by Jon Land
“Which is why I’ll be home so quick you won’t even miss me.”
Dylan looked down, then up again, kicking at the ground where someday a fresh grave would be planted. “You did it for me.”
The boy’s statement took Cort Wesley by surprise, left him stammering for a response until he settled on the truth. “I did it for me, son. Ease my guilt, make me feel better about how I handled things when I got word about Maria and her family. That doesn’t make it right. What it does make it is not your fault. You keep that straight in your head if this starts to weigh you down. If you’d asked me to gun the son of a bitch down, I would’ve said no, absolutely not, since that isn’t the way civilized folk go about things.”
“You saying you’re not civilized?”
“I’m saying violence and me seem joined at the hip. No matter how much I want to change that, I just can’t shake it. And that’s why I gotta go with the man in that old Lincoln. ’Cause if I don’t, all I’ll have left is that violence.”
“You’ll still have me,” Dylan said shyly.
Cort Wesley laid his arms atop the boy’s shoulders, feeling the sun-baked heat radiating off them, hot enough to burn his hands. “Not the way I want, not if we gotta go on the run. You’ll have Caitlin around ’til I get back.”
“She’s the same as you and you know it.”
“No. I would’ve gunned Arno down for sure. Fact that she didn’t exposed him for the coward that he is, and that’s a hell of a lot worse than a bullet. The day the jail door gets slammed behind him he’ll be forgotten for good.”
“I would’ve shot him too.”
“Guess we can both learn something from Caitlin Strong then, can’t we?”
* * *
R. Lee Shine leaned up against the front fender, boots crossed casually on the sun-bleached asphalt. Caitlin and Cort Wesley walked slowly down a slight embankment toward him, arms wrapped about each other.
“Wish I knew how this ends, Ranger,” Cort Wesley said, less surely than she’d ever heard him say anything before.
“They end up jailing you down there, I’ll bust you out.”
“That a promise?”
“From one gunfighter to another.”
“A gunfighter as good with brains as she is with bullets.”
“Easier to aim, as it turns out.”
Cort Wesley touched his bandaged ear and winced. “Still hurts like a bastard.”
Before Caitlin knew it, they were kissing and she didn’t want it to end. And in those moments it honestly seemed like it wouldn’t until Cort Wesley eased her away and held her at arm’s length, smacking his lips.
“I’m gonna remember that taste.”
“That almost sounds romantic.”
“Close as I can come anyway.”
“I’ll be in court for the hearing.”
“Only after you get the boys off to school. And if Dylan gives you any lip or starts his misbehaving again…”
“Want me to shoot him?”
“In the leg, Ranger.”
“Still hurts, Cort Wesley.”
“Doesn’t everything?”
* * *
Caitlin watched R. Lee Shine’s Lincoln pull off, arm draped over Dylan’s suddenly stiff shoulder. Her eyes misted up, but she fought against wiping them as the big car cleared the rise and disappeared. She turned to say something, spotting Guillermo Paz standing in the old cemetery’s one real shady spot thanks to a nest of Texas red oak trees. Unarmed, dressed in civilian clothes, and mopping his damp brow with a sleeve. Dylan glimpsed him too and slid out from under her arm, his eyes freeing Caitlin to approach the man who’d helped saved his life.
“The last time I cried was when I came home for my mother’s funeral,” Paz said, as she neared him. “Sometimes I wish I could cry again.”
Caitlin stopped a few feet before him. “Thought you’d be back in Mexico by now, Colonel.”
“My business here isn’t finished. There’s something I’m supposed to pick up: two truckloads of weapons recovered from an Indian Reservation in upstate New York.”
“Our friend Jones, no doubt.”
Paz let her comment hang in the air between them.
“What else have you dreamed lately, Colonel?”
“Aristotle said hope itself is a waking dream.”
“I was looking for something more specific.”
“About the future, perhaps?” Paz cast his gaze off into the distance, as if to look for R. Lee Shine’s old Lincoln. “I don’t need dreams, Ranger, to tell me you and the outlaw will stand side by side again.”
“When?”
Paz shrugged. “Sometimes my vision confuses this world and the next. Sometimes I’m not sure it matters. It seems like there’s always another war to fight either way.”
Caitlin felt her eyes moistening up again. “Can’t argue with you there, Colonel.”
* * *
Caitlin called Mark Serles from behind the wheel of her SUV.
“Had the first fitting for my legs, Ranger,” he told her. “Don’t mind telling you standing upright again brought tears to my eyes.”
“You’re a brave man, M.J. You deserve a fresh start.”
“I wanna apologize for any bother I caused you.”
“I can’t begin to explain how important the information you gave me was. I’m calling to say that what happened to you over there wasn’t for nothing. Your story saved more lives than you can possibly imagine.”
“How?”
“Watch the news. It won’t be hard to figure.”
The dead air filling the line made Caitlin wonder if Mark Serles had hung up until his voice returned, cracking a bit. “Thank you, Ranger.”
“No, Sergeant, thank you. And I mean for everything.”
* * *
Back in San Antonio, Caitlin and Dylan stopped at Mission Burial Park, the cemetery located on the San Antonio River where her father and grandfather were buried in clear view of the historic Espada Mission. They didn’t exchange a word about his father, and Caitlin felt the boy take her hand when they got to the gravesites of Earl and Jim Strong, squeezing it tight and unconsciously gazing down at the bandaged finger now missing its tip.
“I understand why you didn’t shoot him,” Dylan said, “but I still wish you had.”
“Part of me does too.”
“Well, I wish you’d left me someone to kill,” he said, his remark not as scary to Caitlin as the thin, sure smile behind it. The words, meant to be funny, turning out anything but. “My dad’s going to jail ’cause of me,” he added suddenly. “’Cause of me pestering him and him figuring he had to do something after that guy killed Maria and her family.”
“Oh, almost forgot,” Caitlin said, turning toward him. “I got your boots in my truck.”
Dylan smiled, a boy again for the moment, and squeezed her hand tighter as he pressed his face against hers.
“Your father pulled them off the feet of a Mexican cop who must’ve thought we wouldn’t notice.”
The boy broke down, tears cascading down his face as he hugged her tight. She squeezed him back, not about to let go, her gaze drifting over Dylan’s shoulder to the matching graves of Earl and Jim Strong.
Caitlin couldn’t say exactly what had drawn her to Mission Park today. Maybe it was the hope of seeing the ghosts of her father and grandfather standing under one of the many beautiful cottonwood or flowering dogwood trees on the grounds. She’d caught similar glimpses of them before that always seemed to set things in their proper balance and leave her enriched with the sense that there was a greater purpose to whatever she was doing.
Today, though, there was the only her and Dylan, their sobbing borne witness to by no one from this world or the next, other than an eagle soaring overhead in search of its next prey.
OTHER BOOKS BY JON LAND
The Alpha Deception
*Blood Diamonds
*The Blue Widows
The Council of Ten
*Day o
f the Delphi
*Dead Simple
*Dolphin Key
The Doomsday Spiral
The Eighth Trumpet
*The Fires of Midnight
The Gamma Option
*Hope Mountain
*Keepers of the Gate
*Kingdom of the Seven
Labyrinth
The Last Prophecy
The Lucifer Directive
The Ninth Dominion
The Omega Command
The Omicron Legion
*The Pillars of Solomon
*The Seven Sins: The Tyrant Ascending
*Strong Enough to Die
*Strong Justice
The Valhalla Testament
The Vengeance of the Tau
Vortex
*A Walk in the Darkness
*The Walls of Jericho
*Published by Forge Books
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
STRONG AT THE BREAK
Copyright © 2011 by Jon Land
All rights reserved.
A Forge® eBook
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Land, Jon.
Strong at the break / Jon Land—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-2337-8
1. Texas Rangers—Fiction. 2. Militia movements—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.A469S76 2011
813'.54—dc22
2011011542
First Edition: June 2011
eISBN 978-1-4299-7587-2
First Forge eBook Edition: June 2011