by Jon Land
“You know what they say about the bigger they are,” Epps continued.
“The harder they fall?”
“Nope, the more likely they are to kick the shit out of you if you don’t take the fight to them first. You know what I’m saying here?”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“You gotta take this sumbitch quick, bubba. We’ll celebrate afterwards with a root beer.” Old Leroy shook his head and sucked in some breath. Cort Wesley imagined the thickening rain running rivulets down his dried skin and beading up on his close-cropped graying afro haircut. “Man, I miss the ring, yes I do.”
“All that’s missing here, champ, is the bell.”
“Ding-ding,” Epps said, the crowd erupting into crazed cheers when a guard captain brought a hand down between the two combatants to start the fight.
14
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO; THE PRESENT
The giant came in fast and hard, used to ending fights quickly on brute strength and power. He’d transferred in a month before and beaten two men to bloody pulps in his previous forays into the yard. Cort Wesley had watched the final fight in which the giant had hammered his opponent’s face so hard and so often that nothing even recognizable as human was left when he was done, the man looking as if someone had driven a pickup truck over him. The giant was massive, the giant was strong, but he wasn’t particularly quick or skilled, relying on his size and ability to absorb pain to win him his first two bouts. All he need do was land one punch in a bare-knuckled brawl like this and the fight would be effectively over, and that’s the way it had been in his first two fights.
But not today.
The giant was quicker than he looked from a spectator’s viewpoint and much lighter on his feet than Cort Wesley expected. Looked as if he’d been holding plenty back in those initial fights, perhaps to goad Cort Wesley into a false confidence that would lead him to take the bait the giant was now offering. Cort Wesley sidestepped his way into a circle, the giant matching his motions like a mirror. The crowd’s cheers quickly gave way to jeers, thirsting for the action and blood they were expecting.
“He’s giving you his whole right side,” Leroy Epps warned in his ear. “That means you don’t take it.”
Cort Wesley flicked the rain from his face and slid in and out of the irregular shafts of sunlight that brightened the otherwise blackening ground. He could have opted to try tiring the poorly conditioned giant out, except for the fact he was too much the worse for wear to trust his own conditioning. The crowd might have loved a long, bloody fight staged between prodigious rivals. But the truth was ending the fight as early as possible was the key to staying alive long enough to see his boys and Caitlin again with his brains intact as opposed to mush.
“Got a bum knee on the left,” said Leroy Epps. “Can tell by the way he’s keeping his weight forward on the right even when it’s against the grain.”
“Gotcha, champ.”
“Miss your chance and he’ll tear your face off, bubba.”
The giant wheeled in toward him with a sudden lurch, uncorking a wild roundhouse blow Cort Wesley ducked under and then hammered the giant’s ribs with a right-left combination on the way by. It was like hitting concrete. Didn’t even draw a flinch or wince. The giant simply sneered and loped in sideways, more cocky than confident.
He looked confused when Cort Wesley didn’t take the bait, choosing instead to backpedal and test the giant’s maneuverability by launching a quick flurry of blows that smashed his jaw with no measurable effect at all. The giant spit blood and saliva onto the hard-packed gravel, his booted feet kicking a storm of debris into the air.
“You see that, bubba?”
“See what?”
“I was wrong before ’bout why the monster’s favoring his left so. Ain’t no trick, no. On account of that right eye instead. It’s watering like Niagara friggin’ Falls.”
Leroy Epps was suddenly standing right there for no one else to see, aglow in a ribbon of sunburst that looked like a tunnel carved from sky to ground. Cort Wesley swung from the illusion, ghost, specter, or whatever it was just as the giant wheeled in on him, slamming a fist that felt like a steam iron into his torso. Cort Wesley turned at the last, taking the brunt of the blow on his ribs and feeling them bend inward on impact, nearly cracking.
A vast whoosh of air blew out of him and he staggered backward. He ducked under the giant’s next blow, slipped on the now soaked gravel, and felt the giant’s massive hands grabbing for him. One closed on his shirt collar, going for his throat, but Cort Wesley twisted, leaving his shirt instead of his skin in the man’s deadly grasp.
He turned fast, nearly slipping on the drenched earth again as the giant whirled toward him. Cort Wesley backed out of range of the next blow, then launched a kick that the giant intercepted before it found his groin. Next thing Cort Wesley knew he was airborne, pitched through the drenching rain and slapping the ground hard upon landing to deflect the impact.
A thin beam of sunlight peeked out, then vanished behind the giant’s massive bulk. The giant raised a booted foot over Cort Wesley’s face and brought it down like a pistol-driven anvil. Cort Wesley rolled free of that blow and another, jerking back to his feet and feeling his damaged ribs press up against the flesh and cartilage containing them.
“Ugly mother’s mashing your juice to shit,” Leroy Epps was saying.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Cort Wesley thought, or maybe said out loud.
“How ’bout this, bubba: sun’s coming.”
“So?”
“Take a good look.”
Before Cort Wesley could do that, the giant rushed him in an old-fashioned graceless charge. He twisted aside like a matador facing a bull, tripping the big man up and sending him sprawling into a pool of water collected in a depression in the yard. Cort Wesley pounced on his back and shoved his face into the fetid pool of rain, gravel, and stones, but the giant used his great strength to wrench himself free.
Cort Wesley tumbled off to the side and spun away from another wild attack. The giant was gasping for air now, his breaths turned to rancid whistling wheezes that sounded bizarrely like a baby’s whine. A fresh shaft of sunlight appeared like a beam from the sky, as Cort Wesley fought to keep his own breath.
What was it Leroy Epps had just said?… Sun’s coming.…
And there it was, bright and blinding amid the torrents of rain that bled in and out of its ribbon trailed by rainbow colors flitting about the strange tunnel carved from the sky.
“Now, bubba, now!”
Cort Wesley feinted. Launched a purposefully wild flurry of blows meant only to drive the giant into the sun.
“I was wrong before ’bout why the monster’s favoring his left so,” Leroy Epps had told him. “Ain’t no trick, no. On account of that right eye instead.”
So Cort Wesley sidestepped to make the giant use his right eye to follow him, then positioned himself to push that right eye’s sightline straight into the sun in the last moment before the storm clouds swallowed it once more.
Cort Wesley attacked, the move born of instinct and bred of his training in the Special Forces. Before he could record his own action, he’d scissor-kicked the giant’s left knee, buckling it. The giant sank at the waist, and Cort Wesley hammered his groin with a knee and thorax with an elbow. The breath flooding from him sounded like a balloon popping, the man’s head in his hands now, a single twist to snap the neck.
But Cort Wesley didn’t twist, jamming thumbs into both the giant’s eyes and then slamming a fist into his throat with enough force to drop him without crushing his windpipe. The giant crumpled to his knees, flailing for his face and neck, then keeled over facefirst into the rainwater lapping across the gravel surface.
Thunder rumbled. No, not thunder at all, but the wild applause and hoots of the Mexicles gang members celebrating his, and thus their, victory over their dreaded rivals, the Aztecas.
Cort Wesley looked to the sky, eyes open
to the rain, letting it wash him clean under the certainty the filth wouldn’t stay off for long.
“Winner and still champion, bubba,” said Leroy Epps.
15
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO; THE PRESENT
Cort Wesley stood in the shower, the steaming hot water feeling like needles against his skin that was angry with pain. He got to take a shower inside in a stall normally reserved for the guards every time he won a fight. His ribs throbbed, his face hurt, and the back of his skull felt cottony numb. He listened to the thunder booming outside and the torrents of rain hammering the roof over his head. The stench of spoiled milk drifted down from the cellblock, courtesy of many Mexican prisoners’ penchant to leave it to curdle so they could make their own cottage cheese.
His hair had grown out, longest it had been in years, the near total lack of mirrors sparing him the sight of the gray tinting the black in thickening patches. He shaved blindly, often with cold water and bar soap for cream. Normally, showers were taken outside under heads dribbling cold water that stopped when he let go of the chain over his head. The stench of the place was awful, his as bad as anyone else’s. But in the Gulf War he’d once gone seventy days without a shower and only one change of clothes. He’d gotten used to stinking like a goat there just as he had here.
“Why didn’t you kill that sumbitch, bubba?” Leroy Epps asked him, drawing not even a flinch from Cort Wesley, whose neck muscles had finally loosened from the hot water cascading against them.
“I didn’t want Caitlin and the boys to see me do it.”
“Only one watching of any regard was me.”
“Not in my mind, champ. Caitlin and the boys were there too. They’re always there.”
“Keeps you going, I reckon.”
“For ten months now.”
“Wish I could see the end to all this. But even from where I stand, it’s not exactly clear.”
“I think you’re holding out on me, champ.”
“When have I ever done that, bubba? I can’t see it, ’cause it’s not there, not all of it anyway. All kinds of roads ahead and they all lead someplace different. Ultimately, choice is gonna be yours.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Didn’t mean it to sound that way.”
“No?”
“Trouble’s coming.”
“How’s that?”
“You’ll see. Don’t wanna go breaking any more rules than I have already. But there’s a doorway about to open out.”
Cort Wesley turned off the water and swung to find old Leroy standing before him, bloodshot eyes drooping and sad.
“Where it leads ain’t where you wanna go precisely being the problem. Trouble for sure, bubba, of a different kind.”
Cort Wesley had started to respond when the door to the staff changing room opened and the captain of the guards poked his head through. He seemed to look in Leroy Epps’s direction briefly before finding Cort Wesley in his gaze.
“You got a visitor, amigo.”
16
NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT
Whatever had slammed against her felt stiff and flaccid at the same time, formless somehow. Caitlin had spun, whipping the Glock around and forgetting its infamous hair trigger in the process. The reverberation of the gunshot in the blast oven confines of the Mariah’s gym deafened her while the muzzle flash freeze-framed the sight she’d just started to register:
Bodies, two dozen of them maybe, piled askew atop the equipment and floor, their limbs hanging every which way and the stink of death permeating the air.
She shoved the corpse that must have been perched behind the door from her, ears still ringing but eyes using the light sifting through from the platform beyond to begin to discern what had transpired. The coppery stench of blood was thick and strong, this windowless room clearly the source of the smell she’d caught on the wind shortly after she’d first mounted the platform.
Judging by the amount of blood soaking into the rubber flooring laid in place to cushion the sounds of clanking steel coming from the gym, the Mariah’s crew had been gathered in here and killed execution style. The first four victims she was close enough to study clearly had fallen to perfectly placed headshots, two for each by the look of things.
Caitlin saw it all in her mind, picturing three or four shooters spread in front of the door firing away at men utterly baffled by what had befallen them, the reasons for their murders lost somewhere in the roar of bullets and gun smoke. The engine room worker must have avoided the initial roundup and then fought off the attackers long enough to reach an emergency escape raft with at least one bullet in him.
She didn’t have a flashlight, nor did she want to disturb the crime scene any more than she already had, allowing herself only a cursory inspection of the gym. But that was enough to reveal not a single bullet hole in the walls, either from a miss or a through-and-through. And that could only mean that the three or four killers she’d pictured in her mind earlier were top professionals. Cort Wesley Masters level even.
So, near as she could tell, a team of professional gunmen had found their way on board a jack-up oil rig and murdered two dozen workers. If there was any conceivable sense in that, Caitlin couldn’t see, find, or imagine it.
She emerged back into the light of the platform, never gladder to smell fresh sea air. The Coast Guard was still nowhere in sight and didn’t have the proper investigative apparatus to handle a mass murder of this scope anyway. Neither did the local sheriff’s department, so Caitlin decided to save some time and slice through a bit of red tape.
“You better not be calling me from up on that rig, Ranger,” Tepper said angrily, as soon as she got him on the line.
“We got a code word for the kind of emergency we don’t want broadcast for anyone to hear?” Caitlin asked him.
“Nope. Why?”
“Because I believe we’re gonna need one.”
17
NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT
Tepper arrived with a Ranger forensics team via helicopter three hours later, ninety minutes after the Coast Guard finally pulled up in a pair of crash boats fresh from finding the bodies of two of the missing college kids. He climbed out from the chopper onto the helipad and clamored down the steel steps to the deck, his face ashen and eyes looking as if he’d taken the trip with the angel of death seated next to him.
“You don’t look so good, Captain,” Caitlin greeted at the bottom of the stairs.
“Neither do you, Ranger.”
“Finding a couple dozen men and women gunned down as they stood will do that to you.”
“Women?”
Caitlin nodded. “Two. I didn’t even know they pulled duty on a rig like this.”
Tepper gave her a longer look. “Yeah, women are making progress in all kinds of previously male-dominated worlds.” He started to take off his Stetson, then fit it back into place. “Man, I hate the water, especially when I gotta go someplace I don’t want to go to meet someone who doesn’t belong there in the first place.”
Caitlin gazed about the expanse of open sea around them. “You see any other law enforcement body in the area?”
Tepper held his eyes on her instead, sternly. “What I see is someone prone to ignore whatever I tell her. You’re still riding a desk, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Tell that to the bodies I found.”
Tepper wrinkled his nose. “Well, at least I’m not seasick.”
“You’ve hated boats ever since … What was it again?”
“Galveston Island, with your dad and granddad. Was your granddad’s last case and don’t ever ask me about it again.”
It might have been the light or a product of Caitlin’s imagination, but Tepper’s face looked even more ashen. He took a pack of Marlboros from his jacket and stuck one in his mouth.
“We’re on an oil rig, Captain.”
“So?”
“I’d imagine they have a strict no-smoking policy here.”
Te
pper frowned deeply enough to send the deep furrows branching across both cheeks. “I don’t see anyone here of a mind to protest.”
And he fired up a match.
* * *
“You shot up plenty in your time, Ranger,” Tepper said after completing his own initial survey of the scene inside the cramped gymnasium in the company of the Ranger crime scene team, “but this is the first time you shot up a corpse.”
“I’m not used to a Glock.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t ask where it came from.”
“Good idea.”
Tepper cast his gaze over Caitlin’s shoulder. “Speaking of which, I think you got company, ‘mom.’”
* * *
The platform’s cross-breeze tossed Dylan’s hair across one side of his face and then the other. He ended up holding a hand in the thick black waves to keep it still.
“Coast Guard told us to go back to Baffin Bay.”
“This is a crime scene now, son.”
“And I gotta watch Luke while you go back to being a Ranger.”
“When did I stop?”
He pulled his hand from his hair and blew his breath through it. “Last couple of days just felt nice, that’s all.”
“And you saying you missed your friends, your girls.”
The boy kicked at the deck with his sneaker. “Why you have to put it that way?”
“What way?”
“Like it’s a joke.”
“You see me laughing, Dyl?”
“I’m seventeen,” the boy said, squeezing his features taut and stopping just short of a scowl. “I’ve got a life.”
“I don’t think you need to tell me that.”
“I mean a real life, with real friends and real girls.”