Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “Right. Corporate America at its very best.”

  “Just like the tobacco companies, as you said, Ranger.”

  Lodge beamed at being called that again. “And don’t forget that car company that decided not to fix a design flaw because it would cost less to pay out damages to the dead and injured.”

  “Ford,” Cort Wesley recalled. “And I think the car was the Pinto. I almost bought an old one when I was a kid. The owner was practically giving it away.”

  “I can’t imagine why. You buy it?”

  Cort Wesley nodded. “It died a month later, but at least the gas tank didn’t blow up. What about the third leg?”

  “Drug distribution companies, maybe the worst of the bunch. See, pharmaceutical companies don’t ship directly to pharmacies; distributors hired by them do. The more pills they ship, the more money they make—big money in the case of opiates. Dig deep enough and, at best, you’ll find connections between the distributors and pill mill clinics like that one you torched in Humble. At worst, you’ll find direct links that go as far as the distributors forming shell companies that actually own the clinics. We’re talking names like Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, and McKesson. Anyway, son, those three companies are responsible for shipping eighty-five percent of all prescription drugs in the United States. That helps make McKesson the seventh biggest of all U.S. companies. Cardinal must be slacking, because they lagged behind at fifteenth.”

  Cort Wesley sipped some of his coffee, running all that through his head. “But there’s a fourth leg of the stool, isn’t there? You already said so yourself: the government.”

  “Including the DEA,” the old man said, then nodded.

  “How’s that work?”

  “We’re supposed to be a country of laws.”

  “Emphasis on supposed,” Cort Wesley said through clenched teeth, thinking of Luke.

  “But laws are only as good as the people who enforce them. And these pharmaceutical and drug distribution companies maintain armies of lobbyists to get those laws written as they want them to be written. Care to guess where the bulk of those lobbyists come from?”

  “The DEA?”

  Doyle Lodge nodded. “The administration’s own lawyers, hopping the fence to join the other side.”

  “In full awareness of the DEA’s capabilities and weaknesses.”

  “Especially the weaknesses. It’s a massive bureaucracy riddled by turnover and politics. The best friend the pharmaceutical industry ever had is our political system, since everything resets every four years or so on average. A new administrator comes in and starts from scratch.”

  “While the bad guys just keep at it,” Cort Wesley elaborated, “their ex-DEA lawyers getting the laws written in language that best serves their interests. But what does that have to do with that petrochemical warehouse you showed me this morning?”

  “Political pressure is finally forcing the government to chip away at all three legs of that stool, shave them down a little at a time, but plenty enough to make a sizable dent in their profits. Add to that newly passed safeguards regarding the numbers of pills manufactured, shipped, and prescribed and you’ve got a host of Armani-clad drug pushers who work out of corner offices instead of street corners running scared.”

  “So that warehouse…”

  “I think it’s one of a whole bunch, but I haven’t been able to get anywhere in tracking that down, finding the link, because digging deeper I hit rock I can’t blast through. All I can tell you for sure is that it’s clear somebody at the top of the food chain has found an alternate means of getting their narcotics onto the streets. And the top of that food chain might as well be the Washington Monument, if you get my drift.”

  Cort Wesley did, and it was stealing his appetite. “How much of this can you prove?”

  “Almost nothing, partner. It’s all circumstantial, and whoever’s behind it knows how to game the system because, my guess, they’re part of the system.” The old man’s tired, dull blue eyes sought out Cort Wesley on the other side of the table. “That’s why I bailed you out of jail, because I need you.”

  “To do what exactly?”

  “I’ve heard told you got friends in law enforcement who can help us.”

  “Us?”

  “We got something in common all too many share. Difference being my boy didn’t make it while yours did. This time.”

  Those final words got Cort Wesley’s dander up. But the worn, sad look on the old man’s face induced sympathy more than anything else and the warning implied by “this time” was valid, like it or not.

  “Okay, Doyle, let’s go with us.”

  “Well, hell, I feel like I accomplished more in the last five minutes than I have in the last five months.”

  “What do you need exactly?”

  “Everything your Ranger lady friend can get us on that warehouse in particular, and any connection to those others I’m sure are out there but can’t get a handle on. She still hooked up with the Department of Homeland Security, son?”

  In that moment, Cort Wesley couldn’t think of another man who’d called him “son,” except for his own father. “Caitlin can still make some calls,” he said, missing Jones in his old role for the first time. “She can be rather persuasive when she puts her mind to it.”

  “I’d expect nothing less from the granddaughter of Earl Strong and daughter of Jim Strong.”

  Cort Wesley looked to his right to see the root beer he’d set out for Leroy Epps remained untouched. Of course, that didn’t mean the ghost wasn’t sitting there listening.

  “I’m going to need some more details, Ranger.”

  “Happy to provide those while we eat,” Doyle Lodge told him, signaling for their server to come over, then looking toward the empty chair with the still-full glass set before it. “Why don’t you order your friend breakfast, too?”

  49

  LIVINGSTON, TEXAS

  Yarek Bone couldn’t chase the memory of the woman Texas Ranger from his mind. She was there when his eyes were open, but especially when he tried to close them. Like a phantom, some kind of spirit sent to either set him on a new path or just blow up the one he was on.

  He hadn’t been able to shake the stench of oil from his body since his encounter with her yesterday in the hospital’s subbasement, amid the building’s mechanicals. Being doused with the noxious, steaming fluid had blistered his skin and left him with a patchwork of second-degree burns. He’d retreated to the Alabama–Coushatta Indian reservation outside of Houston, between Livingston and Woodville, where old-fashioned medicine men practiced the old ways of healing. Actually, it was a medicine woman who applied to his wounds a homemade salve that smelled worse than the oil.

  “This is going to hurt,” she warned him.

  Bone had smiled up at her. “Not me,” he said, not bothering to elaborate further.

  This 4,593-acre reservation in Polk County just off U.S. 190 was the oldest in Texas. It featured recreational campgrounds, a smoke shop, a souvenir stand, and a truck stop—all of which were also open to nonnatives in order to raise much needed revenue. But the reservation’s vast lands were similarly home to the headquarters of Fallen Timbers, the reactionary Native American group that preached violence, often as a first resort. When he needed to get right, this was where Bone came and lingered for a time.

  And yesterday he had needed to get very right indeed, both physically and spiritually. Because something had happened during his encounter with the woman Ranger: he had felt pain. Not his own, but hers. It rode his being with as much prominence as the oil that scorched his flesh and gave him a new insight into the ways of the world, as if he could suddenly know the pain of others, even if he could not know his own.

  Who was this woman?

  Maybe this had somehow been caused by his burning. Maybe that experience had reformulated his nerve endings so they could reach beyond the borders of his own body to experience the pain he inflicte
d upon others. An exquisite, glorious, metaphysical experience, to feel what they felt as he hurt them, killed them.

  But Bone feared the new sensation might be transitory, that it would vanish with the blistering of his skin, once the medicine woman’s salve did its job. He had to know whether this new gift, new blessing, would be his for all time forward, had to know it wasn’t just a fluke spurred by the burning and this woman Texas Ranger.

  So Yarek Bone wandered into the deep woods, where the greatest concentration of the reservation’s wildlife resided. As a boy, his father had taught Bone, on different lands, how to “thump” a deer, to stalk it from the rear and slam a hand down on its hindquarters to make the animal rush away. His father, like all traditional Comanche, believed in hunting only for food.

  When he spotted the big antlered buck today, though, food was the last thing on his mind and he wasn’t interested in hunting, either. Bone stalked the big buck, as he had thumped deer as a boy. Instead of slapping its hindquarters, though, he skulked closer to where it was feeding on some grass. When the buck raised its head to sniff at the air, Bone grabbed the animal’s antlers and twisted with a force sufficient to snap its neck, the resulting crack as loud as a gunshot. He felt the animal’s legs collapse, its eyes bulging in terror and then in realization as it hit the ground with a thud, clinging to the last of its breath. He felt it struggling, felt it heaving, felt it dying.

  But most of all, Bone felt its pain. The feeling was indescribable in its primitive nature, as if he had known the simple ecstatic delight of early man. In that sense, what he was feeling was the ultimate reward for killing, for hurting others.

  The things Bone did best.

  He stood over the buck as it clutched for its last breath. He wanted more than anything, in that moment, to feel that same sensation not with another deer or with just any human victim. He was going to feel the Texas Ranger’s pain.

  He was glad the medicine woman’s salve was doing its job, because it would allow him to return to the world and hurt Caitlin Strong in a way he would feel forever.

  50

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “We’ve had some complaints, Colonel. Some parents are voicing … concerns about your teaching.”

  “There’s no accounting for taste,” Paz said to Canyon Ridge Elementary School principal Mariana Alonzo, on the morning of only his third day on the job. “And everybody’s entitled to their opinion.”

  “Is it true that you fired something at the children as they were negotiating this…”

  “Obstacle course,” Paz completed for her.

  “And you were actually shooting at them?”

  “Soft rubber bullets that resemble those Nerf things. I make them myself. And I made sure all the kids were wearing goggles. Safety first, right?”

  “Right, Colonel, yes.”

  “Want to see one?”

  “What?”

  “One of the soft rubber bullets, since that’s the subject of our conversation.” Paz fished one from inside a side pocket on his tactical pants. “Here you go. See?”

  Alonzo rose to take the squat, oblong object that was maybe an inch long from Paz’s grasp. She grasped it almost reluctantly. Paz figured that since it looked just like the real thing, the woman might have thought he’d reached into the wrong pocket. But then she ran the soft rubber bullet between her fingers, squeezing it and watching as the sponge-like material eased back into its original shape.

  “Impressive,” the principal of Canyon Ridge Elementary said.

  “Thank you, jefa,” Paz said, again referring to Alonzo as “boss.”

  “Looks just like the real thing.”

  “I know. That’s the point.” Paz leaned forward in the armchair that was barely wide enough to accommodate his bulk. “I’m teaching the kids what to do if they’re shot at, facing gunfire.”

  “That was the source of the parents’ complaints,” Alonzo said.

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “That I’d look into things.”

  “You could have quoted some of the statistics from school shootings, jefa. This school has active shooter drills, doesn’t it?”

  Alonzo nodded. “A requirement of all public schools in the state of Texas.”

  “You could’ve told those parents my live fire obstacle course is just an extension of that. Because, let’s face it, the only thing active shooter drills teach kids is to run and hide. Problem is, that doesn’t always work. Just ask the victims at Parkland or…” Here, Paz crossed himself as he knew his priest, the late Father Boylston, would have wanted. “Sandy Hook. There’s no substitute for feeling what it’s actually like to be shot at. If this were high school, I would’ve been tempted to use real bullets.”

  Alonzo handed the sample toy bullet back across her desk. “This is a problem for us, Colonel.”

  “The problem’s already there, jefa. A bigger problem is ignoring it. I think Friedrich Nietzsche put things in a nutshell when he said ‘Examine the life of the best and most productive men and nations, and ask yourselves whether a tree which is to grow proudly skywards can dispense with bad weather and storms. Whether misfortune and opposition, or every kind of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, distrust, severity, greed, and violence do not belong to the favorable conditions without which a great growth even of virtue is hardly possible.’ You familiar with that quote?”

  “I’m familiar with Nietzsche,” Alonzo said, evasively.

  “That’s what I miss most about my priest. He understood the notion Orwell championed when he said that we ‘sleep peacefully in our beds because rough men stand ready to do violence’ on our behalf. We need more rough kids, to go with the rough men and women. We need to fully prepare them to survive the school day and get home to their parents, not just teach them to hide in closets, behind desks or locked doors. Because, believe me, none of those are going to stop a person with intent to do them harm.”

  “With all due respect, Colonel, that’s not a decision best supported in physical education class. There are channels you need to go through, and I’d like to head this off before it reaches the school board. On the bright side, no one has voiced any problem with the notion of an obstacle course. The problem lies in what you call the live fire simulation.”

  Paz squeezed the soft rubber bullet so hard and compressed it so tight that it showed no signs of returning to its original contours. “Let me ask you a question, jefa. How did the parents find out about all this?”

  “From their children, of course.”

  “And what did their children say?”

  “That it was the most fun they ever had in school.”

  “Boys or girls?”

  “Both, especially the girls,” Alonzo admitted.

  “Did they mention to their parents that, through the day, not a single kid got clipped by one of my bullets?”

  That seemed to get the principal’s attention. “Is that true?”

  Paz nodded. “And maybe it would translate into an active shooter situation, now that they know what that’s like. You should tell the parents, and the school board, what Thomas Sowell once said: ‘Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.’”

  “You raise an excellent point, Colonel.”

  Paz leaned forward.

  “But my hands are tied here.”

  Paz leaned back.

  “All Texas public schools have a strict policy against the presence or use of any firearms, and that includes your rubber bullets.”

  “I was going to teach marksmanship next.”

  Alonzo rose, comfortable with the desk acting as a buffer between them. “I know you’re only trying to do what’s right, and I appreciate that.”

  Paz nodded as he joined the principal on his feet. “It was Kafka who said, ‘Start with what’s right rather than what’s acceptable.’”

  “In education, I’m afraid the opposite is normally the case. I’m sorry that this didn’t work out, Colonel,” Alonzo said, extending her hand across th
e desk.

  Paz swallowed it in his grasp. “That’s okay, jefa, because it looks like I’m gonna be going to war again anyway.”

  51

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Senator Lee Eckles made the call from his private office, not the one in the Russell building but the one off the Senate floor, down a dimly lit hall lined with unmarked rooms, where ranking members like him could hide out when necessary, unburdened and unbothered by their constituents or the press. His was the third one down on the right.

  “Placing a call” was the wrong way to describe a procedure that, upon dialing a key code, activated technology that was aimed to maximize security and keep the identity of the call’s participants impossible to discern. Participants would speak into their phone and an app, designed by the State Department for use in foreign embassies where spying was constant, would transfer spoken words to text.

  “An opportunity has arisen that requires our immediate attention,” Eckles began, picturing his words being transcribed for the other six participants, to whom he was beholden, to read on their phones, “an opportunity specifically related to our Texas-based operation.”

  Eckles had never bothered to add up the net worth of all the men on this call, who had bankrolled this operation from the beginning, after the senator had laid out for them the facts—along with the potential. The thing about rich people was that they always wanted to get richer. He knew, of course, that this was more about power than money, although in his mind they were pretty much the same thing. They’d ask him what he wanted out of all this and Eckles’s answer was simple: to be president of the United States.

  They hadn’t responded, which he took to be a response in itself. And as pleased as they were with the results so far, they were going to be even more pleased after this phone call.

  DOES THIS HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH THAT TOWN WHERE EVERYBODY WENT TO BED AND NOBODY WOKE UP? appeared on his screen.

  “Camino Pass. And the answer is yes.”

  OUR TEXAS OPERATION HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT, RIGHT? a second participant wondered. NOTHING THAT COULD LEAD BACK TO US.