by Jon Land
“What makes you ask?”
“Well, sir, the complaint against you Homeland’s investigating also alleges you’ve got friends there, partners maybe,” Caitlin said, reciting what she’d actually learned from Homeland Security about travel charges pulled from Fass’s credit cards. “Would that be true? Or maybe you were just meeting with your congressman or something.”
“Are you spying on me?”
“The person who filed the complaint might be. I’m only going on what I was told. I can do my best to assuage their fears, if you tell me who you met with in DC.”
“None of their business, or yours. This is harassment, on both your parts.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Fass. I meant what I said about seeing if we could get this sorted out between just the two of us. I hope we can still do that.”
Fass looked at her, seeming very far away, even though only eight feet separated them. “And me as well, Ranger.”
“I would appreciate that inventory, too, before I head out of the office, if at all possible. And I hope you won’t mind if I pay you another visit before I write up my report.”
“Not at all,” Fass said, standing, a clear sign he was ready for Caitlin to be gone.
As if on cue, her phone rang and she took it from her pocket to check the caller ID.
“I need to take this,” Caitlin said, rising from her chair and moving to the window. “Good morning, D.W.”
“Nothing good I can see, Ranger. You and I are taking a field trip back to Camino Pass.”
“Somebody find something else there?”
“It’s not what they found, it’s what they didn’t. Full accounting of all the bodies is finally complete, but guess what? There’s somebody missing. That was determined yesterday. This morning, Homeland sent in a search team, and guess what?”
“They disappeared too.”
“Is there anything I can say you don’t already know?”
“How about the rest of the story about my great-grandfather teaming up with Pancho Villa?”
“Chopper’s ready and waiting, Ranger,” Tepper told her. “Let’s get a move on.”
54
HOUSTON
Cort Wesley and Doyle Lodge sat in matching wooden lawn chairs set on the plank boardwalk outside his modest, garden-style apartment, which was through the screen door behind them.
“Caitlin Strong came up with all that in less than a day,” Lodge said, shaking his head. “Man oh man, she’s Jim Strong’s daughter and Earl Strong’s granddaughter, all right.”
“She’s pretty good in a gunfight, too.”
“So I’ve heard. Also like her daddy and granddaddy. Man oh man,” the former Ranger repeated. “Sixteen warehouses from coast to coast—seventeen when you include the one here—concentrated in areas with the biggest boosts in opioid traffic, all connected to a single man, this Roland Fass.”
“Fass is a front for something bigger, Doyle. I think that’s a safe assumption to make, as is always the case.”
“Didn’t used to be, son,” Lodge told Cort Wesley, with a combination of regret and nostalgia lacing his voice. “Used to be a bad guy was a bad guy. He didn’t need to be fronting for anybody else at the time, like some straw man. We got us a world now where the food chain’s so high you can’t see the top, new and more powerful links sprouting up all the time.”
“Crime has become big business, Ranger.”
“It always was, in the minds of those doing it. Difference being they didn’t need to report up to the next link if they were fixing to rob a bank or knock off a jewelry store. What we got today is a whole new kind of bad.” Something changed in Lodge’s expression. “Tell me about your son.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s the reason you’re doing this, climbing a chain you can’t see the top of.”
Cort Wesley actually liked hearing it put that way, just as nothing gave him greater pleasure than discussing his boys, although this case made for an exception. “What happened shocked the hell out of me.”
“It’s that way for just about all of us,” Lodge said, his eyes moistening. “People are under the impression that drug addicts give you plenty of warning signs that they’re in trouble, when that’s often as far from the truth as it gets. Difference being, son, you got lucky because your boy lived.”
“I always bought into the stereotype of the drug addict.”
“The dregs of society?”
Cort Wesley nodded, beginning to feel the heat of the day building. “Kind of people you cross the street to avoid when you see them coming.”
“All itchy, pale, and emaciated. Looking as if they’re walking to their own funeral.”
“Those are the ones.”
“Doesn’t describe your boy or mine, though, does it?”
“I have no idea how many times Luke got lucky before he didn’t.”
“You didn’t ask him?”
“It wasn’t the first. And it doesn’t matter, because all I really care about is that it’s the last.”
Doyle Lodge looked like he wanted to laugh, but he just shook his head. “You’re avoiding the real issue here, son.”
“What’s that?”
“The possibility that your boy is a full-fledged addict just like mine was. There’s no hard-and-fast rules to such things, except for the fact they never admit to that being the case.”
“Well, shit…”
Lodge pushed his lawn chair closer to Cort Wesley’s. “You need to get your boy some professional help before you’re calling the coroner instead, son.”
Cort Wesley wanted to punch the old man in that moment, pictured himself knocking out his teeth—or dentures as the case may be. Lodge had just confronted him with a reality he had chosen to avoid, even though Leroy Epps had hinted at the very same thing.
Look at me, relying on a ghost from the grave and a man who may have one foot in it.
“But you’re a lucky man for another reason entirely,” Lodge was saying.
“What’s that, Ranger?”
“You’ve got the skills needed to get back at the people who killed my son and almost killed yours.”
“Maybe I’ll stuff them all in a meat grinder.”
“A worthy pursuit, son, but they don’t make a grinder big enough to fit them all.”
“Then it’s a good thing we’ve got a place to start.” Cort Wesley realized Lodge’s eyes had lost their sheen, no longer wet with unspilled tears. “That warehouse we eyeballed yesterday.”
The old man grinned, showcasing the still-white teeth Cort Wesley no longer felt like knocking out, dentures or not. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
“We need to have a look inside, see if petrochemicals are the only thing being stored there.”
“There’s no ‘we,’ in this case, son, given that I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s an effort for me to get out of the car without losing my breath.”
“Then I’ll have to pull backup elsewhere,” Cort Wesley said, taking out his phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Texting my other son, the one in college.”
“Why don’t you just call him?”
“Because he never answers or listens to his messages.”
Cort Wesley kept the text message short and sweet, the way Dylan liked: TEXT ME NOLA DELGADO’S CELL NUMBER.
55
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Caitlin and D. W. Tepper arrived at the Stinson Airport on Mission Road, where the Ranger chopper was based, climbing out of their vehicles to find Guillermo Paz leaning against his massive pickup truck.
“I didn’t call him, Captain, I swear,” Caitlin assured Tepper.
“I called him, Ranger.”
“You…”
“A trained Homeland Security team vanished while looking for a missing kid in a town where everybody else died. I thought this might be right up your friend’s alley.”
* * *
“I appreciate you recommen
ding me to the principal of that school, Ranger,” Paz told Caitlin, as they walked toward the chopper.
“I’m sorry things didn’t work out.”
“Oh, but they did, for a couple days anyway. You would think schools would place more emphasis on training their students to prepare for the inevitable.”
“School shootings aren’t inevitable, Colonel.”
“I was talking about the bigger picture. First thing that happens when you get on an airplane, they tell you what to do if something bad happens.”
“The passengers don’t really listen.”
“My students listened. I knew I was saving lives. That’s what made my two days there so special. I felt like my priest, the late Father Boylston, showing those children the way just as he showed me.”
“Literally as opposed to figuratively.”
“Is there really a difference, Ranger?”
They reached the chopper, the engine just starting to warm. “Let’s go, Colonel.”
* * *
“What do we know about the missing kid, Captain?” Caitlin said into her headset, once they were airborne.
She and Tepper were seated next to each other; Guillermo Paz sat on the floor of the hold, immediately behind them. Though cramped, it provided him more room, enough to stretch his legs all the way out.
“Well, let’s see,” Tepper said. He pulled a crinkled piece of paper from his pants pocket and squinted for lack of reading glasses. “Andrew Ortega, mother a native-born Texan and father originally an immigrant. In and out of trouble to the point where the family moved to Camino Pass to keep the kid from running with the same gang his father did. Father’s no angel either, by the way. He fought his way through prison in the boxing ring. Highway patrol has been called to the family home on multiple occasions on domestic abuse calls for damage done to both his wife and Andrew. Told the officers he had a right to toughen his kid up.”
“He have an explanation as to why he hit his wife, too?”
“How about the fact he’s just an asshole, now gone to an early grave with his wife and the rest of the town, except for the late Lennox Scully and maybe Andrew Ortega.”
“If he didn’t just up and run away, you mean, D.W. Kid sounds like a prime candidate for it.”
“Maybe you’re forgetting those three missing Homeland Security officials.”
“You think a bullied kid could be responsible for that?”
Tepper shrugged. “Until three days ago, I didn’t think the population of a whole town could die in their sleep, either.”
56
CAMINO PASS, TEXAS
The Ranger chopper landed in the same spot it had on Caitlin’s first trip here, with an equally tight security perimeter erected extending out to a one-mile radius. Although the town had been declared safe, no further threat looming anywhere within it, there was now the press to consider, along with the curious. The last thing they needed was a tourist attraction on the scale of the Marfa lights. It wasn’t hard to picture, given the macabre sense of entertainment, people driving for miles and miles just to see the ghost town that had sprung up overnight.
A standard SUV was waiting for them at the command center. Highway patrol captain Ben Hargraves, who’d been in charge during Caitlin’s first visit, handed the keys to Tepper.
“Have you even gone home?” she asked him.
“What do you think?” Hargraves said, his voice scratchy and raw. “Maybe we’re all dead and this is purgatory.”
“That’s not as far-fetched as it seems, given that hell is just a mile or so down the road, Captain. Anything on thermal imaging scans or motion detectors?”
“No movement, no heat, and no sound, Ranger.”
“And when did the Homeland team go missing?”
“Three hours ago now. They searched his house and came up empty. Then they started a house-to-house, building-to-building search, checking in at five-minute intervals.”
“They obviously had phones or communicators. What do the GPS signals say?”
“You think we would have called in the Texas Rangers if they’d said anything at all?” Hargraves asked her, frustration washing the fatigue from his voice for at least the moment. “Did I tell you I grew up in these parts?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I did. And the area’s been the capital of weird and strange for as long as I can remember. I can recall hearing a train rumbling past my house when I was little boy. I’d run to the window, but there was never any train, never mind any railroad tracks.”
“Boys do tend to have pretty active imaginations, Captain.”
A look somewhere between whimsical, nostalgic, and uncertain crossed Hargraves’s features. “That’s kind of what my parents told me. But funny thing, Ranger, they were lying, because I remember thinking that they could hear that train, too.”
Caitlin passed off his reflections as the product of a tired mind. “Let’s get back to the missing DHS team. You got a notion as to where they were the last time they checked in?”
Hargraves handed over a sheet of paper folded in two. “I marked it on the map for you.”
* * *
The map was a shrunken version of a detailed structural schematic of Camino Pass, each residence marked with a blue number and the remaining buildings with a red one. The map had been divided into lightly shaded grids to denote areas divvied up by the Homeland Security teams that had spent the past three days removing bodies and searching for any clues, hoping to get a better fix on how the cyanide gas had inexplicably struck so suddenly and lethally.
Hargraves had made an X on the last known location where the missing search team had been before they’d gone dark: the lone municipal building, by the look of things, housing all the local departments, including police. Caitlin parked the SUV nose in, the other four angled spaces taken by a pair of police cruisers and two municipal vehicles. A fancy RV that looked like their vehicle on steroids was parked another ten yards ahead, the doors left open, clearly empty of the Homeland Security personnel who’d driven it here from the checkpoint.
Climbing out of the vehicle felt strange, given that the last time she was here she had been confined by a hazmat suit. But the air felt just as dead and empty, to the point that Caitlin was almost surprised that she could breathe freely. She looked toward Paz, who was circling his gaze about, and could sense his tension and discomfort as well. It was more than just her firsthand recollection and awareness of what had happened here. Something had grasped her gut the same way it did when she was searching for a shooter or a suspect. A sense of something threatening, danger and menace, as if a predator were about to pounce.
“Colonel?” she posed, when her eyes met Paz’s.
He was hanging back, seeming to sniff the air. “Nothing, Ranger. It was Voltaire who said, ‘It is not known precisely where angels dwell whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.’”
“Sounds like we’ve stepped square into that void, Colonel.”
“No sound, no heat, no movement, Ranger,” Tepper said, standing next to Caitlin now. “What’s that tell you about this void?”
“If the search and rescue team is still alive, they’re in a basement somewhere. Andrew Ortega too, Captain. That’s the only explanation for how Ben Hargraves can’t pick up any of their thermal signatures.”
“Well, we got a problem there, given that not a single building in Camino Pass has a basement. You ever try digging down into the desert bed?”
“So what’s that leave us with, exactly?” Caitlin asked herself as much as him.
“That,” said Guillermo Paz, who had come up right behind them, his finger pointing straight ahead.
“I haven’t seen one of those for years,” Tepper said, squinting toward an old logo, above them, that read “Fallout Shelter.” “Then again, this town has been here awhile.”
“Dating back to at least 1898, when my great-grandfather pulled Pan
cho Villa out of jail, right, D.W.?”
He ignored her raising of the story that had started here but still lacked an ending. “I believe towns were required to build fallout shelters during the Cold War.”
Following the sign’s arrow, Caitlin realized that, instead of building an actual fallout shelter, Camino Pass had simply adapted a storm shelter for that use. Tornadoes weren’t uncommon in these parts, a far more likely occurrence than nuclear bombs raining down. It would have saved a ton of money and effort while satisfying the instructions of the state.
“They probably shored it up a bit,” Caitlin said to Tepper and Paz, when they came to the angled steel double doors with a faded fallout shelter emblem still stuck in place. “These doors were likely wood originally.”
“Explains why, if anybody’s down there, their phones wouldn’t give up their positions, any more than body heat would.”
“Somebody’s down there,” Paz said, unshouldering an M4 assault rifle with a shaved-down stock.
“You think we’re going to need that, Colonel?”
He smiled at her, his grin blinding in a ray of sunshine that looked like a spotlight. “Don’t we always?”
* * *
“I’m going first, Colonel,” Caitlin said, after Paz had hoisted open the heavy steel doors as if they were made of papier-mâché.
She looked toward Tepper.
“Andrew Ortega was an abused kid, Captain. Being that he was beaten by his father on a regular basis, this could have been where he went to escape.”
“You saying he was down there the whole time, Ranger. Since the night in question?”
Caitlin frowned. “I can’t say how that explains his surviving, but it makes sense. Homeland Security team goes down there looking and never comes back out.”
Tepper shook his head. “So, for survivors, we’ve got a drunk and an abused kid.”
“Just an abused kid at this point,” Caitlin said, recalling all the bodies she’d come upon at the hospital and her battle with the big Native American man.