Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

“All this crap you’re spitting makes you sound like a twelve-year-old.”

  “It’s a tradition, Ranger.”

  “You said that already. And I’m guessing you went to the bayou when you were a pledge, only you came back alive.”

  “I also never ended up on Galveston Island. Plenty of years the pledges don’t actually ever get their hands on the treasure map. They’ve got to find this old man in the bayou who’ll draw one for them for five hundred bucks. But the map never took anyone to Galveston Island before.”

  “And I’m guessing nobody ever did come back with the treasure, did they?”

  “Of course not,” said Jimmy Roy. “How could they if it doesn’t exist? That’s the whole point.”

  Earl and D. W. Tepper exchanged a glance, both of them looking as if they’d tasted something sour.

  “So you sent these boys into the bayou for something you know isn’t real.”

  “It’s a bonding exercise, Ranger Strong, to bring the class together.”

  Earl nodded, pretending to get Jimmy Roy’s point. “Well, it accomplished that much anyway, given that’s the way they died.”

  “Ranger?” Jimmy Roy raised after swallowing hard.

  “Yeah, son?”

  Roy swallowed hard. “One of them was my first cousin.”

  Earl moved closer still to Jimmy Roy, his back taking the brunt of the sunlight streaming in through the windows and keeping it off the fraternity president’s face. “Then tell me how to find this old man in the bayou.”

  * * *

  Dahlberg repacked his pipe before resuming. “Lafitte and Bowie split whatever spoils they took from Quentin Cusp in half. Bowie used his half to buy up as much land in Texas as he could get his hands on, not long before he took a Mexican wife to further smooth the political way for his business interests. Then the revolution came and he ended up fighting not for Texas, but his own wealth, because if Santa Anna retook the colony, all the land Bowie had accumulated would be forfeit. I know all this flies in the face of Jim Bowie’s reputation as a true hero of Texas, but that doesn’t change the truth.”

  “It also doesn’t change Bowie’s heroism, Professor. Deeds he did still belong to him and heroism is a variable term—believe me when I tell you any Texas Ranger knows that firsthand. Now, sir, what about Lafitte’s half of this treasure?”

  Dahlberg grinned. “You ever study history, Ranger?”

  “I guess you might say I’m a true product of it.”

  “Because you ask all the right questions. The truth is I don’t know for sure what Lafitte did with his half of the treasure. But around seven months later, on May 7, 1821, Lafitte and the remainder of his men sailed from Galveston aboard three ships. He was also accompanied by his mulatto mistress and an infant son. Before leaving, the group burned their Campeche camp, eliminating all trace of their existence.”

  Jim Strong considered Dahlberg’s explanation for why there was nothing left of Lafitte’s former base where the five fraternity boys had been murdered. “But you don’t believe it was that simple, Professor, do you?”

  Dahlberg beamed. “Not at all and not for one minute, Ranger. I think Lafitte fled because someone was after him. Somebody was always after him, of course, but he’d never run before, and one theory says Quentin Cusp’s employers hired professional gunmen to track the pirate down and get back what he’d stolen.”

  “What’s the other theory?”

  “That Lafitte went to South America in search of more of the treasure he’d pilfered from Cusp. He pirated the waters around Cuba en route to Honduras on a forty ton armed schooner named the General Santander. On the night of February 4, 1823, Lafitte attempted to take what appeared to be two Spanish merchant vessels. It was cloudy and visibility was low that night. Maybe that’s why he didn’t realize the Spanish ships were actually heavily armed warships. Their guns pummeled the General Santander. Lafitte was wounded in the battle and died just after dawn on February 5, buried at sea that same day.”

  “So he never found the source of Quentin Cusp’s treasure.”

  “No, Ranger,” Dahlberg said, sighing almost sadly, “he never did. End of story.”

  Jim Strong grinned. “I doubt it, Professor.”

  Dahlberg nodded, grinning back. “Lafitte allowed the crew of the Mother Mary to abandon ship before he sank her. Her crew members told their story to anyone who’d listen and the story kept getting passed along, some of it in writing in the form of journals, including entries from the captain of the ship himself leaving out mention of where they’d sailed from to reach Texas. As for Quentin Cusp, there’s no record of him anywhere after that night. Like he flat out vanished. I don’t know if he was a spy or some sort of pirate in his own right. But I do know that whatever he brought with him on board the Mother Mary changed a lot of lives forever. And I’ve believed for a long time that those Spanish warships were sent after Lafitte by Cusp’s employers with orders to kill the pirate at all costs.”

  Jim Strong shrugged. “Professor, I’m just trying to figure out how a man who never existed and a lost treasure nobody’s ever seen connects with the murder of five fraternity boys on Galveston Island.”

  “They’re not the first to die because of that treasure, Ranger,” Dahlberg said with a strange sense of assurance, his gaze narrowing in intensity. “And they won’t be the last.”

  54

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “That’s how they told it when they got back from Louisiana,” medical examiner Frank Dean Whatley finished.

  His words shocked Caitlin back to the present. For a time she’d felt like a little girl again seated on her grandfather’s lap as he spun one of his many yarns about the exploits that had made him one of the most famous Texas Rangers ever.

  “And was it?” Caitlin asked. “Was the treasure real?”

  “They never found out for sure,” Whatley told her. “You wanna tell me what all this has to do with a car accident victim named Pena who turns out to be Arab?”

  “Nothing, Doc. But it may be connected to something else I’m following up,” she said, starting for the door and realizing how stiff and chilled she’d gotten from not moving an inch through the whole of Whatley’s tale.

  “Then I guess I can expect some more bodies on my slab soon,” he said under his breath.

  Caitlin stopped as she reached for the door. “What was that, Doc?”

  “Nothing, Ranger.”

  “Thought so.” She started to open the door, then swung back toward him. “Wait a sec, you said when my dad and granddad got back from Louisiana.”

  “That’s right. Whole other part of the tale I’ve never heard in its entirety. All I seem to recall is your father getting himself in a tizzy over some trinket they found at the murder scene.”

  “Like a cross, crucifix, something like that?”

  “I believe so. You’ll have to ask Captain Tepper about the rest.”

  “Oh, I will,” Caitlin assured him. “But right now there’s someone else I need to see.”

  PART SIX

  During the Great Depression, the Ranger force was reduced to just forty-five men. Adding fuel to the fire, the Rangers openly supported Governor Ross Sterling against Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson in the Democratic primary in the fall of 1932. As a result, when Ferguson took office in January 1933, she fired every ranger for his partisanship, salaries were slashed, and the budget further reduced the force to thirty-two men. Without the protection of the Rangers, Texas soon became a haven for outlaws such as Raymond Hamilton, George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

  —Legends of America:

  Texas Legends: The Texas Rangers—Order Out of Chaos

  55

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  Cort Wesley hadn’t wanted to leave Caitlin or his sons the night before. The thought of a genuine psychopath like Jalbert Thoms standing on his property, leering at his boys with a soul that defined the very pit of hell, turned his blood cold
while the thought of Thoms returning flushed heat through his entire system. He was sweating and chilled at the same time, a rage welling up inside him like none he’d ever felt before. But the rage came coupled with frustration, since Cort Wesley knew he couldn’t focus his efforts on finding Thoms right now.

  “I don’t wanna tell you what I’m going to do to this man once I get my hands on him,” he’d told Caitlin.

  “I think you should leave, Cort Wesley,” she said, stiffening.

  “Why?”

  “Because if you don’t leave now, I’m not gonna let you leave at all.”

  Cort Wesley finally left around three a.m. when an approaching storm turned the air breezy and cold, the smell of ozone seeming to spill out of the shifting tree branches. But he parked the vehicle he’d appropriated from Jones down the street and around the corner, still in view of the house he had bought in the middle of suburbia so the mother of his kids could raise them safely.

  And look at how things turned out.

  Cort Wesley half expected Jalbert Thoms to return and half wanted him to. In moments like this, that part of him which had a thirst for violence he could neither explain nor fully control inevitably got the better of him and he couldn’t get out of his head the image of the pederast Thoms leering at Dylan in a way that made his flesh crawl.

  He lingered until dawn, greeting the sunrise with the false relief that somehow the light would make everything safe. In this case it brought with it the crackle of thunder and first drum of raindrops on his windshield. To Cort Wesley it sounded like gunfire, the storm’s power shrinking the world to the confines of the car and nothing more. He felt claustrophobic, memories of his cramped cell in Cereso prison stoked enough for his mind to conjure up the rancid smells to the point where he cracked the window open. The storm rushed in, drenching him through the mere slit between frame and window like a tepid shower. Enough to cleanse the car of the stench, imagined or otherwise, and leaving Cort Wesley to compare the storm’s pounding rattle to the staccato burst of machine-gun fire during his stretch in Iraq. He tried telling himself this was just another battle, but Caitlin Strong and his boys hadn’t been part of his life back then, and he squeezed the now sodden steering wheel hard enough to make his knuckles crack.

  When the storm abated, Cort Wesley drove back to the motel where Jones had set him up, thinking of Jalbert Thoms the whole way. He almost took out his cell phone and called Caitlin to tell her that the man brought all his inadequacies front and center, all the years he’d been absent from Dylan’s life magnified by Thoms’s sudden immersion of himself into it.

  As Cort Wesley lay atop the motel room bedcovers, he tried to focus on where the makeshift team Jones had assembled would go from here. What exactly the homegrown terrorists murdered in a mosque basement had been up to on behalf of Anwar al-Awlaki. Even though their fingertips had been sliced off, Cort Wesley expected Jones would have IDs and full backgrounds on the victims within a day, maybe telling them more but almost certainly not enough. He tried to sleep, but quickly gave up. Instead he sat with arms cupped behind his head and eyes wide open to the light struggling to brighten amid a typical late-spring thunderstorm that pounded the roof and windows with a fury that would be gone as quickly as it had come.

  He wanted Caitlin Strong to be lying here next to him. He wanted to be home in Shavano Park ready to take a Gatling gun to the likes of Jalbert Thoms. He wanted the ghost of Leroy Epps to show up to provide the counsel he’d come to rely on.

  Cort Wesley wanted a lot of things, but mostly he wanted to yank Jalbert Thoms’s sternum up his throat. Lying here this way was akin to letting the leering psychopath turn into a festering, sucking wound in his consciousness that finally led him to place a call to the cell phone of a young guard at The Walls prison in Huntsville.

  “Yeah?” a groggy voice answered.

  “Guess who, Frankie?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Glad you remember my voice,” Cort Wesley said.

  Frankie came to Huntsville straight from a stretch in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not much more than a kid who’d seen the worst of things and had finally let it get to him. He received an honorable discharge that could have helped secure him a better job than prison guard in general and The Walls in particular. The cons called him Frankie Cakes because of his fondness for sweets, especially store-bought cupcakes, leaving him with jowls that looked like a birth defect atop his otherwise chiseled frame. Cort Wesley hadn’t talked to him in a long time, but the kind of relationships formed in prison aren’t soon forgotten. That was especially true here since a Latino gang inside The Walls had threatened to kill even the most distant of Frankie’s relatives if he didn’t agree to move dope for them inside. Cort Wesley intervened on his behalf as a fellow war vet and the problem went away.

  “What’s this about, Masters? I’m due at work in twenty.”

  “Tell me what you know about Jalbert Thoms.”

  Silence save for Frankie’s suddenly rapid breathing filled the dead air.

  “You don’t want to get mixed up with him in any way, shape, or form.”

  “Too late, Frankie.”

  “How so?”

  “He paid a visit to my oldest son. Seventeen, looks like a rock star. How much more of this picture do I have to draw for you?”

  “Thoms has been out just over a year now and I was never more glad to see a con go.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Child molesters are supposed to be the lowest form of life in the prison food chain, Cort Wesley, but this man turned the tables from his first day in. A black man who was all-Conference playing defensive lineman looked at him crossways and Thoms shoved a broom stick so far up his ass they had to snake out most of his intestines. You know we get the toughest of any in here, but this man scared me more than any of them ever did. Took special pleasure in breaking in the newest and youngest cons whether they be black, Latino, white, or polka-dotted. Call him an equal opportunity rapist.”

  Cort Wesley’s skin felt like it was trying to turn inside out.

  “He fancied himself a gunslinger, a real cowboy. He was in the Corps for a while and tried his hand at Recon until his fingers got the better of him on some twenty-year-old fresh meat and they dishonorabled him out. The man’s a human stain, Cort Wesley, and if he’s got eyes for your boy, my advice is to cancel his ticket before he comes within a hundred feet of the kid again.”

  “Thanks, Frankie,” Cort Wesley said, no longer hearing the hammering clatter of the rain hitting the roof and windows.

  “Something else. Famous young actor whose name I won’t mention paid us a visit to research a role. Came with an honor guard of security accompanying him so he could soak in as much of the place as possible. His guard escorts left him and his private security entourage in a holding area to respond to a potential riot in the yard and returned to find his protectors beaten to hell and the actor stuffed in a broom closet crying like a baby.” Frankie Cakes took some deep breaths as if to settle himself from the memory. “We found Jalbert Thoms taking a nap in his bunk, cell door still open as if he wanted us to know he’d done it. Goddamn, Cort Wesley, you don’t want this thing anywhere near your life.”

  Cort Wesley realized he’d been squeezing the cell phone Jones had given him so hard he’d actually bent the casing. “My intentions exactly.”

  “Wait, I’m not finished. You ever hear of Rubicon X-Ultra?”

  “Mercenary outfit, as I recall.”

  “Plenty more than that, Cort Wesley. They’re assassins for hire that fill their ranks with psychos like Thoms along with army types Sectioned Eight or dishonorabled out. Word is Thoms hooked up with them well before he began his stay in our hallowed halls. Makes me wonder if these X-Ultra boys had his back. See, the deputy warden in The Walls tried to nail Thoms for what he did to that movie actor and had his house burned down with his wife inside. But she’d been raped and stabbed to death first.”

  “Thanks, Frankie,” he said, e
nding the call.

  So much heat had flushed through Cort Wesley that sweat stuck his shirt to his chest and he felt drops of it rolling down his face. He didn’t remember saying good-bye or laying the phone down on the room’s night table. Outside the slowing rain had taken on the din of Fourth of July firecrackers, the brightening sky making it look like blood drops smacking the glass.

  Cort Wesley found himself lifting his cell phone back up and pressing out Dylan’s number, staring at the digits without pressing Call.

  56

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “Say that again?” Tepper urged, coming out of his chair behind his desk so fast he spilled over the contents of his Alamo ashtray on the blotter.

  “Which part?” Caitlin asked him.

  “Oh, I don’t know, let’s start with the Rangers taking on homegrown terrorists bent on blowing up the state.”

  “The homegrown terrorists, least the ones we know of, are dead. It’s Anwar al-Awlaki himself we’re facing now.”

  “Jesus H. Christ, Hurricane, you have genuinely reached category ten proportions on a scale of five this time.”

  “Makes you glad to have me back, doesn’t it?”

  Tepper shook his head, gnashing his teeth together as he felt through his pockets for his Marlboros without success until he checked the jacket he’d draped over his chair. His first deep drag seemed to calm him enough to flush the red from the lines on his face that looked like dry riverbeds carved out of the land.

  “Jones wants to meet with you,” Caitlin resumed.

  “And I always thought he was a figment of your imagination.”

  “Yours too now, D.W.”

  Tepper looked at her through the cloud of smoke thickening between them. “And you figure what you learned from Doc Whatley pretty much lays the missing pieces out nice and neat.”

  “Some of them. Jones’s missing terrorists disappeared all right, into the identities of dead men like Alejandro Pena.” Caitlin finally sat down. “Can I ask you a question?”