Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

  “Only reason why you should know where to find him is I was around when he and your dad had a case that took them to these parts.”

  “My dad?”

  “You didn’t hear it from me, Ranger, but it sure looks like what’s surfaced in the desert has brought back some bad memories.”

  Around Caitlin, thick creosote bushes dominated the landscape, painting the otherwise parched soil a lavish green. The landscape reminded Caitlin more of the Chihuahuan Desert to the west than the western portions of Texas Hill Country in which the town of Sonora lay. Thunderstorms were common during spring and fall months, but at this time of year the area was starved of precipitation, accounting for the desert-like appearance of the rolling land in which Caitlin found herself. The lit-up area looked to be perched on the edge of a mesa, where all flora gave way to thin sloped hills formed of a sandy soil bed inlaid with rocks and boulders. She’d heard of the Caverns of Sonora, a national landmark located a few miles to the west, while the small town itself, the seat of Sutton County, sat five or so miles to the east.

  Drawing closer, Caitlin spotted a combination of light and heavy construction equipment mixed in among the police cars, the coroner’s wagon, and the pickup truck belonging to D. W. Tepper.

  “We found another, Captain!” she heard a voice yell, as she climbed out of her SUV.

  All the digging around a swimming pool–size swath of ground, oval in shape, had clouded the air illuminated by the heavy lights. She spotted D. W. Tepper standing on the lip of the freshly dug hole, cigarette smoke fluttering about the dust and dirt cloud.

  Caitlin approached and came right up next to him without saying a word, noticing a professionally dug rectangular trench maybe a dozen feet beneath them. Everyone else, meanwhile, was focused either on the third skeleton, which was being lifted out of a shallower section of dug-out earth, atop a tarpaulin, or the two already resting on the flat ground set back from the trench.

  “Dog found a bone its owner had the good sense to realize was human,” Tepper said, without acknowledging her. “We’re up to four bodies now.”

  “As in skeletal remains.”

  Tepper turned his head toward her, looking annoyed before sucking a fresh drag out of the dwindling Marlboro. “Instead of getting me to quit, maybe you should take up smoking, instead.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because everyone needs a vice. It’s good for the soul. Keeps a person more moderated.”

  “Some might say my vice is shooting people.”

  Tepper turned back to the trench before him. “That’s my point. Maybe swap one for another. I figured you’d still be in Dallas, maybe for the next month or so, given the shape of things when I left.”

  “Jones dismissed me. Said my presence was no longer required.”

  “Do I smell a cover-up coming?”

  “It’s Jones, Captain. The murdered techies were mostly in his employ, providing intel for what he called zero-footprint operations.”

  “Is there such a thing?”

  “Jones’s world is dominated by them.”

  “You said ‘mostly,’” Tepper reflected.

  “Apparently, Communications Technology Providers was doing some freelancing on the side for a party or parties unknown.”

  “And Jones thinks one of those parties was behind those shooters you gunned down,” Tepper concluded.

  Caitlin nodded. “As near as I can figure.” She gazed about, listening to the generator’s lawnmower-like engine sounds, which cut through the otherwise stark silence of the night. “Nice place to escape to.”

  “No blood, sight or smell, to deal with.”

  “That’s the thing about skeletons. Any idea how old they are, Captain?”

  “I could venture a guess.”

  “But you don’t have to guess, do you?” Caitlin said, recalling the words of the retired Ranger dispatcher.

  Tepper swung from the trench again and, this time, held his gaze upon Caitlin. “How’d you know that?”

  “You told me.”

  “When?”

  “The way you’re standing, the way you’re taking it all in. You’re not surprised at what was recovered here.”

  Tepper cast his gaze back into the empty rectangular trench. “I’m more surprised by what wasn’t.”

  Caitlin joined his gaze. “So somebody dug out whatever used to be down there and disturbed the bones buried with it just enough to grab that dog’s attention.”

  “Lucky dog.”

  “He didn’t get to keep the bone, I’m guessing.”

  Tepper gestured toward the areas of the flat, arid ground that crime scene techs had denoted with yellow flags wedged into the ground in irregular, splotchy patterns. “See those? Crime scene techs have managed to identify a whole bunch of tire impressions from a backhoe. We should know the manufacturer and model number by tomorrow.”

  “Explaining how this ditch got dug out.”

  “I had the techs scour the surrounding area, see if they found them anywhere else.”

  “To determine whether somebody was jabbing blindly at the ground or knew exactly what they were doing.”

  “Could you just let me finish?”

  “Sorry if I took the words right out of your mouth, Captain.”

  Tepper smacked his lips together and gazed about, as if looking for a water bottle he’d set down somewhere. “Techs found other tracks in the nearby area, indicative of the flatbed that hauled the backhoe here.”

  “I don’t suppose there are any security cameras in the area.”

  “Not for a couple hundred miles in every direction. Maybe you can get your friend Jones to see if any reconnaissance satellites were over the area at the time.”

  “He’s got plenty on his mind already right now.”

  The Marlboro burned down close enough to singe Tepper’s fingertips. He shed the cigarette and stamped it out with a force indicating he was trying to snuff out more than just a flickering flame.

  “Funny, Ranger, how you know all the tales of your granddad’s exploits, because Earl Strong told you himself, but almost nothing of your dad’s exploits.”

  “Like this?” said Caitlin, her expression gesturing toward the trench, as she again recalled the dispatcher Revins’s words.

  “For sure,” Tepper told her. “For sure.”

  11

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS; 1994

  “That’s all you can tell me, Doc?” Jim Strong said to Frank Dean Whatley, one of six medical examiners on staff at the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office, but the one he had the most faith in.

  “You only brought the bodies in last night, Ranger,” Whatley said, referring specifically to the corpses found in the freight car without a mark on them.

  “And I imagine they’re in the same condition now as they were then. Question being how they got that way.”

  “Near as I can tell, they died of respiratory arrest and heart failure.”

  “Both?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “Why don’t you pick for me, Doc?”

  Whatley checked his watch, as if he had somewhere else to be, with the day winding down. His wife had recently been hospitalized, having drunk herself into a stupor following their teenage son’s murder at the hands of a Latino gang. Every Ranger who was part of Company F attended the funeral but, in spite of their best efforts, they’d yet to arrest the perpetrators, which frustrated Jim Strong as much as it did Whatley himself. Just last year, the medical examiner’s office had moved from its dedicated facility at 600 North Leona to a new 52,000-square-foot facility on the campus of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, which it shared with the Bexar County Criminal Investigation Laboratory.

  “You need to go visit your wife?” Jim asked him.

  “She’s had a particularly bad day. Getting her off the booze seems even worse than leaving her on it.”

  “I’ve had my own battles with the bottle, Doc. Won my share, but lost
plenty of them along the way. It’s a process.”

  “Which makes me feel helpless.”

  “I still go to meetings from time to time. Maybe she could go down that route. I’d be happy to introduce her to the right folks, help find her the right sponsor.”

  Whatley was clearly less than enamored by the prospects of that. “Not the right time for that, Ranger.”

  “One thing I can tell you about the right time: wait for it and odds are it’ll never come. You want me to take a turn talking this out with her, I’d be happy to help.”

  Whatley frowned from behind his desk, one of three squeezed into an office. “Wish I could be more helpful about what killed the three men in that freight car. I sent everything I’ve been able to gather so far to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.”

  “The CDC? What the hell you want to get them involved for?”

  “First off, it’s procedure with deaths like this, so I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Deaths like what?”

  “That are deemed otherwise inexplicable.”

  “You said respiratory arrest and heart failure. I say that’s explicable.”

  Whatley glanced at his watch again, then matched the time to the wall clock. “The what, maybe, but not the how, as in the cause of those two fatal factors.”

  “And you’re thinking a germ, a virus, a bug—something like that?”

  “I don’t know what to think. Did you know the first toxicology test in the state of Texas was performed by this office in May of 1958?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Jim admitted.

  “I don’t even know where we were located back then, but the test was for arsenic, of all things. And it sure wasn’t arsenic that killed those three men in the train car. Truth be told, I don’t know of a single bio-organism that can kill three men exactly the same way at what looks to be the same time, from your report.”

  “Which part of my report, Doc?”

  “The part that described the placement of the bodies. None had time to even get out of that freight car before they were stricken. They went from showing symptoms to dead in a manner of seconds.”

  “How many seconds might that be?”

  Whatley checked the notes scribbled on a pad in front of him before responding. “Well, based on the condition of the other organs, I’d say less than thirty, for sure, and maybe as few as half that.”

  “You’re telling me whatever got taken out of that freight car might have killed them in fifteen seconds?”

  Whatley rose from behind his desk, impatience flashing on his features. He was a man who badly wanted to be somewhere else, and Jim couldn’t blame him, under the circumstances.

  “I didn’t tell you that at all, Ranger. All we know with reasonable certainty is that they died in the train car. I never said their deaths were caused by the car’s contents. Could be they caught whatever killed them another place and time entirely but didn’t have the bad luck to die until they were inside that car. And there’s something else.”

  “I’m still listening, Doc.”

  “First responders on the scene found the car empty, which we can take to mean that somebody else removed whatever was inside. So why didn’t they die too?”

  “Good question. Got any notions on the subject?”

  “Not a one.” Whatley shrugged. “The forensic team did a detailed check of that car, in full hazmat gear, and their report didn’t mention anything that gets us any closer to an answer.” Whatley looked down at his notes again, flipping pages as if in search of something he couldn’t find, before letting them flop down. “All we’ve got is your notion that there were three ‘shipping crates’ removed from the car. That’s what you called them, shipping crates.”

  Jim Strong was trying to assemble a picture from all the pieces in his head, but he didn’t have enough of them yet. “Near as I could tell from the marks they left behind, and the scratch marks on the floor where somebody had dragged them. Manifest listed the freight car in question as empty, so the only way to figure out what was stolen is to make the trip down to where the crates were headed. Chihuahua, Mexico.”

  * * *

  “Suck it up, D.W. My truck is a no-smoking zone.”

  “We got a six-hour drive ahead of us, Jim,” D. W. Tepper said to him from the passenger seat.

  “We’ll take a couple bathroom and water breaks along the way. You can light up then.”

  “Well, Ranger Strong, it’ll give me more time to formulate my will.”

  “What makes you more likely to die today than any other, Ranger Tepper?”

  “We’re going to Mexico, where Rangers are still affectionately referred to as Texas Devils or something. Not exactly a prime vacation spot for anybody wearing a cinco pesos badge.”

  Jim responded with his eyes fixed straight ahead into an endless ribbon of light reflecting off the parched flatlands through which they were driving. “This train was headed to the Chihuahua railroad station, scheduled last stop. That means somebody was waiting for it to show up and is now missing whatever got clipped from that freight car in Fort Stockton. Could be we’ll be providing them a service, more than enough reason not to go OK Corral on our asses.”

  “And these could be the same people who went through a whole lot of trouble to hide the existence of whatever it was they were bringing south of the border?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Yeah,” Tepper groused, and went back to studying the half-empty pack of Marlboro Reds, fighting off the urge to light one up. “So your plan is to head to Chihuahua to smoke out whoever was ready to take delivery of that cargo.”

  “In the hope they’re willing to tell us what it was,” Jim told him.

  “Think I’ll get to work on that will.”

  * * *

  Once they had completed the six-hour drive to Chihuahua, made thirty minutes longer by D. W. Tepper’s increasing tobacco urges, Jim steered his pickup toward the ornate train station that looked lifted from a different age. Located on the outskirts of the city itself, the station was nestled in the shadow of the mountains, amid the scrub brush from which Chihuahua, and much of Mexico, had been built.

  “You figure we should stow our badges?” Tepper asked.

  “No, sir. Better folks know who we are to start with than find out later, maybe after they’ve gone to guns. Besides, when was the last time a Texas Ranger got himself killed in Mexico, D.W.?”

  “Hard to say, given that I don’t know a single one in our ranks who ventures down here, unless it’s to get lit up for a bachelor party or the like. And in that case, you wouldn’t be seeing a badge.”

  “Then look at us as pioneers,” Jim said, stretching the tightness spawned by the long drive through heat the open windows barely made a dent in.

  He set off without further word, D. W. Tepper falling in behind him as he lit up a fresh Marlboro. “That’s one good thing about being down here. They allow smoking everywhere.”

  “Yup, there’s no shortage of ways to get yourself killed in Mexico.”

  A pair of freight trains, each toting a long line of cars, was stacked back to back at the station’s loading dock. Sweat-soaked workers toiled in the blazing sun to fill the cars with their allotted goods, made possible by NAFTA. Goods had always flowed between Mexico and the United States. The signing of the free trade agreement, though, had increased the traffic tenfold. But Jim Strong suspected that whatever had been removed from that freight car the night before had nothing to do with that trend.

  He started his questioning at the main desk inside the freight terminal, waiting in line like everybody else so as not to piss anyone off. He spoke damn good Spanish, although you wouldn’t know that from the clerk’s reaction, which was to pretend he didn’t understand much, before he went to fetch his immediate superior. That process was repeated two more times, everyone professing to know nothing about a freight train that was still cordoned off in Fort Stockton, or the missing contents of one of its freight cars.

/>   “They’re stalling,” Jim Strong said to Tepper.

  “You mean, as opposed to just telling us shit?”

  “You know who’s based in Chihuahua?”

  “I don’t have anyone from these parts on my Rolodex, Ranger Strong.”

  “Luna Diaz Delgado.”

  “The late Hector Delgado’s wife?”

  Jim nodded. “Also known as ‘la Viuda Roja.’”

  “The Red Widow,” Tepper translated.

  “On account of all the blood she spilled avenging her husband’s murder, a reputation that explains how she’s been able to outlast all her rivals and counterparts these last few years. She didn’t just kill the four heads of the cartels who conspired to murder her husband, D.W. She killed their whole families.”

  “That’s right,” Tepper recalled. He felt about his pockets for his Marlboros but couldn’t find them anywhere. “Made each cartel boss watch as she personally slit the throats of their children to make her point, from what I learned.”

  “There’s plenty of rumors of how exactly she earned her nickname to choose from. I’ve heard told the cartels don’t dare make a move on her, that they missed their chance when they took out her husband.”

  Tepper was still feeling about his pockets. “Did you steal my cigarettes again?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because every time you see me looking for them, you get that gleam in your eye.”

  “Maybe because it adds a few more days to your life.”

  “But it’s my life, Jim Strong, and I have the right to wreck it any way I so choose.”

  “You need an intervention, D.W.”

  “What I need is my cigarettes.”

  A new face appeared behind the counter before them, some kind of yard supervisor, judging by the grease coating his jacket and the grime swept down his face with the sweat. Jim Strong was in the middle of posing his next question when the supervisor’s eyes widened, an instant before he dropped down beneath the counter. Jim and D. W. Tepper swung in one fluid motion, whipping from their holsters the .45s each of them carried and holding them tight.

  Before them, in what looked like a scene staged from an old gangster movie, were six brutish-looking men wielding either twelve-gauge shotguns or old-fashioned Thompson submachine guns. For someone who appreciated history as much as Jim, those Thompsons were a source of more pleasure than fear. Either painstakingly kept up or brilliantly restored, the magazine-fed (as opposed to drum-fed) tommy guns looked brand spanking new and as formidable as ever.