by Jon Land
“Don’t sell them short, Mr. Wong. I’ve heard told of them operating brothels, saloons, and opium dens, establishing communities in cities like San Francisco and beyond.”
Wong’s face wrinkled in what looked like revulsion again. “Fitting in, assimilating, forging communities of their own in darkened corners because the light will not have them. Not so here, Ranger. We have begun something that’s going to last for a very long time, built something that’s going to endure just as long.”
“I’m guessing you’re not alone in this, sir.”
“Not at all,” Wong said, smiling thinly. “Luis Siam controls the trade to the northwest, in Sinaloa and the general Sierra Madre, and Patricio Hong controls the south, leaving me with the center, stretching all the way to the Rio Grande.”
William Ray knew about the towns Wong was referring to, all too well. Mexicali, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Metamoros, to name just a few. Population centers that dotted otherwise vast stretches of wildland running through the Mexican deserts and arid hills. Over the years, he’d heard, everything from ceremonial Aztec skulls to Browning machine guns to white tigers had been smuggled over that line in the sand, well before opium began slipping through like water through a sieve.
He cast his gaze down further through the red flowering fields below, squinting to better make out the army of Chinese workers tending to the crop. Virtual slaves themselves, obviously, though William Ray didn’t raise that particular irony with Wong, given the priority that had brought him down here.
“I don’t see the children you stole from the town of Camino Pass anywhere about, Mr. Wong. If you’d be willing to turn them over so I can bring those boys and girls home, I’d be willing to go on my way and call us square.”
Wong couldn’t help but smile. “I’ve never met a Texas Ranger before, but you’re exactly as advertised.”
“What’s that mean, exactly?”
“Bold, strident, relentless, impetuous, brave, and deadly.”
“Well, I agree with the deadly part. Don’t know what ‘strident’ or ‘impetuous’ mean, exactly, and I don’t know if I can rightfully claim ‘bold’ or ‘brave.’ But, like I said, I’ll take ‘deadly’ anytime, and you’d be well advised to give that strong consideration.”
Wong looked at William Ray Strong as if seeing him for the first time. “Would you mind answering a question for me, Ranger?”
“If I can.”
“All this, coming south of the border on your own, it was about kids?”
“Those kids have rights too, Mr. Wong, and last time I checked, their ages didn’t make them any less Texans. And I didn’t come alone. I had the company of that bandit I sprung from jail instead of delivering him to Presidio to face trial. Calls himself Pancho Villa now.”
Wong’s expression went cold amid the heat of the day. “He’s a dangerous man, Ranger.”
“He’s not much out from still being a boy.”
“Danger knows no age, and this one has a look to him I know all too well.”
“How’s that, sir?”
“Because it’s what stares back at me when I look into the mirror.”
* * *
“I’m going to give you a choice of how you want to die,” Wong told William Ray Strong, when they got back to the settlement. “Firing squad, hanging, poison, burning … It’s the least I can do.”
From atop Jessabelle, his wrist chains back in place, William Ray swung his gaze about the Mexicans under Jesus Arriaga, who’d grabbed him and Pancho Villa from the foothills that morning. Villa himself stood off to the side, reluctant to meet his gaze. Their eyes finally met, and Villa’s passed some unspoken message that the Ranger couldn’t quite read and that the young man must have been afraid would be glimpsed by others.
“There’s still the matter of those kids, Mr. Wong,” the Ranger said. “You hand them over to my possession to be returned to their homes and in return I promise not to kill you.”
“That’s very generous of you, Ranger, but as you’ve seen, they’re not here.”
“One of the other guys have them, then? This Luis Siam or Patricio Hong? Wouldn’t mind making their acquaintance, either.”
“We were discussing the means of your execution, Ranger.”
“You were; I wasn’t. Don’t see the need, given it’s not gonna happen. I’d offer you the same deal, Mr. Wong, but truth be told, a bullet from my Colt is the best I can do.”
Wong let his gaze linger on William Ray’s empty holster. “You don’t have your Colt anymore.”
“A formality, sir. And if those kids ain’t here, where are they? Tending to another of your fields?”
“Something like that,” Wong said smugly. “The territory of my particular jiéhuŏ happens to include other good fortunes.”
“What’s jiéhuŏ mean?”
“‘Gang.’ But there’s another Chinese word we’ve adopted we feel better describes the business we came to do here.”
“What’s that, Mr. Wong?”
“Kătè ĕr. It means ‘cartel’ in English.”
“Last chance, Mr. Wong.”
“I was just about to say the same to you, Ranger, before I choose your means of execution.”
“How ’bout you shoot me yourself?”
Wong’s face wrinkled in disgust. “A bit crass, don’t you think?”
“Maybe, but I’m used to looking a man in the eyes when I kill them. Figured you deserved that courtesy, in return for your hospitality and all.”
Wong nodded. “As you wish, Ranger. And you made me think of a most fitting tribute for your passing.”
He whispered something to one of his men standing nearby. The man rushed off, returning seconds later with William Ray’s Colt in hand.
“A fine weapon that is, Mr. Wong, although I figure it would take more man than you are to use it. Gun’s got a kick to it, even from close range.”
Wong steadied the Colt on William Ray across the ten feet separating them and fired straight at him. The bullet went wildly askew, just as the Ranger had predicted.
“Need a hand there, sir? Maybe a shooting lesson?”
The Colt looked less steady in Wong’s hand. He lowered it to his hip, forcing a smile.
“We have a proverb that, in English, might be taken to say that courage is often caused by fear.”
“Yeah, you Chinese are sure smart that way. Personally, I prefer the one that says something like a man who stands straight doesn’t fear a crooked shadow.” William Ray paused just long enough to let his point sink in before resuming. “Doesn’t appear to me that you’re standing very straight, Mr. Wong—not a man who steals children.”
Wong’s expression flattened, his skin looking porcelain smooth. “Be aware, gwailou, that even the dragon struggles to control a snake in its native haunt.”
William Ray took off his hat and rubbed his scalp with the hands that had been manacled again. “Yeah, about that. Like I said, Mr. Wong, I’ve had me some experience with your culture and your language. Gwailou means ‘foreign devil,’ but you’re as much a foreigner in these parts as I am.”
“Not anymore,” Wong said, his expression cracking into a smile.
As if on cue, William Ray Strong heard the thunder of hoofbeats, dozens of them, coming fast and hard. At first, he thought whoever was coming had been summoned by Felipe Wong. Then he saw the perplexed expression on the well-dressed man’s face, his uncertainty giving way to fear when a flood of riders mounted the plateau, shooting wildly in all directions from horseback.
William Ray ducked low. Wong seemed to look for him briefly, before tearing off upon his majestic horse to rally his own defenses. The Ranger had no idea what was going on here, exactly, but one name clung to his consciousness like mud: Pancho Villa.
And, in that moment, the young man galloped to his side on horseback, brandishing a badly rusted key.
“Stick out your hands, Ranger.”
“What are you doing?”
�
�Saving your life, just like you probably saved mine.”
Villa clanked the key into one manacle Wong had clamped back in place, and then the other, making good on his word.
“I’m talking about this,” William Ray said, hunkered as low as his saddle would have him, as bullets crisscrossed past them. “I’m guessing these guns were following us all the way. I’m guessing you knew who you were after and used me to find him for you.”
Villa grinned, firing off some shots from a long-barreled pistol, tearing a pair of Wong’s men off their horses. One of them got his boot wedged in the stirrup and ended up being dragged across the plateau, his head bouncing off the hardpan like a ball.
“My men needed something that Felipe Wong has.”
“Your men?”
Villa reloaded and resumed firing before reloading again; he handed the Ranger a twin pistol that had been wedged into his belt. “Join the fight, amigo.”
“So I’m your friend now?”
“I owe you this much.”
“Don’t make me regret not delivering you to Presidio to stand trial, Pancho,” William Ray said, firing at a pair of Wong’s men who were coming straight for them and knocking both off their saddles.
“How about you let me take you to where Wong has those kids stashed, first?” Villa asked him.
73
MARBLE FALLS, TEXAS
They’d all finished their pie by the time the ringing of Caitlin’s phone interrupted Jones’s tale, just before William Ray Strong rode off with Pancho Villa on the trail of the missing kids.
“Aren’t you going to take that, Ranger?” Jones asked her.
“It can wait.”
“In that case, getting back to our deal.…”
“What deal is that?” Caitlin asked him.
“I get you the skinny on this reconstituted version of Air America operating stateside and you cut me in on whatever comes out of Camino Pass.”
“Oh, that deal … You must want back into Washington awfully bad.”
“I think I’ve already made that clear.”
Caitlin exchanged a glance with Cort Wesley. “Enough to give us a name?”
“None that I can state for sure, but I can run the math for you. The cowboy’s theory about that Houston warehouse being a way station for the ingredients needed to manufacture opioids makes a whole world of sense, because who better to fill the void left by cutting the opiate balls off Big Pharma than whoever’s holding the scissors?”
“Air America again,” Caitlin said, picturing the likes of Roland Fass packing warehouses nationwide with illicit drugs manufactured somewhere in Texas.
“I can’t give you all the names, Ranger,” Jones resumed, “but I can tell you some of them are splashed all over the news and front pages of the major daily papers. You want to know who’s behind Air America, the sequel? Look toward the loudest crusaders taking a hammer to Big Pharma, because lining their pockets was no longer enough. These days they’re looking to own the whole pair of pants.”
Caitlin nodded. “Looks like I’m headed to Washington, then, doesn’t it?”
PART SEVEN
CAPTAIN BILL MCDONALD
Bill McDonald was one of the most visible Rangers to emerge in this new era. As a Ranger captain from 1891 to 1907, McDonald took on numerous high-profile criminal cases, including illegal prizefights, bank robberies, murders and riots. He earned a reputation for his marksmanship, as well as for being the source of one of the most famous Ranger sayings: “One riot—one Ranger.” Though McDonald probably never said exactly that, it’s a pretty good statement of his attitude. As one story goes, McDonald arrived in Dallas to stop a prizefight, and when community leaders asked when his fellow Rangers were arriving, he said “Hell! Ain’t I enough? There’s only one prizefight!”
—Sarah Pruitt, “8 Famous Texas Rangers,” History.com
74
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“Washington?” D. W. Tepper repeated. “Please tell me I didn’t hear that right.”
“Want me to lie?” Caitlin said, from the single chair poised in front of his desk.
“You and Washington makes for a dangerous combination, Ranger, oil and water being the first comparison that comes to mind. That said, ammonia and bleach would probably be a more accurate description of what’s coming.”
Tepper popped a Marlboro red into his mouth from a box he kept hidden in the back of his drawer. Much to his surprise, a lighter flashed in Caitlin’s hand, as she leaned across the desk to light it for him.
“Did you rig this butt to blow up or something?”
“No, sir.”
“What’d you do to it?” Tepper asked, reluctant to take a puff.
“Nothing.”
He held the Marlboro over the ashtray he’d chained to his desk with a computer lock and let it smolder.
“Making enemies in Texas is one thing,” Tepper warned. “Playing the Lone Ranger in Washington could make you the kind of enemies you can’t scare off and cause you the kind of problems you can’t shoot your way out of.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, Captain.”
“Neither were they, Ranger.”
“What do you know about Lee Eckles?”
“Besides the fact he’s the senior senator from our great state and the chairman of the Senate health committee? How about that he’s a crusader against the pharmaceutical industry, a pain in their collective ass.”
“Maybe I’m looking for an ally.”
Tepper started to raise the cigarette to his mouth, then stopped. “And maybe I was Davy Crockett in a past life. You never go anywhere to see anybody about anything, unless you’re planning on taking them down for something.”
“Maybe you didn’t read my report.”
Tepper feigned feeling about his desk. “Well, it must be here somewhere…”
“I meant the oral version I just provided.”
“Oh.”
“Especially the part about a pharmaceutical lab big enough to fill sixteen warehouses nationwide with opioids being located somewhere in Texas.”
“I don’t recall any proof being provided in that report.”
“That’s what I intend to find in Washington.”
“You plan on pistol-whipping Eckles until he talks?”
“I won’t be allowed to carry a gun inside the Capitol.”
“Since when did you let the law stop you?”
Tepper finally raised the Marlboro to his mouth, looking relieved as he took a puff and sucked in the smoke, before coughing it out in a spittle-drenched burst of smoke.
“Goddamn, Ranger,” he said, retching as he tamped the cigarette out in his ashtray, “what’d you do to this thing?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit!”
“It’s an organic cigarette made of wheatgrass. Guaranteed not to give you cancer.”
“Sure. Can’t cause cancer if it tastes too awful to finish.”
“The price of having no tar or nicotine.”
Tepper sniffed at the cigarettes remaining in the pack, nose wrinkling over the fact that it contained only the wheatgrass variety. “I like tar and nicotine. I like Jack Daniel’s too. And I’m seriously considering heroin.”
“Knock yourself out, D.W.,” Caitlin said, standing back up.
Tepper studied her as if seeing her for the first time. “When was the last time a hurricane hit Washington, Ranger?”
“Isabelle, in 2003, but that was only a category one.”
“Well, somebody better warn them that Hurricane Caitlin is headed their way and she’s a category ten.”
75
HOUSTON
“So what do we do next?” Doyle Lodge asked Cort Wesley.
Cort Wesley had recounted everything that had transpired with Jones, and the plan going forward, once again leaving out mention of how Nola Delgado had summarily executed four hired guns who might have been planning to do likewise to him.
“Based on what we’ve been abl
e to put together, I’d say Caitlin Strong’s headed to take Washington by storm.”
“She’s not us, Masters.”
“She’s one of us, Doyle.”
Lodge’s eyes brightened, suddenly those of a younger man. His spine looked more erect and there was a harshness to his glare that was consistent with the Texas Ranger of lore he’d once been. It was as if the whole experience had shaved twenty years off his age.
“I want to sit down with her ’fore she leaves,” he said to Cort Wesley. “Or, better yet, soon as she gets back. Got a few stories I think she’d enjoy hearing.”
“About Earl and Jim Strong?”
The old man grinned proudly. “I once met a man claimed he was Wyatt Earp.”
“He died in 1929,” Cort Wesley recalled. “Wasn’t that the year you were born?”
“That’s why I said ‘claimed.’ I was just a boy at the time, and if he wasn’t Wyatt, he sure believed he was. Gave me a whole new perspective on Doc Holliday and the O.K. Corral. My point being that maybe he wanted to live out his final years without the notoriety, so he planned his own funeral around ten years ahead of time.”
“That would make him around ninety when he really did pass, Doyle.”
Lodge fingered his chin. “Right. Can’t expect any ninety-year-old to still have his wits about him, can you? My other point being that the reason I believed that old man really was Wyatt Earp was because I knew he was a gunfighter. Maybe the smell of gun oil clings to them like a second skin. He wasn’t carrying at the time, but you could tell by the way he carried himself and held his hand just over where his holster would’ve been that he knew his way around a gunfight. Just like that girl of yours—and all the Strongs, for that matter.”
“Others see Caitlin that way, but that’s not the way she sees herself.”
“What’s she going to Washington for again?”
“Rattle some cages for starters, Doyle, something she excels at.”
“Know what that man claiming to be Wyatt Earp told me the day we met? That his first order of business upon reaching Tombstone was to push the Clantons into the fight he wanted. You thinking your girl’s gonna do the same when she hits Washington?”