Strong Vengeance

by Jon Land

  “The friend I brought with me,” Cort Wesley said, looking back at Caitlin. “You remember his name, PawPaw?”

  “Nope, can’t say I do. Gave you the map too, I did, just like my PawPaw done with me. Made you promise me you’d never go back to Angola, you. Bad place. You come outta there with a smell like the devil on you. Rotten earth it be like. I remembers when you came back ’fore you moved away again.” Chansoir reached out and grasped Cort Wesley’s hand even harder. “You back for good this time?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Gets lonely here, you know.”

  “I do.”

  “I can still make my lures, me. Earn my own keep, Augustin, something your dang father never did a day in his whole life.”

  Cort Wesley gently extricated himself from the old man’s trembling grasp. “I’ve got to be going now for a time, PawPaw.”

  “But you’ll be coming back.”

  “I will. Promise.”

  Beaudoin Chansoir returned his hands to the arms of his chair. “Remember to keep your promise, you. No more Angola, no more trouble. You got your own to take care of now.”

  87

  UVALDE, THE PRESENT

  “Look familiar?” Caitlin asked Braga, holding up the evidence pouch containing the voodoo pendant she’d managed to identify a few days before.

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “So you weren’t the young man Alvin Jackson brought with him to the bayou.”

  “I was not.”

  “And you’re telling me you’ve never seen this before.”

  “Of course, I have,” Braga said, gesturing toward the evidence pouch. “It belonged to Alvin Jackson.”

  “So if I told you this pendant was found in the hand of one of those dead college boys, you’d be suggesting he tore it off Alvin Jackson’s neck in the struggle.”

  “You’re the one doing all the suggesting here, Ranger. I owe more to Alvin Jackson than any man on earth; I cried harder at his funeral, after he passed of a heart attack, than my own father’s. But we both know he had violent tendencies, don’t we?”

  “And what about you, Mr. Braga? Do you share some of those same tendencies?”

  Braga stiffened and held Caitlin’s stare as he responded. “I believe we all do. But there’s a difference between that and being party to the murder of five college students.” His eyes locked on the pendant again. “If Rangers found that at the crime scene, there’s only one man it could have belonged to.”

  “Alvin Jackson?”

  Braga nodded. “As much as it pains me to say that.”

  Caitlin took a deep breath, her expression empty of emotion. “I reread that article about you in Texas Monthly, sir. There was a picture of you with Alvin Jackson taken just after you bought the company in 1983. A pendant identical to what this one used to look like was dangling outside his shirt. Means it couldn’t have been torn off his neck that night those boys were murdered on Galveston Island.”

  Braga looked at her the way he had at Covel Gardens, then again in the conference room at Company D headquarters: unruffled and almost amused by her insinuation. Unlike normal people, men like him, true sociopaths used to ignoring society’s laws, grew increasingly placid the more they were confronted with the truth. Right now Braga looked bored, at least indifferent, as if the murders of five boys thirty years before were no different from crushing ants under his boot.

  “You ever hear of Rubicon X-Ultra, Mr. Braga?” Caitlin asked him, continuing her assault.

  “Did you bring another warrant with you, Ranger?”

  “They’re a paramilitary group that farm themselves out to the highest bidder.”

  “You didn’t answer my question about the warrant.”

  “We’re just making conversation here for the time being. Don’t need a warrant for that, do I? Anyway, my captain and I came up against some of those psychos last night. I thought I’d ask since we’ve been able to link your employee Jalbert Thoms to them.”

  Caitlin thought she saw Braga stiffen ever so slightly. “Mr. Thoms is no longer in our employ, I already told you that. And I haven’t seen him since the unfortunate incident at that bar.”

  “Which followed the unfortunate incident with a teenage boy I was responsible for at the time. Or did that slip your mind, Mr. Braga?”

  “Show me a warrant or get out, Ranger,” Braga said, raising his voice above a sorting machine that had just kicked into a higher gear as a fresh load of trash fed into it down the biggest conveyor belt Caitlin had ever seen.

  “I don’t have one, Mr. Braga. I thought you might like to cooperate of your own volition.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Because you and Alvin Jackson, born Augustin Chansoir, followed his grandfather’s map to Galveston Island where you managed to find Jean Lafitte’s legendary treasure in the form of diamonds mined in Brazil. But Mr. Jackson’s grandfather inadvertently drew the same map out for some college boys on a fraternity scavenger hunt and they had the misfortune of showing up that same night, just after you found the treasure.”

  Caitlin stopped, as if expecting Braga to comment, but he remained strangely silent, breathing like a snake through his mouth.

  “I believe these diamonds provided the stake you needed to buy the company that evolved into Braga Waste Management,” she continued. “I can put you away on all that for sure. But, on the other hand, we’ve got the body of a possible homegrown terrorist in the morgue who was suffering from a severe case of radiation poisoning that would’ve killed him if a car accident hadn’t done the trick first.”

  Something changed in Braga’s expression, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. It was subtle, just a slight shift of his eyes, a swelling in his throat as he swallowed hard.

  “We’ve got firm intelligence that the cell this dead man was a part of is planning an attack based right here in Texas. We know it’s gonna be bad and we know it’s coming soon and now we know it almost surely involves radioactivity.”

  “I have no idea what any of this has to do with me, Ranger. You’re wasting my time.”

  “Am I, sir? I believe you know about the serious problem of storing radioactive waste all across this country, and that the companies behind the power plants responsible pay exorbitant black market fees to anyone who’ll take it off their hands and dump it anywhere they can.” Caitlin hesitated, just long enough. “Like the ocean, Mr. Braga, in barrels identical to the ones we found beneath the Mariah. And when the rig’s ROV happened to find the remnants of a shipwreck on the sea floor, they shut down operations, but not before the same ROV also spotted your barrels. The terrorists must’ve figured that would jeopardize their plans, so they killed the whole goddamn crew to keep the secret.”

  “You can’t prove any of this.”

  “Just like I can’t prove you’ve cornered the market on the illegal dumping of radioactive waste and made yourself tens of untraceable millions in the process.” Braga started to speak, but Caitlin rolled right over his words. “This is much bigger than you, me, and whatever we got between us. I need you to tell me how many barrels we’re talking about and where I can find them now.”

  Braga took a step backward into a spot on the floor the big overhead lighting rigs reached only in shadows. The result was to cast him like a specter, more phantom than man, like something out of a horror movie. His sneer stuck out absurdly, the light sheen of sweat on his face looking like laminate brushed over his skin. He looked down, then up again—beyond Caitlin toward something that had clearly claimed his vision.

  “You haven’t really left me with any choice at all, Ranger.”

  Caitlin saw him nod ever so slightly toward the spot beyond her an instant before bullets clanged off the steel just over her head.

  88

  UVALDE, THE PRESENT

  Up in a darkened corner of the network of catwalks, Cort Wesley heard the shots too. He pinned down their point of origin as a platform
extension on some sort of mobile rig that looked like a cherry picker capable of reaching any point of the facility all the way up to the ceiling for maintenance.

  “Told ya he was up here!” he heard Leroy Epps’s voice blare in his mind. “That freak show Thoms got a death wish for sure! I’d shoot him myself if I could still hold a gun!”

  Cort Wesley was already in motion by then, Glock palmed in his hand as he rushed across the catwalk toward the platform on which Jalbert Thoms was hiding. The platform was raised higher than the catwalk and Thoms had taken a shooting angle that hid him from this angle anyway.

  More gunshots clacked off in rapid succession, clanging off steel with a hollow echo. On the floor below, Cort Wesley glimpsed Caitlin Strong lurch behind a beam for cover as Braga scampered away. Then she was returning fire, her shots missing badly but distracting Thoms from his approach.

  Except that drawing closer still did not yield him even a glimpse of the gunman, much less a clear shot.

  “What a cluster fuck, bubba,” Leroy Epps said in his mind.

  * * *

  Braga had told Jalbert Thoms to wait for his signal. He knew the Caitlin Strong would be coming in the wake of the disastrous gunfight last night. She couldn’t take a hint, didn’t understand the price she’d ultimately pay for going up against true power.

  Thoms didn’t care about any of that. He’d lived his entire life giving into his most base urges and predilections. He never held back, whether it be with a boy he wanted for his own or a man he wanted dead. Whatever gene regulated such behaviors was clearly not in his DNA, and that had suited him just fine until Caitlin Strong had sent him scurrying out of that bar in which he’d intended to leave her dead. The look on Dylan Torres’s face earlier that same day, the fear he’d inspired in the boy, was what he craved and was accustomed to. Not the suppressed rage and sense of purpose he saw on Caitlin Strong’s in that bar. Thoms knew of her reputation and her prowess that made him long for this kill all the more, mandated by nothing more than his own remorseless intentions to take down a Texas Ranger who’d made her name with her gun.

  It was the Old West all over again and he wouldn’t stop until one of his bullets scrambled her brains.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley figured the pause in Thoms’s firing meant he was exchanging a spent magazine for a fresh one. The available seconds were enough to bring him within shooting angle of the platform, but all he glimpsed was the far edge of the sound suppressor affixed to the end of an assault rifle barrel. Fire at that, in little more than frustration, and he’d succeed only in giving himself away to no good or realistically meaningful end.

  “He’s gonna keep shooting ’til your gal is dead, bubba.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Gotta go up or down as opposed to sticking here. How’s that?”

  “Just what I needed to hear,” Cort Wesley thought, or maybe said, as he dashed along the catwalk for the nearest stairs.

  * * *

  Braga slinked further off, using the machinery for cover. Caitlin trained her SIG on him, not sure if she really intended to fire when a ricocheting bullet fired by Jalbert Thoms caught him in the leg and pulled the floor right out from under his feet. She scrabbled out after Braga, keeping low, the echoing din of Thoms’s fire sounding in her ears.

  “I oughtta let you bleed to death,” Caitlin said, dragging Teofilo Braga behind as much cover as she could find.

  “You can’t win this,” Braga said, grimacing in pain as Caitlin fastened her kerchief into a makeshift tourniquet on his leg. “You have no idea what you’re up against. A thirty-year-old murder? I’ll never spend a day in court, not a single day.”

  “It’s you who’s in the dark this time, sir. Hanging’s still on the books for treason, you know.”

  “Treason?”

  “You knowingly conspired with terrorists on the transfer of radioactive waste you’ve been stockpiling from nuclear plants all over the country. How much did those plants pay you, Mr. Braga, how much did it take for you to sell your country out?”

  But Braga remained unmoved. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

  “Get what?”

  “What’s really going on here.” Then he noticed her eyes veer suddenly toward the clamor of what sounded like boots rattling steel.

  “What are you looking at?” Braga asked her.

  “Justice, sir.”

  * * *

  Jalbert Thoms felt a sense of utter calm seize him. It was the same feeling he got when ready to move on a boy he’d been keeping in his sights with just that moment in mind. This was no less of a game than that, and Thoms felt his heart slow to the utter certainty of his ultimate victory. Sooner or later the Ranger would show enough of herself for him to take her down. Patience just wasn’t part of her vocabulary. So long as she had bullets to fire, she’d make a game of it, unable to accept defeat any more than he could. The modified M16/AR15 ArmaLite rifle wasn’t the ideal sniper tool, but from this distance it suited his needs just fine and its scope made it seem as if Caitlin Strong was a finger-length away.

  Sure he’d have to go on the run when this was done, but he’d always fancied himself an outlaw and he had the X-Ultra boys to help place him in a new country with plenty of work and plenty of long-haired fodder he could pretend were Dylan Torres when he took them for his own. In the right country, nobody would even know they were gone.

  The mere thought of that sent Thoms’s heart fluttering in his chest, eye squeezed against his scope to ready his next shot when the platform rocked beneath him.

  * * *

  Cort Wesley knew if Thoms spotted him he’d be dodging 5.56mm bullets in his rush to the truck cab controlling the overhead platform on which Thoms was perched. But he reached it without incurring a single shot, not realizing he’d been holding his breath the whole way until he eased the cab door closed behind him and sucked in air laced with thin trails of refuse from crushed and collected recyclables.

  The machines’ heavy din had camouflaged the sounds of his charge across the floor, staving off the fusillade of fire that would otherwise likely have blazed down upon him. And now Cort Wesley was free to rapidly familiarize himself with the controls in the cab, almost identical indeed to the cherry pickers he’d driven in summer construction jobs as a teenager before he’d started interning in burglary with his dad Boone Masters.

  He jammed the truck into gear, feeling its tires whine against the concrete floor as he sought to put more distance between Caitlin and the psycho he saw himself tearing apart piece by piece, starting with his private parts. Beyond that he had formed no real plan, until the moment he turned the truck parallel with the massive trash separating machine that reminded him of something out of his son Luke’s sci-fi video games.

  Cort Wesley was half expecting some tentacled monster to leap out at him from within it, glimpsing sorting rakes that looked like robotic teeth belonging to a prehistoric shark. Then he heard the rattle of 5.56mm fire clanging against the cab roof, imagining he could feel the heat of Thoms’s bullets struggling to find him.

  * * *

  “I don’t scare easy, Ranger.”

  “You ever see the inside of a military prison? It’s not pretty, but I imagine that’s where you’ll be staying for a time.”

  Caitlin watched Braga smile through the pain knifing through him. “You think that’s the way the world works? You think this strong vengeance of yours is gonna end up putting me away? I almost feel bad for you.”

  “Save the gesture for somebody who needs it.”

  “Oh, you need it, all right; you just don’t realize how much. You think I did this all on my own? I just said you had no idea what you were up against, but I guess you didn’t hear me.”

  “Why don’t you spell it out?”

  Braga’s next smile quickly dissolved into a grimace. “I’d rather let you find out on your own, have to wash the egg off your face when this whole thing blows up in it.”

&nb
sp; “You’re protected? Is that what you’re hinting at?”

  “Figure it out yourself, Ranger.”

  “What I’ve figured out so far is that you’re now an accessory to the attempted murder of a Texas Ranger. You wanna see how that plays out in a San Antonio courthouse?”

  Braga managed another smile. “Your mind has this twisted around. I’m the one who’s shot, remember? Whoever’s doing the shooting is acting on their own.”

  * * *

  Cort Wesley worked the controls to lurch the truck back and forth, hoping to preempt any further shooting by Jalbert Thoms, if not dump him off altogether.

  Dump him off …

  He thought it might have been Leroy Epps’s words in his mind, or maybe they were his own thoughts this time. Either way, he jerked the truck into reverse, feeling a fresh spray of bullets slamming the roof, searching for a soft spot or an angle through the windshield that was pasty with refuse dust.

  Then he heard the distinctive clack of Caitlin’s SIG, echoing loud enough to rise over the clamor of the machines and conveyors powering the facility. Cort Wesley didn’t think she’d be able to hit Thoms but her fire stopped his long enough for Cort Wesley to drive the truck forward now, picking up speed as the platform rocked above him.

  “Love that gal, bubba!”

  “Me too, champ.”

  At that he worked the truck’s wheel and brake at the same time, tires squealing against concrete until its frame slammed into the separator machine’s housing. Impact smacked his skull against the windshield, just as it jostled the platform forward too.

  And Jalbert Thoms with it.

  Cort Wesley was too dazed to see him fall straight into the separating machine’s steel teeth, but not too dazed to hear Thoms’s terrible screams over all other noise as a spray of blood lifted into the dirty air along with macerated bone and gristle. He thought he could still hear Thoms’s high-pitched wails until a sucking sound like air from a spent balloon blew outward and the blood shower stopped.

  Cort Wesley reached for the door latch, but his hand froze halfway there, starbursts pulsing before his eyes before darkness claimed him.