Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  Cort Wesley fired off ten shots in rapid succession, the bullets impacting low by their feet to kick up a storm of concrete shards that stung like needles on impact. Two of them managed to get off feeble, poorly aimed shots before turning and hightailing it from the area, freeing Cort Wesley to lurch back toward Cholo Brown’s table.

  He had his own hand cannon tilting for Cort Wesley in that moment, his eyes bled of the bravado he was desperately trying to recapture.

  “Make the call, white boy.”

  And Cort Wesley did, by kicking Brown’s chair out to send him tumbling. Cholo got off a single wild shot, pistol still clutched in his grasp when Cort Wesley planted a boot over his neck.

  “Drop the gun or I’ll crush your throat.”

  Cholo Brown tossed his hand cannon aside.

  “Now, we’re going to have a little talk, you and me, about you pushing drugs, opiates especially, at the Village School.”

  “What’s it to you, man?” Brown rasped.

  “My son’s a student there,” Cort Wesley said flatly. “He OD’d on your drugs and almost died.”

  “I got nothing to do with that!”

  Cort Wesley pressed his boot down more firmly. “You want to rethink your answer?”

  Brown’s eyes watered, filling with hate. He was breathing in short, rapid heaves that made Cort Wesley wonder if he was about to pass out.

  “You some kind of tough guy, a real badass? You try cleaning house in these parts, it’ll be your own clock ends up getting cleaned.”

  “Where’d you get the pills that almost killed my son?”

  Fear replaced anger on Brown’s expression. The dreadlocks had been tossed back from his face, revealing a receding hairline.

  “I tell you that, we’re both dead men.”

  “A chance I’m willing to take.”

  “I don’t shit where I live, puta.”

  “Give me a name, Cholo. If he’s mobbed up, chances are I know him.”

  Sirens wailed in the narrowing distance, Brown not looking relieved by the sound. “Mob? What, were you born yesterday or something?”

  Cort Wesley pressed his heel down a little harder. “A name, Cholo.”

  “Don’t have a name for you. Just an address. Knock yourself out, puta. Just make sure you got your affairs in order first.”

  32

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  For Yarek Bone, looking the part made for the best disguise of all. With his target technically being held at University Hospital by Homeland Security, he knew the protective forces he’d be facing would be made up of national guardsmen drawn from a rapid response team formulated as part of an emergency action plan. Troops not used to working with each other and comfortable carrying weapons but not much more. He doubted all but a very few of them had ever seen real combat—not a requirement to manage this particular protective vigil.

  Bone dressed in the proper regalia, wondering how long it would take him to kill the entire team assigned to the hospital. More than five minutes for sure. The irony of that location, the fact that people came here to be treated for the kind of pain he couldn’t feel, wasn’t lost on him.

  He figured there’d be at least a half dozen of them on site, the first two of whom cast him nothing more than nods as he passed through the main entrance, their M16s held in the same fashion. So Homeland couldn’t even provide their men with the updated M4 model, figuring the antiquated M16s to be more than adequate for this particular mission.

  Bone knew he’d have to show some ID as he drew closer to the isolation ward where his target was being held. Dealing with them would be no harder than peeling off a self-stick postage stamp.

  No call for subtlety here, this assignment being the murderous equivalent of a smash-and-grab robbery. Yarek Bone didn’t care why the lone survivor of Camino Pass needed to die, just wondered how many more lives he’d have to take before getting to him.

  33

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “What are we missing here?” Caitlin asked Doc Whatley from across the University Hospital cafeteria table.

  “Icing,” the Bexar County medical examiner said, looking up from his danish sprinkled with nuts and what look liked cinnamon drizzle on top. “You know, like the kind they sell at La Panadería.”

  “That place serves the best baked goods in the city, Doc, but the lines are ridiculous.”

  “Depends when you shop, Ranger.”

  Caitlin watched him cut another slice of his danish with a knife and fork. “So why’s Lennox Scully still alive?”

  “I’m working off the theory that the cyanide had a limited dispersal range. And sometimes what something isn’t provides a clearer notion as to what it is.”

  “You’ve lost me, Doc.”

  “Well now, that’s a first, isn’t it?”

  “Sounds like you’re gloating.”

  “I’ve been stuck here for two straight days now and this is my sixth danish. It feels good to do something besides eat.”

  “So tell me what it is you’re gloating about.”

  “How is a typical bio attack waged?”

  “Airburst,” Caitlin said, recalling a rudimentary lesson she’d learned at the FBI’s Quantico training facility. “That maximizes spread, potency, and overall saturation effectiveness.”

  “Thanks to Lennox Scully, then, Ranger, we can rule out airburst. Because if this toxin was dispersed that way, he’d be dead and gone with the rest of the town.”

  “So he’s in a room upstairs instead. The question being, what made him different from everybody else, Doc?”

  “Well, for starters, the vast majorty of the town’s population died in their sleep.”

  “Scully claims he was asleep, too.”

  “Passed out drunk, to be precise, Ranger.”

  “You think the distinction is important?”

  Whatley shrugged, seeming to have forgotten his danish. “Being passed out as opposed to asleep means different blood levels, different breathing cycles, pulse ox levels, heart rate, potential arrhythmia … You want me to go on?”

  “No, you made your point. Scully said he was sleeping it off inside a converted supply closet.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “So what makes a supply closet different from the kind of bedroom where almost all the residents of Camino Pass died, Doc?”

  Whatley shrugged again, suddenly looking very old. “No windows would be the first thing that comes to mind.”

  “You pin that as important?”

  “You asked me what comes to mind, Ranger, not what’s important.”

  “Scully’s alive while almost three hundred other folks are dead. We find out why that is, we’re that much closer to figuring out how it was cyanide gas wiped a town clean off the map.”

  Whatley pushed his chair back, looking like he wanted to be someplace else. “Please tell me you’re not suggesting this was some kind of experiment, attack, or both.”

  “Old friend of ours is thinking along those terms.”

  “Jones?” Whatley wondered, as if it hurt to say the name.

  “None other.”

  “I thought he was out of the picture.”

  “Nope, just slightly out of frame. He picked up a scent that brought him out of the woodwork.”

  “Like an old bird dog,” Whatley said, shaking his head. “Just can’t let go of the hunt.”

  “Jones wants back in with Homeland. He sees this as his ticket.”

  Whatley went back to his danish. “I swear that man won’t be happy until the rest of the world is as miserable as he is.”

  Caitlin rose from her chair. “Think I’ll head back upstairs to have another talk with Lennox Scully.”

  34

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  Caitlin knew something was wrong as soon as she found the guards missing at the security checkpoint set up before the entrance to DHS’s isolation ward. There had been two on duty here yesterday and there was no obvious explanation for why th
ey wouldn’t be on duty today as well.

  She had memorized the four-digit key code that had allowed her access on the day before, but she saw the red light flashing and then noticed that the windowless double doors were cracked open. She eased her way through them, hand on the butt of her holstered SIG Sauer, which she promptly drew at what she saw next: the bodies of four of the national guardsmen attached to the Homeland Security team, the two she’d just noted were missing to go along with two more who’d been posted here. All shot in the head at close range, by the look of things.

  A pro, then. Somebody who enjoyed a knowledge and particular willingness when it came to killing. A stone killer, in other words.

  Caitlin yanked the glass off a fire alarm–like station, depressed the red button until she heard a click, and a high-pitched wail began to shriek. With that sound pounding her eardrums, she charged through the next set of doors and headed on toward the isolation ward.

  The entire medical team, two men and a woman, was dead, their bodies splayed in the laboratory outside the ward where Lennox Scully was the only patient. Scully lay half on, half off the hospital bed, beyond the thick wall of glass. Caitlin imagined his screams going unheard as someone pumped what appeared to be four bullets into him, the blood both soaking the sheets and widening into pools on the floor.

  She could still smell cordite in the air, indicating this had all gone down just minutes before. Likely not enough time for the killer to flee University Hospital before the sounding of the alarm led to the hospital being sealed. No one allowed in or out.

  And that meant she had a chance to catch up with whoever had done this.

  * * *

  Yarek Bone took the stairs to the basement level, where the hospital morgue was located, then used a separate stairwell to reach the subbasement, in keeping with his planned escape route. That subbasement housed the works and controls of the hospital’s heating, cooling, filtration, and ventilation systems, in huge steel cases, producing sounds from a soft rumble to a deafening roar.

  Bone had never served in the actual army, had cut his teeth instead as part of a Native American resistance group called Fallen Timbers. The group took its name from the battlefield where, in 1794, General Anthony Wayne had defeated confederated Indian tribes under the leadership of the famed Chief Tecumseh. The battle became more or less typical of that era and in more modern times had given way to such causes as the American Indian Movement, which was responsible for the occupation of Alcatraz Island in the early 1970s and the 1973 Wounded Knee incident at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

  Fallen Timbers had manifested as a more radical offshoot of the American Indian Movement, made up of Natives like Bone, committed to seeking economic justice for their people, who were often being ripped off by unscrupulous energy companies. Those companies were adept at stealing mineral rights for Native American lands, then laying pipelines and constructing fracking operations with little or no compensation to any number of tribes. Fallen Timbers dedicated itself to fighting in court and, when that failed, beyond.

  Yarek Bone specialized in the beyond.

  The group neither received nor sought publicity or attention. They preferred flying under the radar, where men like Bone could do their murderous work unencumbered by media. And when work dried up on that end, he had made himself available on a paying basis, along with his like-minded associates, who saw nothing wrong in using their skills to turn a profit.

  For his part, Bone sent most of the money he made back to the Comanche Nation in Lawton, Oklahoma, not needing to be paid much to do what he loved to do the most. Roland Fass had proven to be his most lucrative, and frequent, employer yet. No shortage of work corresponding to the cause that had led to the death of all but one of the residents of Camino Pass, who had now joined his neighbors in the great beyond.

  The sudden wailing of a shrill alarm through the hospital told him his work had been discovered. He picked up his already rapid pace down the stairs, emerging in the building’s mechanical subbasement, just as he heard an elevator chime nearby.

  * * *

  Caitlin surged from the car, SIG held with one hand bracing the other. The elevator in University Hospital’s isolation ward constructed by Homeland accessed this level directly, the only level the killer could escape through once the security alarm had been triggered. She couldn’t be sure, of course, but she knew well enough to trust her instincts, which had brought her down here like a dog picking up the scent of the man who’d left eight bodies in his wake upstairs.

  The mechanical subbasement was neither as cluttered nor as noisy as older versions with which she was more familiar. Gone was the hissing and rattling of pipes, the clanking of exhaust baffles dumping out heat sucked from the vents. Instead, white PVC piping ran in labyrinthine fashion up the walls and along the ceiling, pulsing with life and dripping moisture onto the shiny finished flooring. Huge machines Caitlin took for heat pumps and air exchangers colored royal blue climbed the walls, humming softly and then rumbling slightly louder when kicked up into the next gear. Exhaust fans with huge metal blades spun at various intervals to prevent the air from stagnating or superheating, and space-age turbines hummed, routing power through the complex.

  Caitlin slid along the darkest path she could find, off center of the walkway that sliced down the center of the subbasement and past various heavy fire-retardant security doors that housed the hospital’s various HVAC controls. It might not have been as voluminous down here as she’d expected, but there was still more than enough noise emanating from the slew of machines to drown out any footsteps that might have clacked ahead of her.

  She kept peering forward, figuring the man who’d killed eight people upstairs with the ease of doing his laundry was ahead of her, when shots echoed to her rear, puncturing the PVC piping overhead and pouring steam everywhere.

  * * *

  Yarek Bone couldn’t say how he knew it was the Texas Ranger, the same one from the photos lifted from video footage captured by a drone over Camino Pass. He’d spotted her as soon as he’d watched that footage, knowing a gunfighter when he saw one, even through an orange hazmat suit. Maybe it was something in the blood, the generations of battles fought by his ancestors against hers.

  Her …

  The legends of female Comanche warriors notwithstanding, Bone had trouble reconciling that this Texas Ranger was a woman. He wondered if his initial shots had been steered awry by his subconscious, the fact that in his long history of killing he’d never shot a woman before today, just a few minutes earlier, upstairs. Strangled or stabbed more than his share, yes, because he respected women enough to believe they should be killed up close, not with the impersonal distance wrought by bullets.

  This Texas Ranger, this woman, deserved that much, too, Bone deemed, before her bullets punctured plastic steam pipes all around him, forcing him out into the open, amid their crisscrossing spray.

  To find the Ranger standing before him.

  * * *

  The figure looked ephemeral in the steam, more phantom than man. Caitlin emptied the last of her SIG Sauer’s magazine toward his massive shape and, amid the pistol’s slight kick, registered that he was a Native American. He gave the impression of floating before he dropped out of sight and fired a dozen shots her way, rapidly enough to make it seem as if he were firing on full auto.

  Caitlin had hit the floor by then, rolling across the smooth surface as she tried to track him through the gushing steam. Fresh magazine jammed home, she was ready to open fire as soon as he came into view again. She just needed to right her position to better steady her aim.

  But her left boot had lodged in the gap between the housing of one of the big turbines and the floor. That left her squarely exposed, like a target on a shooting range.

  Caitlin thought she glimpsed the huge figure rushing her, then wasn’t so sure. His shape was there, and then it wasn’t, reappearing somewhere else with a swiftness of motion that defied reason. It was almost
like this man could will himself someplace else, action and thought one and the same. He was closing on her snared, still form, there until he wasn’t, while drawing near enough to make his next shots count for sure.

  Caitlin fought to pull her foot from her jammed boot, to no avail. She needed to find a way to neutralize the big man, at least flush him out amid the steam that was providing her only cover for the time being.

  She could feel his presence, knew he was close and taking his time in full awareness that she had fourteen fresh bullets. A shadow danced amid the steam, silhouetted by it briefly. Gone as quickly as it had appeared, only to reappear closer to her. He was baiting her to aim erroneously, at which point he’d stage his attack.

  So she fired. Erroneously. On purpose. SIG barrel tilted upward, toward the traffic jam of iron piping that formed the base of a network of ductwork running all the way through the building.

  Twelve shots, the resulting muzzle flashes carving through the mist, just as her nine-millimeter shells cut through the piping and sent a torrent of steaming oil lubricant spraying downward.

  * * *

  Yarek Bone felt something hot coating him, as if he’d stepped into a scalding shower. It wasn’t pain, of course, more like the sensation of his skin being superheated. For a brief moment, he actually thought it was starting to hurt, that he was about to understand what pain was for the first time.

  Thanks to this woman, this Texas Ranger …

  He could feel his skin already blistering as he clawed the oil free of his face with his hands, the palms puckering from the thick fluid right before his eyes. Bone had been shot twice and stabbed a whole bunch of times. Once he strangled a man to death while the victim kept jabbing a blade into him again and again. Bone still wore the scars across his stomach.

  But this was different; this he could feel—actually feel. Not quite pain, but a sensation that stopped just short of that, even as the heat coating him started to feel like somebody had turned up the oven.