Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

Braga raised the bat a third time, focusing on the umpire’s ribs. But at the last moment his rage bubbled over and he altered his aim for the man’s head, bringing the bat straight down and striking the umpire’s skull with a sickening crunching sound. Blood and brain matter burst from the man’s ears and oozed out of the crack carved down the center of his scalp.

  “You’re out,” Braga said, walking off back toward his Cadillac with bat still in hand.

  PART FOUR

  Organization of the Ranger Force, 1901, House Bill No. 52

  An Act to provide for the organization of a “Ranger Force” for the protection of the frontier against marauding and thieving parties, and for the suppression of lawlessness and crime throughout the State; to prescribe the duties and powers of members of such force, and to regulate their compensation.

  Section 1. Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Texas: That the Governor be and is hereby authorized to organize a force to be known as the “Ranger Force,” for the purpose of protecting the frontier against marauding or thieving parties, and for the suppression of lawlessness and crime throughout the State.

  Section 2. The “Ranger Force” shall consist of, not to exceed, four separate companies of mounted men, each company to consist of, not to exceed, one captain, one first sergeant and twenty privates, and one quartermaster for the entire force. The captains of companies and the quartermaster shall be appointed by the Governor, and shall be removed at his pleasure; unless sooner so removed by the Governor, they shall serve for two years and until their successors are appointed and qualified.

  33

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Guillermo Paz stood outside the San Fernando Cathedral on West Main Plaza in San Antonio, studying the plaque that proclaimed it to be the oldest cathedral sanctuary in the United States. Jim Bowie was married here before dying at the Alamo at the hands of Santa Anna, who used the building as an observation post. The cathedral claimed that Bowie, along with Colonel Travis and Davy Crockett himself, had been ceremonially buried in the church’s graveyard as their official resting places. But Paz knew of other locations that had made the same claim. Since the heroes’ bodies had all been burned after the famous battle, he supposed anybody could claim anything they wanted to.

  Paz mounted the stone steps and entered the chapel to the smell of something like lacquer. He looked down to see the old wood floors he recalled as being faded and worn had been refinished with a fresh coat, and the wooden pews looked reconditioned as well. The church smelled of candles and light incense, relaxing him instantly. It was the same smell he recalled from his youth growing up in the slums of Venezuela where the local church was the only refuge from the gang-riddled streets, making him feel truly at home as he made his way to the confessional perched in the church’s rear.

  Paz squeezed himself into the confessional and eased the door closed behind him. He noticed the armrest just below the confessional window had been refinished as well, obliterating the P-A-Z he’d carved into it with a twelve-inch commando blade during his last visit.

  He’d barely gotten himself settled when the window opened, leaving only the screen between him and the priest.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been, oh, about a year since my last confession.”

  “Your voice is familiar, my son.”

  “I’ve visited you before, padre, a few years ago when I was a different man altogether. I think you’d be proud of me, since I really did take your advice. And it’s nice to see you put the money I left you to good use.”

  “Oh, no,” Paz heard the priest mumble under his breath.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do any more carving. Those days are behind me. Care to hear why?”

  There was a pause, then, “Please, my son.”

  “I think I used to carve my names in places like this to remind God I’d been there, so He wouldn’t forget. That on account of the fact that I hadn’t done much good for Him to remember. That’s all changed now.”

  Paz waited for the priest to comment, continued when he didn’t.

  “Last priest to hear my confession did so in a church of my own making. Well, a tented plank floor with folding chairs anyway, set in the middle of the Mexican desert. Didn’t get much use other than me, unfortunately. Grand opening was set for last Easter but I ended up being elsewhere at the time.”

  Paz could see the priest fidgeting on the other side of the confessional screen. “Do you have something to confess, my son?”

  “I’m getting to that. See, it’s been a long process for me, padre. I didn’t go wrong overnight and going right has taken me some time. It’s not like I woke up one morning determined to change; it just sort of happened, starting down in Juárez, Mexico, where I got tired of innocent people being chewed up by the drug cartels.”

  “Ángel de la Guarda,” the priest muttered. “The Guardian Angel…”

  “So you’ve heard of my work down there.”

  “I … I didn’t think it was real, could be real. One man against…” The priest’s voice tailed off, as if he’d lost his breath along with the rest of the words.

  “Know what I’ve realized, padre?”

  “Tell me.”

  “That my confessions always correspond to these battles that have helped redefine me. I guess I feel them coming. That kind of foresight kind of runs in the family. Does that make any sense?”

  “Are you suggesting achieving purity through violence?”

  “No, but that has a nice ring to it. I don’t have a lot to confess right now but I do need some advice, counsel.”

  “I’m listening, my son.”

  Paz shifted his vast bulk in the cramped confessional. On the other side, he could see the priest finally stop fidgeting and settle into place.

  “You read Aristotle, padre?”

  “Some,” the priest told him.

  “For a long time, Greek philosophers had the way the world works all wrong. Take Plato. He figured the world as an unchanging place of intelligible forms and ideas. But then Aristole shows up and changes everything. Comes out and insists the world’s all about change. Matter of fact, I believe he said it was the only constant. But he also said the reason something changes is because something makes it change. You see my point?”

  “I must say I don’t.”

  “It’s confirmation of what I’ve always suspected, that my Texas Ranger is my catalyst. She’s what has moved and changed me. Makes perfect sense since Aristotle also believed that change is bred by a greater aim, goal, or purpose.”

  “I believe, my son, he was saying that change isn’t an end in itself, but a means to a greater end. Like salvation.”

  “Or peace?”

  “They could be interpreted as much the same thing.”

  Paz leaned back against the confessional wall and felt the boards creak under the strain. “You sure know your Aristole, padre.”

  “I remember the profound effect this Texas Ranger had on you the first time you met her.”

  “Trying to kill each other will do that for you.”

  “And does your return here have something to do with…” Again the priest’s voice trailed off, as if he didn’t want to finish a question for which he feared the answer.

  “That’s the other reason why I came to see you. It shouldn’t, but I’m starting to think it does. See, I’ve got that feeling again. We’re up against a bad enemy this time, and I just needed someone to bounce this stuff off of, help me get my thoughts straight on the subject. You’re a good listener.”

  “This … new enemy. Should I be afraid, my son?”

  Paz pushed himself up off the seat, suddenly missing the fact he wasn’t leaving his mark behind. “We’ll see, padre.”

  34

  ALAMO HEIGHTS, THE PRESENT

  Teo Braga liked to water his lawn manually with a hose, even though the yard was equipped with underground sprinklers. He enjoyed the feeling of doing it himself, not trusting the sprinklers
to manage the same coverage. He’d never stopped being hands-on, no stranger to getting those hands dirty even as the most successful waste management baron in the country. No, it wasn’t glamorous, nor did it hold the seeds of some greater ambition. But it was work he remained proud of with a genuine belief of the good he was doing and the pride he held in a job done well. He treated his employees as his first boss, Alvin Jackson, had treated him and, as for his rivals, well, Braga had come to the conclusion there were times when a pen was called for and other times when a baseball bat was more fitting.

  His first job outside of the farms and ranches through the desert southwest had been hauling trash because he’d never lost his fascination with the reason behind his father having nearly been beaten to death. He was only fifteen at the time, but Alvin Jackson, the first black man he’d ever known and as close to a mentor as Braga had, wasn’t concerned with formalities like age or a birth certificate. Many of the workers were Mexican just like him, though none he met were actually born in the United States as he was. And that seemed to make Braga see the experience in an entirely different light.

  When he walked from the bus stop to the truck depot every morning, he’d pass a long line of trucks pulling out for their morning runs, so many he always lost count. Braga would come up with a rough estimate of the number and multiply it by the amount of tonnage they hauled away on a daily basis. The sum was staggering, city and municipal contracts being garbage gold.

  The company for which Alvin Jackson served as foreman had the El Paso contract until a rival bidder with better political connections stole it away.

  “I gotta let you go,” Alvin Jackson told him, his voice cracking.

  “I understand, sir.”

  “You’re a good kid and I want to do right by you, but we just lost half our business.” Alvin Jackson seemed finished, but then quickly resumed. “Why’d you call me that?”

  “What?”

  “Sir.”

  “Because you’ve treated me well and I respect you, Mr. Jackson.”

  The rival company made its workers, many of them itinerant, pay for their own gloves and work clothes. The price, Braga heard, was deducted from their first paycheck, maybe three times what the same stuff would cost at the local department store. Not content with the municipal contracts, the rival company began going after private contracts as well. Alvin Jackson called Braga back to work when a crew of Mexican illegals from his company was ambushed, beaten, and found in the back of their own truck amid the refuse.

  The day after his sixteenth birthday, Braga accompanied Alvin Jackson to visit the men in the hospital and listened to them tell their story in Spanish, closing his eyes so he could picture his father being beaten by construction thugs just for using the site’s Dumpster.

  “Something’s gotta be done about this,” he told Alvin Jackson, realizing too late he’d actually spoken the words in Spanish.

  A week later a spark in the rival company’s garage set off a gas-line leak that took out half their fleet and the company Braga worked for got the city contract back. Braga’s next paycheck had a nice raise in it and the one after that came with one even nicer. Alvin Jackson had handed him both checks personally.

  “I got big plans for you, son,” he promised. “Big plans.”

  Jackson was a beefy ex-football player with a warm smile and hearty laugh. He’d been born and raised in Louisiana, the great-grandson of slaves who claimed his grandfather practiced voodoo and could set gris-gris spells on anyone for a price. He claimed he’d inherited a portion of his grandfather’s powers and had set a spell using a special amulet the night before that fire had ravaged the rival company’s depot.

  “You think it was magic that got us the business back?” Braga asked him.

  Jackson looked him right in the eye. “Something like that.”

  But magic had nothing to do with the meteoric rise Teo Braga had made since then. Two years back he’d purchased an eight-thousand-square-foot red-stone mansion that sat on four and a half lush acres in Alamo Heights. The property, originally owned by a drug dealer, had been confiscated by the Texas Rangers, who had used it as a safe house of all things. It featured a pool, tennis court, tree house, and two-stall covered barn, and had originally been on the market for $2.5 million. That, though, was before a shoot-out there claimed the lives of two Texas Rangers protecting a couple of kids who’d supposedly gotten themselves involved somehow with a mythical Mexican criminal. A neighbor who was a Vietnam veteran compared the gun battle to the Tet Offensive, which dropped the asking price by another half million and Braga ended up buying it for half the asking price.

  Braga had just started to water a different section of the lawn when his cell phone rang, the office calling. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.

  But his assistant wasn’t calling to inquire about his pending presence; someone had called to request a meeting.

  “Texas Ranger?” Braga said, stiffening a bit, afraid maybe someone had witnessed him bashing in the umpire’s brains the previous night. “Alright, call him back and tell him I’m on my way in.… What do you mean it’s a ‘her’?”

  35

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “Thanks for seeing me so quickly, Mr. Braga,” Caitlin greeted, finding the man’s handshake just firm enough to let her know how strong he was. She had come here straight from the impound lot where, to her dismay, the remains of the car belonging to Alejandro Pena had yielded no further clues as to his true identity or motivation for changing it. Accidents involving eighteen-wheelers don’t tend to leave much behind, and in this case the unrecognizable carcass of the car was little more than a mangled husk of scorched steel.

  “My pleasure. Just never figured the Rangers would have much interest in the waste management industry.”

  “Something came up in the course of one of our investigations.”

  “You mind elaborating further while I make my rounds?” Braga asked, moving casually toward an open Jeep outfitted with the devil’s head logo familiar to her from the barrel she’d spotted on the tape in Young Roger’s office cubicle. “I like to do that every day just to make sure all the pieces are running the way they’re supposed to. Amazing how much you can accomplish by just staying on top of things.”

  Teofilo Reyes Braga spoke like a man with nothing to hide or fear. He tried to appear genuine but came off as if he were reading from a script, the authenticity he was striving for lost in his glib grin and gleam forced on his eyes like a sweater that didn’t fit. He wore his confidence like a badge, smiling so easily and often the gesture seemed more part of an illusion he was casting than a glimpse into his true nature. Some men, and criminals especially, Caitlin knew, disguised their true natures by disarming their foes with fake shows of deference and respect. Her father and grandfather had always told her they could spot a guilty man a hundred feet away in the dark because they seemed to shine. Well, Caitlin was looking at Braga in the light and he seemed to be shining too.

  Young Roger had finally managed to identify the devil’s head symbol imprinted on the otherwise unidentified barrels in the waters beneath the Mariah as the corporate logo of Braga Waste Management. Two phone calls later Caitlin was headed for the Covel Gardens facility Braga owned and operated on Covel Road fifteen minutes from Company D headquarters.

  “I’d love to join you, sir,” Caitlin said, climbing into the Jeep’s passenger seat and studying Braga closer as he moved around to the driver’s side.

  He was of average height or so, but the way he carried himself made him look taller. He wore a dress shirt with the same logo that adorned the Jeep affixed to his lapel, definitely not a suit and tie guy, as his impressive bio indicated. A true self-made, first-generation American who had gone from migrant worker to the biggest name in waste management in the state, if not the entire country. Braga’s dark skin indeed had a glow to it, thanks to a light sheen of sweat brought to the surface by the sun and the heat. She could see tiny pockets
of perspiration growing on his underarms, wondering if he was a man who didn’t use antiperspirant or one on whom its effects were negligible. His hair was full and black, so neatly styled that it looked chiseled into place.

  The open Jeep’s gray interior was hot to the touch and Caitlin leaned forward to keep it from roasting her back. The steel roll bar overhead seemed to radiate more heat than an oven.

  “This facility’s eight hundred acres in total,” Braga said, slamming the door behind him. “We use five hundred of those for waste disposal and the remaining three hundred for recreational facilities, support buildings, and buffer zones.”

  “I noticed the courts and ball fields on the way in,” Caitlin told him.

  “Braga Waste Management, BWM, sponsors my youngest son’s Little League team, the El Diablos. They play their home games here. We lost our last game of the season just yesterday. You have any children, Ranger?”

  “No, sir, I don’t. Not really, anyway,” Caitlin then added, thinking of Dylan and Luke.

  “I’d imagine it would be hard for you, being a Texas Ranger and all.”

  “I’d imagine it would be just as hard for a man of your standing in such a big industry.”

  He cocked his gaze toward her as he eased the Jeep onto the road that swirled through the entire complex. “I think we have something in common. Your grandfather, Earl Strong, ran Al Capone’s boys out of Sweetwater during the oil boom of the thirties.”

  “Yes, sir, he did at that. One of those rare occurrences where legend and fact are the very same.”

  “I had a similar experience with what some people call the Dixie Mafia here in Texas.”

  “Did you now?”

  “They pretty much owned the waste management business in the state when I got started in it as a boy.”

  “I imagine that presented its share of problems,” Caitlin said, grateful that the breeze had at least somewhat cooled the scorched upholstery superheating her skin.

  “My first boss was a man named Alvin Jackson. We were a union shop in those days, but Jackson didn’t appreciate having to pay tribute to those without the best interests of his men in mind. That’s putting it mildly.”