Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

  “I don’t believe in curses, señora.”

  “There’s a lot more involved here than just a curse, more than you’ve ever confronted before.”

  “Maybe you didn’t do as much research into me as I thought.”

  “You’re as stupid as your father. He didn’t know enough to walk away, either—at least not when he should have. He paid a terrible price for that, one that haunted the rest of his days forever.”

  Caitlin stared across the cantina table at the impression of her mother’s locket beneath Delgado’s blouse. “That locket was a Christmas present from my father to my mother. The last time I saw it was the day she died, murdered by drug mules a decade before he met you. I’d like to know how he came to give it to you. I’d like to know why.”

  “Would you like something to drink?” Delgado asked, instead of responding.

  “Anything cold.”

  “Beer?”

  “Soda.”

  The Red Widow signaled to the men behind the bar, one of whom brought over a pair of Cokes in old-fashioned green bottles, the ice they’d been lifted from leaving a residue of frost across the glass. The man popped off the caps with an opener and then returned to his post behind the bar.

  Caitlin took a hefty chug, the sugar seeming to stick to her throat on the way down. She’d never enjoyed a better-tasting Coca-Cola in her life.

  “You were saying, señora?”

  “I wasn’t saying anything.”

  “I asked you about my father, about that locket.”

  “My men will be here soon, Tejano. We don’t have time for the whole long story.”

  “A part of it, then,” Caitlin said, leaning forward and laying her hands on the table, with the green bottle cradled between them. “There’s nowhere else I need to be right now.”

  56

  FORT STOCKTON, TEXAS; 1994

  Buster Plugg looked pretty much like his name. Short and stout with a steel-belted radial for a stomach and a bald head that resembled a bowling ball. But it was his baby-soft face, flushed red by the sudden exertion of charging out of his house with a shotgun, that stuck out the most in Jim Strong’s mind.

  “Something I can help you with there, friend?”

  “Man oh man, this is some truck,” Jim said, whistling his admiration at the black Chevy with oversize tires gleaming in his driveway. “I’d call it my dream vehicle, except I can’t afford to even dream that big. See,” he continued, peeling back his jacket to reveal his badge, “Texas Rangers don’t earn a big enough salary.”

  Buster Plugg’s eyes widened at the sight of the badge, and he slowly lowered the shotgun to waist level. “I apologize, Ranger. You just never know these days.”

  “No, sir, you don’t. You living all the way out here on your daddy’s old ranch, so isolated and such, I can’t say I blame you.”

  Plugg tightened his grasp on the twelve-gauge just a bit. “Did you know my daddy?”

  “No, sir, never met the man, unless you count through you.”

  “Through me?” Plugg asked, the cheeks of his baby-soft face getting more flushed by the second.

  “I did some checking before I came out here,” Jim said, hitching back his jacket to make sure the man shaped like a fire hydrant could see his .45. “Figured I’d get acquainted with your past to better understand your present.”

  “My present?”

  “As a dispatcher at the Fort Stockton train depot. I imagine you heard about the trouble there a couple nights back.”

  “Station just reopened this morning.”

  “You called in sick.”

  Buster Plugg half nodded.

  “You don’t look sick.”

  “I got a touch of the gout.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Buster, I truly am,” Jim said, stepping out from the shadow of the gleaming truck and facing Plugg head-on. “What I’m wondering is how a man with so much debt he had to leverage his own nut sack could afford a vehicle like this.”

  “It’s a lease.”

  “Hard to fathom, with your credit. You hit the lottery or something, play your birthday numbers and claim your prize anonymously?”

  Plugg stood in the sun, the flushing starting to spread beyond his cheeks.

  “I think you gave somebody the word a certain shipment was coming through Fort Stockton the other night. I think they came to you and made you aware of that shipment and put you on the lookout. And when you learned it was on its way, you made a call, and then you altered the manifest to make it look as if the shipment in question didn’t exist, that the freight car where I found three dead bodies the other night was empty.”

  Jim Strong waited for a reaction from Buster Plugg, any reaction, but the man just stood there like a bulbous statue bleeding sweat in the hot sun.

  “Of course, Buster, you couldn’t have known about that, any more than you could know that whoever you placed that call to was going to murder the entire train crew. That makes you an accessory to capital murder. That’s the death penalty, the electric chair. That worth the price of this road rocket here?”

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Jim moved a few steps closer, daring the man to do something with his shotgun, but he knew Plugg wasn’t about to do anything of the kind.

  “Yes, you do, Buster. But let me tell you something you don’t know. The two dead Mexicans carrying pearl-handled forty-fives? They worked for a woman named Luna Diaz Delgado, pretty much the most powerful crime boss in Mexico. And that electric chair frying your brains is nothing compared to what she’ll do if she learns you had a hand in stealing her cargo.”

  “I didn’t steal nothing, Ranger!”

  “Do I need to tell you the meaning of the word ‘accessory’ here?”

  “The bank is foreclosing on my daddy’s ranch. I bought the truck because there’s no point in bothering with those payments anymore. What do you want me to say?”

  Jim took another two steps toward him. “How about who paid you to make that call and how can I find them.”

  “I’m telling you—”

  “I know what you’re telling me, just like I know you’re lying. You’re not much of a liar, Buster.”

  “Look—“

  “Way I see it,” Jim resumed, rolling right over Plugg’s words, “you’ve got three choices. Smartest one is to own up to what you did and come clean. The dumbest is to stand there and keep lying to my face. Somewhere in the middle is to do something with that shotgun, besides holding it like your limp dick, and let me put you out of your misery.”

  Plugg stooped down and laid the shotgun across the superheated driveway pavement. “You wanna shoot an unarmed man, Ranger, go right ahead. But I can’t tell you what I don’t know, and I’m of a mind to report this harassment to the local sheriff.”

  “Sheriff Dabs Dabney’s the one who filled in some of the blanks for me. I get the feeling he doesn’t think much of you.”

  Plugg’s lower lip trembled. “That don’t change the fact I can’t tell you something I don’t know, or confess to something I didn’t do. You want to shoot me, fire away. You want to arrest me, just slap on the cuffs. Meanwhile, I’m going back inside to keep on with my packing. By week’s end I’ll be trading these five hundred acres for a two-hundred-square-foot motel room.”

  Jim moved back up to the Chevy and tapped its gleaming hood, which must have been two hundred degrees. “Well, Buster, at least you got yourself a nice truck.”

  * * *

  Buster Plugg tore out of the driveway an hour later, allowing for what he thought was a safe interim to make sure Jim wasn’t still about. Jim had parked his truck an eighth of a mile down the main road outside Plugg’s property, the only road he could use to get anywhere at all. He’d chosen that spot for the thick nest of brush he could park behind and still watch the road.

  Sitting in his Ford, Jim suddenly realized how worn and faded the upholstery was. It had even developed a musty kind of smell, which was worse in
the sun. This in contrast to the spanking new Chevy that Buster Plugg was driving, thanks to the man’s ill-gotten gains. It was only in times like these that Jim bemoaned his civil servant salary, still high by law enforcement standards but not by much else. His dad, Earl, not just a fellow Ranger but also a legend who’d mixed it up with the likes of Al Capone and J. Edgar Hoover, had left his total net worth to Jim after passing. A lifetime savings that, coupled with a life insurance policy he’d partially cashed in, amounted to just over twenty-five thousand dollars.

  Not a lot to show for ninety years of living, at least not in the monetary sense. Sure, there were a lot of things plenty more important than money, but try telling that to your thirteen-year-old daughter who needs braces and new shoes. Good thing Caitlin didn’t care about clothes and the like as much as just about every other teenage girl—her wish list for guns dwarfed her shopping list for new dresses or fancy jeans.

  Thanks, Dad, Jim mused as, an eighth of a mile ahead of him, Buster Plugg sped down the main road.

  * * *

  Plugg drove sixteen miles to a small strip mall where several occupants had already closed up shop and others were offering going-out-of-business sales. A pay phone had a spot to itself before a concrete seating area in front of a shuttered frozen yogurt store.

  Jim had followed Plugg at a safe distance, as much as a half mile away, once they reached the interstate, and as little as a quarter mile after that. When Plugg’s route spilled off onto the access road where the strip mall was located, Jim continued to hold back. A general fix on what he was up to was all Jim needed at this point, whether that was a meeting or, more likely, the pay phone he was currently standing near.

  Jim pulled into a gas station with a decent enough view of that pay phone, ruminating again, in the course of Plugg’s three-and-a-half-minute phone call, on Caitlin playing with toy guns when other little girls were playing with dolls. The only dolls she ever did play with actually had guns of their own, thanks to his father’s skills with plastic and wood. Jim recalled Caitlin’s Barbie and Ken dolls dressed up as updated versions of Bonnie and Clyde, only it was Barbie holding the tiny Thompson submachine gun, not Ken. Earl Strong had encouraged his granddaughter’s every whim when it came to firearms. She could hit the target well enough with a Colt by the time she was seven and was damn good with a Springfield Model 1911 .45 before she was twelve. When most girls her age were headed to the soccer field, Caitlin was off to the gun range, biking there on her own and coming home smelling of sulfur and gun oil.

  Once Buster Plugg finished his call and drove off, Jim waited for the fancy new truck to pass the gas station before he headed to the strip mall and fed a quarter into the same pay phone, which had a sticker saying it was owned by some phone company Jim had never heard of.

  “Yeah, this is Jim Strong of the Texas Rangers,” he said, once he finally got the right person on the line. “I need the last number dialed from this phone exchange.”

  * * *

  Jim asked a man at the phone company for whom he’d once done a favor to get him the address that matched the number in question. That address turned out to belong to one of those economy chain hotels, maybe the one that always left the lights on for you. It was clean, simple, and offered free breakfast, HBO, and telephone. Jim entered the office and strode straight up to the reception desk, making sure the clerk could see his badge.

  “Don’t suppose you can tell me which of your guests completed a three-and-a-half-minute phone call just over an hour ago?”

  The man, whose name tag identified him as Donnie, shook his head. “Sorry, Ranger. The calls are routed through the phone company.”

  “Then tell me this, son. Did you notice any of your guests leaving around that same time, an hour or so ago?”

  Jim could tell by the look in Donnie’s eyes that the answer was yes, even before he spoke. “He checked out early. I was glad to see him go. He was a big guy. I mean real big. But it wasn’t that.”

  “What was it?”

  “Ranger, I know this is gonna sound crazy, but he didn’t have a face. It’s like it was somebody else’s face and he was wearing it,” the man continued. “Like he sewed it on in strips. He wore a hat tilted low over his brow to disguise it as best he could. But when he was checking out, the light hit him just right and I thought maybe Halloween came early.”

  “Did you see what he was driving?”

  “A van, Ranger.”

  “Cargo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Didn’t get a look inside, by any chance, did you?”

  Donnie shook his head. “No, sir. I ain’t no snoop.”

  “How big was he, exactly?”

  “I got a kink in my neck from looking up at him.”

  “So the maid hasn’t gotten to his room yet.”

  “Like I said, Ranger, he only checked out maybe—”

  “How about we go have a look?” Jim interrupted.

  * * *

  “We’re gonna charge his credit card for this damage, I can tell you that much,” Donnie snarled, seeing the condition in which the big man who’d checked in as “Fred Church” had left his room.

  Checking out so fast likely meant the man suspected that Buster Plugg had blown his cover. He was somebody, then, who hadn’t been born yesterday when it came to such things.

  When it came to the way he’d left his room … well, that was something else again.

  “Who does something like that?” Donnie said, shaking his head. “How did he even do it?”

  The whole of the bathroom mirror had been removed from the wall, along with a vertical one that had been fastened outside the bathroom door. Donnie had found both mirrors fully intact, inside the closet, while Jim Strong found a bathroom wastebasket full of strips of gauze soaked with some kind of medicated cream or liniment. He’d put on plastic gloves before examining them and then had fit the whole contents of the tiny wastebasket into a large plastic pouch.

  “Donnie, I’m gonna need to ask you not to rent this room out until the Rangers can go through it with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “I couldn’t rent it in this condition anyway.”

  “And I’m going to need you to leave it in this condition, too. Shouldn’t take more than a day or so.”

  Donnie didn’t protest. He took out a notepad to catalog all the damage, while Jim moved to the nightstand. He pictured the big man with no face sitting on the bed while talking to Buster Plugg, retrieved the thin motel memo pad from the nightstand, and saw a jagged edge where the top page had been removed. Jim took out the number two pencil he always carried and used it the way his dad had shown him, to reveal at least a semblance of the message on the torn page. Looked like the man used a hotel ballpoint, which he’d likely later pocketed because it contained his fingerprints.

  Jim watched the page come to life as he continued his magic with the pencil, revealing an address.

  In Mexico.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Jim muttered.

  57

  CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO

  “It was your address, wasn’t it?” Caitlin asked Luna Diaz Delgado, when she stopped the story only Jim Strong could have told her. “And the only way you could’ve known all this was if my father had told you. So tell me,” she said, leaning across the cantina table, “what else did the two of you talk about? What happened when my father rode down to Mexico to save you from this man with no face?”

  Delgado remained expressionless. On the side, Caitlin pictured the Red Widow’s emotions churning like gale force winds. She could hear it in the undercurrents of Delgado’s words as she related the circumstances of what had ultimately brought Jim Strong back to Mexico on the trail of the very same thing Caitlin was after now.

  “Ma’am?” she prodded. “Señora?”

  The cantina looked different from when Delgado had picked up the story, pretty much where Captain Tepper had left off in New Braunfels. Smaller and darker mostly, likely the result of the changed position of
the sun, which had stopped pushing big amber rays through the building’s windows.

  “Yes, your father found my address in the faceless man’s motel room,” Delgado said finally. “Not where I live now, but my former home, where I had shared a life with my husband, Hector. I never should have returned there after that day he was assassinated by the cartels.”

  “And did this man with no face show up too, maybe around the same time as my father?”

  “I never saw him, I never saw any of them. But there were many, an endless stream of them it seemed, just like what just happened at the Policia Federal compound. All of them, both then and now, beholden to forces with power beyond comprehension, Tejano.”

  “Even yours?”

  “A different kind of power than mine, the kind that brings nations and governments to their knees.”

  Something toyed with the edge of Caitlin’s consciousness, a sensation she’d come to recognize when the waters she’d waded into proved deeper than expected, which was pretty much all the time. She wondered if Guillermo Paz was starting to rub off on her, if she had somehow gained a crude form of second sight through osmosis. She recalled the part of the story about Mo Scoggins, special assistant to the governor, trying to close the case against Jim Strong’s wishes, which suggested the fix was in—something that would take a whole lot of power to do with the Texas Rangers.

  A different kind of power than mine, the kind that brings nations and governments to their knees.

  The colonel had speculated that Texas was the moral epicenter of the planet, where great battles came to be fought. Caitlin couldn’t say to what degree she believed that, but it had been proven true often enough these past few years.

  “Care to share with me who we’re talking about, exactly?” she asked Delgado.

  “We’re not talking about them; I am.”

  “But we are talking about more than just those three shipping crates stolen from you twenty-five years ago and dug out of the Texas desert a few nights back, aren’t we?”