Strong Cold Dead Page 3

  By the time Alcantara had swung back toward Caitlin, she’d pulled a plaid kerchief soaked in her dad’s old cologne up over her nose and mouth. And two, maybe three seconds later, the dense white cloud unleashed by the crop duster settled over the area like a blanket, spreading straight down the street toward riot central, at the head of the neighborhood’s commercial center.

  Of course, it wasn’t called crop dusting anymore, Caitlin knew. The new term was “aerial application,” and the plane that had just soared overhead, not more than fifty feet off the ground, cost more than a million dollars and was outfitted with an advanced turbine engine and sophisticated GPS system to allow for just this kind of flight. The pilot was a former Texas Ranger who’d taken up the practice to supplement his pension. He also had come up with an especially noxious formula that mixed corn starch and soap powder with a scent most closely resembling skunk oil. He’d used a version of it to repel a riot of his own, back in the day, and was more than happy to come out of retirement to return favors done for him by both Earl and Jim Strong, Caitlin’s grandfather and father.

  “Hell,” he’d told her, “they saved my life more times than I care to remember. Just tell me where and when, Ranger.”

  He didn’t own a cell phone, so Caitlin had provided him with one, to ensure he could receive her signal via text message.

  Caitlin made her way through the vapor, which was thicker than any fog, brush fire, or West Texas dust storm she’d ever seen, dodging bodies, to Diablo Alcantara’s last position. The gang members were desperately fleeing the street all around her, grunting and gasping, some doubled over with nausea from the stench. Those sounds drowned out the last of the crop duster soaring overhead, the fading drone of its turbine engine matching the cadence of its arrival on the scene.

  She reached Alcantara just as he managed to unsling the assault rifle shouldered behind him. Caitlin clocked him on the side of the skull with the butt of her SIG Sauer and watched his grasp go limp as his knees buckled. She caught his dazed form halfway to the roadbed and dragged him from the street with one arm, the whole time keeping her SIG ready in her free hand.

  The soupy, stink-riddled mist had dissipated enough for a few of the gang members to clear their watering eyes and follow the trail Caitlin blazed toward the thick congestion of houses and yards. She shot two, and then a third, in rapid succession, all shots aimed low, for the legs, since incapacitating the bangers was as good as killing them, under the circumstances. More followed those three, and then still more, until Caitlin felt she’d entered some crazed video game, she was clacking off so many shots.

  Everything was going just fine until a police helicopter sweeping overhead blazed its spotlight down over the scene. The beam pierced what was left of the thick, soupy vapor and exposed her for all to see. A dozen bangers, maybe, left to give chase. More bullets needed than she had left in the magazine, Caitlin thought, as they struggled against their own retching to sweep their weapons around.

  The police chopper was hovering directly over them, its spot as big as an oversize truck tire, carving a cone-shaped ribbon of light into the night. Caitlin aimed her SIG up toward it, instead, and clacked off three shots. A poof sounded, as the big bulb exploded and a shower of glass rained down onto the remaining gang members, slowing them up enough for Caitlin to continue dragging Diablo Alcantara into the dark cover of a yard adjoining a pair of multifamily houses.

  Her back slammed into the frame of an aboveground swimming pool sturdy enough to steal her breath, just as Alcantara regained enough of his senses to try to wrench himself free of her grasp and then to launch an elbow backwards. It struck Caitlin in her left cheek, rattling her jaw and smacking her teeth against each other.

  Alcantara managed to tear free, but instead of running, he launched himself at her, so enraged that his one functioning eye looked ready to bulge out of his head. Caitlin tried to bring her gun back around, only to have him knock it from her grasp. She tried to snatch it out of the air, then heard a plop as it smacked the pool water, which looked like a pocket of refined oil shining in the night.

  Alcantara came at her again, and Caitlin realized he’d never gone anywhere at all—he was latched to her by a watchband that had become ensnared in her denim shirt. The shirt was soaked with perspiration and dappled with vapor spots that dragged the rancid stench with them. Alcantara fired a jab-like blow, which she managed to deflect. But his next strike landed in the side of her neck.

  Caitlin shrugged off the stinging pain just in time to duck under the next blow and shoulder him hard into the aboveground pool. Her intention was to spill Alcantara over into the water, but the impact buckled the framing and, instead, unleashed a torrent of water from a tear she’d cut in the liner. Its force separated and pushed both of them backwards, Caitlin feinting one way and then launching a palm strike from the blind spot created by the marble-sized fake eye wedged into his eye socket, straight into his nose.

  Bellowing in pain and blowing out a torrent of blood from his nose to match the water still cascading around him, Alcantara barreled in toward her, his one working eye as big as an eight ball. Caitlin let him get close—close enough that he practically rammed that big eye straight into the thumb she plunged forward and twisted.

  Caitlin had never heard a scream as deep and as shrill as Alcantara’s. She grabbed hold of both his shoulders when he sank to his knees, and began dragging him toward the side street parallel to J Street, where the bangers had gathered. The fight had stripped her cologne-soaked bandanna free. The stench and bite of the old Ranger’s skunk-stench concoction pushed tears from her eyes.

  Caitlin could barely see when she reached the side street. Sirens were screaming everywhere, and bright lights poured through the haze that had settled before her vision.

  “Stop right there!” an SAPD uniformed officer screamed at her, pistol trembling in his hand instead of steadying on her. “Stop, or I’ll shoot you dead!”

  5

  HOUSTON, TEXAS

  “I’m sure you understand my position, Mr. Masters,” Julia De Cantis, head of the Village School, said, from behind a desk that seemed much too large for her.

  “I don’t think I do, ma’am,” Cort Wesley told her, fidgeting anxiously in the easy chair. The color of its leather had apparently been selected to match the wood tones of both the desk and the impressive array of bookshelves, which looked ready to swallow the room.

  “Call me Julia, please. Everyone does, even the students.”

  “I still don’t understand your position, Julia.”

  De Cantis started to lean forward, then stopped suddenly, as if hit by a force field separating Cort Wesley’s space from hers. Outside, the early morning sun seemed to twinkle off the dew-rich grass of the school’s spacious twenty-eight-acre grounds. There was no one about yet, except a few of the boarding students out jogging. Fortunately, Cort Wesley’s son Luke wasn’t among them; he had no idea of his father’s presence here, and would have forbidden it if he had known.

  “While it is customary for rising junior students to select their own roommates, the issue of your son boarding with Zachary Russo presents the school with several issues.”

  “Keep talking, Julia,” Cort Wesley prodded, after De Cantis had stopped, as if that were the end of things.

  “Well,” she started, stopping again just as fast. She was the one doing the fidgeting now.

  The discomfort didn’t seem to suit her. It was like a set of clothes that didn’t fit right, Cort Wesley figured. Julia De Cantis had a sheen to her, a kind of persona that she slapped on for meetings with board members, alumni, fund-raisers—and parents too, to some extent. She appeared to him to be cut from a more natural cloth, stitched in the classroom, absent of political or financial pressures. The freedom to mold young minds was what she’d signed up for. In the natural order of things, Cort Wesley guessed, she’d likely become a victim of her own success and popularity in that venue, fueling her rise to the administrative level.
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  “Rule seems plain and simple to me,” Cort Wesley said matter-of-factly.

  “There is nothing either plain or simple about the relationship between these two boys.”

  “The relationship, as you call it, is over, ma’am. They’re just friends now,” Cort Wesley corrected, even though he wasn’t so sure himself.

  Nearly a year before, Luke had come out about himself, and then about his relationship with Zach.

  Came out.

  How Cort Wesley despised that term, though he supposed there was no easy way to classify the experience of learning that his youngest son was gay. That revelation had been sprung on him at the same time that he had learned an equally difficult truth about his own father, who, it turned out, wasn’t nearly the bastard Cort Wesley had figured him for. Not even close. More a hero, during his final days, in fact.

  Realizing he’d had both his dad and his youngest son all wrong filled him with a new respect for the truth. Now he welcomed it, in spite of the anxiety and tension it had wrought initially. Hell, he was about Luke’s age when he started boosting major appliances with Boone Masters.

  “All the same,” Julia De Cantis was saying, “we are dealing with precedent here, more than appearances.”

  “So what you’re saying is that a boy and a girl can’t room together for obvious reasons.”

  “Of course.”

  “And my son can’t room with his best friend for what you’d label equally obvious reasons.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But it’s what you meant,” Cort Wesley said, leaning forward closer to her desk. “And it implies, from your way of thinking, that Luke can’t room with any other male student. So tell me, ma’am, what if he wanted to room with a girl?”

  De Cantis drummed her fingers against the uncovered wood of her desk and then tightened her fingers so stiffly her knuckles cracked. “Mr. Masters—”

  “I’ve got a confession to make, Julia,” Cort Wesley said, instead of letting her continue. “I didn’t take this news so well myself, and it took me some time to come around. So I’ve been looking for an opportunity to prove myself to my son, to show him my support isn’t just window dressing. So the fact that rooming with Zach is very important to him makes it even more important to me. You hearing me on this?”

  “I believe a single room would be in his, and the school’s, best interests.”

  “I guess you’re not hearing me, then. You know about Luke’s mother, I suppose.”

  De Cantis nodded slowly, the compassion returning to her expression. “Yes, and I’m sorry.”

  “But not so sorry that you have a mind to do right by a boy who deserves at least that much. He loves your school. It’s the best in the state, and you should be proud of your work.”

  “So should your son. He’s been a stellar student, a credit to the Village School in all ways. He’s unquestionably earned all the boarding privileges we can afford him.”

  De Cantis stopped, collecting her thoughts. Outside the window, Cort Wesley could see a trio of riding mowers working at trimming the grass, which was moistened by the morning dew and by underground sprinklers that he now recalled had been on when he’d driven on campus.

  “Zachary Russo’s academic record, on the other hand,” De Cantis continued, “requires no such privilege be extended.”

  “That’s the way you want to play this?”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Masters?”

  “Drawing this line in the sand. Fine strategy. But in my experience people aren’t prepared to deal with what happens when somebody crosses it.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Just a statement. And I could just as soon ask you the same question when you brought up Zach’s—what’d you call it, ‘academic record’?”

  The engines of the three riding mowers grew louder as they drew closer to the window. De Cantis paused so she wouldn’t have to talk over the roar. The blades churned up stray acorns and discarded twigs, grinding them with a crunching sound that made Cort Wesley think of trying to chew ground glass.

  “You have quite a reputation yourself, Mr. Masters,” the head of the Village School said, after the sound had abated.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

  “That’s the way I took it, all the same.”

  De Cantis leaned forward over her desk, hands clasped before her and elbows resting on the desk wood. “You worked for the biggest crime family in the South. You did time in prison. Before that, you were a decorated war hero. Now you work unofficially for the Texas Rangers.”

  “Just one Texas Ranger, ma’am,” Cort Wesley corrected.

  De Cantis started to nod, then stopped. “That would be Caitlin Strong. Maybe we can find a solution to this, after all.”

  “I’m listening, Julia,” Cort Wesley said, over the sound of the riding mowers retracing their path over the grounds.

  “This situation with your son is a difficult sell to the board, but one I believe I could make, if the circumstances were right.”

  “And how do we make them right?”

  “I’m glad you asked, Mr. Masters,” she said, stopping again to let the engine sounds pass. “Since you’re well acquainted with Caitlin Strong—”

  Cort Wesley felt his phone vibrate with an incoming call and eased the phone from his pocket. “You mind excusing me while I check this?”

  De Cantis looked a bit perturbed, but she nodded anyway.

  Cort Wesley recognized the number as a Brown University exchange. “It’s my oldest son’s college calling, Julia. Would you mind if I…”

  “Please, Mr. Masters.”

  The caller identified himself as being from the registrar’s office, said he just needed to confirm some details on the paperwork recently filed by Dylan.

  “Wait a minute,” Cort Wesley said, interrupting him a moment later, “say that again.”

  6

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “You made one hell of a mess for yourself this time, Ranger,” Captain D. W. Tepper told Caitlin, after the San Antonio police were finally done with her that morning.

  “Seems to me the mess was already made, and the way the powers that be intended to clean it up would’ve only made things worse.”

  “Seemed to you.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “The problem is nobody appointed you judge in the matter, and now they’re calling for your head.”

  “You going to give it to them?” Caitlin asked, standing before Tepper’s desk, in a shady corner on the second floor of Texas Ranger Company F headquarters in San Antonio.

  “It’s out of my hands, Caitlin. This is too big a pile of shit to sweep under the rug. You might have thought you saved the day, when what you really did was embarrass a whole lot of folks seated behind big fancy desks, who couldn’t save their own ass from a hemorrhoid.”

  “I tried to explain it to Consuelo Alonzo, Captain. But she was too busy getting even with me to listen. What was I supposed to do?”

  “How about nothing, like Alonzo ordered?”

  “And what shape might the city be in right now if I’d done that?”

  “I don’t believe those folks behind those big desks care about the might, only the is. And right now they’re trying to cover their collective asses, along with the truth.”

  Tepper was old enough to have partnered with both Caitlin’s legendary grandfather and her father, stitching multiple generations of Texas Rangers together. Unlike many, he had proven adept at both relinquishing the old ways and methods and adapting to the new. He wore his experience on his gaunt face. Caitlin imagined there was a story behind each of the deep furrows lining his cheeks and brow. His thin gray hair looked glued to his scalp, dry patches evident amid all the sheen. He had youthful eyes that belied the smoking habit that had left him with sallow coloring and stained fingernails. Caitlin’s efforts to force him to cut back on his smoking had also cut back on the wet,
hacking cough that one doctor said made Tepper a poster child for emphysema.

  “What truth would that be, exactly?” she asked him.

  “Let’s see, where would you like me to start?” Tepper said, tapping a Marlboro Red from its box but stopping short of lifting it out. “How about sticking your nose in somebody else’s jurisdiction? How about taking on the entire gang population of San Antonio, with a riot brewing a few blocks away? How about shooting at a police helicopter?”

  “I was shooting at the spotlight.”

  “Last time I checked, the two were connected. There’s also trespassing, damage to civilian property, and arresting a suspect without a warrant.”

  “I had probable cause on Diablo Alcantara.”

  “That probable cause entitle you to shoot four other men while dragging him off?”

  “All in the leg. I thought you’d be happy.”

  “Sure, jumping for joy,” Tepper said, forgetting he already had a cigarette out, launching it airborne when he tapped the pack again.

  Caitlin crushed the cigarette with her boot before he could retrieve it from the floor, and he set about tapping out a fresh one in its place.

  “As I was saying…” Tepper continued.

  “As you were saying…”

  “Hell, I don’t even remember what I was saying, you get me so ramshackled.”

  “You were jumping for joy.”

  “Oh, yeah. Turns out you nicked an artery in the leg of one of those gang members. They got him to the hospital just before he would’ve bled out. Somebody had tried to stitch the wound with a sewing needle.”

  “And that’s my fault?”

  “Was it your bullet? Anyway, forget that. We got bigger fish to fry. Feds are thinking about charging you with use of a weapon of mass destruction.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Ranger, you poisoned a whole section of the city with whatever spewed out of that crop duster.”