Strong Light of Day

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  For my father

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Before we start, it’s time to give some much deserved shout-outs to those who make it possible for me to do what I do, as well as do it better.

  Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but let’s start at the top with my publisher, Tom Doherty, and Forges associate publisher Linda Quinton, dear friends who publish books “the way they should be published,” to quote my late agent, the legendary Toni Mendez. The great Bob Gleason, Karen Lovell, Elayne Becker, and especially Natalia Aponte are there for me at every turn. Natalia’s a brilliant editor and friend who never ceases to amaze me with her sensitivity and genius. Editing may be a lost art, but not here thanks to both Natalia and Bob Gleason, and I think you’ll enjoy all of my books, including this one, much more as a result.

  My friend Mike Blakely, a terrific writer and musician, taught me Texas first-hand and helped me think like a native of that great state. And Larry Thompson, a terrific writer in his own right, has joined the team as well to make sure I do justice to his home state along now with his son-in-law, a state trooper who was part of Governor Perry’s protective detail and would make a great Texas Ranger himself. I want to thank all the organizers of the Books in the Basin book festival for giving me my first taste of West Texas and, especially, Brenda Kissko of the Midland Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and Randy Ham from the Odessa Council for the Arts and Humanities for introducing me to that wonderful city I hope I’ve done justice to in these pages. You’ll also find more info on how Strong Light of Day came to be in my author’s note that follows the epilogue here.

  Check back at www.jonlandbooks.com for updates or to drop me a line, and please follow me on Twitter @jondland. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank all of you who’ve already written or e-mailed me about how much you enjoyed the first six tales in the Caitlin Strong series. And if this happens to be your first visit to the world of Caitlin, welcome and get ready for a wild ride. I promise you the greatest one yet this time out, so enough already and let’s get started.

  P.S. For those interested in more information about the history of the Texas Rangers, I recommend The Texas Rangers and Time of the Rangers, a pair of superb books by Mike Cox, also published by Forge.

  We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark;

  the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

  —PLATO

  PROLOGUE

  Perhaps the earliest confirmed existence of a true Texas Ranger company was in January 1827. [Stephen] Austin had taken his militia out to maintain order during the Fredonian Rebellion in Nacogdoches. To protect his colony from surprise Indian raids in his absence, Austin ordered Captain Abner Kuykendall and eight other men (John Walker, Early Robbins, Thomas Stevens, Barzillai Kuykendall, John Jones, William Kuykendall, James Kiggans, and John Furnash) “to range the country” between the Brazos and the Colorado along the San Antonio Road.

  —Stephen L. Moore, Savage Frontier, Volume I, 1835–1837: Rangers, Riflemen, and Indian Wars in Texas

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS; 1983

  Jim Strong entered the Menger Bar via the street entrance, the Texas Ranger badge pinned to the lapel of his shirt struggling to glisten in the dull light. The patrons, mostly tourists mixed with a smattering of locals, paid him little heed, except for the solitary figure seated at the bar itself, who followed his approach the whole way in the mirror.

  “Boone Masters,” Jim said, taking the stool next to the man and noticing the melted ice dotting his auburn-shaded bourbon.

  “Buy you a drink?” Masters asked, eyes fixed on Jim Strong in the bar’s mirror, which was streaked with cleaning solvent.

  “I come to talk, not drink.”

  Masters finally turned toward him. He was a raw-boned man with tawny-colored skin like stitched leather, courtesy of several years spent as a dockworker and railway foreman before another livelihood had claimed his attention. Crime, robbery in specific, had produced far better earnings without giving his complexion the texture of a darned sock.

  “So talk, Ranger,” he said.

  Jim Strong ran his eyes about the polished wood and elegant glassware for which the Menger Bar, located off the lobby of the Menger Hotel and with a direct entrance off the street as well, was known. “Not the kind of place I’d expect to find you, Boone.”

  “We on a first-name basis now?”

  “You offered me a drink, so I figure we must be.”

  Masters turned back to the mirror and sipped from his glass. “Except you didn’t take me up on it.”

  “I could do with a Doctor Pepper.”

  “I almost forgot. You gave up booze after your wife got gunned down by those Mexicans in front of your little girl.”

  Jim stiffened. “That’s no concern of yours.”

  Masters turned on his stool to better face him. “That’s right. Now that I recall, it was your wife getting Swiss-cheesed by those bullets that turned you to booze, not away from it.”

  Jim Strong’s upper lip started to curl upward and his eyes narrowed with a focused intensity that made them look like the twin bores of a double-barreled shotgun. Boone Masters felt a pressure settle between the two men that seemed ready to topple him backwards off his stool.

  “Me turning to booze after my wife’s murder is a fact,” Jim managed, clinging to his calm, “just like you beating yours senseless when you had too much whiskey inside you. I heard tell the emergency room kept her records in a separate drawer, the file was so thick.”

  Masters pushed up against the pressure that felt like a stiff wind blowing straight out of Jim Strong. “That what you come in here to discuss?”

  Jim Strong waved the bartender over and ordered a Diet Coke, settling more easily onto his stool. “This is the very spot where Teddy Roosevelt recruited his Rough Riders for the Spanish–American War.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Sure is. Word is he got them drunk before sticking the enlistment papers before them with pen in hand.”

  Masters gazed toward a brass spittoon sitting at the far end of the bar. “That’s an original, you know, dating back to 1887. The mirrors, too. Guess we’re both students of history, Ranger.”

  “I’m here to talk about your history, Masters,” Jim Strong said, as the bartender set his Diet Coke down on a napkin before him, complete with a lime he hadn’t ordered bobbing atop the foam.

  “What history would that be?”

  “Criminal, mostly. Heard you been enlisting your own teenage boy in heisting major appliances in those warehouse jobs.”

  “You working for Social Services on the side now, Ranger?”

  “Nope,
just talking recent history. My daughter’s a few years younger than your boy. I’m trying to square how any father worth his salt could risk getting his son sent to Huntsville, where he’d be poked more than those whores your daddy pimped back in the oil boom days.”

  Masters had already gone back to sipping his drink, not even bothering to regard Jim Strong in the mirror anymore. “Your daughter—that be Caitlin, right?” he asked, with just enough of a gleam in his eye. “Hope she can take care of herself, what with you gone so often and only old Grandpa Earl Strong to watch her. She know not to answer the door for strangers?”

  Jim Strong unpinned the badge from his shirt lapel and laid it on the bar. “She knows an asshole when she sees one, just like her dad.”

  With that, he reared back and punched Boone Masters in the jaw so hard that Masters flew off his stool and upended three more that had been occupied just seconds before. He stayed down until the Ranger hoisted him back up by the hair, riding the move close enough to head butt Jim Strong square in the nose. Blood exploded from both the Ranger’s nostrils, his eyes gone shiny with tears.

  Masters seized the advantage by trying to slam Jim Strong’s face into a wooden pillar left over from the bar’s original construction. But Strong slipped from his grasp and smashed the back of Masters’s skull into the pillar instead. Then he punched him hard in the jaw. Masters started to slump, only to hammer a knee into the Ranger’s groin, dropping him in a heap to the shiny floor, which was the same cherrywood as the walls.

  Masters grabbed a chair from a nearby table, now vacated, slashing it downward on an angle meant to smash its legs over Jim Strong’s spine. But the Ranger shifted at the last moment. Chunks, splinters, and shards coughed up into the air on impact with the floor, as Jim scissors-kicked Masters’s legs out from under him.

  Masters went down fast, still managing to grasp the remnants of a stool leg, which he promptly splintered against Jim Strong’s skull, slowing the Ranger not in the least. Before Masters realized the stool leg had been stripped from his hand, he was being jerked backwards, up and over the bar, with Jim Strong landing on top of him amid a shower of glasses toppled from the shelves.

  Several bottles had smashed on the floor as well. Boone Masters grabbed the neck of one and thrust its fat, jagged end up toward the Ranger’s face. Jim deftly deflected it and jammed his thumbs hard into the outlaw’s throat. Masters’s neck muscles were so taut and hard it felt like squeezing gristle. The man grinned at him and spit, even as his face darkened and wispy, guttural rasps pushed out his mouth.

  Jim realized too late that Masters was going for the heirloom .45-caliber automatic holstered on his hip. Should’ve left it in his truck, of course, locked in the glove box. Because now he felt it coming free of its holster, already cocked, and Jim just managed to get a thumb wedged before the hammer to forestall any thoughts Masters might have had of firing. But he had his breath back now. The Ranger, left with only a single hand, stretched up to grab hold of a bar gun.

  Jim Strong jerked the bar’s soda gun dispenser downward and jammed it into Masters’s open mouth, which was still gasping for air. He hit a plunger, with no idea which of the available choices was now flooding down the outlaw’s throat. Jim felt Masters give up his hold on the .45, thrashing wildly to work himself free, and finally managing to latch a hand onto the hose dangling downward from the bar works. Masters yanked and the hose came free, a fountain of soft drinks erupting from beneath the bar in a geyser and spraying into the smoky air.

  He started punching at Jim, even as huge gulps of fluid mixed with spittle coughed from his mouth, further soaking his clothes. The Ranger punched right back, the two of them poised on the floor behind the bar, hammering each other silly, until Boone Masters’s final strike died in midair and his arm flopped back to the floor. His gaze grew glassy, somewhere else entirely now, as Jim Strong cocked a fist for a final blow meant to avenge his busted nose.

  Then the world before him froze up solid and Jim Strong collapsed atop Boone Masters, who’d preceded him into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  “You never did tell me what you came into the bar to talk about,” Boone Masters said from his gurney, alongside the one on which Jim Strong rested in the back of the ambulance summoned to take them both to the Southwest General Hospital. Normally, each would have gotten his own transport, but a pileup on the 410 had left emergency services short of vehicles.

  “You busted my nose,” Jim said, feeling about the thick wad of bandages the paramedics had wrapped in place to stanch the bleeding.

  “I did you a favor, on account of it already being bent to one side. Now you can get it fixed for free.”

  “I’d like to fix you, same way they fix a pup before it knows any better.”

  Masters continued to regard him, gaze lingering on the bandages crisscrossing the Ranger’s face, stretched over his nose. “You come into that bar already fixing to clean my clock?”

  “Nope. I come because I need your help,” Jim Strong told him, his voice nasally from his broken nose.

  “My help? I know I got my bell rung pretty bad, but now I’m hearing things.”

  “You heard right.”

  “Help you, the Texas Rangers?”

  “It’s in your best interests.”

  “How you figure that?”

  “We may not have any of the same friends, Masters, but we got a few of the same enemies.”

  “Who that be exactly?”

  “The gang you use to move all that stolen merchandise through.”

  “What stolen merchandise?”

  Jim tried to sit up, but the IV the paramedic now seated on the ambulance’s rear bench had hooked into him didn’t have enough slack to allow the effort. “Let me put it this way: a few months back I heard a warehouse full of major appliances got boosted—funny thing, being those appliances had been boosted before that. Ironic, don’t you think?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “What’s what mean?”

  “Ironic.”

  “Couldn’t tell you. Just that I know what it is when I hear it.” Jim let Masters see him staring at him through still-watery eyes. “Just like I know what I’m looking at now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A man I could put away for a stretch if I had a mind to, which I’ll do if you don’t have a mind to help me out with something.”

  “You mean you’ll try, Ranger, just like plenty others who weren’t up to the task neither.”

  “Then let’s do this another way: How you think your boy Cort Wesley would do behind bars until his midtwenties, if he’s lucky?”

  Boone Masters stiffened. “Don’t go there, Ranger.”

  “You already did, when you made him an accomplice on your heists. Very considerate, to just have him stand lookout, but make sure you have him wear a mask next time. Turns out we can identify the boy clear as day, thanks to one of them newfangled video surveillance systems.”

  Masters tried not to show how concerned that left him. “Hard being a single parent, ain’t it?”

  “We got that much in common, anyway—’long with something else.”

  “And what would that be exactly?”

  “The Russian mob. I intend to take them down, and you’re going to help me. Otherwise, your boy’s going away for a time.”

  Now it was Boone Masters who tried to sit up, working to tear the IV from his arm until the paramedic, who’d played three years of college football, stopped him. “You’re a real son of a bitch, Ranger, just like Teddy Roosevelt. You came into that bar to recruit me, the difference being you didn’t buy me a drink.”

  “Comes with the territory, Mr. Masters. And right now that territory is running Russian red. They’re up to something a lot bigger than fencing major appliances. I believe they’re fixing to kill a whole lot of Americans, and we just might be the only ones who can stop them.”

  EASTERN AFGHANISTAN; 2002

  “Empty,” Navy SEAL Lieutenant M
ark Grasso said, standing just outside the cave entrance in the darkness that had fallen like a blanket over the area. One moment there was light draining from the sky and the next there wasn’t. Grasso continued, not bothering to disguise the disgust in his voice. “Just like the whole nest of them.”

  “It happens, Lieutenant,” said the big man who’d remained at the holding point until the all-clear sign was given. He looked more like a shadow silhouetted against the night, like some sort of holographic figure projected onto the scene instead of standing within it. “Get used to it.”

  “What, you spooks fucking up? Sending us after ghosts over and over again with lousy intelligence?”

  “You expect to turn over a rock and have Osama pop up with hands in the air? You sign up for this shit, you need to stop figuring the rules are yours to make up. We’re playing by the rules of others, Lieutenant, but we’re getting close. Whoever was here left in a real hurry. We probably missed them, him even, by a couple hours at most. Maybe next time.”

  “I don’t give a shit about next time.”

  The night smelled of a combination of soot and ash, a perpetual burned odor that hung in the air as if residue of bomb blasts that had torn these mountains apart had become a permanent fixture on the scene. Every shift of the breeze seemed to intensify the scent that reminded Grasso of driving through a burned-out forest, lingering long after the fire itself was done.

  “That’s the business I’m in, son,” the big man told the SEAL Team 3 leader, his tone abrasive and condescending. “Giving a shit about the next time, since I can’t do anything about the last.”

  “You need to see this, Lieutenant,” a voice called from inside the cave.

  The SEALs had stormed the mountain just before dawn on intelligence that high-asset targets and large stores of munitions had been located in a cluster of caves hollowed out like entrances to a hive. But the SEALs had found no guns, no explosives, and no targets, high asset or otherwise.