot, while opening the slightest sliver of one for Caitlin.
“No, not you!” Arno screeched at him. “It’s gotta be her!”
“Go ahead,” Cort Wesley said to Caitlin. “Take the shot, Ranger, take the goddamn shot!”
Caitlin eased her hand closer to her pistol, watching Arno smile at the sight, his eyes gleaming.
“Draw your gun, Ranger! Make me the martyr of my movement! Help me fulfill my fate!”
Still a tough shot by any stretch of mind, an inch bad and Dylan could catch the bullet instead of Arno, who was pressing the knife hard against his flesh, the tip ready to pierce flesh as soon as she went for her SIG.
“I’ll take it, if you don’t,” Cort Wesley said, voice slightly muffled.
Then a new figure stepped into the light splayed from a pair of utility poles. Danny Killane was holding a pistol in hand, a revolver, walking straight for Malcolm Arno from the rear, stopping maybe ten feet behind him.
“Do what she says, Mr. Arno. Let the boy go.”
“You betrayed me, Daniel,” Arno said hatefully without turning toward him. “You brought this on all of us!”
Caitlin tried to make Danny Killane regard her, catch his eye with hers, but no such luck. Danny Killane, his life destroyed by the father, who’d agreed to plant false intelligence with the son about the attack. He’d promised Caitlin he’d flee the premises right afterward.
“You’re a traitor, Daniel. You’ll be the first to be punished.”
Killane raised his pistol in a shuddery hand, not even seeming to see Dylan in the picture. Out of the corner of her eye Caitlin saw the big man named Kean bring his left hand around, hearing fresh shots blaring in the night in tandem with muzzle flashes spitting from his barrel.
Danny Killane spun around like a marionette attached to some invisible puppet master.
Cort Wesley blew a burst from his M16 into Kean, staggering him.
And Malcolm Arno twisted that way as Kean fell dead in the same moment as Danny Killane, exposing himself for a shot. Caitlin drew her pistol, finger taut on the trigger ready to fire.
But she didn’t fire. Looking at Danny Killane’s body splayed in the street, a portrait in futility and despair bred of the violence that had destroyed him a long time before it had killed him.
“Take the shot!” Cort Wesley yelled.
“No,” Caitlin said, eyes on Arno and the knife he held against Dylan’s throat as she holstered her pistol and started forward. “I won’t do it.”
Arno looked bewildered, lost, uncertain, knife quivering in his hand.
“It’s what he wants.” Caitlin kept walking. “You hear that, Mr. Arno? Forget martyr.” Caitlin stopped ten feet from Malcolm Arno, trying to reassure Dylan with her eyes. “Drop that knife now or all you’ll ever be known for is killing an innocent boy.”
Arno’s eyes bled rage, hatred, but also something else she hadn’t glimpsed before: weakness. The mask of his power ripped off, exposing the twisted soul beneath.
“Either I arrest you for kidnapping or for murder, sir. Your choice.”
Arno’s grip tightened on the knife and for a moment, just a moment, he seemed ready to plunge it home. But then his fingers opened and let it drop to the pavement. It clanged, bounced once, and stopped.
Dylan broke away from his slackened grasp and ran toward Cort Wesley, leaving Caitlin and Arno staring at each other. Neither breathing until Caitlin yanked her handcuffs from their belt pouch and covered the rest of the ground between them, while father and son collapsed in each other’s arms.
“You are under arrest, sir.”
As she jerked Arno’s hands down and behind him to slap the cuffs on, Caitlin glimpsed the body of Danny Killane. Killane’s eyes glazed yet somehow hopeful, as if restored of the innocence stripped from him so many years before. Kean’s bullets had shredded his torso and the fall had torn his shirt to expose his shoulder and a tattoo painted over the flesh in the most vibrant ink colors Caitlin had ever seen.
“What is it, Ranger?” Paz asked, approaching with both assault rifles slung from his shoulders.
Caitlin held her gaze on the tattoo.
“An eagle, Colonel. It’s an eagle.”
EPILOGUE
I believe the common thread from the first days of the Rangers until today is pretty much the same. Their job one hundred and eighty years ago … was to protect the innocent … citizens against the people who take advantage of the weak and defenseless. We are still doing that today. We still have that passion.
—Texas Ranger Senior Captain C. J. Havra, 2002
MIDLAND, TEXAS; FOUR DAYS LATER
While Malcolm Arno was being arraigned on a charge of felony kidnapping before a surprisingly sparse crowd at the 142nd District Courts in Midland, Danny Killane was being buried next to his mother, Beth Ann, in a tiny cemetery on the outskirts of Odessa. Caitlin, Cort Wesley, and Dylan were the only ones in attendance besides a paid minister who kept pronouncing the kid’s name wrong.
But he wasn’t a kid, Caitlin reminded herself. His childhood had ended right around the same time hers and Malcolm Arno’s had. Just like Dylan’s effectively had now. He’d insisted on attending the funeral and stood impassively between Caitlin and Cort Wesley, as if searching for the right expression of what he was feeling.
When the minister closed his Bible before completing the final prayer, Cort Wesley flashed Caitlin a look and then led Dylan down an embankment into a sun-drenched section of the cemetery so the boy wouldn’t have to look at R. Lee Shine’s ancient, elegantly restored Lincoln Continental. They stopped in a rare open space amid gravestones squeezed so close to each other as to remind Cort Wesley of the flagstone walks he’d laid while working construction as a boy about Dylan’s age.
“You understand why I gotta do this,” he said to his oldest son.
The boy pursed his lips and blew the hair from his forehead. “Not really,” he said, as the strands flopped back down.
“I killed that man.”
“He deserved it.”
“Irrelevant in the eyes of the law.”
Dylan frowned. “No such thing down in Mexico, Dad, and you know it.”