Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  Caitlin squeezed the wheel, accidentally blaring the horn in the process, which made her jump in her seat. “You haven’t even asked about them yet.”

  “’Cause I know they’re fine, better than fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “Jones filled you in about the school?”

  Cort Wesley nodded. “Sounds like you got the shaft.”

  “I got what I deserved, Cort Wesley. I messed up, plain and simple.”

  “You?”

  “Sucks being human, doesn’t it?”

  “Raising teenagers’ll do that to you.” Cort Wesley paused. “You can tell me whatever bad thing Dylan’s done lately if you want.”

  “Well, I caught him with a joint.”

  “What else?”

  “He brought a gun with him on a fishing trip we were just on. Told me you charged him with protecting me and his brother.”

  “I did at that,” Cort Wesley nodded. “And you only would’ve found he had a gun with him if you needed it. That oil rig?”

  Now it was Caitlin who nodded. “Your turn.”

  “I got something else I’d rather do instead.

  This time it was Cort Wesley who leaned across the seat, their arms wrapping around each other, Caitlin feeling his rough, hard hands swimming through her hair. She started wondering what he’d done with those hands, where the bruises had come from, how he’d managed to survive in a prison run by human excrement whose worth was less than the shirts on their tattooed backs. She felt him touching her, not wanting it to stop, the thought of poor Frank Dean Whatley entering her mind for some reason when her cell phone buzzed.

  It took six rings before Caitlin managed to extract herself from the embrace, her head leaning against Cort Wesley’s chest when she saw D. W. Tepper’s number flash in her caller ID.

  “Where are you?” he asked her, the phone screen’s dim glare cast across Cort Wesley’s face, making his bruises look like ink blotches.

  “Still at the ME’s office,” she said, clearing her throat, enjoying the feel of Cort Wesley’s heart thumping against her.

  “Well, get on back here. Young Roger says he found something on those tapes we need to see.”

  30

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Teofilo Reyes Braga sat by himself in the bleachers, apart from his wife and family, his son Jorge stepping into the batter’s box in the bottom of the sixth inning with the score tied. Two outs and two men—well, boys—on. Base hit from Jorge would win the game and propel the El Diablos into the playoffs.

  His company, Braga Waste Management, was the team’s sponsor and Braga himself had personally designed the company “devil” logo embroidered on the front of each uniform top. The nicest the San Antonio Little League had ever seen.

  “Strike one!” the umpire bellowed, even though the pitch looked clearly down and in to Braga, so much so it had backed ten-year-old Jorge off the plate out of fear of getting hit.

  Braga cringed and gnashed his teeth, glared at the rotund umpire who wouldn’t be able to see him through his mask even if he looked. He pressed his hands into his linen slacks, feeling perspiration leaking through a matching light cotton shirt. He fought the urge to undo more of the buttons, or strip the shirt off altogether as he would’ve done while working in the fields as a boy Jorge’s age. He never wore jeans or shorts, nothing too casual, so as to present only his best possible face at all times—residue, he imagined, of spending his youth as a migrant worker inevitably shunned and disparaged. Braga imagined the fat umpire having never done any kind of real labor in his life. For him cheating young boys with a lousy strike zone in the midday heat was probably as rough as it ever got.

  Jorge stepped out of the batter’s box, wiped some dirt onto his hands, and stepped back in.

  The sight made Braga think of himself at that age, growing up on a series of farms concentrated mostly in Texas. He’d actually been born on one of them in the fetid heat of a summer night in the back room of a barn. No celebration, or birth announcement in the local paper, and his mother was back to work the next day with him stowed in an old wooden drawer his father had found amid the garbage. But being born in Texas made him an American citizen, the significance of that never lost on him, even as a boy.

  “Strike two!” the fat umpire barked, and Braga seethed as he watched his son look back at the man as if to question where the pitch was. It looked outside this time and high enough to make the catcher come out of his crouch to snare it.

  Braga sat in the sun no matter how hot it was. The experience reminded him of the fields, his roots, how far he’d come. He had just turned fifty but looked ten years younger with a full head of thick black hair, matching mustache, and body still toned thanks to regular weight-lifting workouts in a solarium gym he’d added to the Alamo Heights mansion he’d purchased a couple years back. Braga had tried a personal trainer for a time, dismissing him after five workouts when it became clear he wasn’t comfortable having someone tell him what to do and how to do it. His skin showed few ill effects from so many years of overexposure; dark, yes, but not creased and leathery the way his father’s had been.

  The umpire took off his mask and wiped a hand through his greasy, sweat-soaked hair. Then Braga saw him look ever so subtly toward the opposing team’s bench where the coach stood on the top step of the dugout. It wasn’t much and could have been innocent, if not for the way the coach looked back. Braga watched their stares meet, however briefly, but long enough for more than a casual connection to be made.

  Braga had been ten years old when his interest in the waste management industry effectively began the night he’d accompanied his dad and two other men to a construction site for a local housing development outside of El Paso. Any number of large Dumpsters had been set there to handle the day-to-day refuse. The farm owner had lent the men a truck they’d packed with all manner of garbage collected from cans outside the tiny shacks the migrant workers called home. The black bags filled out the truck’s rear and Teo Braga had ridden atop them, balancing himself in the stiff wind.

  Once at the construction site, his job was to drop the bags from the truck’s rear to be retrieved by his dad and the two other men for deposit in the Dumpsters. Everything was going fine until Braga saw four men wielding two-by-fours coming around the truck. He started to shout out a warning to his dad, but fear swallowed his words. He burrowed down and hid amid the garbage while the thunks of wood against bone and the screams of the men split the cool, quiet night.

  Lost amid the darkness and the stench, Braga tried to cover his ears, but it did no good. The screams and thunks continued until he heard the rattle of the boards being discarded, then the footsteps of the men moving away followed by the roar of a car engine and screech of tires.

  One of the three men was dead by the time Braga got to him, his father and the other man both alive but barely. His father woke up long enough to climb into the cab on his own, but Braga had to drag the other man to the truck and then find a way to get him settled in the cab as well. Even then, with both his father and the other survivor unconscious, it was left for him to drive the truck all the way back to the farm.

  Braga let instinct guide him the whole trip, the ride pretty much a straight shot until he got to a series of local winding roads that all looked the same in the darkness. But he made it back somehow and another of the workers who’d been trained as a medic in the Mexican army got his father’s wounds stitched and his broken limbs splinted.

  Braga quickly realized his father had lost an eye and the use of much of his right arm because trash was expensive to dump. Landfills charged by the pound for dumping and even in the huge sprawl of Texas, there weren’t enough of them to go around. Farmers like the ones the Braga family worked for couldn’t spare the expense and were thus forced to find illegal dumping grounds like rivers, roadsides, or conveniently placed construction sites.

  Braga couldn’t let go of the memory of cowering within the trash while the sounds of his fa
ther’s screams and bones breaking reverberated in the air. So one day a few weeks later he rode a stolen bicycle back to the housing development site where his father had almost been beaten to death. It took awhile, but he picked out the four men, construction workers, who’d wielded the two-by-fours that awful night. He lingered about until he could identify the trucks belonging to all of them.

  He came back another week later on the same bicycle. While the four men who’d beaten his father and killed another man worked their way through the day, Braga slashed the tires and sugared the gas tanks of their trucks.

  All told, he’d never felt better, filled with a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment like none he’d ever felt before. That night, he slept soundly and without fear for the first time since his father’s beating.

  “Strike three!” the fat ump yelled. “You’re out!”

  His son Jorge dropped his bat, unable to believe another ball had been called a strike. That was it, game and season over for the El Diablos. And as the ump walked off the field he crossed paths with the opposing coach and Braga again saw them hold gazes, each smiling ever so slightly.

  Braga lingered in the new wooden stands seething, peeling the fresh blue paint from the row before him off with his fingernails. The crowd filed out, Braga paying none of the greetings and commiserations passed his way any heed whatsoever. A breeze had blown in from the south, squeezing the heat from the air and turning the afternoon surprisingly cool. Braga could feel the heart thudding in his chest, so angry he was trembling.

  “Can you believe that?” a parent of another kid on the team said, as he stormed down the aisle. Braga didn’t know his name or his son’s. Number 16, he thought.

  Braga didn’t respond.

  “We should file an appeal, a protest, a complaint. Something.”

  “Yes,” Braga heard himself saying, “something.”

  31

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “So here’s the thing,” Young Roger said from behind his computer, “everything that happened in the waters beneath the Mariah was recorded by their ROV, remote operated vehicle.”

  “Anything in these recordings gonna explain why they suspended their drilling operations on account of that shipwreck?” Caitlin asked him.

  “You bet. See that?” Young Roger asked, clicking his mouse over a section of his computer monitor to enlarge it.

  “No,” Captain Tepper said, before Caitlin had a chance to. “What exactly are we looking at?”

  Caitlin and Tepper were squeezed into Young Roger’s cramped cubicle in the basement of the Ranger Company D headquarters on the outskirts of San Antonio. The young man was a Ranger himself, but the title was mostly honorary, given after his technological expertise as a computer whiz helped the Rangers solve a number of Internet-based crimes ranging from identity theft, to credit card fraud, to the busting of a major pedophile and kiddie porn ring. Caitlin had never seen anyone so mad as Tepper when they raided the ringleader’s home, his face going so red that the color filled out the furrows and creases to the point where his skin looked baby smooth. In that moment Caitlin saw the younger Ranger who’d spent years ranging the same modern trails as her father and grandfather, often in the company of one or the other. Young Roger had accompanied the team on the raid, there to preserve whatever the ringleader’s hard drive yielded.

  He worked out of all six Ranger Company offices on a rotating basis as needed by the current investigative caseload. Young Roger wore his hair too long and played guitar for a rock band called The Rats. Caitlin had never seen them play but she’d listened to the CD. Not the kind of music she preferred, but Dylan told her it was pretty good.

  “This is footage captured by the ROV of the Mother Mary’s wreckage,” he explained. “They reported the findings and that’s when the rig’s owners followed protocol and ordered drilling operations suspended. You can see the ship’s remains here, here, and here,” Young Roger said, clicking to enlarge on the spots in question with his mouse in sequence.

  “You call us down here to explain something we already know?” Tepper asked him, sounding annoyed.

  “No, sir. Turns out the ROV captured something else along with the wreckage,” Young Roger said, enlarging a section of the screen yet more. “Here, check this out.”

  Caitlin leaned in over Tepper’s shoulder. “Those look like barrels, oil drums maybe.”

  “Something else I need to show you,” Young Roger said, working his keyboard until the screen changed, or seemed to. “Here’s the same area the day before the killings.”

  “So what are we supposed to be seeing this time?” Tepper asked.

  “It’s more a matter of not seeing, Captain.”

  “The barrels are gone,” Caitlin realized.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Young Roger affirmed.

  “Maybe the currents took them away.”

  “Not with that kind of barrel weight, especially the way they were dug in. Almost like somebody had put them in that spot on purpose, Captain, and nobody would’ve ever noticed if the Mariah’s ROV hadn’t uncovered the remains of that shipwreck first.”

  “Then wouldn’t the ROV have recorded whoever came for those barrels?” Caitlin asked.

  “Except it either malfunctioned or was tampered with.”

  “So you’re saying somebody showed up and picked the barrels up,” Tepper concluded. “Just how in all that’s holy could they manage that?”

  “First off, this footage recorded by the ROV was sent in compressed form over the Internet to Gulf Strategic Energy Partners. And when you think of the Internet I want you to picture a bank that leaves its doors opened and vault unlocked for anybody who wants to steal money. That’s about as secure as the Web is.”

  “So you’re saying…”

  Young Roger clicked the mouse, returning the enlarged shot of the barrels to the screen, and then wheeled his desk chair backward. “That anybody who pulled this feed off the Web could have been responsible for getting the barrels out of there.”

  “And if that happened to be the same party that put them there in the first place,” Caitlin said, leaving her thought at that.

  Tepper started to reach for his Marlboro Lights, then changed his mind. “Next question being who might that be exactly?”

  “Don’t have an answer for you there yet, Captain,” Young Roger told him.

  “Hold on a sec, what’s this?” Caitlin asked, pointing to a section of the screen highlighting the enlarged barrels with her finger.

  “What’s what?”

  “There’s a mark, an impression, on this barrel.”

  “Probably just a smudge or a scratch.”

  “I can’t see anything,” Tepper said, squinting again.

  “No, it’s there,” Caitlin insisted. “Looks like a symbol, maybe a drawing or something.”

  Young Roger maneuvered the mouse to the area beneath Caitlin’s finger and clicked three times. “You’re right, Ranger.”

  “What the hell is that?” Captain Tepper asked, whatever Caitlin had spotted went fuzzy under the enlargement.

  “I can’t say for sure,” she told him, “but it looks like a devil’s head.”

  32

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Teofilo Braga thought he might calm down as the day went on. By nightfall, though, his anger over the umpire calling his son out on balls out of the strike zone only intensified. So with that umpire’s cell phone number in hand, Braga used the tracking software his company used to keep tabs on its trucks to pin his location down to a bar beyond the edge of San Antonio’s tourist district, well past the River Walk.

  He sat innocuously at a back table, nursing a trio of Coronas with limes squeezed down their necks, fidgeting at the sight of the bulbous umpire chomping down chicken wings and ribs, chased with shots of Jack Daniel’s and Budweiser. The spices brought a shimmer of sweat to his skin that made his basketball-shaped head look as if it were glowing under the bar’s dim lights.

  But
Braga still hadn’t decided what to do, and was actually thinking about making himself go home, when the opposing coach from that afternoon’s game entered and took a seat next to the ump. The coach stayed only long enough to pick up the umpire’s tab, after which the two of them exchanged a ridiculous high school half hug before the coach took his leave.

  Braga rose and headed for the door, leaving his final Corona only half finished.

  * * *

  He watched the umpire waddle out of the bar twenty minutes later, stumbling back to his car illegally parked in a nearby alley. He’d backed his Mercury Marquis in, blocking access to a Dumpster that was serviced by Braga Waste Management. Steam rose off pools of water collected near drainage gates in the humid night, the silence of which was broken by a stubborn car alarm wailing from several blocks away.

  In those brief moments, Braga felt again like the young boy hidden amid the trash bags while his father was beaten with two-by-fours. He felt the same nervous flutter in his stomach knotting his muscles. Even the stench rising out of the overflowing Dumpster smelled the same. The umpire brought back every painful memory of a youth dominated by weakness and subservience, memories that no amount of power and wealth he’d accumulated as an adult could vanquish. The difference tonight was that he held a baseball bat in his right hand, adding his left as he approached the umpire now fumbling drunkenly for the car keys in his pocket.

  Before Braga could mentally record his actions, the bat was coming up and around, impacting against the side of the umpire’s knee with a crunching thud.

  “Strike one,” Braga said, as the overweight man who stank of garlic and beer dropped screaming to the ground.

  Braga brought the bat down on the front of his other leg, landing just over the knee this time and leaving the umpire clawing for that spot instead as he wailed in agony.

  “Strike two.”