Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  Earl took off his Stetson and flapped it against his side. “So you didn’t draw these boys a map of Lafitte’s old Campeche base camp on Galveston Island.”

  “Listen better with your ears, Dead Man. There those things on the sides of your head there. Them boys came by skiff boat they musta rented. Lot more scraped and busted up than when they took it out I saw for sure, me.”

  The old man tapped his wrist to signal they’d spent all of Jim’s money even though twenty minutes had clearly not passed. D. W. Tepper handed Chansoir a ten this time.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “Nothin’. That be all there is to tell, yeah. Here,” he said, dropping the ten-dollar bill at Tepper’s feet, “take your money back and get yourselves gone from here. Ain’t gonna draw no map for you, no matter how much you’s offers, me.”

  He rose fast from his chair, knees creaking, his half open shirt billowing in the wind.

  “Dead Man,” he said, addressing Earl, “you take your boys and do the get-go. You heard what I got to say and there ain’t no more to be said.”

  68

  MARBLE FALLS, THE PRESENT

  “It was when he stood up,” Tepper finished.

  “What?”

  “I saw something that didn’t really register at the time. It wasn’t much really, just a faded portion on the top part of his chest. Figured it was a scar or birthmark or something and didn’t think any more about it. But the mark was about the same size as that cross in that pouch there.”

  “So if you’re right, it could mean Chansoir gave the cross to whoever eventually murdered those college kids.”

  “Except we couldn’t make any sense of the disconnect between those boys following a map of the Louisiana bayou to Galveston Island. And we never really got the chance to try.”

  “That’s the second time you raised that issue, Captain.”

  “We didn’t know it then, but our trip to the bayou was pretty much the end of things as far as the investigation was concerned.”

  “With you and the Strongs teamed up, I find that hard to believe.”

  “Subject for another day,” Tepper said, his voice lower, clearly not interested in continuing the tale.

  “You rule out any of the five frat boys being targeted personally?”

  “Course. Nope, near as we can figure this was an utterly random crime, those boys being in the absolute worst place at the absolute worst time. We figure they surprised somebody who was up to no good in that clearing, but were never able to figure out exactly what kind of no good they were up to.”

  “You went back to Galveston, didn’t you?”

  “We did indeed, Ranger.” Tepper drained a hefty portion of what remained of his beer. “I’m just starting to relax. That makes this the wrong time to go about telling you the rest. It ain’t good. Let’s leave things at that.”

  “I’ve got my own part of it to add,” Caitlin said, holding the evidence pouch up to the light for both of them to see. “What if this isn’t a cross at all, D.W.?”

  “You’re talking about the broken off piece we never found at the scene,” Tepper responded, unable to disguise his interest.

  “I believe there are two missing pieces. Did some Internet research when I couldn’t sleep last night.”

  “Yeah, gunfights’ll do that to you, Ranger.…”

  “You wanna hear what I found out?”

  “I don’t know, do I?”

  Caitlin pulled some pages she’d folded up from her pocket. All three had pictures of the same object but from different angles: a cross with a heart extending from the top and a second piece extending out of the bottom that featured a swirl design with what looked like a grid pattern running through it. She used fingers on both her hands to cover up the extensions on the page featuring a dead-on view.

  “Look familiar?”

  Tepper compared it in size and shape to the item contained in the old evidence pouch. “Looks like our cross, all right.”

  “According to what I found out, this pendant is called Erzulie veve.”

  “Who? What?”

  “Erzulie is the voodoo loa, spirit force, of love in Haitian folklore later adopted by Cajuns like Beaudoin Chansoir. A veve is a loa’s spirit symbol, and that’s what we got here.”

  Tepper viewed the symbol, then the cross through the cloudy plastic, trying to superimpose both of them over the faded spot the old Cajun had on his chest. The proportions were just about perfect.

  “Okay, Ranger, you have now succeeded in linking a Cajun bait salesman who could barely see to a crime scene maybe a thousand miles away.”

  “No, I haven’t. I’ve only linked his voodoo charm to that crime scene, toted there by somebody else,” Caitlin said, laying the evidence pouch and sheets of paper down on the table. “But say you’re a Cajun who wants to escape into the modern world. You’d start by changing the name Chansoir to an English equivalent, like Jackson maybe.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, am I hearing you right on this?” He fanned his face with the dinner menu. “You suggesting that Alvin Jackson, Teo Braga’s boss when he started out in waste management, was involved in those murders?”

  “Braga raised the Cajun magic connection himself. I’m just connecting the dots. Whoever killed those boys also knew enough about Cajun lore to ravage the bodies the way that mythical creature would, Rougarou or whatever.”

  “All this over some legendary treasure that probably never existed?”

  “I’m not saying Alvin Jackson or anybody else found it, D.W. I’m just saying they might have gone to Galveston Island looking.”

  Tepper worked his nicotine-stained fingertip in and out of the deepest furrows that look liked ditches dug on his cheeks and forehead. “Forgetting one thing, aren’t you, Ranger? That old man drew maps that sent treasure hunters like those frat boys deeper into the bayou, not to Galveston Island.”

  Caitlin thought about that for a moment. “You said you got a rise out of Chansoir when you mentioned that fact to him.”

  “He looked kind of sick, almost as bad as me, and I’d been puking my guts out. But what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Assume Lafitte buried whatever he took off the Mother Mary on Galveston Island instead of the bayou. Assume Chansoir drew out a map for his grandson Alvin directing him to where the real legend said the treasure was actually hidden.…”

  “And then these frat boys come along almost right afterwards, and he draws them the identical map instead of the one that would’ve taken them deeper into the bayou.” Tepper nodded, weighing Caitlin’s assumption. “I like you better when you’re thinking instead of shooting, Ranger. Except I don’t know where you’re going with this theory exactly.”

  Caitlin grabbed a warm roll wrapped in a linen napkin from a breadbasket before her. “I believe I’ve got a way to prove it, sir,” she said, as a big Ford Expedition with blacked-out windows pulled into a no-parking zone across the street.

  69

  MARBLE FALLS, THE PRESENT

  “And don’t you think I didn’t hear about those fights you got in,” Cort Wesley said to Luke, broaching the subject for the first time since they’d driven north to Marble Falls to meet Caitlin and Captain Tepper for dinner.

  Luke frowned so hard that the sides of his mouth seemed to disappear entirely. “I lost two of them.”

  “Well, that’s something we gotta work on.”

  “Don’t bother,” Dylan said, giving up on trying to find a decent radio station. “He sucks.”

  “He’s right. I do.”

  “Well,” Cort Wesley started, as they cruised down Main Street looking for a space close to Obie’s Barbecue, sliding under a banner strung across the road announcing a Soapbox Derby right here that weekend.

  Luke leaned forward. “Hey, that could be fun.”

  Dylan shook his head, blowing the hair from his face through pursed lips. “It’s gay.”

  “Now why you gotta use that word that way?” Cort Wesle
y said critically.

  “What way? What word?”

  Cort Wesley just shook his head and lined up his rental to parallel park adjacent to a black Ford Expedition with its nose against the curb.

  “I think I see Caitlin inside the restaurant,” Luke said, waving to get her attention.

  * * *

  Caitlin took a bite of her roll and chased it down with a gulp of water from a glass laden with shards of melted ice. “I think that’s Cort Wesley’s rental car parking across the street in front of that drugstore.”

  “You sound like a high school girl.”

  “Stop it.”

  Tepper grinned. “I say something wrong?”

  Caitlin started to smile back but then stopped, her features freezing as she spotted something else outside. “Get your gun ready, Captain.”

  “We haven’t even ordered yet, Ranger,” he said, drawing his .45 as Caitlin showed her SIG over the table.

  * * *

  “Duck your heads!” Cort Wesley yelled at his boys, noticing the Expedition’s back window sliding down in the midst of parallel parking.

  “Huh?” from both his sons together.

  “Get down!”

  He jerked the car to a halt and jammed it into park only half in the space. He had his Glock in hand in the next moment, kicking the driver’s door open just as the muzzle flashes erupted, bursting out of the Expedition’s open rear window.

  * * *

  Caitlin and Tepper hit the floor together before they could get off a single shot, the staccato barrage of machine-gun fire blowing out Obie’s plate-glass window overlooking Main Street. Shards of glass and bullets poured inward, the gunfire’s sound drowned out by the screams of diners diving for cover everywhere.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Tepper rasped, his voice sounding like someone had strained his words through steel wool.

  Caitlin started crawling toward him. “You okay? You hit?”

  “Hold your horses, Ranger. Just been a time since I been in a shooting war.”

  “How long?”

  “Let you know if I live,” Tepper told her, popping up even with the window’s bottom and firing off shots toward the Expedition.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley hit the ground and rolled, poised and ready to fire from a prone position when the Expedition’s four doors opened in a single motion and four figures clad in black from head to toe lurched out. He hit the Glock’s trigger and kept pulling, focusing his fire on the two men on the vehicle’s driver’s side to which he had an unobstructed view. Last thing they would’ve been expecting which should have given him the advantage.

  At least eight of his shots, four for each, were on target, knocking the gunmen off kilter while not seeming to slow them down at all.

  Armor suits!

  He’d heard of the suits but had never actually seen one in action, save for video footage of some bank robbery where the crooks shot up an entire police department while walking straight down the street. Cort Wesley seemed to remember they used automatic weapons to mow down cops, all the while with bags of money slung over their shoulders.

  He popped a fresh magazine home, already twisting his angle to account for headshots instead. Only by then the two gunmen whose armor he’d hit were swinging his way, assault rifles ready to dance in their hands.

  * * *

  With only eight shots in his .45, Tepper had to reload before Caitlin. The pistol was a commemorative model issued just last year to celebrate the great Ranger tradition that had started with Samuel Walker’s Colt, custom designed to shoot from horseback in 1881, and continued well into the next century with the Springfield Model 1911 .45. The brute force of the .45 slug was second to none, packing maybe twice the stopping power of Caitlin’s nine-millimeter shells. But neither of their shots managed to do anything but ruffle the advancing gunmen’s forward motion.

  “Frigging Terminators,” Tepper mumbled, jamming a fresh magazine into his .45. “We’re gonna need goddamn ray guns or something.”

  More bullets peppered Opie’s, raining stray glass downward. Caitlin held to her position long enough to see one of the gunmen twisting toward Cort Wesley, tip of his M-16 angling downward. She fired, not for him, but the side window glass immediately at his rear. Three shots that sent glass flying everywhere, distracting him long enough for Caitlin to risk standing all the way up and measuring off a shot straight into the center of his face.

  She watched the hollow point shell erupt from the back of his helmeted skull dragging chunks of bone and flecks of brain matter with it. Impact whipsawed him sideways, slamming him into the second gunman on the driver’s side in the very moment that man was sighting down on Cort Wesley.

  * * *

  Curled up half on the seat and half on the passenger side floor, Dylan reached up and popped open the glove compartment.

  “Dylan!” Luke wailed from the backseat.

  “Shut up!”

  “Dylan!”

  “Keep your head down!”

  Dylan’s groping fingers finally closed on the cold steel of a .40 caliber Glock where his dad always kept it no matter what vehicle he was driving. Dylan’s hand was shaking, all of him was shaking, as he drew it to him, racking the slide as he pushed the door open and lurched out onto the street.

  * * *

  The two gunmen from the Expedition’s passenger side fired twin nonstop barrages through the open space where Opie’s plate-glass window used to be. Caitlin and Tepper hit the floor again, each soon to be down to their last magazine.

  For some reason, Caitlin registered the sound of cooking grease sizzling. “Cover me!” she called to Tepper, already pulling herself across the glass-splattered floor.

  “Bad idea, Ranger!”

  “No good ones right now.”

  * * *

  Cort Wesley had the man in his sights but his angle precluded the headshot he desperately needed. He tried two shots low, hoping to hit skin and bone beneath the armor suit. But the hollow thunks told him the Kevlar or ballistic nylon padding stretched all the way to the man’s feet. The man opened up with a barrage that strummed against the rental’s driver’s side, digging divots from the steel. Pop up and Cort Wesley would be dead for sure. Stay down and it would just take longer.

  Pop! Pop! Pop!

  Caitlin doing the shooting, he figured, until the sound and the trajectory proved all wrong, and he glimpsed Dylan coming round the rental to catch the gunman totally by surprise. A couple of shots slammed into the armor like it was a man-sized cardboard target, Cort Wesley having the sense of mind to register his oldest son was shooting for the first time at flesh and blood.

  Cort Wesley thought he heard a half dozen more shots, at least two of them smacking the armor with dull whops. But it held the man steady and stopped his assault long enough for Cort Wesley to bounce upward to one knee and empty his Glock for his face. Might have hit it once or eight times; he didn’t know, since it only took one to put the man down in a burst of blood spray after slamming him into the door. The man’s rifle strap ended up snaring on the mirror, leaving him suspended only halfway to the pavement.

  Cort Wesley’s eyes found Dylan, looking at the dead man instead of him, the .40 caliber shaking up a storm in his hand. All he could do was lunge to his feet, positioning himself to shield his son as Caitlin Strong emerged from Opie’s to confront the remaining two shooters.

  70

  MARBLE FALLS, THE PRESENT

  Caitlin dropped down behind a standing mailbox, never more gratified than now by the postal service’s work ethic that had failed to collect today’s accumulated mail, further safeguarding her from the barrage that burned her ears as it clanged against steel. Her hearing came in fits and starts now, silence in one breath and blistering volume in the next. The latter detected the heavy booms of Tepper’s .45 offering resistance, buying time to …

  To what?

  For some reason, her mind flashed back to the gunfight inside the school all those months before. Ho
w she’d felt when she realized one of her bullets had found an innocent boy. There were still bystanders scurrying everywhere in the street, and she had to fight not to temper her instinct by not taking a shot when the first opening allowed. Confidence had never been an issue for her, not since she was a girl. But today, for the first time, she felt suddenly hesitant about firing, afraid of downing another innocent.

  Caitlin figured maybe a minute at most had passed since the shooting had started with the spray that peppered Opie’s window, but it felt like an hour. Times like these, her granddad had told her, were when the gunfight stopped and all-out war began. And she had to be ready to fight it on those terms. Think too much and she was dead; it was as simple as that.

  With Tepper’s fire at least slowing the gunmen’s advance, Caitlin pushed herself prone and angled her SIG in the small space between the mailbox’s bottom and the sidewalk. She propped the tip upward on the other side, believing the armor suit to be weakest over the throat. If she got lucky, one of her hollow points might carve a path straight through it, leaving only the one gunman to contend with.

  The shot was difficult, impossible almost, as she had to peek around the outside of the box to aim, her appearance greeted by a fresh barrage before Tepper’s final bullets bought her a few extra moments. The street had gone briefly quiet, devoid even of screams when she fired five shots, glimpsing the nearer gunman twist in the direction a clean hit would have taken him.

  But the brief sense of elation fled her when no blood spray accompanied the impact and she knew her latest shots had been mere distractions as her others had been.

  “Damn!” she said out loud.

  Both her dad and granddad had survived scrapes just as bad as this, except for the fact that nothing they, or she, had ever come up against before compared to the firepower and murderous intent these shooters displayed. They were professional hitters bred of military training, not run-of-the-mill cowboys like the friends Jalbert Thoms had brought along with him to the Red Stripe bar the night before. Caitlin had just decided upon an all-out frontal charge as her only remaining move, the suicidal nature of it not withstanding, when the explosive roar of an engine claimed the street.