Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  “How ’bout we see for ourselves where it led them?” Jim suggested.

  * * *

  Sheriff Plantaine hung to the side, as the Rangers stepped back to better view the clearing where the five college students had been murdered. Without the bodies to disturb it, the land looked pristine and unspoiled again, smelling of fresh leaves and drying soil.

  “Wasn’t much of a clearing back in Lafitte’s time, I’d imagine,” Earl said.

  “A hundred sixty years of storms have played holy hell with the trees in these parts, reduced the coastline dramatically too,” Jim noted. “And that college professor told me Lafitte burned the colony before leaving to boot.”

  “Even if he hadn’t,” started Tepper, “oaks and cottonwoods like these living that long would be a stretch.”

  Earl’s gaze emptied, as he pictured the boys trudging along to the guidance of Beaudoin Chansoir’s map. “I think one of the map’s prime landmarks was that big tree there, since all the victims were killed within a few feet of it.” He thought of something and swung toward the sheriff. “They had a name for this part of the island in times past, didn’t they?”

  Plantaine nodded. “Hollow Cove, Hollow Ridge, Hollow Beach—something like that.”

  “Named for the fact that many of the big oaks had hollowed themselves out, little more than dead standing bark, going down as far as the thickest roots.”

  “Like an underground tunnel,” Jim followed.

  “Not a bad place to hide some treasure where nobody would ever think of looking,” his father said to the three of them. “Lafitte must’ve figured he’d be gone maybe a couple years at most. Problem we got is that hollow tree, wherever it was, must be long gone.”

  “Maybe it was already gone even back then,” said Tepper.

  “Come again, D.W.?”

  But Tepper had already started toward the big oak tree and laid his back against it. “Lafitte settled Campeche here ’cause of a creek on the left for water from where I’m standing and the thick brush on the right for protection. Now the tree we’re likely looking for would have been about halfway between the two and favoring the north.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Considerably less sun, which would account for the tree being hollow or just dead roots.”

  “Well, there’s nothing here now but brush and trees no older than the three of us,” Jim commented.

  “Those frat boys were killed close together, weren’t they?” Earl asked, fingering his chin.

  “Seemed to be, based on where the bodies lay when we found them,” Sheriff Plantaine told him. “And there were no blood trails indicating otherwise. Course the rain would’ve washed them away by now, but…”

  “Bunched up like they were following the trail together, nothing to see before them and nothing that spooked them in a way that would’ve made them run off to create more distance between ’em.”

  “What’s your point, Earl?” Tepper asked.

  “That whoever killed them wasn’t in plain view when they got here.”

  “Could have been hiding.”

  “I suppose they could, Jim, but I’m thinking they were out of sight. Underground maybe while close enough to pounce quick.”

  “Behind them,” Plantaine muttered, too deferential to speak the words loud.

  “What was that?” Earl asked him.

  “I said maybe we got this wrong. Maybe they walked right over the spot where that old hollow tree stood and didn’t even know they had company underground.”

  “Or,” picked up Jim, “that company had just found the treasure and were worried these boys had come here to rob them.”

  Earl nodded. “I like that. The killers would never believe it was coincidence. They’d figured they were followed and on a pitch black night never would’ve recognized those fraternity boys for what they were until it was too late.”

  “What was it the ME said was used to rip their insides out?” Jim asked. “Some kind of garden hoe or spade, something like that, wasn’t it?”

  “So the killers expected the tree to be gone, knew it was the ground they had to clear to find what was left of where the roots dug deep.”

  The four men walked about, kicking and smoothing at the ground with their boots instead of garden tools, searching for a patch of land that had grown over the opening left when the big hollowed-out oak finally keeled over and died.

  “Whoa,” Sheriff Plantaine said suddenly, “got a depression of some kind over here.”

  The Rangers gathered around the patch of earth he’d just stepped back from and knelt almost in unison. They swiped the surface brush, gravel, stones, and twigs aside gently, like a prospector sifting for gold, to make sure they didn’t miss any potential evidence. First, one bit of empty blackness was revealed beneath the product of their toils, then another. Before too long, they’d cleared a space approximately equal to a large tree stump that had finally given up its hold on living death in one of the many storms that had ravaged Galveston Island. Beneath it, roots had dried out and died, becoming part of the earth again, to reveal a hole in the ground that went five feet down and swept to the south like a tunnel.

  “Direction of the creek bed,” Jim Strong noted. “That’s the way the roots would have grown.” Then he watched his father lowering his head into the hole. “Whatcha think you’re doing?”

  “Just hand me a penlight. D.W., I know you always carry yours on you.”

  “Why?” Tepper asked, producing it.

  “’Cause I think I spotted something down here.”

  * * *

  The object Earl had spotted was a flashlight, but he hadn’t brought any gloves along with him and elected to leave it just where it lay a good five feet underground.

  “How fast can you get a crime scene unit out here?” he asked Plantaine as soon as he popped back up.

  “An hour from the time I make the call from my cruiser.”

  “Tell them to go over this hole with a comb, a brush, or whatever it takes to find any hair, fiber, blood samples, broken fingernails, shoe impressions, or bad breath.” Earl looked toward Jim and D.W. “Whoever went down that hole likely stayed there awhile, ’til they found whatever it was they was looking for.”

  Plantaine took off his hat and scratched his brow. “You saying somebody honest to God found Jean Lafitte’s lost treasure?”

  Earl’s expression was grim and deadpan. “They wouldn’t have bothered killing five innocent boys if they hadn’t have found something.”

  * * *

  The old Company D headquarters in San Antonio was abuzz with the Rangers’ return, word spreading quickly they’d brought back evidence that might be the key to finding the true killers of the five students from the University of Texas at Austin.

  The company captain, a husky man with a huge barrel chest named Bertrand Ash, closed the door to his office behind him, ignoring the flashlight contained in an evidence pouch Earl Strong had laid on his desk.

  “You boys have caused me a heap of trouble,” he said, addressing the three of them with hands planted so tight on the sill of his desk that his fingers reddened with trapped blood flow.

  Earl, Jim, and D.W. exchanged an uneasy glance.

  “I don’t think I heard you right, Captain,” Earl said.

  “Oh, yes you did, Ranger. Federals are looking at those missing Mexicans for the murders and nothing we say or do’s gonna change a goddamn thing.”

  Jim Strong thrust a finger toward the flashlight. “I don’t think that belongs to any of those Mexicans unless they were searching for Jean Lafitte’s lost treasure.”

  “That’s the last thing I wanna hear about goddamn lost treasure!”

  “What’s going on here, Captain?” Tepper asked him.

  “Why don’t you tell me, D.W., being that you’re the only Ranger of the three of you who understands the political realities of certain situations.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Earl asked him.

  “T
ell him, D.W.”

  “I’ll leave it to you, Captain.”

  “That’s an order, Ranger,” Bertrand Ash followed with his eyes locked on Earl.

  The men continued to hold stares while Tepper began, his stomach still queasy from the boat ride back to the mainland hours before. “Sheriff Plantaine said it best our first trip over and what we saw with our own eyes said it even better. Lots of money in Galveston, lots of people with big Texas names investing in its future prosperity of a future resort island with marinas, hotels, golf courses, fancy beachfront condominiums. I need to go on?”

  “Please do,” Ash said, finally dragging his eyes off Earl.

  “Five fraternity boys get themselves murdered by anything but crazed Mexicans long gone from the area could, no, would put a serious damper on those big Texas names getting a proper return on their investment. Hell, any return.” Here Tepper looked squarely at Captain Ash, the anger building in him starting to push the color back into his face. “So the governor gets wind of things and makes the call to turn the whole thing over to the federals, knowing that a phone call or two will keep the case buttoned up under his thumb, as opposed to leaving it with us. Have I said about all there is to say on the matter, Captain?”

  Ash hadn’t budged, his big chest expanding with each heavy breath. “Pretty much.”

  “Well, screw that to hell!” roared Earl Strong, showing a side of his temper he seldom revealed, even when going up against Al Capone’s boys in Sweetwater or ambushed by Mexican gunmen in the desert or facing a drugger army in the famed Battle of Juárez.

  “Watch your tongue, Ranger.”

  “Watch my tongue? What the hell’s going on here? We’re Texas Rangers. We never look away or stand aside for nobody, least of all the federals or friggin’ politicians.”

  “We’re not,” Ash told him. “The governor is.”

  “Since when do we listen to the governor?”

  “Since a thing called the present ushered in something else called reality, Earl. How many years ago was it you cleaned up Sweetwater?”

  “I don’t know, near fifty give or take a few.”

  “You did your job.”

  “Exactly as ordered.”

  Ash finally pulled his palms off his desk with a squishy sound as if his flesh had started to stick to the wood. “Same thing here, Ranger. You do your job. Exactly as ordered.”

  Jim leaned in, trying to ease his father away and feeling heat radiating through every inch of his body, reminding him of his daughter, Caitlin, when she had a bad fever. “You telling me you got no problem with this, Captain?”

  Ash frowned and shook his head. “Of course I’ve got a problem with it. What I don’t have is a choice. And that means neither do any of you. God, in the person of the governor of our fine state, has spoken.”

  “Pompous ass,” Earl muttered.

  “God or the governor?”

  “Whoever called us off. Whoever’s not gonna let us find the killers of those five boys.”

  “Let it go, Earl,” Ash said, softer, taking the tone of a man speaking to someone who’d defined the Texas Rangers for nearly half a century.

  “You ever known me to let anything go, Bert?”

  “You’re eighty years old—”

  “Seventy-nine.”

  “—with enough history to fill a dozen books and make people take off their hats when you pass. You don’t need this shit anymore.”

  Earl ran a long, thin finger down one side of his face and up the other. “I take my badge off now, this case’ll haunt me ’til the day I die.”

  Ash’s gaze grew warm, sneaking a look at the .45 on Earl’s hip and thinking of the Colt previously holstered there that had made him a legend. “You got more important things to concern yourself with, like that beautiful granddaughter. Mark these words, Earl Strong, someday she’s gonna be the first woman to ride with the Rangers, thanks to your teaching.”

  83

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  “Rest, I suppose,” Tepper finished, “is history now.”

  Caitlin found herself transfixed, wishing there was more to the story and sorry it had come to an end. She had no idea how much time had passed, how long Cort Wesley and the boys had been waiting for her outside.

  “And here you are, Hurricane Caitlin about to break her grandfather’s last case wide open.”

  “What happened to the flashlight, Captain?”

  Tepper shrugged his shoulders, pushing the pointy bones up against the seams of his shirt. “Federals took it. My guess it’s at the bottom of a lake somewhere between here and Washington.”

  “Not that voodoo pendant, though.”

  “Nope, we’d already inventoried that, and Captain Ash conveniently forgot to make mention of it to the FBI.”

  “You think he knew this day would come?”

  “I believe he hoped it would. Rangers and politics have never been a smooth mix, Caitlin. Our history more than bears that out. I don’t believe your granddad putting men on the chain the way he did in Sweetwater would go over very well at all today.”

  “Well, sir, some of my methods haven’t been too far off from that.”

  She’d meant for the remark to get a smile from Tepper but instead all she saw was a glum look that quickly turned sad. “And you’ve paid a price for that, haven’t you?”

  Caitlin gazed out the window toward Cort Wesley and the boys waiting patiently in his rental car. “Depends on your meaning, sir.”

  Tepper followed her gaze. “You know my meaning, Mom. I barely knew the woman you’ve been these last few months up until you found that oil rig. And, truth be told, I’m not sure which of you I like better, but I think we both know which one was happier.”

  “Seemed like that rig found me, Captain.”

  “I know.”

  “So maybe I don’t have as much a choice as you think.”

  “Something I left out of the story,” Tepper told her. “Old Earl didn’t lay his badge down on Captain Ash’s desk that day we got back from Galveston, but he may as well have. I’m starting to wonder if you’re coming to a similar crossroads.”

  “I am a bit younger.”

  Tepper’s gaze drifted through the entry glass where Dylan and Luke were still plainly in view. “Earl walked away ’cause he had you and he knew you needed him more than the Rangers. You get my point?”

  Caitlin tried not to let Tepper see her swallow hard. “I’m going to pay Teo Braga a visit tomorrow, Captain.”

  “This have anything to do with whatever it was you found in the bayou?”

  “Only everything,” Caitlin told him.

  84

  SAN ANTONIO, THE PRESENT

  The faces of the four men appeared in each corner of the laptop’s screen, their heads bowed slightly in reverence.

  “You hold the hand of God as we prepare the final stage of our holy mission. It comes tomorrow and you are its bearers, and for your service heaven will be at your feet and history will remember you as heroes forever.” Al-Awlaki bowed his head to match theirs. “But let us now pray for the souls of our lost brothers, who were sacrificed to a greater purpose. Let us remember the pain they suffered and bore, a pain each of us share as one. I close my eyes and see a man whose wife was raped and murdered because she was a Muslim. I see a man who was falsely accused of terrorist activity and hasn’t been able to get a job since. I see men who were turned down for jobs, denied mortgages, forced out of their communities—their lives disrupted for no other reason than their cultural heritage or their religion. And the only thing they all have in common, each and every one, in addition to their faith, is that they are Americans.”

  As al-Awlaki continued with head bowed, Harrabi’s mind flashed back to that night in the Wolfsboro, Tennessee field where stake and strings traced the outline of the Islamic Center the local Muslim community had financed and obtained the permits for, all on a totally aboveboard basis. The air had smelled of gasoline and machine oil from the cons
truction equipment that had been vandalized just the week before and would begin digging out the foundation tomorrow under a forecast for a perfect day.…

  * * *

  Harrabi was certain he caught the scent of manure in the crisp, cool air, even though this hadn’t been an active farm for years. The neighboring ones were too far away to account for the scent, making him wonder if smells could have ghosts too, and he dozed off to sleep that night thinking of his new life filled with new hope.

  With both his boys in high school now, Harrabi looked at their night of guard duty like a campout spent without electronic distraction, even more pleased when his wife, Layla, agreed to come with them. She’d always hated the outdoors, the bugs and the dirty air, and their boys made sure she remembered that while cooking dinner over an open fire. This area lacked even cell phone service, meaning he had his family to himself from dusk to dawn at least. Time to get reacquainted with them in a way their mutually divided schedules never seemed to allow anymore.

  But the night had not gone nearly as well as he had hoped, with the boys growing quickly anxious and impatient over the lack of their phones and computers. They had finally sulked off to sleep and Harrabi vowed not to bother rousing them, intending to cover the entire night’s guard duty himself until they emerged from their tent together right on time.…

  * * *

  “Like our departed brothers, you are Americans all who did everything right and have paid a terrible price for your loyalty. One of you was forced to bury his parents when they were run off the road and killed after being harassed at a restaurant. They stare at you when you board airplanes and they turn away in revulsion at the color of your skin and depth of your faith. You always looked at yourself as one of them, one of the many, until their actions left you with no choice but to turn away and seek the fair-minded response with which I have entrusted you.”

  * * *

  Harrabi was sleeping with his beautiful Layla cradled against him, when he heard the thunk. It wasn’t much of a sound, shouldn’t even have been enough to awaken him. But he lurched upward in his sleeping bag as if it had been a thunderclap, later recalling the odd sensation that it had been the ghosts of his parents that drove him from his slumber. Sending him out into the night where his life would change forever.