by Jon Land
She didn’t want to linger too long where she or her vehicle might be spotted, so Caitlin forced herself to drive off, even though a part of her nature wanted to enter the building and see how good these men were with a gun. Anger and frustration inevitably made her think that way, violence being a place her mind went for displacement, or even comfort.
Spilling blood is part of our heritage. We were born this way. All the Strongs were, and that includes a half Strong like me.
Nola Delgado’s voice resounded in her head anew. Caitlin was not in the mood to consider the insight in her statement.
Instead, she focused on the matter at hand, driving from headquarters across town to Stone Ranch at Westover Hills, one of San Antonio’s most luxurious apartment complexes. Funny how, when Jones was working for Homeland Security, Caitlin had never considered his living situation. He existed only as an annoying phantom who popped in and out, with no more physical form, for all intents and purposes, than Casper the Friendly Ghost. Given that he was no longer based in Texas, she had no idea why this was the address he had provided, or what he was still doing here.
Stone Ranch offered units of varying sizes and layouts, which were known for their luxury and style. The apartments featured floor plans that had been written up in Architectural Digest and featured private-entry garages, patios, a private gym, and a lavish pool rimmed by cabanas. It was like living at a country club—hardly something she could picture being right for Jones. She wondered if he’d signed the lease under his own name.
She found herself checking her rearview mirror constantly during the drive over to Westover Hills on the I-410, looking for more of the black SUVs she had spied outside Company F headquarters, never imagining she’d be wanted by forces inside the United States government. But she had more important things to worry about, starting with Jones.
“You decent?” Caitlin asked, as the gated complex came into view.
“I’m out by the pool.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“I don’t have good news, Ranger.”
“It’s been that kind of day.”
“So I’ve heard. We can have lunch if you want. I’ll order something from the clubhouse.”
“I’m on an asshole-free diet.”
“I’ll give your name to the guard at the front gate.”
* * *
Caitlin found him alone, halfway along the curved pool, the sun gleaming off the crystal blue water. Jones was seated in one of the beige fabric chaise longues that featured an attached red, rectangular pillow. A wrought iron table by his side held an empty plate.
“How’s the head?” he asked her.
“I’ll live,” she told him, the aspirin having barely made a dent in the pain.
“Hope you don’t mind I ate without you,” he said from behind his sunglasses, not so much as budging or appearing to regard her.
“I’m not hungry anyway, Jones. By the way, I seem to remember you being in shape, once upon a time.”
Jones budged only to gaze at his flabby stomach, moving his eyes from one love handle to the other. “You mean back when it was important, when it mattered.”
“You’re still here. Seems a waste of rent money to me, under the circumstances.”
He took off his sunglasses and squinted into the sun at her. “We have Homeland Security to thank for that. After they dumped me, they forgot to cancel the lease or ask for my keys back. Your government at work.”
“I’ve seen far too much of that already today.”
He sat up, his stomach protruding farther over the waistband of his bathing suit.
“You going for a retro look in that thing?” Caitlin asked him. “Like James Bond or something?”
“More like Burt Lancaster in the movie The Swimmer. You should check it out. Looks like you’re going to have plenty of time to do so, given that I drew an utter blank.”
Caitlin sat down on the chaise next to his, the sun raising a thin layer of sweat beneath her shirt. “As in those satellite photos I asked you for?”
“Based on your theory that this secret drug manufacturing facility is somewhere under the desert in the area of Camino Pass.”
“I thought it made sense.”
“Except it’s not there, Ranger. I spent enough time to feel like I worked for Homeland again, looking at overhead satellite shots of the area going back ten years.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Not a truck coming or going. Not a construction vehicle, which you figure these assholes would’ve needed to build something like this. Absolutely nothing other than normal vehicular traffic, none of which fit anything close to what you’d be looking for.” Jones studied her, his expression neither gloating or empathetic but a strange combination of the two. “You’re not wrong often, but it looks like this is one of those times.”
Caitlin shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It is what it is.”
“Civilian life has made you philosophical, Jones.”
“Cheer up, Ranger. My company is hiring. I’m sure they can find a place for you. Your boyfriend, too.”
“You’re a true pal.”
“I do my best.”
Caitlin started to look away, then fixed her gaze back on him. “The facility has to be there, Jones. My great-grandfather uncovered the fact that Felipe Wong was mining gold all across that stretch of the border. And you heard Young Roger’s estimate that those mines clustered around Camino Pass used something like five hundred thousand gallons of cyanide to separate the gold from ore. I figured constructing that facility must’ve let it loose, one mother of a pocket that ended up killing the residents of Camino Pass when their pipes went dry and hydrogen cyanide gas took the water’s place.”
“A great theory, if it wasn’t so damn wrong.”
“I’m not buying that, Jones.”
“No, you and reality never did have much of a relationship. But this time you’ve boarded the crazy train with a one-way ticket to nowhere.”
“Train,” Caitlin muttered, the perspiration beginning to blanch her shirt turning cold and clammy.
“You look you just saw a ghost.”
Caitlin was on her feet, with no memory of standing up. “I believe I just did.”
Jones pushed himself forward atop his chaise longue and crossed his legs. “Anything I should know about?”
But she was already striding off, pace quickening with each step. “Thanks for lunch, Jones.”
100
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS
Cort Wesley sat parked in his truck, down the street from his own home. A big SUV was parked directly before his house. He was too far away to see how many men were inside, but he thought he glimpsed a pair of shapes in the front seat.
He had opened the windows, the slight breeze doing little to relieve the heat that had built up inside, as well as around him. He could even feel it in his ears, as if his rage at being unable to approach his own home for fear of being detained by federal marshals was boiling his brain. There were times when Cort Wesley would have just rammed their SUV and dealt with the men inside up close and personal. But he couldn’t risk getting picked up just when Caitlin needed him the most. Luke was safe under the protection of Guillermo Paz and, he reminded himself, this was all about bringing down the largest drug operation that had ever permeated the planet.
“Know how I knows you’re not yourself, bubba?” Leroy Epps asked, appearing suddenly in the passenger seat of his truck. “You didn’t stop off and pick up a couple of root beers to keep us cool in all this heat. Love the new brand, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
“That all you got to say on the matter?”
“What else were you expecting?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe something about no longer being able to tell the good guys and bad guys apart.”
“That’s nothing new, champ.”
“Really? I must’ve forgot all the times you couldn’t go home on a
ccount of federal marshals taking a shit on the lawn.”
“You get testy when you don’t get your root beer.”
“I didn’t know what ‘testy’ means when I was alive, and I still don’t, now that I ain’t.”
“I’ve been reading more.”
“Not much up my alley these days. It’s not like they got lending libraries where I be now.”
“Life without Amazon, too.”
“You mean the river?”
“No, the internet shopping site.”
“Believe I’d have a tough time establishing credit with them in my current state.”
Cort Wesley glanced across the seat. Leroy’s shape seemed to fade toward translucence before sharpening again. “Maybe they’re selling the wrong stuff.”
“Oh?”
“They should be selling a pill that makes people do the right thing.”
“Still have to get folks to buy it, bubba, and from where I’m sitting, plenty of them are real happy being assholes. The ones you’re up against now being a prime example.”
“Lee Eckles has turned the U.S. government into the world’s biggest drug dealer.”
“Some would say it’s been that way for a good long time.”
“There’s a difference between turning a blind eye and looking at the situation through a telescope, champ.”
“You lost me there.”
“Politicians have never been averse to padding their own pockets, but this is about running a drug operation bigger than anything the cartels or anybody else has ever pulled off. They’ve made the old Air America into the Apple of the drug business.”
“Apple?” the ghost raised.
“The company, not the fruit.”
“You’ve lost me again, bubba.” Leroy turned his gaze up the street, toward the same SUV Cort Wesley had been staring at for over an hour. “So what are you gonna do about them and their bosses in particular?”
“I’m going to sit here roasting in the heat until the call comes from Caitlin that it’s time to fry some ass, champ.”
His phone rang, CAITLIN lighting up in the caller ID.
“Ask and you shall receive, bubba,” Leroy Epps said, grinning.
101
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Caitlin had pulled into a parking garage on the campus of Northwest Vista College, just a few miles from the Stone Ranch apartment complex. The security camera she passed under triggered something in her mind, which faded as quickly as it had come.
She wanted to get off the street in case she was being followed, and she figured the garage was a safe place from which to make a call and follow up on something Jones had triggered in her mind.
But this time you’ve boarded the crazy train with a one-way ticket to nowhere.
Train, indeed. The fact that Jones had shot down her theory about using satellite footage to track down Senator Lee Eckles’s drug manufacturing facility had triggered a memory of something that Captain Ben Hargraves of the highway patrol had said to her at the command post outside Camino Pass. She called his cell phone number and he answered after the first ring.
“Hargraves.”
“Caitlin Strong here, Captain.”
“I’m off duty, Ranger.”
“This isn’t about Camino Pass. It’s about that train you used to hear.”
“Come again?”
“You mentioned that you heard it when you were a little boy, mostly at night. Your parents sent you back to bed, insisted you were imagining things. But you told me you were convinced they were lying. You were right, Captain, because I believe that train was real. I think your parents heard it regularly too, along with everyone else around where you grew up.”
“You don’t say…”
“Where precisely was it that you grew up, sir? And tell me everything you can remember about this train.”
* * *
Caitlin called a second number, which she’d strangely committed to memory, as soon as Hargraves had told her what she needed to know.
“I thought you would’ve lost my digits by now,” Nola Delgado greeted.
“Where are you, Nola?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because I’m getting the band back together. I need you.”
“Me or my gun, sis?”
“Is there a difference?”
102
SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS
“They still out there?” Luke asked Guillermo Paz.
Paz continued to gaze out the window on the right of the front door. “I was thinking of mixing them up some drinks that would glue their lips together,” he said, without turning.
“You’re standing in just about the same place where my mom died after one of your men shot her. Remember?”
Paz turned at that. “All too well. But I’m not that man anymore. I needed to be here then, just as I need to be here now. Back then, I didn’t know how much my encounter with my Ranger would change my life.”
“I was here,” the boy reminded. “You look pretty much the same to me.”
“In appearance, yes, but in no other way.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“You ever hear of Heraclitus?” Paz asked.
“I studied him in school,” Luke said, trying to sort through his feelings about being alone with Guillermo Paz for the first time since the big man had drowned two gunmen in his tropical fish tank at school a few years back. “He was a Greek philosopher. We covered him in AP history.”
“Then you should know Heraclitus believed that all things are characterized by pairs of contrary properties, like something that can be both hot and cold at the same time. Results in a constant push-pull, a battle for dominance that ends in harmony as the concepts grow organically closer to each other until they merge.”
“What’s that have to do with you killing my mother?”
“I hadn’t accepted the other part of my consciousness yet. I didn’t, until that day changed me and made me realize I was two men instead of one. The man I used to be killed your mother, that’s true. But the man I became saved your life and the life of your brother. That’s the man standing before you now.”
“And if those guys outside decide to come through that door?”
Paz started to grin, then stopped. “They won’t get very far.”
Luke smiled. “You read Nietzsche, Colonel, or Schopenhauer? Because they had plenty to say about redemption.”
Paz nodded, impressed. “You studied them, too?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That must be a good school you go to. Maybe I could be a guest speaker. I’ve read everything Schopenhauer ever wrote. He believed redemption was a release from the very need to exist, liberation from life itself. I’ve read all of Nietzsche, too, and he believed it was more like personal affirmation, taking control of one’s own fate. But I don’t believe either of those principles. I don’t believe redemption exists. I believe it’s a word we made up to make ourselves believe we can change our natures. But we can’t; we can merely adjust them to better suit our needs.”
“You ever think of giving teaching a try?” Luke asked him.
“I already did,” Paz told him, thinking back to his failed stint teaching English to immigrants. “It didn’t work out very well. More recently, I taught gym at an elementary school. That didn’t work out too well, either. I also audited college classes for a time, until a professor quit on account of me.”
Luke sighed, and in that moment he was again the little boy Paz recalled from ten years ago. “I wish I could just go back to school.”
“T. S. Eliot once said, ‘Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.’”
“And what if they don’t?”
“You find someone who can make them possible.”
Luke nodded. “In my AP class, we covered Nietzsche’s writings on Ariadne, Theseus’s lover, who provided the thread that allowed Theseus to find his way back out of the labyrinth after slaying the
Minotaur.”
“What does that mean to you?” Paz said, feeling like his recently departed priest and understanding better what he must have sounded like all those times he’d visited Father Boylston in the confessional.
“That a person can venture anywhere on their own but they need help finding their way back and are forever striving to find the right thread. And you still haven’t told me why you drowned those two guys in my fish tank a few years back, when you could have just knocked them out and tied them up or something.”
Paz shrugged. “I thought they looked thirsty.”
PART TEN
JOAQUIN JACKSON
As much as any Texas Ranger who served in the last half century, Joaquin Jackson knew well what fellow Captain C. J. Havrda meant about being a part of history. That was surely the case up until the day Jackson died of cancer on June 15 in Alpine, Texas. He was 80. The lawman was a part of history from 1966 to 1993, working thousands of cases across the Lone Star State.
Jackson might have done as well at another point in history—say, in the real Ranger heydays. James L. Haley, who helped write Jackson’s second book, One Ranger Returns, says, “His love of open country, and horses, the thrills of chase, danger, adventure—he was aware that all those would have been heightened in the Old West. However, he certainly accepted that those days were over.”
Jackson himself never made that comparison, at least so far as we know. But he believed that modern Rangers could have done the job back then: “The storied Ranger heroes of days gone by, Leander MacNelly and John B. Jones and Bill McDonald and Frank Hamer, still have their equals today. To paraphrase Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, it is the times that have gotten small.”
The times, and maybe a bit more. Jackson remained a Ranger private his entire career so he could work in the field, not behind a desk.…