by Jon Land
“It’s for the best, Ranger, believe me.”
“What is?”
“For both of us,” the Red Widow continued, as an afterthought.
“Care to explain yourself, señora?”
“I believe I already have. And I don’t want to keep you any longer. It’s a long drive home, after all.”
Jim Strong’s eyes fell on the thugs holding the freshly oiled and shiny Thompsons. “Ranger Tepper and me are gonna make our way out now, ma’am. We’ll keep our hands in evidence and in return I expect you’ll order your men to do the same and not raise those Thompsons again.”
“They heard you, Tejano. My men all speak very good English.”
Jim gave them a longer look, picturing these men, or others just like them, backing Luna Diaz Delgado’s efforts to gain revenge for her husband’s murder. Standing at the ready while she killed the family members of her rivals one at a time. It was impossible to visualize someone this beautiful being capable of acts so heinous and violent.
“I’ll keep you informed on our progress recovering your cargo that cost ten men their lives, señora,” Jim said, tipping his hat her way.
Something changed in Luna Diaz Delgado’s expression, a mix of fear and vulnerability showing for a brief moment. “Trust me, Tejano, that’s only the beginning if we don’t get it back.”
24
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“I don’t suppose you can tell me where things went from there,” Caitlin said, when Doc Whatley stopped.
“There is one other thing, Ranger.”
“More of the story?” Caitlin posed expectantly.
“Could be. I’m not sure.”
“How’s that, Doc?”
“I spent the morning examining the four skeletons Captain Tepper supervised being lifted out of the desert near Sonora last night. What you’re about to hear didn’t come from me, Ranger. I haven’t gotten all that far yet, but I can tell you, based on the condition and general decomposition, that those bones have been in the ground for right around twenty-five years.”
“Dating just about back to 1994,” Caitlin surmised, recalling how anxious and on edge D. W. Tepper had been the night before.
“Like I said, you didn’t hear it from me.”
“Anything else you didn’t tell me?”
Whatley’s expression remained flat. “The owners of those skeletons had all been shot. Big bullets, too. I’d say forty-five caliber.”
“My dad carried a forty-five. And now we’ve got something gone missing from a railroad car in 1994 and something somebody went to great pains to bury forever being yanked out of the ground. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
Whatley didn’t respond, having gone as far as he could.
“Anything else, Ranger?”
“You mean, besides the rest of the story about Jim Strong getting mixed up with Luna Diaz Delgado?”
“She’s still at it, you know, still among the most powerful and definitely the most feared in Mexico.”
“I’ve heard of her,” Caitlin told him, “like pretty much everybody else in Texas law enforcement has. But nothing’s ever led us to cross paths.”
“Now that would be a confrontation people would be willing to pay to see.”
“If the occasion comes up, maybe we could sell tickets on pay-per-view. Now get back to those bodies, Doc, the ones my dad found in that train car.”
Whatley frowned, then shrugged behind his desk. “There’s not a lot to tell. I couldn’t make hide nor hair of what caused their deaths. I suppose a man’s heart can just stop and his breathing can seize up without firm explanation in science. But three men at the very same time, after being exposed to the very same thing?”
“‘Exposed,’” Caitlin repeated.
“It was a conclusion I came to on my own, having eliminated everything else. Captain Tepper told you the crime scene techs that removed the bodies wore hazmat gear, right?”
“He did.”
“The problem being, whatever hazard there might’ve been was long gone by the time they got to the scene, and Jim Strong before them.”
“D.W. mentioned my dad coming to the conclusion that something heavy had been removed from that freight car—three shipping crates of identical size, was the way Captain Tepper put it.”
“So your next question is did Jim Strong ever find out what they contained?”
“You must be psychic, Doc.”
“Don’t have to be psychic to state the obvious. But I can’t help you. I wish I could, but I can’t. Maybe if the CDC hadn’t removed the bodies from my possession, I’d be able to tell you more about how this worked out. But if you’re trying to connect that freight car, the bodies, and Delgado’s missing cargo to those bones and whatever else was in that big hole in the ground, you’ll have to find the clues you need someplace else. If it was Jim Strong who buried the bodies with whatever it was that got dug up from that ditch, it’s the first I’m hearing of it, and I don’t know anyone else who’s ever heard anything, either.”
“Well, Doc, somebody knew where to dig. That same somebody made a connection that we can’t, and whatever Jim Strong thought he’d buried forever is back in the world again.”
Whatley looked like a man feeling for a wallet he feared had slipped from his pocket. “No proof at this point that it was those same three packing crates, something you’d be wise to keep in mind.”
“Sure thing, but the possibility remains. It’s out there.”
Whatley hesitated before responding. “You still got your dad’s old forty-five lying around?”
“You know I do.”
“Bring it down and let me run it through ballistics. Let’s find out one way or another if the slugs that killed those four bodies somebody buried in the desert came from that weapon.”
“I’ll go get the forty-five right now, Doc. I’m unofficially off duty until DPS clears me in yesterday’s shooting.”
“That never stopped you before, Ranger.”
“And it’s not stopping me now. You might say this case that might involve my father got dropped in my lap at just the right time.”
Whatley scolded her with his gaze. “You’d be doing exactly what you’re doing now, even if it were the wrong time.”
“True enough.”
A heaviness settled between them, Whatley holding his gaze on Caitlin in accusatory fashion, the way he might focus on a criminal from the witness box in court. “Don’t do it, Ranger.”
“Don’t do what, Doc?”
“What you’re thinking.”
“What am I thinking?”
“That the best way to find out the connection between that night in Fort Stockton in 1994 and whatever got pulled out of the ground last night is to pay a visit to Luna Diaz Delgado.”
“Know something about her I don’t?”
Whatley squeezed his hands into fists. “Just the fact that the gangbangers who murdered my son worked for a cartel that was under her control. This woman’s been like a human Venus flytrap ever since she took over for her husband.”
“All the same, Delgado might be the only person who can tell me what killed those three men in the train car, maybe even who made their bodies disappear.”
Whatley looked hardly impressed with the prospects of that. “If she didn’t tell Jim Strong, what makes you think she’ll tell you?”
“We don’t know what she told my dad after their first meeting, do we?”
“No, Ranger, but we sure know Delgado’s still around, almost twenty-five years later, while everyone who’s crossed her is long gone.”
“Sounds to me like she knows which fights to pick, Doc.”
“So?”
“So she didn’t pick one with the first Texas Ranger she met and she’s not going to pick one with the second.”
“You sure about that?” Whatley posed, in a voice that dragged out like a stuck record.
25
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
“You look like t
he greeter at Walmart, Gunny,” Cort Wesley Masters said to the man behind the main counter of the Nardis Gun Club, the longer standing of two in the area, located at the intersection of the 410 and I-10. “All that’s missing is the smock.”
The grizzled man with close-cropped hair, angular face, and ridged cheekbones glanced down at the black polo shirt embroidered with the Nardis logo. “Way we go about our business here is more like Disney World. Goddamn Magic Kingdom of Magnums.”
“How about the Tomorrowland of Tommy Guns?”
“I was thinking more like the Haunted Mansion of HKs.”
“Works for me, Gunny.”
“What can I do for you, sir? Need a lane? Just got in a few beauties you’d fall in love with at first sight.”
“Another time, Gunny,” Cort Wesley said, thinking of the right hand he’d tucked into his pocket so the man behind the counter wouldn’t notice anything awry. “And how many times have I told you not to call me ‘sir’?”
“I imagine quite a few, but I can’t rightly remember the exact number … sir.”
“I need your help with something.”
“I’m all ears, or eyes if that’s what you need.”
“Eyes for starters. You been paying any attention to the gunfight in Dallas yesterday?”
“Whole lot of folks got plugged, bad guys and good. I heard it was your girlfriend who gunned down the bad.”
“My girlfriend?”
“You got another term to describe her?”
Cort Wesley realized he didn’t, though several options came to mind that he couldn’t quite put a label on. Like the way she’d become as close a thing to a mother as his boys had had over the years. Maybe his resistance to Gunny’s term was over the fact that his last girlfriend, and the mother of his boys, Maura Torres, had been gunned down on account of him. Such things tend to have lasting effects.
Gunny’s full name was Sergeant Tom Baer. Their paths had first crossed during Operation Desert Storm, where Cort Wesley had served with the Special Forces—first men in, last men out, as they say. Baer had already enjoyed a full career up until then but had served anyway, and had even forced himself back into the army in some ill-defined capacity when Iraq heated up for a second time at the same time that Afghanistan got hot for the first. And Cort Wesley had no doubt that if things got hot somewhere else today, Gunnery Sergeant Tom Baer would be on the first plane out tomorrow.
The Nardis Gun Club, meanwhile, offered San Antonio’s most polished shooting facility, if not the city’s outright finest. It boasted a dozen firing lanes where club members could shoot numerous ammo loads at targets strung at various distances. In stark contrast to the days when teenagers learned to shoot in their backyards, this was where Cort Wesley had taken both Dylan and Luke. Dylan had taken to the process right from the get-go, a fact that now haunted Cort Wesley, given how often his oldest son had ended up on both sides of a gun barrel. Luke, on the other hand, was far from a natural and seemed to hate the whole atmosphere, as much as his brother loved it.
Go figure, right?
For somebody who’d grown up in a time of no-frills shooting ranges, the Nardis Gun Club felt more like a country club. From a lounge stuffed with leather couches to a snack bar to a training and service staff outfitted in those matching polo shirts, the club boasted a family-oriented atmosphere and featured a regular newsletter, a member-of-the-month board, regular shooting competitions, occasional guest speakers from the shooting or law enforcement communities, and instructors who looked more like golf pros. Cort Wesley figured that Gunny’s presence as manager represented a compromise with the old school of doing things—a living, breathing, war-born symbol lifted from another age and world to be plopped right down amid the automatic air fresheners that pushed the scent of gun oil from the air.
“Well,” Tom Baer started from behind the counter, “it’s a quiet time of day, so you’ve got my full attention. How ’bout you show me what’s tucked in that envelope there?”
26
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Cort Wesley used his left hand to slide out from the envelope pictures of the assault rifles the shooters had used in Dallas the day before.
“Okay,” Tom Baer said, lifting onto the bridge of his nose a pair of reading glasses that had been dangling from his neck, “what am I looking at?”
Cort Wesley was still looking at him, wearing a slight smirk on his face.
Tom Baer took his glasses off and put them on again. “You wanna check my driver’s license, see if I’m old enough to wear them?”
“In my mind, Gunny, a man who walks on water doesn’t have vision problems.”
“Yeah? Well, check these out,” he said to Cort Wesley, turning his head from one side to the other to reveal the pair of hearing aids curled around the cartilage. “Price I’m paying for teaching dumb lugs like you how to shoot straight.”
“So turning sixty-five had nothing to do with it.”
Tom Baer laid his beefy forearms on the glass gun display counter in a way that inflated the size of his ropy biceps ridged with veins. “I’ve been kicking ass for around sixty of those years and have no intention of stopping, in case you’re keeping score.”
“You were kicking ass when you were five?”
“Playgrounds have a pecking order, sir, and I wasn’t about to let anyone beat me to the top of the jungle gym.” He started to arrange the photos in neat rows before him. “Now, let’s see what we got here.…” Baer whistled. “Man oh man, that Ranger girlfriend of yours must be one hell of a shot to take out a hit team wielding these. How is it you’ve never brought the great Caitlin Strong around here for a go at our range?”
“I’m afraid you’d steal her from me, Gunny.”
“Yup, my balls have the consistency of old-fashioned hardball rounds. Too bad they’ve shrunk to about the same size.”
Cort Wesley was still smiling when Baer plopped a finger down on the assault rifles, all with perforated sound suppressors affixed to the ends of their squat barrels.
“That, my friend,” Baer started, tapping at the picture, “is a PM-84 Glauberyt nine-millimeter Para submachine gun. Manufactured in three different plants and standard issue for divisions of the Polish military, as well as mostly special operations outfits in those Eastern European countries that separated from the Soviet Union. Now, a few years back, someone in ordnance for the Polish military filled out a requisition order with a typo that resulted in the government being the proud owner of ten thousand weapons they had no use for.”
“Don’t tell me, Gunny … the Poles sold them as surplus.”
“Okay, I won’t tell you. But that doesn’t change the fact it happened. They sold almost that entire batch of PM-84s to anyone who was offering anywhere near the asking price, the vast majority of orders coming through in bulk. End result: anybody tall enough to ride Space Mountain at Disney, like my grandkids, could buy a state-of-the-art killing machine for pennies on the dollar.”
“What you’re telling me is there might be no way to trace the weapons.”
Tom Baer lifted the picture up and regarded it again before responding. “Sometimes, who you can rule out leaves you with the best candidates to rule in. Not a single NATO nation uses this weapon, and even less ever train with it. Need I tell you how important that is?”
“Refresh my memory.”
“Professionals only work in real time with the weapons they train with. I really need to tell you that?”
“I just wanted to hear it from an expert, Gunny.”
“Well, let me know when you find one. I’m gonna hazard a guess here: those four shooters your girlfriend plugged came with no IDs and nothing whatsoever to give you any notion of who they might be or where they might’ve come from.”
Cort Wesley nodded. “I’m impressed.”
“I do consult from time to time. And, in case you’ve forgotten, there was a time before glasses and hearing aids when I actually practiced what I preached.”
&nb
sp; “I seem to remember a time or two.”
“Bottom line being that you’re looking at Europeans here. And I’d start my search in Italy, Austria, or Latvia.”
“Why?”
“Because,” said Gunnery Sergeant Tom Baer, “those are the countries that bought the most PM-84s when Poland held that fire sale. If I’d been on the mailing list, I’d have ordered up a couple myself. Magnificent weapon. I never heard of a single one jamming in the field, and I don’t have to tell you how rare that is for submachine guns.”
Cort Wesley was about to direct Baer’s attention to the photographs of a sleek, elegant semiautomatic pistol, when Baer snatched up one of them on his own.
“To further the case I’m making here,” he started, eyes remaining fastened on the photo like a camera, “this is a Steyr M series semiauto pistol—the M9, my personal favorite of the line manufactured by the Austrian gun maker Steyr Mannlicher. Not so coincidentally, Austria and Italy again are among the two biggest buyers, and have been ever since 1999, when the M series first came out.”
“Think you could narrow it down a bit more than that, Gunny?”
“As in…”
“As in what groups might be most likely to be operational with these weapons in those countries.”
Tom Baer’s forehead crinkled as he pondered Cort Wesley’s question. “That’s a pretty big pond to cast my line into. But I’ve got my share of sources among the gun-worshipping hordes over in Europe who might be able to narrow things down a bit.” Gunny thought for a moment, Cort Wesley watching him fiddle with his matching hearing aids. “Gunmen traveling as light as these were must’ve had a staging ground where they stowed their passports, airline tickets. Out-of-the-way motel off the beaten path, most likely. You find that, you find them, and render me superfluous. And while you’re at it, ask your girlfriend if she remembers anything about their stances, the way they held their weapons, the precision of their reload. Those kinds of answers can further narrow down their point of origin, get us closer to the source.”