Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  23

  NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO; THE PRESENT

  Paz rose from his chair, wearing the blue uniform of a Mexican federal policeman that fit his massive frame much too tightly, the seams stretched to the point of tearing.

  “You switch sides, Colonel?”

  Paz looked down at the uniform as if to remind himself he was wearing it. “What do you think? How does it look on me?”

  “Bad fit, in more ways than one.”

  “But required today, along with the badge and identification that came with it.”

  Paz retook his chair and Cort Wesley sat down across from him. “Caitlin send you to check up on me?”

  “The Ranger has no idea I’m here. A good thing too.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The purpose of my visit.”

  “Which is?”

  “To get you out of here, outlaw.”

  * * *

  The giant Cort Wesley had bested earlier that day was big, but Guillermo Paz was bigger. Flirting with seven feet tall in his boots, every bit of the frame squeezed into the blue uniform of the infamous federales composed of rock-hard muscle. He had wild black hair that shined with grease and hung to his shoulders in twisted ringlets. His ancestors were Mayan warriors and he himself had grown up in a Venezuelan slum en route to becoming a colonel in Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s secret police and one of the most feared killers in the world. Cort Wesley’s and Paz’s paths had crossed first tragically and then out of necessity that left them fighting together alongside Caitlin Strong. She was all they had in common, but it was enough.

  “Your exploits here have reached the outside world. They call you el gringo campeón.”

  “So you come to take me on?”

  Paz grinned, his white teeth glowing even in the holding room’s dull lighting. The overhead fixture was outfitted for three bulbs but Cort Wesley could only see one was screwed in.

  “You’re being released on orders of the Mexican government. Two of my men are waiting outside.”

  “Your men,” Cort Wesley echoed.

  “We have a meeting across the border in Laredo. I brought a change of clothes for you.” Paz hesitated, studying Cort Wesley closer. “I see you’ve already showered.”

  “What’s this about, Colonel?”

  “Your freedom.”

  “There must be a catch somewhere.”

  Paz grinned again. “Interesting how fate continues to throw us together. Einstein wrote that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”

  “Like you being hired to kill the mother of my two boys, what, three years ago?”

  Paz laid his massive arms on the table before him, his shirt darkened by sweat spreading out from the underarms. “And because of the tragic indiscretion on my part, those boys ended up a part of your life.”

  “I don’t like where this is going.”

  “Where would you be without them, outlaw?”

  “Not here, for one thing.”

  “With the Ranger?”

  “What’s she have to do with this?”

  “That day she saved your boys linked you to her forever.”

  “She saved them from you, Colonel, as I recall.”

  Cort Wesley’s head felt fuzzy, as if cotton was wedged up between his ears. Maybe it was the lingering effects of today’s fight, maybe it was trying to make sense of a man determined to speak in riddles, denying him the clarity he craved after months in a place where others did his thinking for him.

  “Precisely my point,” Paz told him. “I was the instrument that brought the two of you together. And since then it’s been my responsibility to keep you that way.”

  “So that’s what this is about?”

  “Ultimately, you mean?”

  “Can you just give me a straight answer?”

  Paz rose, coming up just a half foot short of the light fixture. “Your release papers are being processed,” he said and lifted a plastic bag from the floor, laying it on the table.

  Cort Wesley took the bag, found clothes inside; civilian clothes, welcome beyond measure after wearing prison uniforms that were washed once a month.

  “What’s waiting in Laredo, Colonel?”

  “Get changed, outlaw.”

  24

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “Take this,” D. W. Tepper said to Caitlin, pulling something old and rusty from his desk’s top drawer.

  “What is it?”

  “Key to that chain holding you to a desk,” Tepper told her, laying the key down between them. “I’m giving it to you on a provisional basis.”

  “What are the provisions?”

  “You don’t piss me or anybody else off.”

  “Two dozen oil rig workers are dead, Captain. I’m bound to piss somebody off.”

  Tepper stuck a Marlboro in his mouth. “I switched to Lights. Aren’t you proud of me?”

  “I suppose you are adding a few hours to your time clock,” Caitlin told him.

  “To hopefully replace the ones you took away. You weren’t the best I’ve got, that key would remain in the drawer for sure. But I figure this case requires the best.”

  “I visited that boy I shot in the shoulder,” Caitlin said abruptly.

  “I know.”

  “Somebody else told you?”

  “Nope. I just knew. I hear he’s doing just fine.”

  “If you call losing his dream of playing quarterback all the way to the pros fine. Not easy losing your dream.”

  “We talking about him or you, Ranger?”

  Tepper took in a deep drag and the smoke raced out his nostrils in competing streams that dissipated in his office’s dull lighting. He liked to tell Caitlin it was because he didn’t want to add any more heat to the sun-baked confines. But she had begun to suspect it was more about wanting to keep views of his own reflection as blunted as possible.

  “Tell you what, Ranger. You solve me this case and I’ll quit for good and that’s a promise.”

  “One you’ve made before, D.W.”

  “But never before with a mass murder of epic proportions on the line. You don’t believe yourself to be up to the task, just say so and I’ll keep enjoying my smokes. Thing you can’t get past, Caitlin, is how much better I feel since I went back to stuffing my body with nicotine. Anyway, our tech guy Young Roger is pouring over the underwater recordings the Mariah’s ROV made of that shipwreck right now. Every time I pass his office, I mistake him for a college kid.”

  “That how he got the name ‘Young Roger’?”

  “Nope, that was on account of we used to have another Ranger named Roger who retired five years back.”

  Caitlin didn’t bother pressing the issue further. “That would seem to give us time for you to finish the story about those murders on Galveston Island.”

  Tepper shook his head and stifled a cough. “You know what you sound like? The little girl old Earl used to tell stories to while seated on his lap.”

  “He never told me the one about Galveston.”

  Tepper’s nose wrinkled like he’d just smelled something rotten. “That’s ’cause it didn’t have a happy ending.”

  He might have been about to say more, but his phone buzzed sparing him the effort.

  “This is gonna have to wait,” Tepper said, hanging it back up. “I need you down at the Medical Examiner’s Office. We got a body there they pulled from a wreck on I-35 a couple days back.”

  Caitlin’s expression tensed in displeasure. “This more important than the murder of two dozen oil rig workers?”

  “Thing is, Ranger, the dead man had already died once before. Fifteen years ago.”

  25

  HOUSTON, THE PRESENT

  “Challenges are merely Allah’s way of testing us,” the cleric said to Sam Harrabi, as they made their way down the dark hall in the mosque’s basement. Morning prayers had just ended, the crackle of departing footsteps above sounding like the rattle of old-fashioned typewriter keys. “To
see if we are truly worthy of His divine mission.”

  “You believe the car accident was part of His plan?”

  “This man had completed his part in the mission, had he not?”

  “He had, sayyid.”

  “Then I believe choosing him to test us was hardly random.” The great man paused, his tone taking on more of an edge when he resumed. “There’s nothing that can possibly connect this man to us, of course.”

  “Nothing. I made sure of that. And the others are all accounted for.”

  The cleric smiled reassuringly as he pressed a code into the keypad alongside the heavy steel door at the end of the dark hall. “Then let us greet them.”

  The door opened with a loud click and the cleric entered ahead of Harrabi. At the sight of him, the dozen men working inside the secret room dropped to their knees, heads bowed reverently. They were plainly dressed in casual Western clothes, wearing mostly khakis or dress pants and fitted shirts. Beardless with hair neatly groomed. Nondescript in all respects with nothing to suggest their part in the operation, no different from the neighbors whose lives they would soon be party to taking.

  “Rise, my brothers,” the cleric said, scanning the room’s contents and holding his stare on a huge, computer-generated map of Texas projected on a wall-sized screen. A series of black lines crisscrossed the state, shaded thicker and darker through the cities of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Those cities were colored a deep red in circular grids closest to those lines, changing to blue slightly further out, and then, finally, to yellow.

  The cleric turned back to the men who had been working behind computers, studying topographical maps, or were involved in phone conversations his appearance had interrupted. They were all on their feet now, standing rigid and reverent before him. Harrabi noticed the angry sneers that had replaced reverently placid expressions on four of the men’s faces. These four were breathing harder than the others, the ones he recognized as paying the heaviest price for their faith just as he had. Rage may have festered below the surface of all the men, but the others had managed to supplant it beneath the great purpose before them while these wore it like a scar. Harrabi preferred to keep his terrible scars within, even though his pain was just as great as any of theirs.

  “We have not met before,” the cleric greeted, comfortable to have Harrabi by his side, “but I and all of Islam are blessed by your presence and your commitment. You have sacrificed much for the great victory soon to be visited upon us. You have channeled your own personal pain and tragedy into this holy mission blessed by God Himself, and I am made prouder by your acquaintance.”

  “Tell our leader the good news there is to report,” Harrabi said, nodding toward a thin, bespectacled man with coarse thinning hair.

  The man looked back toward the wall-sized map of Texas. “We believe there will be upwards of ten million people inside the areas shaded in red when the blessed moment arrives. Of these we can reasonably expect a five percent mortality rate. Five hundred thousand victims,” he continued after a pause, “with an expected quarter million to follow in the blue and yellow zones. That is phase one.”

  “And phase two?”

  Another of the men pressed a button on his computer and the wall-sized map switched to one of the entire eastern seaboard. It was shaded in similar fashion, only with thick swatches of the coastline colored red, the blue and yellow areas extending further inland.

  “The major cities and population centers are designated by the grids you see in black,” this man explained. “We are operating on theoretical grounds here, but it is safe to assume that given the right conditions the effects will be nothing short of catastrophic, just as your vision dictated.”

  “Not my vision,” the cleric corrected, “God’s vision. What are these right conditions?”

  “A storm when the blessed hour comes.”

  “Then Allah will make one for us, rest assured. But I have another question for you, for all of you,” the cleric said, widening his gaze. “Was it not worth it? Is not all your pain and suffering now justified by the blessed mission you all find yourselves party to?”

  To a man, they nodded resolutely.

  “God has a plan for us all and divine happiness comes only when we embrace that plan. All of you have done that and I can only express my most profound gratitude and appreciation for your efforts. I speak for Allah when I say many men pass through history; you all share the distinction of making it.”

  The men continued to regard him reverently, the cleric reveling in running his eyes over each of them one at a time.

  “I understand better now the necessary sacrifice of one of our brothers, since it left us with twelve of you standing before me. The perfect number since in Shi’a Islam there are said to be twelve imams who stand as legitimate successors to the prophet Mohammed. But the Christian Bible has something to say about that as well, does it not, Brother Harrabi?”

  Harrabi nodded, a bit stung by the cleric referring such a question to him, referencing a part of his life that seemed so far in the past now. “A woman, thought to be the Virgin Mary, wears a crown of twelve stars, each representing one of the twelve tribes of Israel. And each of the twelve tribes has twelve thousand people.”

  “Yes,” the cleric acknowledged, “as covered in Chapter Twelve, Part One. Of which part of their Bible, my brother.”

  “The Book of Revelation,” Harrabi told them all.

  26

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “Man was identified at the scene as Alejandro Pena,” said Frank Dean Whatley, a small, thin man who’d been the Bexar County Medical Examiner since the time Caitlin had been in diapers. He’d grown a belly in recent years that hung out over his thin belt, seeming to force his spine to angle inward at the torso. “Highway Patrol recovered his wallet and the car registration matched perfectly. Routine as they come.”

  “So what changed?”

  “Fingerprint check. Also routine.”

  “No, it’s not,” Caitlin told Whatley.

  The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office and Morgue was located just off the Loop 410 not far from the Babcock Road exit on Merton Minter. It was a three-story beige building that also housed the county health department and city offices for Medicaid. Caitlin had been coming here for over twenty years and what struck her was how it always smelled exactly the same, of cleaning solvent with a faint scent of menthol clinging to the walls like paint. The lighting was overly dull in the hallways and overly bright in offices like Whatley’s.

  “Okay,” Whatley said, “you got me.”

  “Keep talking, Doc.”

  “Alejandro Pena, what was left of him after a semi tore his car apart anyway, didn’t look Hispanic to me.”

  Whatley stopped to suck in some air and Caitlin let his remark settle between them. His teenage son had been killed by a Latino gang when Caitlin was a mere kid herself. Ever since then, Whatley had harbored a virulent hatred for that particular race, from the bag boys at the local H.E.B. to the politicians who professed to be peacemakers. With his wife first lost in life and then death to alcoholism, he’d probably stayed in the job too long. But he had nothing to go home to, no real life outside the office, and remained exceptionally good at performing the rigors of his job.

  “How’s that?” Caitlin asked him.

  “Skin tones were wrong. Next step was to run his ID and social, usual check that came back anything but usual since the real Alejandro Pena died fifteen years ago of a cerebral hemorrhage while watching his son play a high school football game. I printed out the obituary for you,” Whatley said, handing it across the desk.

  “So what else can you tell me about the real victim?” Caitlin asked, taking it.

  “He was in lousy health, Ranger. There was blood in his intestinal track and rectum. Skin tone and temperature indicated a recent infection, source of which could have been some unhealed cuts on his legs not consistent with trauma from the accident.”

  “Any idea wh
at exactly you’re describing here?”

  “None at all, or even if any of this is particularly relevant. People steal identities all the time.”

  “Rangers don’t get called out to most of them, Doc.” Caitlin was ready to leave it at that but something stopped her from standing up. “When was the victim’s driver’s license issued in Pena’s name?” she asked instead.

  Whatley consulted one of a dozen clipboards hanging on the wall behind him, Caitlin realizing for the first time that he hadn’t even switched his computer on.

  “Six months ago, it looks like here.”

  Now Caitlin did rise. “I’ll check it out.” She started to move for the door, then stopped. “One other thing, Doc. Mexican druggers murdered my mother. But neither one of us has a right to hold an entire ethnic group responsible for the tragedies that chew us up inside. Otherwise we’d spend our entire lives hating everything.”

  “I thought you weren’t working cases anymore, Ranger,” Whatley said, his eyes deep and sad.

  “Things changed.”

  * * *

  Caitlin felt the sweat soaking through her shirt by the time she approached her SUV parked in a corner of the building garage. She’d found a spot in the relative cool of a lower level but exhaust from the upper decks blew shafts of superheated air down against her at regular intervals, making the walk feel as if she were slogging in and out of a steam room. To save money, much of the garage’s lighting was turned off during the day, the sun’s rays streaming in through the open walls leaving checkerboard patterns across the garage floor.

  Caitlin wondered if she’d been too hard on Frank Dean Whatley, a man without companionship or purpose outside of his job. The mere thought made her value the presence of Luke and Dylan Torres in her life all the more, the price extracted in becoming their surrogate mother well worth it if they kept her from becoming as sad and bitter as Whatley. Still, his findings about the man who had assumed the identity of Alejandro Pena left Caitlin with a burning against her spine, not unlike a nagging sunburn. She’d stop off at the impound lot next to see what, if anything, had been gleaned from an inspection of the wreckage of his vehicle. Probably nothing, since there was no reason to suspect any crime behind the accident. But now she needed to request a full tech workup on the vehicle, starting with any and all fingerprints, fibers, any evidence whatsoever that might tell her who the victim was and why six months ago he’d adopted another man’s identity.