Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

  “If el Barquero saved my life, he must’ve had his reasons or his orders. Any guess as to where those orders may have originated?”

  “Don’t go there, Ranger,” Tepper said, waving a finger in the air.

  “All this goes back to 1994, Captain,” Caitlin told him. “Since I don’t have a time machine, I think I’ll just jump in my truck and settle for the next best thing. I could use some personal time, and Mexico’s beautiful this time of year.”

  “I suppose, if you like hundred-and-twenty-degree temperatures.” Tepper scratched at his scalp, coming away with some flaky residue of Brylcreem under his nails. “Ordinarily I’d tell you not to bother, that you got as much chance of talking to Luna Delgado as I’ve got of fathering another child. But it turns out this might be your lucky day.”

  Caitlin looked back across the street, thinking of the four bodies inside Bane Sturgess who, according to Doc Whatley, appeared to have perished the same way as the three her father had found in a freight train car twenty-five years ago.

  “It just so happens,” Tepper continued, “the Red Widow was arrested this morning and is currently in the custody of Mexico’s Policia Federal.”

  “My lucky day indeed. You mind paving the way for me, Captain?”

  “No problem, Ranger,” Tepper said, shaking his head. “No problem at all, given that you’re about as popular down there as cancer.”

  “You once told me I’ve killed more people than cancer, D.W.”

  “And I was only talking about last month.”

  45

  NEW BRAUNFELS, TEXAS

  Jones emerged from the plastic antechamber, which remained in place despite the preliminary finding that it hadn’t been something in the air that had killed the three men inside Bane Sturgess. “Here’s what we got, cowboy.”

  “‘We’?”

  “You wouldn’t want out of this, even if I let you. Not after learning somebody sent two hitters your way.”

  Cort Wesley didn’t bother arguing the point. “So what have we got?”

  “The four dead bodies belong to the four principal partners of Bane Sturgess. That old ME’s initial assessment puts time of death around dawn, a half hour either way, maybe while it was still dark.”

  “Strange time for a partners’ meeting.”

  “Given all the business the company maintains in Europe, late nights and early mornings would’ve been SOP.”

  “Standard operating procedure,” Cort Wesley translated.

  “What did I just say?”

  “Why do government types use acronyms so much?”

  “Because we don’t want to waste any time on unnecessary syllables, not when career life expectancies are so short in Washington these days.”

  “You’re in Texas, Jones.”

  “Washington’s not a place, cowboy, so much as a state of mind.”

  “Speaking of which, you should also know that the recently departed partners of Bane Sturgess had their fingers dipped in the mercenary world and liked to play soldier themselves. Beyond that, we should be focusing on the fact that the bodies Caitlin Strong’s father found in that train car died of what must’ve been the same cause.”

  “Acute respiratory failure.” Jones nodded. “The old ME already confirmed that, too. We’ve got a preliminary time of death and cause of death. What we don’t have is any security camera footage to get us any closer than that, and the whole computer system is toast.”

  “There’s always the Cloud,” Cort Wesley reminded him, wondering what Jones would make of his sudden technological expertise.

  “Not in this case. The company’s Cloud connection has been severed. All their data is still backed up there, but good luck finding it.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing, since the only clouds I know my way around drop rain and have silver linings.”

  “Not this one,” Jones noted, “unless that Ranger rock star with the long hair can find a miracle in there.”

  “Young Roger,” said Cort Wesley.

  “Who?”

  “The rock star Ranger with all the hair.”

  “I must’ve forgotten.”

  “I won’t hold it against you, Jones.”

  Cort Wesley smelled talcum powder and figured Leroy Epps must be close by, found himself craving a root beer.

  “Where you figure we go from here, cowboy?”

  “Usually it’s me asking the questions.”

  “Call it role reversal. I’m taking a lot of heat for Dallas. Since Communications Technology Providers was on my payroll, the fingers are already pointing, and Washington’s looking for a scapegoat.”

  “This would be the Washington that’s a state of mind?”

  “Yuk it up at my expense, go ahead.”

  “Mr. Jones!” Young Roger called out, jogging their way from the parking area of a bank across the street.

  Jones glanced back toward the building occupied by Bane Sturgess, as if he expected Young Roger to be coming from that direction. “I thought you were inside.”

  “I was. Figured I’d look elsewhere, when the security cameras and computers came up blank.”

  Cort Wesley glanced at the bank. “Need to use the ATM machine, Rog?”

  “Nope, I wanted to see if the bank had an external security cam. Turned out it was built into that ATM machine and, if we get lucky, it just might show us something.”

  46

  CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO

  “So this is the daughter of the Texas Ranger Jim Strong, a Texas Ranger herself,” Luna Diaz Delgado said, after her Mexican police escorts had closed the door behind her. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Tejano.”

  Caitlin rose to greet Delgado, finding her handshake surprisingly firm. “That’s what you called my father.”

  “A term worthy of the respect you deserve.”

  “Not the reception I’m used to getting in Mexico.”

  “That’s because not all Mexicans share the kind of relationship I shared with the Texas Rangers, especially your father.”

  “Rather unusual, ma’am. Unconventional, to say the least.”

  Policia Federal headquarters in Chihuahua was located in Villa Ahumada, a location meant to show strength to the cartels perpetually at war with the nation as a whole. The Policia Federal, long known as the federales, had claimed it as their own in the wake of the 2008 attack on the facility by the Sinaloa Cartel, which had killed the police chief, two officers, and three civilians who’d been involved in a traffic accident.

  The incident helped intensify the efforts of Coordinated Operation Chihuahua, a joint Mexican Army and Policia Federal effort. Colonel Enrique Rojas had distinguished himself prominently in that effort aimed at wresting control of Ciudad Juarez from the cartels. Caitlin knew the task force of which Rojas was a part had adopted an acceptance of ruthlessness and violence that mirrored that of the cartels, the unofficial motto of the operation being “Combater el fuego con fuego.”

  Fight fire with fire.

  The Rangers had joined forces with Rojas on any number of joint strikes. She didn’t know him well, but Captain Tepper knew him well enough to get her in, on an unofficial basis, to see Luna Diaz Delgado while she was in custody.

  They confiscated Caitlin’s gun and kept her waiting in a sweltering interview room for nearly a half hour before Delgado was escorted into the room, absent of restraints and looking none the worse for wear.

  Delgado smiled as she approached the table, more like a long-lost friend. “I make no secret of my business interests and the means by which I pursue them. I would not insult your intelligence by insisting otherwise.”

  “My father spoke to you about some cargo headed for Chihuahua that was stolen off a freight train in 1994. He had reason to believe it belonged to you.”

  “That reasoning was flawed. And I know no more about that cargo today than I did twenty-five years ago.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t have children, do you, Ranger?”

&nbs
p; “You haven’t earned the right to speak in such a familiar tone to me, señora.”

  “Consider it a word of advice. You’re the last of your kind, Ranger, last in a line that will go extinct if there’s no one to carry on the Strong name. It would be like the Strongs never existed, five generations of Texas Rangers forgotten, with no one to uphold the legacy. Even your infamous exploits will become a footnote to history.”

  “And what will the history books say about you, señora?”

  “I’ve never cared much for that.”

  “Something we have in common, because I don’t either.”

  “But I do care about my family’s legacy.”

  “Your husband was murdered, and you stepped in to take his place.”

  “It was my duty.”

  “I’m sure it was. I heard your first act was to consolidate your power by executing the heads of the other three primary cartels as revenge for your husband’s murder. A bold act, especially when undertaken by someone merely fulfilling their duty.”

  “I’m a fast learner, Ranger,” Delgado said, interlacing her fingers on the table.

  “So it seems. But I’ve heard other versions from a few who claim to be in the know. About how you’d tired of your husband’s increasing devotion to religion, his decision to surrender control of his cartel to others so he might serve God better. He woke up one morning, found religion, and then found himself machine-gunned to death at a traffic stop.”

  “Weakness killed my husband, Tejano, not bullets.”

  “But you couldn’t go after weakness, señora, so you went after the men behind the bullets instead. I’m surprised you didn’t just send el Barquero.”

  Caitlin was hoping to get a rise out of Delgado by raising the mythical assassin’s name. But she’d already determined that the Red Widow didn’t spook easily.

  “El Barquero.” Delgado grinned, shaking her head. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “He doesn’t work for you?”

  “I don’t employ men who don’t exist. I have enough trouble finding good ones who do.”

  “That’s funny,” Caitlin told her, “because earlier today a pair of bodies was found, killed by bullets with stars carved into their tips.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I just did.”

  Delgado nodded. “You know my father’s true family business, the father I watched murdered on his wedding day?”

  “Can’t say that I do, señora.”

  “Cattle. His father operated a number of slaughterhouses throughout Mexico. The Meat King, they called him.”

  “El Rey de la Carne,” Caitlin translated.

  Delgado’s eyes widened. “Your Spanish is excellent.”

  “As you said, it’s kind of in my blood.”

  “Blood is what I remember most from the few visits I made to those rendering plants. The smell,” Delgado said, leaving it there.

  “I’ve been around my share of blood, too, señora.”

  “So I’ve heard. I’m sure your father would’ve been proud,” Delgado said, not bothering to hide the irony in her voice.

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Your father?”

  “Particularly what brought him to you twenty-five years ago—the contents of that train car that went missing. My captain worked the case with my dad, and my captain believes that whatever was stolen from that train car ended up buried in the desert near Sonora, Texas, for safekeeping.”

  “Does he have a basis for such a conclusion?”

  “Only that whatever it was got pulled out of the ground a few days back.”

  Delgado looked toward the door. “You should leave, Tejano.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m doing this for your father.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “To save your life,” Delgado continued, as if Caitlin had said nothing at all. “They’ll be coming.”

  “Who?”

  Delgado shook her head. “I’m disappointed.”

  “I seem to have that effect on people.”

  “You really have no idea what’s going on here, the stakes involved. The lengths that people will go to.”

  “To do what, ma’am? Why don’t you enlighten me? What’s in those crates that’s led to so many deaths?”

  “Their contents are only the beginning,” the Red Widow told her. “Believe me.”

  47

  CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO

  “Why should I believe you?”

  Delgado fixed her gaze on the door. “They’ll be coming. You should leave while there’s still time.”

  “Who’s coming, señora? And what do they have to do with the contents of those crates?”

  “Your father was a fool, Tejano. Apparently, it runs in the family.”

  “I’m more concerned about the families of four men who were found dead this morning in New Braunfels. Preliminary indication is the cause of death was the same as the three men my father found in that empty freight car.”

  “Is that a scientific conclusion?”

  “Near as any, I suppose, except for the lack of specifics.”

  “So you don’t know what killed these men, either the ones from this morning or the ones from twenty-five years ago.”

  “No, señora, not yet. But I will,” Caitlin added, with a confidence that defied reason.

  “No, Tejano, you won’t, because doctors and scientists will scour the knowledge of the world for something that doesn’t exist. Because science had nothing to do with the deaths of those men or numerous others throughout history.”

  “Then what killed them?”

  “A curse,” Luna Diaz Delgado told Caitlin.

  “Did you say a curse?”

  Delgado nodded. “The Spanish word is maldición.”

  “I know what the Spanish word is; I’m just trying to make sense of how the supernatural fits in here.”

  “You should ask the crew of the Turkish freighter Dolunay that ran aground at the Port of Ordu in 1959 with all of its crew members dead.”

  “Carrying the same crates that went missing from a train car back in my dad’s day now have gone missing again from where he likely buried them twenty-five years ago.”

  Delgado’s stare bore into Caitlin’s, lingering in expectation of Caitlin breaking it. When Caitlin didn’t, she resumed. “What do you know about the red widow spider?”

  “You mean besides the fact I’m staring at her right now?”

  “Red widow spiders are a little-known species. They’re difficult to study, due to the fact that they hide their places of dwelling. They even conceal their funnel-shaped webs in palmetto shrubs, specifically the opened leaves, rendering them invisible to the world. A mystery.”

  “And you think that describes you?”

  “I’m a woman. People in my world have always tended to underestimate me, to look at me and see someone they’d never believe capable of what I’ve done and how I’ve done it. When you’re a woman, a smile can often get you a lot farther than a bullet.”

  “Not in my experience,” Caitlin told her.

  Delgado leaned back and crossed her arms. “You’re so much like your father.”

  “You ever tell him it was a curse that killed the three men in that train car? Because their bodies ended up at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, same place the bodies we found this morning are likely headed. Normally, the CDC doesn’t involve itself in curses,” Caitlin said, not bothering to hide the bite in her voice.

  “What do you want from me, Tejano?”

  “I want to know who pulled the crates that went missing from that train car twenty-five years ago out of the Texas desert two nights back.”

  The Red Widow shook her thick shock of hair, smoothing it back out with her hands. In the process, a locket on a simple chain, hardly befitting a woman of Delgado’s station, slipped out from inside her blouse. The locket dangled briefly, just below her neck, before she quickly tucked it
back inside as if she’d just gotten away with something.

  “You look a lot like your father,” Delgado interjected suddenly. “The eyes mostly. You have the same eyes. I’ve always believed the eyes truly are the window to the soul. You agree?”

  Caitlin was still thinking of the locket, a simple gold heart, noting the thin contours of its outline through the fabric of the Red Widow’s blouse. A memory toyed with the edge of her consciousness, like an itch she couldn’t quite scratch.

  “To a point,” Caitlin responded, trying not to be distracted by whatever the locket had triggered. “But I’m more interested in what killed those three men in that train car and what was inside those shipping crates that went missing.”

  The room’s door jerked open. A man whose name tag read “Rojas” entered, followed by a trio of Policia Federal officers.

  “You are being transferred, jefa,” he said.

  Delgado rose stiffly from her chair. “To where?”

  Rojas’s gaze fell briefly, dismissively, on Caitlin. “I am not at liberty to say. It is routine in these matters involving high-level suspects.”

  “But I’m not a suspect, am I, Enrique? Someone has already judged me, haven’t they?”

  “I’m sorry, jefa.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Delgado looked toward Caitlin. “The Ranger was just leaving anyway.”

  Caitlin joined Delgado on her feet, her attention turned to Rojas. “We’re filing a request for extradition with your government. Why don’t we just sit still here for a little while?”

  The Policia Federal colonel shook his head. “I have my orders. And you have no jurisdiction or authority here.”

  Caitlin thrust a finger at Luna Diaz Delgado, the gesture just harsh enough. “This woman is guilty of crimes that have taken place on United States soil, specifically Texas. Details are being worked out to avoid another El Chapo debacle. We’re saving the cell next to the one he’s in now for her.”

  “I invite your people to take this matter up with my superiors, el Rinche,” Rojas snapped, using the derogatory slang term Texas Rangers had been called in Mexico since the time of Steeldust Jack and William Ray Strong. “Any intervention will have to come from them. Until my orders are changed, I must see them through.”