Strong from the Heart--A Caitlin Strong Novel

by Jon Land

  Which made no sense, no sense at all. Which was why he needed to talk to Caitlin. He tried her number again, with the same result.

  He turned back to where Nola Delgado had been standing, but she was gone, having had enough fun for one day. She’d switched the uniforms, somehow, to set the shooter up, opting in the end not to go after him in order to stay with Luke. A study in contradictions, as if there was a little of Caitlin inside her, just as Cort Wesley was certain there was a little Nola in Caitlin.

  He was about to try Caitlin yet again but, at the last moment, pressed the contact for Paz instead.

  “I’m on my way, outlaw,” the colonel greeted, engine and road sounds shadowing his words.

  “You don’t even know where I am.”

  “I’m headed north. That’s right, isn’t it? North, while waiting for your call.”

  Cort Wesley almost asked him how he knew even that much, then decided not to bother. “They’re connected, Colonel.”

  “What?”

  “The drugs and that town—the same force is behind both.”

  Cort Wesley could hear the road sounds again, before Paz’s voice returned. “Do you know what Voltaire said on his deathbed, when a priest asked him to renounce Satan?”

  “No.”

  “‘Now, now, my good man, this is no time to be making enemies.’”

  “I’m not going to bother asking what that means.”

  “If you need to ask, you wouldn’t understand anyway, outlaw.”

  Cort Wesley spotted Captain Tepper moving fast toward a mobile SWAT command center, where a number of figures wearing flak jackets had just emerged.

  “Masters!” Tepper yelled to him, as Luke followed the figures down the scant steps.

  “I need to go, Colonel,” he said to Paz.

  84

  HOUSTON

  Cort Wesley didn’t realize he was running until he nearly slammed into a pair of Houston uniformed officers inside the security perimeter. He thought he heard one of them yell “Hey!” after him, but he wasn’t sure and didn’t care. He was conscious of his own feet pounding the turf of the same field his son had almost died on—would have died on, if Nola Delgado hadn’t switched his uniform jersey with another kid’s.

  In his mind, he called out Luke’s name, but his stomach muscles were clenched so tight he couldn’t muster the breath needed, so he just kept running until he swallowed the boy in his arms and felt the heat of his body and tears moistening his shirt.

  “Ben was wearing my jersey.”

  “I know, son.”

  “Somebody switched them.”

  Cort Wesley let his words stand and hugged him tighter.

  “It was supposed to be me.”

  Tighter still.

  “I should be dead now, not Ben.”

  Cort Wesley eased him away. “But you’re not.”

  Then he hugged Luke again, the tightest yet.

  * * *

  “You take the bird back home,” D. W. Tepper said to Cort Wesley. “Rangers have been put in charge of the investigation, so I’m likely to be making my bed here tonight.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  Tepper stamped out his cigarette as if embarrassed to be smoking in front of a kid and turned toward Luke.

  “How you holding up, son?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “We’re gonna get whoever did this to your friend,” Tepper said, his voice strained, sounding like he was speaking through a mouthful of gravel. “You can count on that, you hear me?”

  The boy nodded, biting his lower lip.

  Tepper looked from son to father, not needing to say any more. He half nodded, and Cort Wesley mirrored the gesture. He was reluctant to leave the scene, as if he hoped the killer might be somewhere about and he could still get a shot at him.

  Supporting his son the whole way, he reached the Ranger chopper to find Nola Delgado standing in a dark patch untouched by the lights that had snapped on in Menske Park with the fall of night.

  “Give me a sec,” Cort Wesley said to Luke.

  The boy was reluctant to let go of him but finally released his grasp. Cort Wesley walked backwards across the grass toward Nola so as to not have to take his eyes off his son. He reached her with his focus still trained on Luke.

  “The shooter’s name is Yarek Bone, Pops,” she said to him.

  “Yarek what?”

  “Our paths have crossed a few times south of the border,” Nola continued, instead of answering him. “Sometimes on the same side, other times on different ones.”

  “And yet he’s still alive. Explains why you stayed with Luke instead of going after him.”

  “A man like that could’ve figured soon enough that he’d fucked up. Could’ve doubled back while I was giving chase.”

  “He that good?”

  “I’ve known better, but not many.”

  Cort Wesley nodded, pondering her words. “Paz is on his way.”

  “Should make you sleep plenty easier.”

  “I’m going to turn him around to Shavano Park, in case Yarek Bone shows up to finish the job. Go home, Nola.”

  She grinned. “When things are just starting to get interesting? Not a chance.”

  “You need to find a hobby. Maybe origami or a Zen garden. Somewhere you can find some peace.”

  “Why?” Nola scoffed, face crinkling as if she’d just smelled something rancid. “You don’t need a hobby when you love what you do as much as me, Pops.”

  “You’re scared.”

  “Come again?”

  “You heard me. This Yarek Bone has you spooked.”

  Nola didn’t bother trying to deny that. “Like I said, our paths have crossed.”

  “You ever hear of Siamese fighting fish?”

  “Sure. They go at it until one of them dies, even if it takes days.”

  “Like you and Bone. But you’re both still alive.”

  “No one who goes up against this guy stays that way long, Pops.”

  “He hasn’t met Guillermo Paz yet, Nola.”

  Cort Wesley’s phone rang:

  Caitlin.

  Cort Wesley started walking back toward his son as he took the call.

  “Luke’s fine, Ranger.”

  “I’m shaking so much right now, passengers are complaining about turbulence. Somebody had the news feed on his laptop. You want to call Dylan or should I?”

  “I’ll do it. That way I can put his brother on the line. You’ve got other things to worry about,” he said, and he told Caitlin about the connection between the drugs and all those deaths in Camino Pass, in the form of the man who’d shot Ben Brussard in the back.

  “Yarek Bone?”

  “That’s who you went up against at University Hospital.”

  A pause followed, so long that Cort Wesley thought he might have lost her. “Ranger?”

  “I’m still here. Just thinking on how best to wipe the floor with this Yarek Bone, Roland Fass, Senator Lee Eckles, and everyone else involved.”

  “I’ve already called Paz, Ranger.”

  “Stay clear of Nola Delgado in the meantime. Looks like we’re going to need her before this is done.”

  PART EIGHT

  FRANK HAMER

  After Frank Hamer helped capture a horse thief on the ranch where he worked, the local sheriff recommended him to the Texas Rangers. Hamer joined the Rangers in 1906, and became part of a company that patrolled the South Texas border. He left the Rangers periodically over the years to take different law enforcement jobs, but by 1922 he had become a senior Ranger captain in Austin. In the 1920s, Hamer was a key figure in preserving law and order in Texas’ oil boom towns. But it was in 1934, after he retired as a Texas Ranger, that Hamer scored his biggest triumph: Hired as a special investigator for the state prison system, he spent 102 days tracking the infamous outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, finally ending their multi-state crime spree in a police ambush in Bienville Parish, Louisiana.

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

  85

  TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER

  The fights were being staged in a different location tonight, in a trench silo that had once held tons of grain. For the latest series of bouts, its huge, cylindrical shape was playing host to the hundreds in attendance, who lined the steel catwalks that Roland Fass had erected over the pit that looked an extension of hell itself. The whole setting had been retrofitted at considerable expense to serve as another in his network of clandestine locations where his bare-knuckle brawls were staged. There wasn’t much he could do about the poor air quality or circulation, never mind the cramped confines. But the audience didn’t care, so long as the open bars were operational and flowing with enough booze to get them through the night.

  Attendance and revenue were sure to both be down, because Yarek Bone wasn’t on the card. Too bad, Roland Fass thought, since a return engagement by his biggest draw, in the wake of beating five men to death in record time, would have led to Fass having to close the doors early.

  Fass charged a five-hundred-dollar admission plus a twenty percent vig on all gambling proceeds. He was not about to let his clientele complain, since he didn’t expect any of them to pay taxes on their winnings. Local authorities in counties and towns where the fights were staged were given a “detail fee” for not showing up to work a detail or bust his balls in any way.

  With four fights down and a dozen more to go, Fass surveyed the crowd that spiraled across five levels above him, whipped into a frenzy over the very real possibility of watching a man get beaten to death, secure in the notion that they were safe. He waxed whimsically on how long any of them could have lasted against Yarek Bone, doubted it would have reached a minute. He wondered what made a man willing to pay five hundred bucks to stand in a rancid pit where the stench of stale sweat owned the air and blood sprayed like dewy mist on a Gulf morning.

  Fass’s phone rang and he knew he had to answer it. He couldn’t put off talking to Eckles any longer.

  “Where the fuck you been?” the senator demanded. Then, after a pause, “You’re not from Texas, are you?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “You already had the Texas Rangers breathing down your neck, and now Caitlin Strong’s going to be crawling up your ass. What the fuck were you thinking, letting Bone take out a kid?”

  “Pedal to the metal, like you said.”

  “No such shit ever left my mouth, Fass.”

  “No harm in scaring them off.”

  “Aren’t you listening to me, you asshole? You can’t scare off the Texas Rangers. Caitlin Strong’s going to come calling, so you better make sure your affairs are in order. First you lead her straight to me, and now you authorize an Indian who could have wiped out Custer’s army by himself to take out a boy who’s as close to a son as she’s got.”

  “Good thing Bone shot the wrong kid, then.”

  “And don’t even get me started on the kid’s father, dipshit. I finally got a peek at his classified military file. Does the name Rambo ring any bells with you? Man, you sure can pick them, can’t you? Tell me, Roland, when you went up the river on that embezzlement beef, did you pick the warden’s pocket?”

  A commotion broke out and Fass spotted uniformed figures shoving their way through the crowd, having burst through the guarded entrance above, on ground level.

  “I have to call you back, Senator,” he said, ending the call and pocketing his phone.

  Then he spotted Caitlin Strong advancing toward him.

  86

  TEXAS-MEXICO BORDER

  “You’re under arrest, Mr. Fass,” Caitlin said flatly, her voice sounding tinny in the odd acoustics of the trench silo.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear, we’re protected.”

  Caitlin froze on his stare. “Not from me or the state of Texas, sir.”

  Fass looked around at the crowd, which was taunting the police and making no effort to rush toward the exits. “You really want to cause a riot, Ranger? This is a pretty rowdy crowd, armed better than those state cops, in all probability.”

  “You know where our motto ‘One riot, one Ranger’ comes from?”

  Fass shook his head. “And I don’t care, either.”

  Caitlin ignored the commotion circling around her, figuring the state cops could fend for themselves. In that moment, as far as she was concerned, she and Fass were the only two people in this old grain silo that still stank of fertilizer.

  “Goes back to 1896, maybe seven years after Texas outlawed prizefighting. But that didn’t stop promoters from trying to stage a heavyweight title fight in Dallas, between Bob Fitzsimmons and Irish Peter Maher. Local officials got wind of the thousands of folks sure to be streaming in for the festivities and wired the Rangers for help. The mayor came down to meet the train that the reinforcements he’d requested were coming in on and out steps a single Ranger, no bigger than you. So the mayor comes up to Captain Bill McDonald and says to him, ‘Are you the only one they sent?’ To which McDonald replied, ‘Hell, ain’t I enough? There’s only one prizefight.’ You get the point, sir?”

  “No.”

  “I’m shutting you down, just like Bill McDonald stopped that championship match. You, and Eckles, and whoever else is involved here. You can tell the senator that the reconstituted Air America is being grounded. And while I don’t know the part you all played in the deaths of nearly three hundred residents of Camino Pass, I will soon enough. Speaking of history, did you know that the state of Texas was the first to execute a prisoner by lethal injection—Charles Brooks Jr., in 1982?”

  “Thanks for the history lesson, Ranger,” Fass said.

  “There’s a method to my madness, sir. You want to enjoy a different fate than Brooks, all you need do is start talking and don’t stop until you’ve given me enough to nail the whole gang operating in the shadows, starting with Eckles.”

  Fass scratched at his head, the motion looking rehearsed and contrived. “I’m confused here, Ranger.”

  “Maybe I can help set you straight.”

  “What exactly are you arresting me for?”

  “Suspicion of murder, sir.”

  If Caitlin’s remark rattled him, Roland Fass wasn’t showing it.

  “And who do you suspect I murdered?”

  “Does the town of Camino Pass have a phone book? Because if it does, that would be the perfect place to start.”

  “I’ve never been there and hadn’t even heard of the place until news of what happened hit the airwaves a couple days after the fact.”

  “As in pretty much all the residents dying in their sleep.”

  “News reports continue to say the cause is still being determined. You plan on arresting me for the murder of all those people I never met, without even knowing what killed them?”

  “There’s always the eight people Yarek Bone killed at University Hospital. I make you as an accessory to that, just like you are to what happened in Camino Pass.”

  “What’s a Yarek Bone?”

  “Did you really just ask me that?”

  “I never heard of the man.”

  “This would be the same man you may have sent to paint a bull’s-eye on a high school boy’s back,” Caitlin told him, feeling the sweat starting to soak through her shirt and jeans. “Also the same man I have it on good authority is your star attraction at whatever you want to call this,” she added, sweeping her gaze about the converted silo.

  Fass tried to hold to his bravado, which was bred of the sweat and testosterone stink on the air of the silo. “And now you want me to talk, get my sentence reduced for something I had no part in. Is that it?”

  Caitlin nodded. “You know the drill, Mr. Fass. And I believe you denied your complicity in that embezzlement beef, too, before you finally changed your plea to guilty.”

  “That’s a lot different than murder, and you don’t have a damn thing on me.”

  Caitlin gazed about at the audience for that night’s bare-k
nuckle brawls, which was slowly filing toward the exits, grumbling their dissatisfaction and protesting the loss of their admission fee after only four bouts had been staged. “Not much that I can prove at this point,” she conceded. “Guess we’ll have to settle for operating an illegal gambling venture and a sporting venue without a license.”

  “Are those even felonies?”

  “The warrant I’m holding says they are.” She took a step closer to Fass, catching the strange combination of peppermint and beer on his breath. “The thing is, sir, Yarek Bone killed the wrong kid today. That’s lucky for you, since the real target’s father would’ve gotten to you before I could, if it was his boy whose funeral was about to be listed in the papers. But there’s still a dead eighteen-year-old gunshot victim on your doorstep. Rangers don’t take kindly to anyone getting murdered, but when it’s a kid, we get taken back to our roots, when I would’ve put a bullet in you before slapping on the cuffs.”

  Fass extended his hands in appropriately dramatic fashion, forcing a smile. “Knock yourself out, Ranger.”

  “Where are those ingredients being stored in your warehouse ending up? Where’s the drug lab, Mr. Fass?”

  “Drug lab?” Fass smirked.

  “Who besides your senator friend is behind all this, by way of Washington? Where’d the money come to bankroll the whole thing? Tell me about the new Air America.”

  “It was a movie, starring Mel Gibson I think.”

  Caitlin took another step closer to him, feeling the heat of his rapid breathing on her face. “You’re disposable, sir. How long you figure it’ll be before Eckles sends Yarek Bone after you? Maybe he has already. Maybe me coming here tonight saved your life. Would you like me to describe what Bone did to some of the victims he took on behalf of an Indian resistance group called Fallen Timbers? Here’s a hint: check out what a man looks like after he’s been scalped. How about this judge who ruled against a tribe’s petition to toss some frackers off their land? Bone skinned the man but made sure to leave him alive.”