Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

  “Jones wants to see me,” Cort Wesley said suddenly.

  “I saw him yesterday. Turns out the IT outfit that got wiped out was his go-to for private intelligence gathering. When did he call?”

  “Message was waiting when my plane finally landed, a few hours back.”

  Caitlin started to raise her mug again, then changed her mind. “Wanna bet it’s about Communications Technology Providers?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The place that got hit.” Caitlin had sketched out the broad strokes to Cort Wesley the night before, while he’d been flying home, but she had left out the details. “You know the one thing I can’t get out of my mind?”

  “I’m guessing there’s a whole bunch of things, Ranger.”

  “One in particular, though. It’s strange, but I didn’t recognize the assault rifles the shooters were wielding.”

  “You not recognizing a firearm?”

  “That’s why it’s stuck in my mind.”

  “European?”

  “If so, that’s where the shooters must have come from. Meaning they brought their guns with them.”

  “I see what you mean.” Cort Wesley nodded, finishing his coffee and hoping Caitlin wouldn’t say anything else about him holding the large take-out cup in his left hand instead of his right. “So what do you figure Jones needs me for?”

  “My guess is trust is at a premium. He’s circling the wagons.”

  “How’s that involve me?”

  “He trusts you.”

  “Well, I don’t trust the son of a bitch as far as I can throw him.”

  “Not very far, with your arm like that, Cort Wesley. Anyway, in Jones’s world, that passes for affection.”

  The two of them stood side by side against the front railing, looking out into the front yard.

  “We never come out here in the day.”

  “It’s August, Ranger. Forecast is for close to a hundred again.”

  “It’s not always August, Cort Wesley.”

  “True enough. So maybe we don’t want anyone to see us together.”

  “You think anyone’s looking?”

  Cort Wesley gazed out toward the neighborhood beyond. “They notice whenever a car backfires or somebody plays an action movie too loud with their windows open. Four of the houses we can see from where we’re standing have renters in them now. I’m trying to make myself believe us turning the neighborhood into a war zone doesn’t have anything to do with that, but somebody told me the homes on this street are worth a third less than comparable ones in Shavano Park.”

  “So we’re bad for home values now?”

  “I believe it’s the occasional shoot-out that’s the problem. Three of the homes where the owners still reside have installed bulletproof glass on their windows.”

  “Must’ve set them back a pretty penny.”

  “They haven’t told me yet.”

  Caitlin squared her shoulders toward him. “You offered to pay?”

  “Those kids from that neo-Nazi gang just missed a baby’s crib with a five-point-five-six-millimeter from a fully auto M16. The bulletproof windows were my idea.”

  “Where you meeting Jones?”

  “Bluebonnet Café in Marble Falls.”

  “That’s our place, Jones and mine.”

  “You jealous, Ranger?”

  “No, he’s all yours. Just make sure you get that arm checked out on the way,” Caitlin said, setting her coffee back down on the railing when her phone rang.

  “How soon can you get down to headquarters?” Captain D. W. Tepper asked her when she answered it.

  18

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “Hey,” Guillermo Paz announced to the five- and six-year-olds enjoying their morning snack, “who’s ready for story time?”

  The kids around him at Alamo Daycare cackled and hooted, rushing to claim the pillows littered across the floor.

  “You’ve got to finish your milk first,” Paz told them. “We’re not going to start until everyone finishes their milk.”

  Paz felt a tugging on his leg and looked down to see a boy who barely came up to his knee, who was wiggling about with his legs pressed close together.

  “Colonel Gee,” he said, using the name they all called him. “I got to go wee-wee.”

  “So go.”

  “My mommy or daddy always takes me,” responded the boy, whose name tag identified him as Marcus.

  Paz knelt down, still well over a head taller than the boy, who was only at Alamo Daycare because citywide budget cuts had reduced the number of all-day kindergarten classes. “I just got back from my mommy’s funeral.”

  The boy’s shoulders sank, but his knees remained squeezed together to ward off an accident.

  “When I was your age, we didn’t have a bathroom in our house. We were supposed to use an outhouse behind the shack we called a home. But the smell in there was so bad, lots of times we just used the trench that ran behind our shack. We lived in a hillside slum, and the trench had been dug that way so the sewage could run downhill.”

  Marcus had curled his teeth over his lower lip. “I think I’ll go to the bathroom myself.”

  “Good idea.”

  And it gave Paz one, too. He had been volunteering at Alamo Daycare for just over a month, before his imprisonment in his native Venezuela had forced him to take an unexpected sabbatical. This followed a stint volunteering at a soup kitchen he ended up leaving after mounting complaints from the homeless that he scared them. Paz shrugged the ignominy off, convinced it was more the life counsel he dispensed with their grilled cheese sandwiches at lunch and the religious services he forced the nighttime residents to attend after dinner that accounted for his dismissal.

  After all, none of the five-year-olds who called him Colonel Gee seemed scared, and Paz found himself much more comfortable presiding over story hour than chapel hour.

  “Who wants to hear about what I did while I was away?” Paz asked his young charges.

  The tiny hands of the boys and girls shot up into the air, then went down, except for a girl whose name tag read “Lucy.”

  “Colonel Gee?”

  “Yes, Lucy.”

  “Did you kill anyone while you were on your trip?”

  “That’s part of the story.”

  The kids got settled in, lounging comfortably atop their pillows and cushions, as he started.

  “I wasn’t supposed to go home anymore. They didn’t like me there. I didn’t have any friends, only enemies.”

  The kids uttered a collective sad sigh at that.

  “All my friends were dead,” he continued, “and I didn’t have that many to start with. Who here loves their mother?”

  All the hands shot up enthusiastically.

  “I loved mine, too. But it had been a very long time since I’d seen her.”

  “Why’s that?” Lucy asked him, raising her hand but not waiting for Paz to recognize her.

  “I live in America now, in Texas. My life is here. And it would’ve been dangerous for my mother if I were anywhere near Caracas.”

  “What carcass?” asked a boy whose name tag was blocked from Paz’s field of vision.

  “Caracas,” Paz corrected. “The city where I was born, where I lived when I was your age.”

  “Where you went wee-wee in a trench?” wondered the girl named Lucy.

  “That’s right. It’s also where I killed my first man.”

  All the kids leaned forward now, hanging on his next words—even Marcus, who’d made a triumphant return from the boys’ room.

  “I was fifteen at the time,” Paz continued.

  “That’s old,” noted Marcus.

  “Five years before, the man had stabbed my priest to death. I killed him with the same knife. I still have it. I’ll bring it in for show-and-tell on Friday.”

  The children clapped.

  “Why’d you wait so long?” asked Alex, which Paz knew was short for Alejandro.

  “I waited unti
l I was strong enough. Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’ In other words, don’t fool yourself, and if I had tried to kill the man who killed my priest when I was young and weak, I would have died too. So I waited until I grew bigger and stronger and until fate brought us together, and I knew it was a gift from God.

  “My mother knew her time was coming, that she was going to die. She called me from the hospital and told me not to come home for her funeral. She told she’d be watching over me and that if I listened hard enough, I’d hear her words to me.”

  “And did you, Colonel Gee?” This from Buck.

  Buck? Really? What kind of parent names their son Buck?

  “Whenever I needed to hear them the most.”

  “But you went home anyway,” Elena pointed out. “You did what your mommy told you not to.”

  “I had to go to her funeral because it was the right thing to do, even more so because I knew they’d be waiting for me. These were the same men who’ve been after me since I ran away, and I knew they wouldn’t be able to resist witnessing my hanging.”

  “What’s hanging?” asked Buck.

  “They break your neck with a rope when you fall through a trapdoor.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I don’t know, because my friend killed all the bad men before they could open the door.”

  “I have friends,” said Marcus.

  “That’s good.”

  “But they’ve never killed anyone.”

  “Maybe they will,” Paz told the boy. “Maybe you will. But only if they do bad things, evil things. You only kill those who want to hurt you or others. Protecting the innocent, that’s a good thing. Is anyone here a bully?”

  No hands went up into the air.

  “Who here hates bullies?”

  All the hands shot up again.

  “You could practice on them,” Paz said to his young charges. “Not kill them, but hurt them after they hurt others. Let them know that kind of behavior won’t be tolerated. Stop them in their tracks. Do you know what I’m getting at here?”

  Blank, expressionless faces stared back at Paz.

  “George Orwell,” Paz continued, “wrote, ‘People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.’”

  “Are you a rough man, Colonel Gee?”

  “Oh, yes, most definitely. I was born that way, just as my mother was born a bruja.”

  “A witch?” a girl named Paulina blurted out. “Your mother was a witch.”

  “That’s what all the villagers thought, on account of the fact she got feelings about things, like visions,” Paz related, thinking specifically of the one that had come up when he’d returned to their shack covered in blood after his priest died in his arms.

  “You’re going to take more lives than I can see. Your fate was sealed today, and now I see why, just as I see the blood staining your clothes.… The smell of blood will be forever strong on you, Guillermo.”

  Paz was about to tell the children how right she had turned out to be, when the day blackened outside. He turned back to his charges, wondering if they were seeing the same scene unfold out the window, but they were gone.

  Replaced, to a child, with skeletons.

  But the skeletons were moving, shifting about, just as the kids had been, and Paz even saw the mouths moving as he vaguely registered words aimed his way.

  What’s wrong, Colonel Gee?

  We want to hear the rest of the story.

  Yeah!

  Did you kill all the bad guys?

  It was impossible to kill all the bad guys, Paz wanted to tell the kids; there were just too many of them. Outside, beyond the windows, the darkness continued to thicken, and Paz was struck by a sense at once both familiar and unwelcome.

  Something was coming.

  Like his mother, he had the gift of visions. He lacked her talent for specifics, but he could see the big and bad well in advance of its coming. He knew, in that moment, that his Texas Ranger was going to get swept away in this, yet another maelstrom—the outlaw, too.

  This was why God had brought him to Texas in the first place, why He had brought Caitlin Strong into his life. Turned out, the Almighty had had some pretty big plans for him, seeming to funnel a vast amount of the evil riddling the world straight to Texas. Like it was the epicenter of the immoral universe, the metaphysical low point to which so much of the world’s shit sank.

  “Colonel Gee?”

  A girl’s voice roused him and he realized he’d squeezed his eyes closed. When he opened them, the room was empty save for a man standing in the very back of the room, directly before him, a man as big as he was.

  A man with no face, just a black void where it was supposed to be.

  Paz held his eyes shut again, and this time, when he opened them, the sun was back and the skeletons were gone, the flesh-and-blood kids back in their places.

  “Can we hear the rest of the story?” a boy asked.

  “Everything but the ending,” Paz told him, “because I don’t know that part yet.”

  19

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “You missed all the fun, Ranger,” Young Roger greeted Caitlin, as soon as she entered Company G’s conference room, which he had appropriated for the computer equipment confiscated from Communications Technology Providers the day before.

  All of which was now gone.

  “You lose something?”

  “Somebody came and took it.”

  “Who?”

  “They didn’t say, not to me anyway. Captain Tepper brought them down here, looking none too happy about the prospects.”

  Jones, Caitlin thought, asserting his authority along with the fact that Homeland was taking point with this.

  “Please tell me you got something.”

  “I got plenty, all of it tucked on a thumb drive I was ready to swallow, if it came to that.”

  “Good thing you won’t have to pass it now,” Caitlin told him.

  Young Roger was in his midthirties but still didn’t look much older than Dylan. Though a Ranger himself, the title was mostly honorary, provided in recognition of the technological expertise he brought to the table, which had helped the Rangers solve a number of Internet-based crimes, ranging from identity theft to credit card fraud to the busting of a major pedophile and kiddie porn ring. He worked out of all seven Ranger company offices on a rotating basis. Young Roger wore his hair too long and was never happier than when playing guitar for his band, the Rats, whose independent record label had just released their third CD, with a release party planned at Antone’s, Austin’s top club venue. Their alternative brand of music wasn’t the kind she preferred, but it had grown on her, and hearing it live had given her a fresh perspective on the band’s talent.

  “You want to lay it out for me, Rog?” Caitlin picked up.

  “I’ve got to sort through some more of the contents before I’m ready. You wouldn’t believe some of the shit this Communications Technology Providers was into.”

  Caitlin recalled Jones explaining private intelligence firms and zero-footprint operations. “I wouldn’t believe it if they weren’t. Something else,” she said, sliding the evidence pouch from the night before from her pocket. “I’d like to know what you make of this.”

  Young Roger inspected the charred piece of paper through the plastic. “Not much at first glance. Maybe not much more at second.”

  “I’ve got faith in you, Rog.”

  He looked at the contents of the pouch again, turning it upside down to check the other side. “It might be misplaced this time, Ranger.”

  “Just wave your magic wand and see what you can come up with.”

  “Abracadabra,” Young Roger mocked, waving an imaginary wand through the air. “If only it were that easy.”

  “With you, it usually is.”

  He took anothe
r look at the front of the paper through the pouch’s plastic. “You notice this thin smudge of red?”

  “I thought it might be blood.”

  “Of course you did. But it looks symmetrical.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “For me to find out.”

  “Anything more you can tell me about the men who came for the computers and servers, Rog?” Caitlin asked him.

  “That’s above my pay grade. You’ll have to ask Captain Tepper.”

  “Meaning me,” Tepper’s voice chimed in from the conference room entrance.

  20

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  They adjourned to Tepper’s office on the third floor, Caitlin closing the door behind them after he took a seat behind his desk. This Texas Ranger company had been headquartered in San Antonio since before even her grandfather’s time. A few years back, when Company F was relocated to Waco, Company G was established here as part of a long-awaited, modest Ranger expansion.

  Since it was still morning, Tepper hadn’t turned on the air-conditioning yet, and the summer heat was starting to push its way through the open window.

  “Jones?” Caitlin started in, taking the chair set in front of Tepper’s desk.

  “Their IDs read Homeland, yup.”

  “Why the qualifier, Captain?”

  Tepper stuck a Marlboro Red into his mouth and spoke with it dangling out the corner. “You want to give me back the lighter you just whisked off my desk?”

  Caitlin tossed him the Bic she was still holding in her hand. “What happened to the one you kept chained to your desk with a computer lock?”

  “That was an ashtray, and somebody sawed right through the cable and made off with it.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Ranger?”

  “Want to search me?”

  “The ashtray disappeared a couple days ago. Wish I’d searched you then. Next time, I’m going to rig the thing to explode.”

  “Thanks for the warning, D.W. Now get back to Homeland. Jones didn’t come himself?”

  “Maybe he stayed in the car.”

  “That’s not his style.”

  “Jones doesn’t have any style, Ranger.”