Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  Luke’s eyes told Caitlin he got what she was saying. But then he pursed his lips and blew out some more breath, not aiming for the hair that had flopped over his face this time.

  “How ’bout we head out to the range next week?” Caitlin proposed without thinking.

  “You mean it?” the boy said, perking up.

  “Wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t.”

  He grinned at her, looking more like his brother—and father—every day. “You don’t want me to shoot the kids instead of punch back, do you?”

  “Nope. I want you to have something you can do that they can’t. Nothing gives you more confidence to walk away from a fight than knowing that if it ever comes down to it you’re not gonna miss.”

  Luke’s gaze deepened again, his smile fading away. “You missed at Dylan’s school, Caitlin.”

  40

  HOUSTON, THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley Masters, wearing the uniform of a worker for the Houston Department of Public Works, sat in the back of the van in clear view of the Bear Creek Islamic Center in Coventry Park on the outskirts of Houston. Paz was somewhere close by with the six former Mexican Zeta commandos he’d brought along for the job.

  “Counting down to zero hour, cowboy,” Jones told him. “How are the nerves?”

  Cort Wesley didn’t respond, just kept his focus on the mosque on one of the surveillance screens built into the van’s rear.

  “That’s what I thought,” Jones said, and Cort Wesley could visualize him smiling.

  “The problem, Jones, is you don’t think, not nearly enough.”

  “That a fact, cowboy?”

  “You’ve been out of the game too long. Something doesn’t add up here and your vision’s too narrow to notice.”

  “My intelligence is solid.”

  “But the man you had inside the cell is gone and presumed dead. I got that right?”

  “Not entirely,” Jones said, sweat beading up over his upper lip. “I’m gonna turn up the air-conditioning.”

  Cort Wesley reached out and latched a hand onto his forearm. “Wait a sec. What is it you’re not telling me?”

  Jones looked down at the hand restraining him. “I got you out of prison, secured you an official pardon, cowboy. That buys me the courtesy to tell you whatever the hell I want to and nothing more.”

  “Why do I think there’s a lie in there someplace?”

  The Bear Creek Islamic Center was a sprawling structure boasting a fully equipped community hall that included a stage and state-of-the-art sound system. It was laid out with an elongated V-shaped design equally fit for a church or synagogue. It boasted a membership of nearly a thousand and was generally considered to be a positive contributor to the community.

  “You want to tell me more about these homegrown terrorists,” Cort Wesley said, when Jones remained silent.

  Jones angled himself so he could look at the window and Cort Wesley at the same time. “Since nine/eleven fourteen Americans have been killed in jihadist terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Thirteen of those were gunned down at Fort Hood right here in Texas, and the fourteenth was a young military recruiter who was shot outside a recruitment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. In both cases, the suspects were Americans—Major Nidal Hasan and Carlos Bledsoe—who appeared to have some connection with al-Qaeda’s arm in Yemen.

  “The Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was a young American of Pakistani descent with an MBA. Shirwa Ahmed, a young Somali-American from Minneapolis, was a college student who went to Somalia and now owns the dubious distinction of being America’s first suicide bomber. He drove a truck full of explosives into a U.N. building in Puntland. The FBI matched his prints to the remains of a finger found at the scene.

  “So we’re no longer looking for some poor kid from Pakistan who’s come to the U.S. to find his path to the afterlife and however the fuck many virgins are waiting for him. Radicalized Americans who spent time overseas in Crazy World stand out on our radar like jumbo jets. But the new model is the mountain coming to Muhammad instead of visa versa. Planners out of Yemen mostly making the trip to the dreaded West to oversee the whack jobs who’ve sworn allegiance to jihad. Signed themselves up as willing recruits whose psychological profiles are then vetted and the courtship process begins. The bottom line being that, as is the case with whatever’s going down across the street here, the al-Qaedas of the world are building an army under our very eyes we can’t see.”

  Jones hesitated, Cort Wesley having trouble seeing his eyes in the van’s dull lighting.

  “And here’s the other thing, cowboy,” he continued. “Osama bin Laden’s dead and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s a dinosaur, yesterday’s news. But that doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods, far from it, and that’s my point. The plot to bomb New York City subways, which was described as the worst plot leveled against the U.S. since September 11, would have killed dozens had Najibullah Zazi succeeded in mixing the chemicals and getting them on the trains. Had the bombing of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day succeeded, it would’ve killed hundreds.”

  Jones swung all the way toward Cort Wesley, the light hitting him in a way that made his eyes look all black, no whites at all. “Now we’ve got a basement lair inside this mosque for these American Muslims who’ve gone to the dark side. We don’t know what’s going on down there or what they’re up to exactly. But they all dropped off the face of the earth right after my man filed his final report, into identities we imagine they’d been ghosting all along. We’ve got confirmation that the men we’ve been watching entered that mosque yesterday and have yet to emerge, so we’re gonna hit it hard and fast, take no prisoners in the process, and learn what we can learn before Texas goes boom. How’s that?”

  “Not bad for starters.”

  “Starters?”

  “Time to fill in the blanks, Jones,” Cort Wesley said to him, “like what was in your agent’s final report about how big this really is.”

  Jones looked at him across a compartment that reeked of stale coffee and gasoline fumes. “Try this on for size. All those attacks on American soil I just mentioned were the work of one man: Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric living in Yemen.”

  “Then I guess it’s a good thing a Predator drone took him out last year.”

  “Try again, cowboy. Al-Awlaki played us. There was no body to recover or DNA to test, so we’re relying strictly on intelligence that turned out to be manufactured.” Jones hesitated, as if to collect his thoughts. “Man needed some freedom to operate, to plan something that will make nine/eleven look like a fire drill. The piece of shit’s fingerprints are all over this Texas plot and all our information indicates it’s going to be a game changer of epic proportions. And that’s not all.”

  “What else oould there be?”

  “Al-Awlaki himself. We’re convinced he’s running things from Ground Zero, cowboy, right here in the Lone Star State.”

  41

  SHAVANO PARK, THE PRESENT

  “Who’s that?”

  Dylan Torres was teaching Luke how to skateboard in the half-pipe he’d reconstructed in the front yard when a pickup with an extended cab and double rear tires slid to a halt at the curb.

  “I have no idea,” Dylan told his younger brother as a man who wore his cowboy hat tilted so low his eyes were lost to the shading climbed out.

  Dylan moved between Luke and the street as the man spread his black suit jacket just enough to reveal the shoulder holster contained beneath it. He walked listing slightly to that side as if his gun was weighing him down. His clothes looked too big for his gaunt frame, which made Dylan think of sick people he’d met who had trouble keeping food down. The man was stringy thin, his boots outfitted with spurs as if his pickup was actually a horse he needed to prod into motion. The parts of his face that weren’t shaded by his hat were red and blotchy.

  The man stopped five feet from Dylan, the hooded nature of his gaze making the boy backpedal involuntarily, measuring off the distance to retrie
ve his dad’s Glock from inside the house. The man’s skin didn’t seem to fit him, Dylan thought, looked to have been fastened around his bones with tape and glue.

  “I’m looking for Caitlin Strong,” the man said. “Might she be home?”

  “She doesn’t live here.”

  “But she’s staying with you while your father’s in jail, isn’t she?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  The man started to reach under his jacket, making Dylan flinch and then stiffen until his hand emerged with a regular-sized envelope. “Well, I’ve got something here my boss asked me to deliver to her personally.”

  He extended the envelope toward Dylan, hitching up his cowboy hat to reveal eyes that leered at him in a way that made the boy’s stomach flutter. He felt queasy all of a sudden, maybe a little unsteady on his feet. He made no move to take the extended envelope, nothing that would bring him any closer to this human freak show.

  The man grinned, his ill-fitting skin rising on one side while lowering on the other. “Ranger Strong is expecting this,” he continued when Dylan remained frozen. Then his narrowed, leering eyes widened in apparent recognition. “Say, you’re that boy got himself kidnapped in Mexico last year by those slavers. Tell me, son, any of them have their way with you?”

  Dylan cocked his gaze back toward his brother. “Get inside and do your homework.”

  But the man in the black suit took a few casual steps that planted him between Luke and the front door. “You experience that feeling like a hot poker being jammed up your innards?” His eyes seemed to twinkle as he said that. “Or maybe they just made you use your mouth on them. That can change the way a pretty-looking boy like you sees the world forever.”

  Dylan took his phone from his pocket. “Think I’ll let Caitlin know you’re here. You can give her the envelope yourself.”

  “Good idea, boy,” he said pocketing it. “Tell her Jalbert Thoms came a calling. If she wants to pick up this here envelope later, you tell her I’ll be at the Red Stripe bar off Vance Jackson Road.”

  Dylan touched CAITLIN on his favorites list, never taking his eyes off Jalbert Thoms, willing the call to go through quick.

  “Those Mexicans got swizzle sticks for private parts. But a good American hot poker make you long for more. You walk around looking pretty as you do, you’re asking for it, challenging the very inhibitions of good folk like me.”

  “Hey, Caitlin,” Dylan said when the call went straight to voice mail. “There’s somebody here looking for you.”

  Thoms tipped his hat and slid sideways back toward his truck. “Next time I’ll show you my gun, boy. I’m a damn good shot once I got something fixed in my sights.”

  42

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “When’s it stop, Ranger?” D. W. Tepper asked when Caitlin finally made it back to Company headquarters.

  “Excuse me?”

  “My phone’s been lit up all afternoon. Guess Hurricane Caitlin has blown back into town in all her glory. Maybe I should have tossed you off that oil rig into the ocean instead of giving you charge of the investigation. Did I warn you not to make me regret that decision, or has my memory shit the goddamn bed?”

  “This have something to do with Teofilo Braga?”

  “Only everything. I’ll say one thing for you, Hurricane, at least you pick on the high and the mighty.”

  “I didn’t pick on him.”

  “Oh no? What do you call accusing a man of being party to a multiple homicide?”

  “Was he talking about the Mariah, the four Dixie mobsters from a decade back, or the bodies found in a Lubbock Dumpster?”

  “I really couldn’t say. But this is what happens when you rattle the cages of powerful men who aren’t used to explaining themselves or their actions.”

  “So did I do something wrong?”

  Tepper just shook his head, scowling as he jammed a Marlboro into his mouth and fired up a match. “You’re fixing to kill me for sure, Caitlin Strong. You realize my return to smoking coincided with your return to the Rangers?”

  “I never asked you to explain yourself or your actions, D.W.”

  Tepper jabbed his cigarette at her. “That’s not funny, Ranger. Every time you shake somebody’s tree, I get mine shaken. Jesus Christ, Braga was on the cover of Texas Monthly a few months back as the ultimate immigrant success story.”

  “He’s not Jesus Christ.”

  “No, but he’s a millionaire lots of times over who started out as a migrant farm worker.”

  “And how’d that happen exactly?”

  “Oh jeez…”

  “I read the magazine article too, Captain. One day Braga is working for a waste management company and then practically overnight he owns it. Unless my issue was missing a page, something must be missing from his bio.”

  Tepper nodded the way a man does when a point’s about to follow. “And how exactly might that be connected to the Mariah?”

  “No way I can see.”

  “Then stick with what you can.”

  “Like you did with Earl and Jim on Galveston Island?”

  Tepper looked like a man stifling an acid-laced belch. “Don’t go there again, Ranger.”

  “Then tell me the rest of the story so I don’t have to, D.W.”

  43

  GALVESTON ISLAND, 1979

  “So, Mugsy,” Earl Strong said to Sheriff Plantaine, “we have us an understanding?”

  “In other words,” Jim Strong picked up, “you feel yourself up to the task of staring down all the money people with their own agendas or not?”

  “There are plenty of good lawmen in Texas who ain’t Rangers,” he told them.

  “Difference being that Rangers don’t have to stand for reelection,” Jim reminded. “And I imagine you gotta keep that fact in sight.”

  Plantaine ran his eyes over the mangled bodies of the dead frat boys lying in the clearing. “These victims are the only thing I got in my sight right now.”

  “Okay, then. What would’ve brought them out to this here spot?”

  “We get our share of tourists and explorers in search of Jean Lafitte’s Campeche grounds. But not on their own and certainly not on a night where you can’t see squat even when the moon is as bright as it gets.”

  “They have these things called flashlights today,” Earl reminded with a wink and a nod.

  “You’d need more than a flashlight to find your way in these parts. There’s no actual remnants of Lafitte’s camp and, besides our own tours, no one much advertises he made one of his homes here, the other of course being in the Louisiana bayou, which reminds me…”

  “What?” Earl spurred.

  “The Cajuns there talk of a legend they call the Rougarou. Mythical figure kind of like Bigfoot. Not quite as big, but twice as mean.”

  “This is Texas, last time I checked.”

  “I’m only raising that on account of Lafitte’s roots elsewhere.”

  “So,” Jim Strong said from over his inspection of one of the bodies, “you figure this Rougarou may have been hanging around all these years looking for some frat boys to kill.”

  “Disemboweling the bodies this way has got Cajun practices written all over it.”

  “You talking voodoo, spells, sticking needles in dolls—all that sort of shit?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud here,” Plantaine told them. “Maybe there’s something ritualistic about all this, like these boys were sacrifices or something.”

  “Looks more like they surprised somebody,” noted D. W. Tepper. “And I don’t see any evidence of voodoo dolls on the scene.”

  “My granddaughter Caitlin’s got three dolls herself,” Earl Strong chimed in. “Stuffing’s all falling out of each.”

  “On account of you teaching her to shoot the poor things with a BB gun,” Jim said.

  “Well, I didn’t think she was old enough at three to try my Colt, son.”

  “I believe,” started D. W. Tepper, “we can n
ow see why the famous Rangers Strong, father and son, have never been paired up on a case before.”

  “First time for everything,” said Jim.

  “And I’d say the bodies of five mutilated frat boys from the University of Texas certainly calls for it,” Earl added.

  That was enough to plunge the three men back into the horrible reality of what was before them. Scavenger birds neither Earl nor Jim even knew were native to Galveston Island buzzed the skies overhead. They looked sleeker and less imposing than buzzards, but their aims were the same and the stench of human remains and entrails had likely sent their primal instincts spinning into overdrive. Back on the ground, the Rangers knew the encroaching swarm of insects and maggots made their investigation of the crime scene a race against time and decay. It would probably be best to chopper the remains back to medical examiner Frank Dean Whatley’s office, but they might have to settle for Sheriff Plantaine’s men bagging the bodies for transport back via their launch. Either way they were dealing with a finite amount of time to continue their inspection of the crime scene.

  “Come have a look at this,” D. W. Tepper called to the others.

  Plantaine hovered just behind the Strongs as they knelt even with one of the dead frat boy’s feet.

  “Check out this boy’s boots,” Tepper continued, pointing to the pasty contents of the deepest grooves with the tip of his pen. “I make this as some sort of red soil or clay.”

  “Like nothing I’ve ever seen on the island,” Plantaine remarked.

  “Nor in the area of University of Texas at Austin either.”

  Tepper wiped his pen on his pants and slid it back into his pocket. “I’d say a tennis court, ’cept who plays tennis in his boots?”