Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  Eckles thought of the Texas Rangers being on the case. “Nothing that can lead back to us, no. But the opportunity we need to discuss has everything to do with Camino Pass.”

  I DON’T FOLLOW YOU, from another member of the exclusive club.

  “We all know how the world works. There’s above the surface and below, and the factor all of us had in common before we even convened our first meeting was that we’re equally comfortable functioning in both. We’re upholding a long-standing and glorious tradition to do what needs to be done, without anyone knowing we’re doing it. That’s what the Texas operation is all about and always has been, taking the traditions started by those who came before us at tables like this to the next stage.”

  Eckles waited for the transcription process to catch up with his words before continuing.

  “We now have the opportunity to go to another level entirely, beyond anything we or those who came before us were ever in a position to consider.”

  AND HOW MIGHT YOU DESCRIBE THIS OPPORTUNITY?

  “As potentially securing the future.”

  OURS?

  “The country’s.”

  OURS, THEN. AND JUST WHO IS IT WE HAVE TO KILL?

  “Anybody we want,” Eckles said, watching his words transcribed in real time, “any number we want, anywhere we want.”

  The silence in his private office became palpable. Eckles took the lack of response from the others as permission to proceed with his plan. That was the way it was with these people: no answer could be taken as a response in the affirmative, as with the promise of him ending up in the Oval Office because of this operation, which he had built himself.

  “I’ll report back within forty-eight hours,” he finished, his transcribed words again standing alone.

  PART FIVE

  JOHN B. ARMSTRONG

  Yet another Tennessee native, Armstrong clashed with Reconstruction-era authorities at home and ended up moving to Texas in 1872 at the age of 22. He joined the Austin militia unit known as the Travis Rifles before moving on to a company of Texas Rangers led by Captain Leander McNelly. Armstrong’s most famous exploit as a Ranger by far was his capture of John Wesley Hardin in the spring of 1877. Hardin, Texas’ most infamous gunfighter, was said to have killed at least 20 men in the decade following the Civil War; some said the total reached as high as 40. By 1877, he was on the run, wanted by the Rangers for the killing of Comanche County Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb. Though he was recuperating from a gunshot wound, Armstrong sought and won permission to work the Hardin case. He and his team tracked Hardin to Pensacola, Florida, and confronted the gunfighter and his gang in a train car. Though various versions exist as to what happened next, the most commonly told story is that Hardin’s gun snagged on his suspenders and Armstrong was able to hit him over the head, knocking him out. Armstrong then sent Hardin back to Texas to stand trial for Webb’s murder.

  —Sarah Pruitt, “8 Famous Texas Rangers,” History.com

  52

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “I didn’t like seeing Nola Delgado sitting in our spot when I got home last night,” Caitlin said, sipping a take-out coffee she’d warmed up in the microwave.

  “She does have a way of making herself feel at home, Ranger,” Cort Wesley said, working on one of his craft beers instead. “Speaking of which, I notice she helped herself to a couple of my favorite Freetail brand, the amber ale. I’m blaming you for that.”

  “Me?”

  “She’s your half sister.”

  “You can’t choose your relatives, Cort Wesley, no matter what the percentage is.”

  He took a hefty sip, his eyes never leaving her. There was something different, unusual, about his expression, a mix of resignation and uncertainty. Caitlin figured Luke’s overdose had given him a new understanding about how little a parent actually knows their kids. Just when you think it’s time to let go, you want to reel them in tighter than ever. He’d always preached about letting Dylan and Luke live their own lives, but now one was living with a psychopath and the other had come close enough to death to feel the breaths of angels.

  “How’s your head feeling?” Cort Wesley wondered.

  “Worse than ever, after chasing down that killer at University Hospital,” Caitlin told him. “Feels like there’s a hole in it as big as the one he must’ve slipped through to escape.”

  “So take a pill.”

  “Already had my fill for the day.”

  “Which is how many exactly, Ranger?”

  “‘As needed,’ the prescription says, which seems a whole lot more often lately.”

  Cort Wesley smiled slightly. “Since bullets can’t kill you, I don’t think you’ve got much to fear from pills.”

  “I’m thinking of going back to the doctor, maybe a neurologist this time.”

  “What for?”

  “To figure out why that blast whatever-you-call-it seems to be getting worse instead of better.”

  “I need your help with something in the meantime, Ranger. Does the name Doyle Lodge ring any bells?”

  “Sure, although I was still a little girl when he drummed himself out of the Rangers.”

  “On account of falling into the bottle after his son died of an opiate overdose.”

  “Propelling Lodge into a legendary career at DEA, starting at the ripe old age of sixty-three. He became such a legend, first they waived the mandatory retirement age and then called him a special advisor or something in order to keep him on the books. He tell you they had a nickname for him over there?”

  “No.”

  “The Terminator. The second film in the series had come out around the time he was busting as many heads as dealers.”

  “Taking a Ranger approach to things, in other words. Lodge reached out to me, sees us as kindred spirits.”

  “What do you, and he, need?”

  “Lodge has been eyeballing a suspicious petrochemical warehouse just outside of Houston.”

  “Eyeballing? He’s damn near ninety. And where do petrochemicals fit in with Luke and his son?”

  “The warehouse opened for business at almost the very time a new flood of drugs hit the streets.”

  “Sure,” Caitlin nodded. “About a year ago. I’ve seen the reports, looked at the data. Sixteen cities have seen a spike that’s off the charts when it comes to availability.”

  “Lodge smells a connection.”

  Caitlin remembered her coffee and took a fresh sip. “Seems pretty tenuous to me.”

  “No more than the basis for plenty of your investigations.”

  Caitlin laid the big Styrofoam cup down on the porch floor. “You want him to be right.”

  “I want to put everyone behind the likes of Cholo Brown in a box. Whether that’s a jail cell or a coffin is up to them.”

  “And you think Lodge can help you?”

  Cort Wesley nodded. “That’s why I hope his gut is right on this.”

  She flashed her phone before him. “Homeland Security is open twenty-four seven, Cort Wesley. I’ll make the call and have it stamped priority. We’ll have something on that warehouse by morning.”

  “Glad to hear the doors Jones opened for you there haven’t closed in his absence.”

  “Well, he’s itching to get back in.”

  “You saw him?”

  “He rolled in like the bad penny he’s always been.”

  “Don’t tell me: Camino Pass.”

  “Jones may be out of government service, but when it comes to mass deaths he’s like the old firehouse dog who springs back to life when the alarm sounds. Sees whatever caused this particular one as his potential ticket back to Washington.”

  “Well,” Cort Wesley groused, “there’s no accounting for taste.”

  “What’s Doyle Lodge like?” Caitlin asked him.

  “You’ve never met him?”

  “Not for more than thirty seconds.”

  “In a word: old.”

  “About the same age as my dad would be if he’
d lived.”

  “The Strong legend is not lost on him, Ranger. He speaks of you with the same reverence he does about your father or grandfather.”

  “I don’t belong in their company.”

  “That’s not an opinion shared by many, least of all Doyle Lodge.”

  Caitlin hesitated briefly. “It’s kind of like old home week, Cort Wesley, me running into Nola Delgado on top of Jones.”

  “You didn’t run into her; she was waiting for you.”

  “I spoke to Dylan about her,” Caitlin admitted, leaving out mention of her breakfast with Luke, during which she had told him his father had set fire to the pill mill behind the drugs that almost killed him.

  “Doing my job, in other words.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m glad you spoke to him, because I just can’t talk to him on the subject of women.”

  “Well, you are his father.”

  “How do you get away with it?”

  “I wasn’t talking about Nola Delgado as his girlfriend, or my half sister. I was talking about Nola Delgado as a man killer.”

  Cort Wesley ran his tongue from one side of his mouth to the other, his cheeks puckering one after the other. “I’m surprised he didn’t hang up.”

  “I get the feeling he thinks Nola is there to protect him.”

  “From what?”

  “Dylan was home for over a year. I think it was harder to return to school than he let on. I think he’s scared.”

  “Dylan?”

  “Hard to believe, I know, Cort Wesley, given who his father is.”

  “Sure, Ranger, I’m scared of nothing besides losing my seventeen-year-old honor student to an opiate overdose.”

  Caitlin gave him a long look, trying not to appear harsh, caustic, or judgmental, given her own proclivities. “What happens when you catch up with whoever’s behind Cholo Brown and that pill mill in Humble?”

  “You mean the pill mill, one-stop drug shop that used to be in Humble?”

  The breeze picked up, blowing the light fixture dangling from the porch ceiling back and forth. The light splayed against Cort Wesley in a way that made him look like he was cut down the middle, one side light and the other lost to the shadows, the illusion intensified by his not realizing what Caitlin was seeing.

  “I don’t know, Ranger,” he said. “And that’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “You can’t burn down the whole world, Cort Wesley; there aren’t enough matches.”

  “Maybe not, but you know that won’t stop me from trying.”

  53

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Thank you for seeing me without an appointment, Mr. Fass,” Caitlin said, sitting down before the big wood desk.

  “Well,” the jittery Roland Fass said from behind it, seeming to have trouble getting settled in his chair, “you know what they say about the Texas Rangers.”

  “No … What do they say?”

  She watched Fass jiggle himself one way and then the other, making her wonder if he was suffering from hemorrhoids or something. “Figure of speech, that’s all. I haven’t had my coffee yet. Would you like some?”

  “I’ve had my morning fill already, but please feel free.”

  “No, I can wait. Don’t want to waste any of your valuable time, do we?”

  “Your time is valuable too, sir, given that big warehouse you own outside of Houston,” Caitlin said, getting to the point by reciting part of the intelligence she’d gathered from Homeland Security. “Tell me: how’d you get into the petrochemical business?”

  “I’m not actually, Ranger. In fact, I couldn’t tell you a petro from a chemical. I just own the building, not its contents. I lease the space to a consortium or something.”

  “And that’s kind of why I’m here. See, I’m kind of an agent for the Department of Homeland Security, representing Texas. When I get the scent of something that doesn’t feel right, with links here, it’s my duty to follow it up.”

  Fass looked even more uncomfortable. “Are you still talking about my warehouse on Rankin Road?”

  “Along with the sixteen other warehouses spread all over the country, all owned by a shell company that leads straight back to you,” Caitlin told him, paraphrasing the information Homeland Security had provided earlier this morning. “That, and the fact you bought all sixteen of them going back between twelve and eighteen months. A good businessman would never do something like that, unless he had tenants—a whole consortium maybe—already lined up. Are you a good businessman, Mr. Fass?”

  Caitlin felt his eyes boring into her while he tried to appear casual, his expression trapped between the beginnings of a smile and nothing at all.

  “I’m guessing you already know the answer to that question is a bit complicated,” he said softly.

  “You mean, on account of your business license being revoked because of that embezzlement beef? Your own engineering design firm, wasn’t it?”

  “I was one of five partners. The others conspired against me, tried to cut me out of the profits.”

  “The court must not have taken your extenuating circumstances into account.”

  “I pled out for a lesser sentence.”

  “From what I’ve seen, sir, nobody pleads out unless they’re guilty.”

  Fass tried to hold her stare but failed. “You ever deal with the feds, Ranger?”

  “Our paths cross from time to time.”

  “You can’t beat them, even if you’re in the right.”

  “In my experience, they’re just out to do their jobs. Aside from that, you know what I find interesting? How you invested that money you embezzled. Your trades were confined to a single sector: the pharmaceutical industry, ‘Big Pharma’ as they say.”

  “That’s not me anymore,” Fass noted stiffly. “You’re looking at a changed man.”

  “You could have skated, if you’d given up the name of whoever fed you the information. Maybe you were fronting for him or her.”

  “Who said I was fronting for anyone, Ranger?”

  “Because the trades came out of nowhere, timed to coincide with the record profits turned in by Big Pharma. You know where the bulk of those profits originated, sir?”

  “I’m going to guess prescription narcotics, since they’ve become the industry’s cash cow.”

  Caitlin studied him across the big desk. “There’s some derision in your voice, Mr. Fass.”

  “I got involved in something that destroyed my career, Ranger. That’s on me, all of it. But that doesn’t make the men I was involved with any better. They sweat acid, I tell you.”

  “I’m sorry to drag more baggage into your life, but there’ve been some concerns raised over that warehouse you’re operating just outside of Houston proper.”

  “Are we talking concerns or complaints?”

  “One often leads to the other, sir. That’s why I’m here, what with large increases in cancer occurrences regularly showing up within close proximity to facilities like the ones you own. Maybe I can help you avoid a lawsuit, at least in Texas.”

  “I keep my nose in the day-to-day operations when it comes to oversight, and I can tell you that facility has passed every inspection. We run tests on the groundwater on a weekly basis and have reinforced the walls and floors way beyond what the building code dictates.”

  “That’s good, sir, just fine, because if I can reassure your neighbors to that effect, we may be able to avoid further complaints being lodged.”

  “They’re baseless, I’m telling you.”

  “Could you be a bit more specific as to the contents?”

  “It varies from location to location, but for the most part those warehouses store the raw chemicals that go to make fertilizers, pesticides, industrial solvents, even space-age polymer—anything that’s not the finished product. You know, the stuff nobody else wants to touch. You want to climb back up after you hit rock bottom, you stake your claim someplace nobody else wants to get ne
ar. You asked about the chemicals being stored in my warehouse on Rankin Road? I can have a list generated before you leave.”

  “I’d appreciate that, sir, along with any inspections the state has conducted, and all your licenses.”

  “That’s a big ask, Ranger. Might take some time to put all that together.”

  “I’m just trying to be thorough here and save both of us the bother of getting the state involved. If we can get this sorted out between us, life would be a lot easier. I’ll take you at your word that you’ve got no stake in this consortium or whatever that filled all these warehouses with petrochemicals. But it was something else that caught my eye in Homeland’s report and that I just can’t make sense of, sir. Specifically, the fact that all sixteen cities in which your warehouses are located have seen a dramatic spike in illicit drug distribution and use, particularly prescription opiates, from right around the time each of them respectively opened their doors. Can you offer an explanation about that?”

  “How about coincidence?”

  “That’s always a possibility.”

  “Especially given that the opioid crisis in this country isn’t limited to these cities my warehouses happen to be located in.”

  “No, but they have shown some of the biggest spikes in drug use for large population centers. And I would’ve thought, Mr. Fass, that more out-of-the-way locations would have been better suited to house such petrochemical facilities.”

  Fass looked like a man trying to figure out what a player was holding in Texas Hold’em. “Those warehouses were all empty when I bought them. I could just as easily have put in a church choir, if they could make the monthly nut. But, since you know my background, I’m going to assume you know my engineering firm was no stranger to the petrochemical industry, since we specialized in building manufacturing plants. And safety was always our first priority,” he added, in what sounded like an afterthought.

  “I did figure that’s where you became such an expert on the topic. But, tell me, does making your ‘monthly nut,’ as you call it, require you to be in Washington frequently?”