Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “Fill this out, sir, and I can get the number from your provider.”

  “It’s ten o’clock, though.”

  “We stay open until the last patient is seen,” the receptionist said, as one of the armed security guards threw back the locks and took up vigil, arms crossed, directly inside the glass door, to bar further “patients” from entering.

  “That’s good, because I’m in a lot of pain. Car accident.”

  “Just take a seat and fill out the form. You will be seen tonight before we close.”

  Cort Wesley pretended to check the boilerplate questions, quickly tiring of the whole charade. He wished he’d asked Colonel Paz to accompany him—not Caitlin, since she had a way of talking him out of the impulsive responses to which he was prone. And, as he stood in front of the glass partition the receptionist had neglected to close while waiting for the return of his form, he felt one of those responses coming on, as impossible to impede as a sneeze or cough. For Cort Wesley, violence had long been a natural bodily function. He figured he could thank his upbringing at the hands of his criminal father for instilling such a trait in him. It had served him well a few times, while getting him in a boatload of trouble, including a dishonorable discharge from the army, far more often.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Cort Wesley said, returning the clipboard and its blank form to the receptionist. “I changed my mind.”

  The words sounded as if someone else was speaking them, as close as he’d ever come to what felt like an out-of-body experience.

  The woman reached up to close the partition, regarding Cort Wesley again with a forced smile. “You can always come back tomorrow.”

  “I’ve got business here tonight, ma’am. Can you tell me who’s in charge?”

  “Tonight, that would be—”

  “Not tonight; all the time. Who pays the bills? Who finds doctors willing to dispense pain meds to patients with no intention to use them to treat pain?”

  In the glass, Cort Wesley could see the reflection of one guard approaching, the other falling into step behind him. Both men had their hands atop their holstered pistols, the way ex-cops might.

  “I think a drug dealer named Cholo Brown got his hands on drugs prescribed in this place and sold them to students at the Village School. My son was one of those students. He almost died.”

  It took all his will, and a picture of Caitlin flashing in his head, to not react when the security guards brushed against his shoulders on either side.

  “Sir, you’re going to have to leave.”

  “But I haven’t seen the doctor yet,” he said, his eyes remaining locked on the receptionist, without moving an inch.

  Cort Wesley could feel the hands closing on his elbows.

  “Don’t make us call the police, sir,” the other guard said.

  “Would you really do that?” he asked the receptionist, still paying the armed men no heed. “Would you call the police? I don’t think so, given what you’re up to in this place with the likes of Cholo Brown. Want to tell me how many of the pills dispensed here end up on the streets? I’m guessing some of the ‘patients’ I watched go through that door are shilling for him. Think he pays them more than you clear every week?”

  The security guards started tugging him backwards, Cort Wesley making no effort to resist while keeping his gaze fixed forward.

  “You know what,” he said to the receptionist, “I think I will come back tomorrow.”

  41

  HOUSTON

  It had taken all the self-control he could muster to stop Cort Wesley from dropping the two security guards and feeding them their pistols. He saw himself doing it, frame by frame and blow by blow, as they led him toward the glass door and he watched their reflections growing in the glass.

  As it was, just picturing himself putting them down provided enough of a calming influence to see him through the door without further incident, even when they shoved him hard off the curb. He pretended to stumble, letting perceived weakness be enough of a weapon to make the men, ex-cops for sure, pay him no further heed.

  But he couldn’t make himself leave the scene, unable to chase from his mind the phone call that had brought him to the hospital where Luke had been rushed by ambulance, recalling how close his son had come to meeting the Grim Reaper. Cort Wesley shared the bouts of acid reflux his father had suffered, another piece of unfortunate DNA, and right now he felt bile pushing up his throat while he eyeballed the now darkened Uptown Medical Clinic from the other side of the parking lot. He’d moved his truck there after driving out the exit while the two guards were watching, only to pull back in when they weren’t.

  He knew the smart and obvious thing to do was to leave, whether he came back tomorrow or sent more formal authorities in his stead. The mere thought of that, though, made him cringe. He continued to steam and seethe, boiling in his truck and refusing to cool himself with a blast from the air-conditioning, as if not wanting to disturb his discomfort. He could no more stop himself from climbing back out of his truck than he could stop himself from breathing.

  Cort Wesley figured that, like many patient-centric facilities throughout storm-prone Houston, the Uptown Medical Clinic had installed a generator, and sure enough, he found a commercial model, manufactured by Kohler, at the rear of the building, connected up to the office suite in question.

  Thanks to the robberies he’d done with his father, locked doors posed no impediment whatsoever. Security alarms were something else again, but given the response time in this part of town, he figured he’d have all the time he needed, even with it triggered.

  He entered through the rear, which had the same antiseptic smell that had greeted him in the front. Since no bells and sirens began to shriek, Cort Wesley assumed it must have been a silent alarm, so he figured he had enough time to do what he was certain he’d probably regret later.

  He found the interior feed line connecting the emergency supply of propane to the office’s heating, cooling, and electrical systems. The system was rigged to automatically kick on in the event of a power failure, and locating the line was as simple as following its origins in the rear of the building through the walls. He found a trio of access hatches high up on the walls, which he reached by climbing on a chair. He popped those hatches and, one at a time, sliced the rubber tubing.

  By the time Cort Wesley finished, the coarse stench of propane filled the clinic. His impulsiveness and commitment to finish what he started kept him from considering the damage that might be done to the adjoining structures. In that moment, he didn’t care. What pushed his buttons was the fact that the drug dealer who’d nearly gotten his son killed had identified this as the place where he’d gotten his supply. A pill mill, by all appearances, where anyone with a pulse could get a supply of prescription opioids to use recreationally.

  In high school, he’d been forced to give up playing football because he couldn’t contain himself on the field. He’d hit a kid and keep hitting him well after the whistle had stopped play.

  “You don’t have an Off switch, son,” his coach told him in dismissing him from the team after his fourth ejection in five games. “Turning you on is like unleashing the hounds of hell, and I’m tired of getting bit.”

  Nothing had changed since—not in the army, not while serving in Desert Storm, not while working as muscle for the Branca crime family, and not during the years afterward. Cort Wesley pushed until whatever he was pushing went off a cliff.

  Being a nonsmoker, he didn’t carry a lighter or matches. As expected, though, he found a lighter in a drawer belonging to one of the receptionists. With the stench of propane starting to make him nauseous, Cort Wesley exited the building through the glass front doors and poached a rock from a garden that rimmed the single floor of storefront offices. Around the rock, he balled the remains of a newspaper he’d found on a chair inside the waiting area, backed up to what he considered a safe distance, and lit the newspaper ablaze.

  Cort Wesley could feel it st
arting to singe his hand. He threw the paper-wrapped rock forward in line with one of the windows, which would shatter more easily than the thicker glass forming the entry’s double doors. He heard the crackle of the glass shattering in the same instant that he became aware that the sirens belonging to police speeding to the site of a suspected break-in were fast reaching a crescendo.

  That was all drowned out by the rippling blast that followed, accompanied by a surge of superheated air that buckled Cort Wesley’s legs and nearly toppled him off his feet. The parking lot felt cushiony beneath him, as the whole of the Uptown Medical Clinic was swallowed by a bright, white-hot fireball that lent daytime brilliance to the night sky.

  For a moment, he thought the colors splashing off him from the flames had morphed into a rainbowlike sparkle, maybe from all those pain pills going up in flames, but then he realized that the kaleidoscope was spawned instead by the trio of police cruisers that had sped into the parking lot.

  “Hands in the air! Freeze where you are!”

  Cort Wesley stuck his hands in the air and froze. Felt his legs being kicked out from under him before he hit the pavement hard, where his hands were jerked behind his back. Through it all, he never took his eyes off the raging flames, even when a pair of the cops jerked him to his feet.

  “What the fuck did you do?” one of them asked him, shaking his head.

  “Your job, hoss. You want to read me my rights, go right ahead.”

  42

  HOUSTON

  So now here he was in lockup, nose pressed against his own shirt to ward off the dueling stenches of urine and vomit. The booking officer who’d formally processed him wrote down D. W. Tepper’s name and phone number and promised to contact him.

  “What are you, a Ranger or something?” the man asked.

  “Something.”

  “And what you did to that medical clinic, how’d that involve the Rangers?”

  “I’m not allowed to say. That’s why you need to call Captain Tepper.”

  Cort Wesley knew it would still be several hours before Caitlin arrived to pick him up, once Tepper had made the proper arrangements to secure his release. He figured the captain’s authority and rank would carry more weight with the Houston PD, and, besides, Cort Wesley was too embarrassed to have Caitlin find out first.

  “How is it, bubba, that you’re prone to doing so much shit you end up regretting later?”

  He was glad it was only Leroy Epps’s voice in his head right now and not the ghost himself appearing up close and personal, which would have necessitated a response. Yet Cort Wesley still made one, muted and under his breath, as he raised a hand and pretended to stifle a cough.

  “It’s a gift, champ, what can I say?”

  “Well, I’ll be looking forward to what you got to say to the Ranger lady about all this.”

  As if on cue, a uniformed Houston officer appeared at the cell, calling out Cort Wesley’s name as he jiggled a key in the old-fashioned cell lock.

  “Get a move on, Masters,” the officer continued. “Your ride’s here, and you don’t want to keep him waiting.”

  “Him?” Cort Wesley questioned.

  43

  HOUSTON

  “What do you mean he’s gone?” Caitlin asked the desk sergeant at the Houston police station located in Kingwood, where Cort Wesley was being held, instead of by the locals in Humble, where he’d been arrested.

  “Someone else secured his release.”

  “Without posting any bail, on an arson beef?”

  “The man who signed him out is owed lots of favors by this department, Ranger. Kind of guy you’d make the rain stop for, if you could. He was Ranger once, before he joined the DEA. Maybe you’ve heard of him: Doyle Lodge.”

  “I’ve heard of him, all right,” Caitlin said, having a pretty good idea what Doyle Lodge’s stake in this was. “Must be pushing ninety now.”

  “But still sharp as a tack and looks like he could still mix it up with the likes of John Wesley Hardin or Sam Bass.”

  “His Ranger career straddled my dad’s and granddad’s,” Caitlin told the desk sergeant.

  “Why does a man leave the Rangers for the Drug Enforcement Administration?”

  “Beats me,” Caitlin lied.

  * * *

  At that point, after a tortuous drive from San Antonio spent ruminating about what had moved Cort Wesley to torch a medical clinic, the last thing Caitlin wanted to do was turn around and drive straight home. She always carried a kind of go bag with her, and she decided to make use of it to spend what remained of the night in Houston, checking into a chain motel between the jail where Cort Wesley had been held and the Village School.

  The clerk didn’t raise an eyebrow over what Caitlin needed a room for at three a.m., not after he glimpsed her Ranger badge, and he refused to take the credit card she tried to hand over.

  She called Cort Wesley from the clean, functional room but didn’t get an answer. Tried texting him, with the same result. A former Texas Ranger who’d become a legend in the DEA had bailed him out of jail in the wake of Cort Wesley torching what must’ve been a medical pill mill for the illegal distribution of narcotics. Caitlin didn’t need a program in front of her to figure he’d somehow uncovered the source of the drugs that had almost killed Luke.

  Luke …

  For more than a day now, she’d been questioning the tone she’d taken on what had already been the most miserable day of his life. He’d never gotten into as much as a speck of trouble before, and now this. Caitlin wasn’t sure what frightened her more, that fact alone or another undeniable truth—that this was hardly an isolated incident, from a nationwide standpoint. The young opioid users of today were on a road that led to heroin and, further down, fentanyl, with all its deadly dangers.

  She slept hardly at all, stirring from a doze to find the television playing but with no memory of turning it on. On a whim, she tried Luke’s phone, half surprised when he answered.

  “You decide to arrest me?” the boy greeted.

  “Let’s have breakfast this morning, just you and me.”

  “Er, you know I’m at school, right?”

  “I’m not too far down the road right now. I’ll pick you up.”

  She heard him take a deep breath on the other end of the line. “I’m kind of confined to campus; nothing unsupervised.”

  “I’m a Texas Ranger. That should qualify me.”

  “I don’t want to push it, Caitlin.”

  “Okay,” she said, thinking fast, “we can have breakfast in the school cafeteria. What time do they start serving?”

  * * *

  She called Dylan over her SUV’s Bluetooth on the way to the Village School.

  “Do you know what time it is?” he asked groggily, leaving Caitlin with the feeling that this was a replay of her call to him yesterday, when he’d put Nola Delgado on the line.

  Caitlin pictured him chasing the sleep away, just past six in the morning out in Providence.

  “I didn’t figure you’d be sleeping in with no one to sleep with.”

  “Very funny,” he said, pushing the words through a yawn.

  “Your girlfriend and I had a little talk.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “A few other words come to mind, but we’ll leave it there. Anyway, I think maybe I was a little hard on Nola.”

  “Is this really the Caitlin Strong talking?”

  “I don’t know about the, but it’s Caitlin Strong all right. What I mean is, I think I’m confusing whatever relationship you’ve got with Nola with my own issues. I think it all goes back to me having trouble accepting that she’s my half sister, that my father had a whole other life I never knew about.”

  “Your father never even knew Nola existed, Caitlin. I don’t know where you’re going with this.”

  “I’m trying to figure what I’d think of Nola if it wasn’t for all her baggage. I think she used you to get to me a few months back, here in Texas, but that’s
got nothing to do with her following you to Providence. So, I don’t know, maybe I’ve got her wrong.”

  “You haven’t even mentioned a word about her being a psychopath.”

  “I’ve been accused of the same thing often enough, and I imagine Nola doesn’t look at herself any different that I look at myself.”

  “I think you’re softening on her,” Dylan said, sounding once again like an adult. “I think this sister stuff is starting to grow on you.”

  “She mentioned she was the only blood relative I’ve got left in the world,” Caitlin told him.

  “You can’t choose your relatives. But I’d say you’ve more than made up for it.”

  44

  HOUSTON

  “What are we looking at here exactly?” Cort Wesley asked Doyle Lodge, as they sat inside Lodge’s truck in a mostly empty parking lot of an industrial building on Rankin Road, maybe five miles out from the center of the city.

  “That there warehouse across the street was vacant from the start of the big recession all the way through last year, when all of a sudden it got filled up again,” the old man said in a leathery drawl.

  Cort Wesley gazed across the grassy knoll cut in half by a low-lying ditch to catch rain runoff. “You plan on telling me with what?”

  The series of buildings in question was nestled in what looked like a hive of industrial structures, Cort Wesley figuring it for maybe a hundred thousand square feet or so.

  “Petrochemicals, as near as I can tell. The real dangerous stuff that goes into making fertilizer bombs and the like. Explains all the security, on the surface anyway, given there’s still a big need for the same ingredients that killed all those folks in Oklahoma City, the population of a day care center inside the building being foremost among them. How did that make you feel, partner?”

  “I think I was overseas at the time.”

  “And now you and Caitlin Strong are quite the item, from what I hear told, which is the primary reason I’m taking you under my wing.”