Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Dylan flashed a smile at her that quickly slid from his face as if the wind had brushed it off. “That’s what my father always said.”

  “Past tense?”

  “For now.”

  Caitlin smiled too. “Well, he was fond of saying the same thing to me. I guess that’s where I picked it up.”

  “Can I have my gun back?”

  “No.”

  “Can I get yours out of the truck?”

  “No.”

  Dylan grinned again and shook his head, his face disappearing in a mask of hair. “I feel you, Caitlin,” he said through the strands.

  * * *

  “Boy misses his dad,” Tepper said, as Captain Bob’s charter boat motored away from the Mariah.

  Caitlin watched it shrinking toward the horizon, no longer able to make out the shapes of Dylan and Luke looking back at her. “Some days I get it in my mind to bust their father out of that damn place.”

  “You miss Masters too, just as much. He plugged a big hole in your life, but that’s not all.”

  “What else is there?”

  “He lets you be. Not many men out there are willing to play second fiddle to that gun of yours.”

  “Not a problem lately.”

  “You blaming me for that, Ranger?”

  When Caitlin failed to respond, Tepper swirled his tongue about his parched lips. They looked pale and chapped, the late spring heat taking its toll.

  “I had a dream about your friend Guillermo Paz last night,” Tepper said, referring to the former Venezuelan assassin who always seemed to surface when Caitlin needed him most. “He was on top of the Empire State Building, swatting away biplanes.”

  “I haven’t seen him since the shoot-out at the Patriot Sun, Captain.”

  “Nobody has. That’s what worries me.”

  “I’d likely be dead if it wasn’t for Paz. You should keep that in mind.

  Tepper stared up into the sun until his eyes watered. “Had a friend once worked at a game preserve tending the crocodiles, one of which was a twenty-five-footer named Oscar that might’ve been a thousand years old for all he knew. Used to boast about how he’d bonded with the thing ’cause he fed it. Could pet Oscar like he was a goddamn dog. This went on for years until one day, just like any other, he was walking through its paddock and Oscar ate him whole.”

  “What’s this have to do with Paz?”

  “I think you know what I’m getting at.”

  Caitlin looked at Tepper but didn’t respond. Eager to change the subject, she swept her eyes about the deck, focusing on the Rangers supervising evidence collection on the part of Coast Guard personnel. With a storm brewing and whatever evidence there was soon to be compromised by the elements, they had to work fast as well as thoroughly.

  “We’re looking at the biggest mass murder in modern Texas history,” Tepper said, sparing Caitlin the need to talk further about Cort Wesley.

  “You forgetting Waco?”

  Tepper looked as if he’d just swallowed something that disagreed with him. “I was one of the first inside after they put the fire out. You bet I’m trying to forget that.”

  18

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  “Okay,” Tepper told Caitlin, the two of them in the shadow cast by one of the drilling derricks as the last of the afternoon sun bled from the sky, “this is what we got. This jack-up crew hasn’t done any oil drilling in ten days.”

  “Come again?”

  “You heard me.”

  “One of those new offshore ordinances shut the rig down?”

  “Nope, they only apply to the deepwater rigs, not the shallow. According to the logs, the crew stopped of their own volition. Some big shots from GSEP are en route now. Hopefully, they’ll be able to shed more light on the situation.”

  “GSEP?”

  “Gulf Strategic Energy Partners. A consortium of smaller companies operating jack-up shallow-water rigs like the Mariah. Not nearly as much profit potential as their deepwater brothers but not nearly the same risks either. Thing is they’re held to the same monitoring and safety requirements Shell, Chevron, BP, Exxon are.”

  “Tell that to the crew,” said Caitlin.

  * * *

  The Department of Public Safety in Austin gave the Rangers formal charge of the investigation a few minutes later, Caitlin and Tepper waiting for the GSEP execs to arrive by running through everything they knew so far.

  “You want me to stay on this or not, D.W.?”

  “Well, you’ve come this far, and I don’t have anyone else available right now.”

  “Does this qualify as an official reinstatement?”

  “Let me put it this way, Ranger. I’m not clearing your desk out at Company headquarters yet. Long as we’re talking, what do you make for the timeline?”

  “Started not long after dawn,” Caitlin told him.

  Tepper took off his Stetson and smoothed his thin hair slathered with Brylcreem back into place. “Explain.”

  “Raft outboard was cold to the touch by the time the man who escaped reached the Mariah. I don’t know if he ever even got it started and if so he didn’t hold on to it long. Thing has a dead man’s switch…”

  “Literally, in this case.”

  “Right. His hand drops off the control, the engine shuts down. Now, judging by the sunburn on his face I figure he was drifting on the currents for ninety minutes, maybe two hours at the outside. Almost nine o’clock on the button when Captain Bob reeled the raft in. Backtrack the time the killers showed up and it brings you to around dawn.”

  “Not much activity. Perfect time to strike.”

  “That was my thought too.”

  “We found plenty of half-eaten meals in the mess hall, like the killers interrupted their breakfast.” Tepper paused, started to reach for a fresh Marlboro but changed his mind. “So why not kill them there? Why drag them all the way to the gym to do the deed?”

  “Haven’t gotten that far in my thinking yet, Captain.”

  Tepper turned and gazed into the sun dropping for the horizon, the late-afternoon rays exaggerating the length and depth of the furrows he wore like fade spots on a favorite leather jacket. He held a cupped hand upon his brow, as a helicopter grew in the narrowing distance, soaring straight for the Mariah.

  “Looks like we got company, Ranger.”

  19

  NORTHERN GULF STREAM, THE PRESENT

  The Gulf Strategic Energy Partners executives numbered three, a pair of vice presidents and Robert Killibrew, who introduced himself as the operations manager. Killibrew wore his grief in bloodshot, weary eyes. Caitlin had given too many family members bad news in her time, and the shell-shocked look on his face most resembled theirs, genuine in the pain and helplessness it portrayed.

  “The bodies need to be positively identified,” he said before Caitlin or Captain Tepper could. “I’m going to inform the families personally.”

  “I’m sure they’ll appreciate that, sir,” Tepper told him. “But if you’d rather wait until—”

  “No, Captain. I think it would be more prudent to do it here.” He shook his head, stuffed his hands in his pockets to still their trembling. “As OM, I spent ten or so days a month on the rig. I rotated off just two days ago, so I could just as easily have been…”

  Killibrew let his voice trail off. The stiff wind blowing across the Mariah’s deck billowed his windbreaker outfitted with a fancy GSEP logo. He wore glasses and had thinning blond hair that was blowing every which way. Except for the knot, his tie was concealed by the windbreaker and he wore khakis that looked too tight on him.

  Coast Guard personnel had just finished moving the bodies from inside the gymnasium, a Ranger having demonstrated how to use bedsheets to wrap them tightly enough to be impervious to the stiff wind. The plan was then to use one of the rig’s cranes to off-load them onto the two crash boats for transport back to the mainland where re
scue wagons would be waiting to take them to the nearest medical examiner’s office. Even though the sun still burned strong enough in the sky, someone had switched on the rig’s bright night lighting or maybe it had gone on automatically by itself.

  “I appreciate and respect your concern for your employees, sir,” Caitlin told Killibrew, “but right now the best thing you can do for them is help us figure out what exactly happened here.”

  “Mr. Leon and Mr. Golding can handle the IDs,” Killibrew said, clearing his throat when his voice wouldn’t stop cracking. “That leaves me at your disposal, Ranger.”

  * * *

  Caitlin, Tepper, and Killibrew reconvened inside the media room where a DVD of the latest movie directed by Clint Eastwood had been the last one to play. The room was cool and dimly lit, welcome respite from the sun’s heat and rays that had dominated the day. The three of them took seats on faux leather chairs complete with cup holders, but Killibrew bounced up quickly, unable to remain still. He started pacing, the clack of his shoes the only sound in the room other than a ceiling fan with a loose bolt whirling noisily overhead.

  “You should sit down, sir,” Caitlin advised finally.

  He stopped pacing, then resumed just as fast. “I should be back on deck, with my crew.”

  Whether he meant Leon and Golding or the twenty-five who had perished on the Mariah, Caitlin wasn’t sure. She glanced at D. W. Tepper whose nod told her to take the lead.

  “Your crew are the reason you need to talk to us, Mr. Killibrew. You’re the only one who may have some notion of why this happened and who may have been behind it.”

  Killibrew stopped pacing. His thin blond hair had formed itself into a forelock that drooped toward his eyebrows, grazing the top of the one on the right. The ceiling fan pushed dark shadows across his face, covering one eye and then the other.

  “Just tell me what you need to know,” he said.

  Caitlin crossed her arms. “Well, one odd thing springs immediately to mind, that being why the rig’s work logs show they shut down the drilling operation ten days ago.”

  “That was on my orders,” Killibrew said, unmoved by the revelation.

  “Was there something wrong with the equipment? Did you have any reason to fear a blowout, something like that?”

  “No, not at all. We just find the oil, we don’t bring it up—that’s a drilling platform’s job. Before this rig had a chance to find anything, though, the camera on our ROV, remote operated vehicle, caught something that looked strange and my foreman had the sense to put a hold on things,” Killibrew told her. “Turns out he is, I mean was, an amateur historian, enough to know something potentially important when he sees it, a shipwreck in this case.”

  Tepper leaned as far sideways as his chair would let him. “Shipwreck?”

  “Maybe the most famous ever in these waters. The Mother Mary.”

  Caitlin watched Tepper nearly slide all the way out of his chair, the furrows on his face straightening to the point where his expression took on the texture of glass a stiff breeze might shatter. He lifted his Marlboros from his jacket but struggled to open the pack with his knobby, arthritic fingers that were now trembling.

  “No smoking allowed on this rig,” Killibrew warned. “A spark settling in the wrong place could blow us all to hell.”

  “We may already be there,” Tepper said, heading for the door.

  * * *

  “What’s got you so spooked, D.W.?” Caitlin asked Tepper outside the media room.

  Tepper finally got his pack opened and cigarette lit. “You believe in ghosts, Ranger?”

  Caitlin thought of catching Cort Wesley having conversations with his dead cellmate from The Walls, and her own visions of spotting her dad or granddad from time to time. She felt a sudden chill amid the heat still roasting the rig around her, gooseflesh prickling her arms. “Never thought about it much,” she lied.

  “Well, I feel like I just saw one.”

  “That shipwreck Killebrew mentioned, the Mother Mary?”

  Tepper took a deep drag on his Marlboro, then flicked it aside and stamped it out with his boot. “I hate the goddamn water, Caitlin. I hate the water, I hate islands, and most of all I hate boats.”

  Tepper stopped, his thoughts hanging in the air the way the trail of his cigarette smoke lingered.

  “I’m still listening, D.W.,” Caitlin told him.

  “Galveston Island, Ranger. It’s time you finally heard the story.”

  20

  GALVESTON ISLAND, 1979

  “You don’t look too good, D.W.,” Jim Strong said in the back of the launch ferrying them out to Galveston Island. “Last time I saw a man that yellow, he was an alcoholic with a shot liver who died of jaundice inside of a week.”

  “Nah,” Earl Strong said from his perch by the gunwale, lowering a boot back to the deck, “smoking’ll be the death of D. W. Tepper long before drink will.”

  “You boys just keep having your fun at my expense,” Tepper managed in between retches. “But there’s nothing in the Ranger code says a man can’t get seasick. How long we been doing this and I ain’t never had to ride the waters before.”

  The Strongs, father and son, exchanged a smile, as Tepper leaned further over the launch’s stern on the chance his breakfast might make a return trip up his throat. Earl had just celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday. Other than his sun-weathered skin that had taken on the look of cracked leather, though, he showed few signs of age. His still thick hair had equal patches of gray and white. He kept the same weight he had from twenty years ago and, with Stetson fastened tight and Springfield model 1911 .45 holstered on his hip, he looked every bit the part of the Texas Ranger legend he was.

  This was the man, after all, who’d pretty much cleaned up Sweetwater, the dirtiest of the oil boomtowns of the 1930s. He’d faced down Al Capone’s boys when they made a run at returning Texas to the Old West, sending more of them to the grave than back to Chicago. Not surprisingly, Capone’s Outfit never returned to the Lone Star State. Earl had also laid waste to the Mexican drug cartels in the legendary Battle of Juárez in 1934, after waging his own personal war with them north of the border. Earl Strong defined the Texas Ranger of the twentieth century, an example to be held high for others to emulate while never quite reaching.

  Earl’s son Jim had been born into a different age, one filled with more rules, regulations, and paperwork for legendary lawmen whose founding dated back to a time in the 1800s when many of them couldn’t read or write. But that didn’t stop Jim Strong from making his own mark as a Ranger, albeit without the spectacular gunslinging exploits of his legendary father.

  He’d been dispatched to the Rio Grand valley in 1966, four years after becoming a Ranger at the age of thirty, when the United Farm Workers struck for higher wages, setting off a firestorm of violence. He’d been on the front lines when a criminal named Fred Gomez Carrasco led inmates in an armed takeover of the Walls Unit in Huntsville State Prison in 1974. But he’d curtailed his efforts as of late following the brutal murder of his wife at the hands of the very drug cartels his father had laid waste to four decades before. There was the raising of his daughter, Caitlin, to focus on now, his number one priority.

  “Been meaning to talk to you about something,” his father said, sliding up next to him as D. W. Tepper vomited over the stern again. “Figured it’s time I pulled back a ways, stop tempting fate to come chase me down.”

  “Dad,” Jim Strong started, “if fate was gonna catch you, it would’ve done so already. You got it running scared, just like everything else ever stood in your way.”

  “Point being that I’d hoped to be ranging ’til I was eighty, and a year advance of that at this stage don’t hold a lot of weight.”

  “Never figured you for the retiring type.”

  “Didn’t say I was or had any intention of being. But we got ourselves a little girl to raise and spending the rest of my days educating her in the ways of the Rangers is an attractive prospec
t from where I’m standing.”

  “Caitlin’s three years old, Dad.”

  “You put a toy pistol and a doll out for her and you know which one she’d pick every time, son, so I won’t have age used as a factor here. She’s gonna be a Ranger; you know it, I know it, so let’s get started early to give her the advantages a woman in our ranks will sorely need.”

  “That what you really want for her?”

  “Four generations have come and gone before her. Wasn’t a question for them and it won’t be for her. Fact that she’s a woman means a lighter gun, that’s all. But her bullets’ll be the same weight and travel at the same speed.”

  Jim Strong could only shake his head as D. W. Tepper heaved up the rest of his breakfast behind him. “Earl Strong, babysitter.”

  “Kind of has a nice ring, don’t it?”

  The Rangers had been called to Galveston Island by Sheriff Mumford Plantaine, better known as Mugsy, to investigate a murder. Details were sketchy at this point. All Jim and Earl Strong knew was that it was bad. And since Austin had dispatched the two of them along with Tepper, it must have been really bad. Strangely enough, Jim and Earl had never actually worked a case together. Sure, there were occasions when prison or labor riots, jailhouse takeovers, and outlaw groups had called them out among a whole assemblage of Rangers. But Galveston was the first criminal investigation on which they’d ever been paired.

  Galveston had long occupied a distinct place in the history of Texas, as well as a distinct character. It was a beautiful, sun-swept island rich with the vibrant colors of oleander trees that towered over its pristine beaches and shorelines, as well as dotting the main residential streets and commercial thoroughfares. In 1528, when the first Europeans landed, Galveston Island was home to Akokisa and Karankawa Indians who camped, fished, and hunted the swampy land. The Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked on the island and lived among the Karankawa for several years as a medicine man and slave. In the late 1600s, French explorer Robert Cavelier La Salle claimed the island for King Louis and named it St. Louis.