Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  “Okay, boss, whatever you say,” the biggest of them said. “When we dump your body in a hole somewhere in the desert, it won’t be on us either.”

  The lights went out in that moment, Cort Wesley dropping low just as the first familiar spits of sound-suppressed gunfire sounded. A series of muzzle flashes, a half dozen maybe, followed by another three, blew light in thin swatches that faded as quickly as it came. Cort Wesley heard the thumps of bodies hitting the floor, accompanied by grunts, groans, and the airless wisp of men taking their final breaths.

  Then a flashlight pierced the darkness, silhouetting the lithe figure of Nola Delgado, who reached his side as Cort Wesley climbed back to his feet.

  “You can thank me later, Pops.”

  “For what?” he asked, as they retraced their steps toward the building’s rear entrance.

  “Saving your life.”

  “You set those men up. You must’ve purposely tripped a silent alarm so you could enjoy some target practice.”

  “Well,” Nola said, not bothering to deny it, “I haven’t been to the range in a while. Gotta stay sharp, right?”

  She was close enough for Cort Wesley to feel her breath on him. “You executed them. That’s not target practice.”

  “I go up against four assault rifles and you call that an execution?”

  “They never had a chance.”

  “They were ex-army. I could see that plain as day, even in the dark, and so could you while I was saving your life.”

  “You dropped them in a barrel and plugged them like fish. And don’t say you did it for me. Don’t lay this on my doorstep.”

  She slowed, snickering at Cort Wesley as they neared the door. “Come on, lighten up, Pops.”

  “I just watched you murder four men, Nola. You might as well have tied their hands behind their backs and blindfolded them.”

  “Except I didn’t. And it was their own fault, not considering the likelihood, at least possibility, someone else was in the building.”

  “They had me figured as a reporter, maybe a cop,” Cort Wesley persisted.

  “You heard what the head guy said. You were dead meat, headed for a hole in the desert. A little gratitude would be nice, Pops—just a little.” A new look danced across Nola’s expression, something hot and cold at the same time, amorphous in the light that made her features look more liquid than solid. “How about we call Dylan and give him an update?”

  They stepped into the steamy night air.

  “Leave him out of this,” Cort Wesley warned.

  “You think he wouldn’t want to hear? You don’t think he eats this shit up?”

  “I was there when he killed a kid about his own age a while back. He did it to save my life. I saw the look on his face and, no, I don’t think he eats this shit up.”

  “Ease up and look in the mirror,” Nola Delgado told him with chilling assurance. “Because you like the taste as much as I do. That’s why you don’t want to call him, because you’d have to admit that.”

  “I apologize for calling you a psychopath before.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Because you’re something worse, Nola, the kind of a person they don’t have a term for. The kind the world wants to believe doesn’t exist, just like the monsters that live under the bed.”

  “Doesn’t mean they’re not there, does it?”

  Cort Wesley stopped and faced her. “I don’t want you seeing Dylan anymore. I don’t want you going back to Providence.”

  “He tells me to go, I’m gone.”

  “I just did.”

  “But you’re not him, Pops. The way I feel about Dylan is why I saved your bacon. Along with something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  She smiled like a kid reaching the tree on Christmas morning. “Because I know when you and my sister go to guns, there’s a whole lot of fun to be had.”

  Cort Wesley looked down at the bodies again. “Except we do our best to avoid collateral damage.”

  “Wake up and smell the gun smoke, Pops. We’re at war, and war always brings collateral damage with it. I need to tell you that, after what happened to Luke?”

  “You’ve never even met him.”

  “But he’s family to Caitlin, which makes him family to me. That means I intend to keep an eye out his way, stop him from ending up collateral damage too,” Nola said, glancing at the men she’d dropped in their tracks as if to better make her point.

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “I wasn’t asking for permission. Like I said, I’m doing it for Caitlin. I told you I was the only blood she’s got, but that’s not really true, is it? She’s got you, and Dylan and Luke. Think about it. One of the four of you is my sister, and I might be in love with one of the other three. So I figure looking out after Luke isn’t a favor, it’s a duty.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Cort Wesley told Nola Delgado, no longer able to argue the point.

  66

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “You’re saying he was underground the whole time?” Doc Whatley said to Caitlin, after listening to her brief description of how and where they had found Andrew Ortega.

  “In a fallout shelter, of all places,” she told him across his ever-cluttered desk.

  “Might be the first time one of those actually saved a life. It took long enough, I suppose.”

  “The question is how, Doc. What is it this kid has in common with Lennox Scully?”

  “Had,” Whatley corrected. “And maybe nothing.”

  “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

  “I believe it until I find a firm indicator, as in actual proof, otherwise. Run the numbers for me, Ranger. Let’s think this out.”

  The Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office and morgue was located just off the Loop 410, not far from the Babcock Road exit, on Merton Minter. It was a three-story beige building that also housed the county health department and city offices for Medicaid. The office inevitably smelled of cleaning solvent, with a faint scent of menthol clinging to the walls like paint to disguise the odor of decaying flesh. The lighting was dull in the hallways and overly bright in the offices, except for in Whatley’s, thanks to lesser-strength bulbs he’d placed in the hidden ceiling fixtures.

  “Okay,” Caitlin started, “the late Lennox Scully was sleeping off a bender in the local walk-in medical clinic, something he’d done before. Kind of like it was his own personal Holiday Inn. Maybe the fact that he was drunk is what ended up saving his life.”

  “How’s that compare with this kid?”

  “Andrew Ortega fled to that bomb shelter because he was scared as hell of his father beating the crap out of him. Add to that the guilt over leaving his mother to face his fury alone, and his heart must’ve been going a mile a minute. And, when I saw him anyway, he was breathing so fast I thought he was about to hyperventilate and pass out.”

  “So now you’re in the diagnosis business?”

  “You asked me a question, Doc, and now I want to ask you one. Given what I just said about Andrew Ortega’s condition, is there anything that jibes, in a medical sense, with a drunk passed out in what used to be a supply closet?”

  “Now you’re on the right track, Dr. Strong.”

  “Does that mean you’ve got an answer to my question?”

  “Being on the right track doesn’t necessarily mean the right line. Because the answer, in general anyway, is still nothing.” Whatley hesitated, tapping a pencil atop his desk blotter until the tip broke. “Can you get me a copy of the results of whatever tests Homeland runs on this kid?”

  “I can try. Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

  “Something maybe with no connection to where you found him. Could be in the blood work, or some congenital issue that somehow rendered them immune to cyanide poisoning.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “I said ‘somehow,’ didn’t I?” Whatley snapped. “And the answer is that I have no idea. We’re ope
rating in totally uncharted territory here.”

  “And from where I’m standing, we still have no idea where the cyanide gas that killed an entire town originated.”

  “An entire town minus two, Ranger.”

  “What are we missing? Like any gas, cyanide disperses through the air. And last time I checked, Andrew Ortega and Lennox Scully were breathing the same air as the three hundred or so others who weren’t as lucky.”

  Whatley’s eyes snapped alert. He started to look toward Caitlin, then stopped.

  “What, Doc? What’s on your mind?”

  “How quickly can you get me those test results on this kid, Ranger?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve got a notion of how Camino Pass got wiped off the map.”

  67

  HOUSTON

  “What’s wrong with your face?” Roland Fass asked Yarek Bone. The two of them were standing where all four bodies of the security team had been found on the warehouse floor earlier that morning.

  “Ask me that again and there’ll be something much worse wrong with yours.”

  Fass cleared his throat and looked away. “This is where it happened,” he said, no longer wanting to meet the big man’s gaze.

  “I know,” Bone told him. “That’s why I’m standing here.”

  Bone could see the bodies, even though they weren’t there anymore. They had been removed long before he got to the warehouse, with the so-called authorities being none the wiser. But he more than just saw them; he could also feel the residue of their pain. Not quite as pronounced as what he’d felt in the hospital basement or when he’d killed the deer, but it was there, tweaking his reality with a pleasant euphoria beyond even that of the peyote he’d done as a kid.

  No matter how pleasant it might be, though, he couldn’t shake from his mind the experience with the Texas Ranger that had left him with his newfound ability. No matter how many showers he took or how many times he washed himself, he couldn’t rid himself of the oil smell that rode his flesh like paint. Bitter and sweet at the same time and making him feel like he’d spilled gasoline on himself at the self-serve.

  Bone’s Comanche ancestors had had more than their share of run-ins with the vaunted lawmen who, back in those days, shot first and shot second, too. A quirky turn of events, then, that his path should cross with a Texas Ranger who’d similarly gotten the jump on him. Bone was left fleeing on foot, the same way his ancestors had on horseback. He wasn’t used to running, even less used to failing. But he knew he’d get another chance at the woman Ranger, felt it somewhere down deep, where the pain of others radiated outward. And he couldn’t wait to feel the woman’s pain again, only magnified a hundred times.

  “Are you listening to me?” Roland Fass was asking him, voice raised.

  Bone looked down at the man who was at least a head shorter than him, even at almost six feet tall. “You need better security.”

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “It’s what you need, all the same. I can bring in some men from Fallen Timbers who’ve been off the grid for years. All of them have spilled real blood—not just trained to do it, like the ones who died here.”

  “That nose of yours tell you anything else?”

  Bone didn’t bother telling Fass that, lately, the only thing his nose had been telling him was that he stank of oil. “They didn’t get a single shot off.”

  “Did I tell you that?”

  “You didn’t have to. It’s obvious from how the bodies fell in such a tight cluster.”

  Fass looked up at the bigger man, suddenly hesitant. “Can you see them?”

  “Feel them. Same thing really. And I can feel something else, too: whoever did this enjoyed it. They considered it sport.”

  “You don’t think they were trying to send us a message?”

  “That is a message,” Bone told him.

  “Because maybe somebody’s wised up about our business. Like maybe the cartels south of the border don’t like us cutting into their market share.”

  “The cartels would’ve burned the place down, Fass. Whoever did this was scoping the place out instead. I can have my people here by nightfall. They come with an ironclad guarantee that you won’t be finding any more bodies on the floor unless they put them there.”

  Fass hesitated. “You think this was the work of that Texas Ranger, the woman?”

  Bone sniffed the air. “She wasn’t here, but…”

  “What?” Fass prodded.

  “Nothing,” the big man said, not sure of what he was feeling. “Tell me about the kid.”

  “What kid?”

  “The one who OD’d, got this whole mess started.”

  “He’s an honor student or something. Kind of like this Texas Ranger’s son.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. She’s involved with the kid’s father, who happens to be the guy who burned down the one-stop pill shop where the dealer got the oxy that almost killed his boy.”

  “I see.” Bone nodded. “We need to change the game here.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s better to have thunder in the mouth and more lightning in the hand. My people have been masters of psychological warfare since before the white man ever got here. I think it’s time we started to employ some of that here, make Caitlin Strong hurt in a way she never has before.”

  “Sounds personal.”

  “Take another look at my face. There’s no worse pain than what follows a loved one dying on your watch.”

  “You talking about this kid?”

  “I’m talking about finishing the job that overdose started.”

  Fass’s phone rang and Bone watched him step aside to take the call.

  “You confirmed this?” Fass said into the phone. “You’re sure?… No, don’t do a goddamn thing until you hear from me.”

  Fass ended the call and put his phone back absently, as if he were sliding it into somebody else’s pocket.

  “Something good?” Bone prompted, noting the smile breaking out over Fass’s expression.

  “Good doesn’t begin to describe it, kemosabe,” Fass said, the smile stretching into a broad grin. “Not even close.”

  68

  MARBLE FALLS, TEXAS

  Caitlin remained silent after Cort Wesley finished, twisting another napkin into knots before shredding it.

  “You want me to arrest her?” she asked him finally.

  “I watched her gun down four men.”

  “Who might’ve been fixing to do the same thing to you if she hadn’t.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear what I said, Ranger. She set them up. Lured them into showing up just so she could enjoy a little target practice.”

  “‘Lured’ isn’t a legal term, Cort Wesley.”

  “So you’re taking Nola Delgado’s side?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? But what’s the point? The charges won’t stick and Nola’s sure to skate even if they did.”

  Cort Wesley looked down at the Bluebonnet Café menu, then up again across the table. “I just want her out of my way.”

  “This, after you called her in. Have I got that right? I mean, correct me if I’m wrong about who’s to blame here.”

  “You think this is about guilt?”

  “I think it’s about Dylan.”

  Cort Wesley picked up the menu set before him. “Which pie you going to get?”

  The Bluebonnet Café was known for its wide selection, in addition to offering a Pie Happy Hour every afternoon, during which slices were two for the price of one, mix and match.

  “Hey,” Cort Wesley said suddenly, “they’ve got key lime today.”

  “Stop trying to change the subject.”

  “It’s anger management control, what I do to stop from reacting in a way I may regret later.”

  Caitlin tightened her stare. “You brought Nola Delgado into this. What did you think was going to happen, exactly?”

  “I didn’t think she’d punch h
oles in four shooters like they were cardboard cutouts at the range.”

  “What’d you tell Doyle Lodge?”

  “Same thing I told you about those storage containers. Same thing I’m going to tell Jones as soon as he gets here.”

  Caitlin leaned back. “We should talk to Dylan, both of us together.”

  “Now who’s trying to change the subject? Nice to see that the kid dating a serial killer actually bothers you.”

  “Nola Delgado’s a lot of things, but she’s no serial killer.”

  “How about a mass murderer?”

  “I’m not any happier about them being together than you are, Cort Wesley.”

  He leaned back in the chair, fanning his arms to the side. “Nola’s obsessed with you, Ranger.”

  “Well, I am the sister she never knew she had.”

  “Which cuts both ways. But in Nola’s case I think it’s more the fact that you can match her every step of the way. Her big sis with a bigger gun.”

  Saying it that way made Cort Wesley tighten his gaze across the table. Caitlin looked different to him and it had nothing to do with the lighting or mood. He figured he was looking at her through a different lens, one filtered through the sensibility of her half sister, Nola Delgado. He knew Caitlin Strong better than he knew anyone in the world but, in that singular moment, wasn’t sure he really knew her at all.

  “Nola pushes things to the limit because that’s where she’s most comfortable. For her, going to the extreme is the only way to go.”

  “Well,” Cort Wesley started, leaning forward and laying his arms on the table, “it does take one to know one.”

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

  “I think you and Nola should have your DNA tested, see if the two of you have an extra chromosome or something. I think you’re protecting her, maybe because the same thing corrupted the gene pool that spawned the two of you. You look at her and see an extreme version of yourself, what you’d be like if you embraced the same limits she does.”

  Caitlin’s eyes looked past Cort Wesley and toward the entrance. “Jones is here.”