Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

  “After that Turkish freighter crashed in 1959, they went missing for a very long time. Fate brought me to them in 1994 and then again today, because I am meant to reveal the secret they contain.”

  “With all due respect, señora, you seem a lot more comfortable holding a gun than a secret.”

  Delgado’s gaze grew elusive, the dimmer lighting in the bar making it impossible for Caitlin to see her eyes, almost as if they’d vanished. “When my men arrive, I’ll provide you with a vehicle to get you home. Unless you’d prefer to drive the policia’s armored truck back to Texas.”

  “I don’t think that would sit too well with the Border Patrol, señora, and I’m grateful for the gesture. But you told me you wanted me gone before your men arrived.”

  The Red Widow’s gaze finally found Caitlin again. “I’ve changed my mind. Out of respect for your father.”

  “Because he saved your life?”

  “Yes.” Delgado nodded.

  “What else?”

  “That’s not reason enough?”

  “It would be if it were true, señora, but you answered my question too easily. That tells me there’s more to the story you don’t want to talk about.”

  “I don’t want to lie to you.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “So I’m going to say nothing, other than it’s for your own good.”

  “I believe I’m in a better position to know what’s best for me, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No, Tejano, in this case I wouldn’t. Some things are better left unsaid, and other things are better left unknown. Sometimes they are the very same thing.”

  Caitlin tried to gauge the meaning of Delgado’s words from her expression, but the light wouldn’t allow her.

  “You never had children of your own,” Delgado said suddenly.

  “No,” Caitlin told her.

  “But I’ve heard told you treat the sons of this outlaw you once put in jail, and have now taken up with, as your own.”

  “You mentioned the red widow spider before, señora, but you left something out. Specifically, that it kills the male after mating. Maybe she eats him, too, but I’m not sure.”

  “Is there a point that I’m missing?”

  “This is the second time you haven’t held the upper hand,” Caitlin told the Red Widow. “The first was back when you and my dad crossed paths.”

  Caitlin heard the rumble of big engines, followed by the crunching of gravel outside, and caught the flash of motion beyond the windows. She rose from her chair, making sure her empty holster was in evidence to anyone who entered the cantina.

  “You joined forces with one Texas Ranger twenty-five years ago. Now you’ve joined forces with another.”

  Delgado regarded her in a way people do when they have something to say but can’t push the words into place. So Caitlin remained silent, hoping that, if she waited just a few seconds more, that would change.

  “I’ve said enough, Ranger,” the Red Widow told her, as if reading Caitlin’s thoughts, “and if I say anything more it’ll be too much.”

  At that, the door burst open and a phalanx of her men flooded the cantina. Caitlin already had her hands in the air.

  “I’ll be in touch, señora.”

  58

  CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO

  Caitlin sat in the big truck the Red Widow had loaned her, the interior smelling of perspiration and gun oil, overheated, as if the occupants had ridden here without using the air-conditioning. She held her cell phone in her grasp the whole time, having forgotten she still had it. She’d taken it from her pocket to call Captain Tepper, then figured reporting that she’d lost both her vehicle and her gun south of the border was probably not news best shared over the phone.

  So she sat in the big truck, trying to make sense of what she knew now that she hadn’t known before, and how that fit into the bigger picture that was slowly falling together. She wished she’d made a tape of her conversation with Luna Diaz Delgado inside the cantina, not so much to replay her words as to listen for the meaning beneath them—the inflection, the way the Red Widow had let certain thoughts dangle, and the pain Caitlin detected as an undertone at times.

  But it wasn’t just the subtext behind her words that Caitlin found herself pondering, but some of those words themselves.

  After that Turkish freighter crashed in 1959, they went missing for a very long time. Fate brought me to them in 1994 and then again today, because I am meant to reveal the secret they contain.

  She pressed JONES on her contacts list and drew the phone to her ear.

  “How long have you known?” she snapped, before he’d even gotten his greeting out.

  “Known what?”

  “The origin of those missing crates: a Turkish freighter that crashed in 1959.”

  “It must’ve had a bad crew.”

  “The crew was dead and you know that too. Killed the same way as those men my father found on that train car in 1994 and we found at Bane Sturgess this morning. I’ve heard it told a curse was to blame, but that wouldn’t explain your interest, because you can’t weaponize a curse.”

  “I’m hanging up now,” Jones told her.

  “I’ll remember that next time you call,” Caitlin said, beating him to it.

  She settled back in the seat that was baking her skin through her clothes, lost in her thinking until she realized her cell phone was ringing.

  “You coming back to headquarters anytime soon?” Young Roger asked, after Caitlin answered.

  “Just about to make my way there now. Why?”

  “Because Christmas came early, Ranger. I’ve got more news on that credit card receipt you found in the desert.”

  59

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “You’re still here,” Cort Wesley said to Selina Escalante, who nuzzled against Dylan on the living room couch.

  The two of them were watching a movie, which Dylan paused as he eased her off of him.

  “I came back after work,” she said, rising and stretching a pair of arms that looked as toned as Caitlin’s. “Sold enough pills today to addict a small country to painkillers.”

  “A lofty achievement.”

  “It’s a job. How about you, Mr. Masters? How’d your day go?”

  “Well, it wasn’t boring,” Cort Wesley said, meaning it.

  He watched the girl strut her way into the kitchen.

  “Those jeans look familiar,” he said to Dylan, when she was gone.

  “It’s the pair you hate. I gave them to her. They don’t fit me anymore.”

  “They never did, son.”

  “I’m talking about since I hit the weight room again to get ready for football.”

  Cort Wesley nodded, recalling that he’d added Dylan to his gym membership but wasn’t sure he’d actually been using it. Boy’s shoulders did look broader, though it was tough to tell with all that hair swimming around.

  “So you need my help.”

  “What’s with the smirk?”

  “I don’t ever remember you asking for it before, that’s all.”

  Cort Wesley took out his phone. “You check your email lately?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I sent you something I need you to look at, some still shots lifted off a security camera feed.”

  Dylan sat straight up on the couch. “Whatever you need translated, right?”

  Cort Wesley nodded.

  “Sounds mysterious.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s mysterious,” Selina Escolante said, returning to the living room with three beers, one for each of them. “Finding a bottle opener.”

  “Here,” Cort Wesley offered. “Let me.”

  He took the bottles in hand one at a time and thumbed off the caps.

  “Wow,” Selina said. “Now I’m impressed.”

  “It’s nothing. There’s a trick to it. My dad showed me.”

  “I’ll bet you were all of twelve or thirteen at the time, Mr. Masters.”

 
“I believe I was.”

  Cort Wesley handed Dylan one of the locally brewed Back Pew Blue Testament American Pilsners and started with him for the stairs.

  “If you don’t mind, Dylan and I have something we need to do,” he said. “Shouldn’t take too long.”

  “He told me you needed his help with something.”

  Cort Wesley pushed his son playfully, just short of the stairs. “Sometimes he talks too much.”

  “So when do I get to meet the other member of the family?” Selina asked him, something about her voice sounding different.

  “My younger son, Luke, is in Europe.”

  “I was talking about Caitlin Strong.”

  Cort Wesley stiffened, unsure where this was going, until Selina pointed to a framed picture of the four of them on one of the room’s end tables. “I recognized her from the photo.”

  “She gets that a lot these days.”

  “Amazing she can still do her job.”

  “People shooting pictures aren’t normally the same ones shooting guns.”

  “Yeah,” Selina nodded, “all those gunfights. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Dylan didn’t say what you did.”

  “You didn’t ask me,” Dylan piped in.

  “Anyway,” Cort Wesley picked up, addressing Selina, “Caitlin’s working a case. Might be back in ten minutes or ten days.”

  “If you want to wait,” Dylan started, and let his thought hang there.

  “I’ll just gather up my things and get going,” Selina said, her gaze rotating between the two of them but lingering on Cort Wesley in a way that left him uncomfortable for some reason. “Just realized there’s something I need to take care of too. Sorry.”

  Cort Wesley watched his son’s shoulders slump, always the clearest tell that he was disappointed. “What about dinner?”

  She jiggled an imaginary phone near her ear. “Call me.” Then, with a grin flashed Dylan’s way, “And I like your dad, boy. I can see where you get your looks.”

  60

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “What was that about?” Cort Wesley asked, while Dylan got settled behind his laptop computer, after Selina had gathered up her things and left.

  “What?”

  “Your girlfriend.”

  Dylan blew the hair from his face, what would pass for a snicker from anybody else. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “You gave her your jeans.”

  “She kind of took them. And it wasn’t like I bought them for her. That’s relationship shit. It’s not like I gave her a ring, either. Nothing like that.”

  “Felt a little creepy downstairs, that’s all.”

  “What?” Dylan asked again.

  “I’m not sure,” Cort Wesley said, wishing he hadn’t even raised the issue. “You got your email opened yet?”

  Dylan turned sideways in his chair to better meet his gaze. “Takes too long, doesn’t it? I told you I needed a new computer to take to school. And I need to ask you a question, too.”

  “Can we get this done first?”

  “No,” Dylan said, gesturing toward the right hand that Cort Wesley had tucked into his pocket. “Your hand’s fucked up.”

  “Do you have to put it that way?”

  “What way would you like me to put it?”

  “It’s not my hand,” Cort Wesley said, not wanting to lie to his son, “it’s my arm.”

  “You get shot or something?” the boy asked, suddenly tentative.

  “Something.”

  “What?”

  “I thought it was a cramp. When it didn’t get better, I had it checked out. Good news is it wasn’t serious and is getting better. Bad news is it was one of those mini strokes.”

  Dylan swallowed hard, looking in that moment like a boy again, instead of a man, wishing he could lose himself in the nest of hair that kept straying onto his face. “A TIA…”

  “Don’t ask me to tell you what that stands for.”

  “I know what it stands for.” Dylan blew the hair from his face with his breath. “How is it I didn’t notice this before?”

  “Either ’cause you didn’t look or you were too hungover to notice. It just happened, down in Venezuela.”

  “But you’re okay?”

  Cort Wesley nodded. “Call me one of the lucky ones.”

  “For getting this warning.”

  “And for having a son who knows his way around ancient languages.”

  Dylan sighed deeply and then opened his Gmail and scrolled down in search of the one sent a while back from Ranger headquarters. Cort Wesley stood over his son’s shoulder, pretending not to look but glad to see the glut of incoming messages that came from various incarnations of the email address @brown.edu. As much as he’d kind of enjoyed having his oldest boy around these past few months, he was relieved beyond even his own expectations by Dylan’s decision to return to Brown with only three semesters left to go. None of his relatives had gone to college, except for a distant cousin or two who’d graduated from one of various branches of the University of Texas across the state. There might have been one who went to TCU or Texas Tech, something like that, too. Cort Wesley hadn’t been paying much attention, because it didn’t matter to him, just didn’t hit his radar.

  Well, it did now.

  He wasn’t totally sold on Dylan’s desire to play football, especially given the reality that he’d likely never see anything but the practice field. Then again, it would reunite him with his friends and help make his return to campus less jarring, given all he’d been through since he’d left. All fathers, secretly or not, want their kids to be like them, and Dylan had paid a very real price for possessing the same character traits that had nearly gotten both father and son killed on numerous occasions. How often Cort Wesley had complained to Caitlin, and even to Leroy Epps, that the son wouldn’t learn his lesson, just as the father had never learned his.

  Yup, Dylan was the apple of his eye, all right.

  “Must be this one, if you sent it from the Ranger building,” Dylan said, and he clicked on the message that had come from a URL that included dps.texas.gov.

  “Somebody else sent it,” Cort Wesley told him, peering over his son’s shoulder, “but that’s where it came from.”

  “Then let’s see what we’ve got here.…”

  Dylan downloaded the attachments, which were large because they amounted to a bunch of high-resolution photos.

  “Where’d you meet Selina?” Cort Wesley asked him, while they waited for the pictures to take form on the screen.

  “Antone’s, the other night.”

  “She approach you or did you approach her?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Could you just answer the question?”

  “It’s a stupid question, Dad.”

  “Is it? Given your track record with girls? Do I need to recite the list for you?”

  Cort Wesley watched his son’s shoulders slump. “No. Thanks for making me feel better about it, by the way, given that two of them are dead.”

  “I know, son.”

  “Yeah, a cozy shoulder to cry on,” Dylan mocked. “Oh, that’s right, you couldn’t lend me your shoulder because you had an assault rifle slung from it.”

  “She approached you, didn’t she?” Cort Wesley asked, trying not to sound as accusing as he ended up sounding.

  “Come on, can you blame her?” Dylan grinned, threading a hand through his long hair.

  “She told you she’s a pharmaceutical rep.”

  “Why?”

  “Selina Escolante—that’s her full name, right?”

  “Why?” Dylan repeated, his voice firmer.

  “Because I think we should have Caitlin check her out.”

  Cort Wesley watched his son shake his head derisively. “You want me to find something with her fingerprints on it?”

  “Son, I’ve got a feeling it’d be tough to lift prints off what she’s been touching.”r />
  The computer chimed, signaling that the download was complete.

  “Here we go,” Dylan continued, leaning forward and clicking on the attached file to open it. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.…”

  61

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “Wow,” Dylan said, working the machine’s trackpad to scroll through the various still shots Young Roger had lifted off the ATM video assemblage. “This looks like the real deal, for sure.”

  “You mean a real ossuary?” Cort Wesley asked him.

  “How much you know about such things?”

  “What I learned earlier today.”

  “Then I’ll assume nothing,” his son told him. “An ossuary is generally a chest or box, just like this one, that serves as a final resting place for human skeletal remains. Lots smaller than a coffin, because it only holds bones, which is the point.”

  “Point of what?”

  “In ancient times, bodies were first buried in temporary graves. After however many years it took for there to be nothing left other than bones, those bones would be removed and placed in a chest just like this one,” Dylan explained, pointing at the weathered, boxlike, gray stone thing sitting on a table, or desk, at Bane Sturgess, just minutes before four men died.

  “Using ossuaries that way means plenty less space taken up by each deceased, which means plenty more dead bodies can be laid to rest, permanently, in a single tomb. Coffins would take four or five times the space, even more in some cases.”

  Dylan enlarged the chiseled inscription to better regard its contents.

  “So,” Cort Wesley responded, “the bodies end up getting buried twice even though, last time I checked, they only died once.”

  “Not necessarily, Dad.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Plenty, maybe most of the time, ossuaries were stored in caves. They were carved out of stone, known for being able to resist the elements and capable of lasting forever—or until somebody wants to steal the bones contained inside, whichever comes first.”

  “Did that actually happen?”

  “It did and it still does. These are ancient artifacts, virtual one-of-a-kinds, that are among the best-preserved relics from as much as three thousand years ago.”