Strong Darkness Read online

  The hybrid engine of the 644K sounded a hundred times quieter than the roar coughed by the older version, and handled as easy as a subcompact, when Caitlin started it forward.

  “Sinners repent or more will die! Sinners repent or more will die! Sinners repent or more will die!”

  She couldn’t hear the chanting anymore, imagining it in her mind with each thrust of the picket signs into the air. It was loud enough to keep the protesters from detecting her approach, even when she lowered the shovel into position and let its teeth dig maybe a foot down into the ground.

  Caitlin plowed the growing pile of dirt forward as if it were snow after a rare Texas blizzard. The back row of the protesters turned just as the wall of gathered earth crested over the shovel. Caitlin imagined the panic widen their eyes, heard screams and shouts as they tried desperately to warn the others what was coming.

  Too late.

  The massive power of the John Deere pushed the earthen wall straight into the center of the pack fronted by William Bryant Tripp himself, driving the mass forward without even a sputter. The last thing Caitlin glimpsed were picket signs closer to the front stubbornly clinging to the air before those holding them were gobbled up and shoved forward.

  Down into the drainage trench.

  Caitlin pictured Reverend Tripp toppling in first, imagined the trench as a mass grave or, better yet, the week’s deposit zone in the local landfill. Because that’s where the members of the Beacon of Light Church belonged in her mind, dumped in along with the other stench-riddled trash.

  Some of the protesters managed to peel off to the side to escape the John Deere’s force and wrath, and Caitlin didn’t brake the big machine until the earthen wall she was pushing stopped on the edge of the trench. Portions of it sifted downward, forestalling the efforts of Tripp and his minions to climb out. So she gave the Deere just a little more gas to trap them a bit longer.

  Caitlin cut off the engine at that point. Her gaze drifted across the street to the funeral ceremony for Junior Chauncey, where everyone had turned around to face the other side of the road. They saw the members of the Beacon of Light Church visible only as hands desperately clawing for purchase to pull themselves from the trench into which Caitlin had forced them. She hopped down out of the cab and walked around the wall of dirt and grass the John Deere had helped her lay.

  Then, to a man and woman led by Bud Chauncey himself, the funeral goers started to clap their hands, applauding her. It got louder and louder, reaching a crescendo just as the television cameras began rotating feverishly between both sides of the road and reporters rushed toward Caitlin with microphones in hand.

  She leaped across the trench, brushing the microphones and cameras aside, the sun hot against her flesh.

  “You’re going to pay for this, Caitlin Strong!” she heard Tripp scream at her, as he finally managed to hoist himself from the ditch. “The Lord does not forget!”

  “Neither do I, sir,” Caitlin said calmly, regarding the dirt clinging to him that no amount of shaking or brushing could remove. It turned his ash gray hair a dark brown, making him look as if he was wearing a vegetable garden atop his head. “And you’d be wise to remember that.”

  4

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “You know what a TV camera looks like, Ranger?”

  “I believe it’s one of those dark things with a man’s eye stuck to it,” Caitlin told Texas Ranger captain D. W. Tepper, head of Company F headquarters in San Antonio. “And in this case it caught a whole bunch of people at that funeral applauding my actions.”

  “So you’ve seen the coverage.”

  “Nope. I just saw the directions all those cameras were pointing in.”

  “All those?” Tepper shook his head, his expression growing even tighter. His ceiling fan spun lazily overhead, picking up the room’s stray light and splashing it against the cream-colored walls stained by cigarette smoke. “How many cameras we talking about here? Or were you too busy bulldozing two dozen people into a drainage ditch to notice?”

  “A trench, actually.”

  “So you don’t dispute the bulldozing part.”

  “It was a wheel loader.”

  Tepper puckered his lips. “I gave you the assignment because I figured even you couldn’t cause a storm at a funeral. But never underestimate the reach of Hurricane Caitlin—you’d think I would’ve learned that by now,” he said, and made a show of lighting one of his Marlboros just to piss her off. “You got something you wanna say about my smoking?”

  “Why bother?”

  Tepper slapped his desktop with enough force to rattle his fingers. “Exactly my point, Hurricane. Now you know what it feels like.”

  “I thought I behaved responsibly.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I didn’t shoot anybody, D.W.”

  “No, today you put a whole bunch of live people into graves, instead of dead ones.”

  “At least they could climb out. Normally it’s a permanent condition.”

  “You know what else is permanent?” Tepper said, cigarette dangling from his mouth now. “You being a genuine pain in my ass. I’ve tried everything, Ranger, and nothing seems to stick. You just keep writing up your own rules and the rest of the book be damned.”

  “You’ve got two boys who’ve been to war, Captain.”

  “And I’m proud as hell of them.”

  “So how do you think you’d feel if you were Bud Chauncey, about to lay your firstborn to rest while that Beacon of Light Church lot was chanting up a storm about God hating gays?”

  “I sent you there to enforce the law, Caitlin. What’s so damn hard about that?”

  “William Bryant Tripp wasn’t a hospitable man. He wouldn’t listen to reason.”

  “So you hit him with a mountain-load of dirt. Is that how you deal with all the inhospitable folk out there?”

  “Normally I just shoot them.”

  “The Beacon of Light Church was operating within the boundaries of the law it’s our job to enforce, not make up as we go along.”

  Caitlin thought of the radiation stains along Bud Chauncey’s neck and leaned over the desk far enough to pluck the cigarette from Tepper’s mouth.

  “I believe I was smoking that.”

  “You keep on smoking, D.W., I’ll keep on plucking,” she said, pressing it out in an Alamo ashtray now missing almost all of the famed landmark’s facade because of age and use. “Maybe you should try those new E-cigarettes.”

  “What’s that, like e-mail? How the hell I am supposed to smoke something on a computer? Close my eyes and imagine?”

  “You should try it some time.”

  “Oh, I have, and you know what I imagine? Not opening the newspaper to find more damage from Hurricane Caitlin on the front page.”

  Caitlin eased the old vinyl chair set before his desk closer to the front. “That’s not what’s bothering you this time.”

  “Oh no? What is?”

  “The fact that the Rangers are going to get applauded for what I did, finally standing up to the Beacon of Light Church. You’re afraid it’ll encourage me.”

  “As in encourage you to do something you’re going to do anyway, Ranger. So why should I bother?” Tepper started to reach for a fresh cigarette, than thought better of it. “How long you figure it’ll be before they file a lawsuit?”

  “What for?” Caitlin asked, the agitation over that morning’s mere memory creeping into her voice.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe premature burial. Some would call that a violation of civil rights.”

  “Tell that to the family burying their son.”

  “Be glad to. But that doesn’t change the fact that what the Beacon of Light Church was doing was legal.”

  “No, sir, it wasn’t.”

  Tepper rolled his eyes, started to reach for the pack of cigarettes nesting in his pocket but then stopped again. “Why, because you say so?”

  “No, because I measured.”

  �
��Measured what?”

  “The distance between the gravesite and where the Beacon of Light Church whack jobs were standing behind that drainage trench. Came out just short of nine hundred and sixty feet.”

  “I’m not following you here, Ranger.”

  “Law that passed the Texas legislature requires them to be a minimum of a thousand feet away.”

  “So they were off by forty.”

  “The law’s the law, D.W.”

  Tepper massaged the bald patches of his scalp. “I’ll let Austin know. But I’m taking the bills to clean the clothes those people were wearing out of your salary. And William Bryant Tripp is waiting for an apology.”

  “Then I hope he’s a patient man, Captain, because he’s going to be waiting for a long time.”

  “You have any regrets over this at all?” Tepper asked, shaking his head.

  “I sure do, Captain: that it wasn’t a sewer trench instead, so that piece of shit who calls himself a reverend would’ve felt right at home.”

  Tepper pulled something from his open desk drawer and plopped it down on the blotter right next to his Alamo ashtray.

  “What’s that?”

  “Pocket tape recorder I bought at Radio Shack so you could listen to how you actually sound.” Tepper gave it a closer look, then brought the recorder right up to his eyes. “Goddamnit, I forgot to push the record button. Damn thing wasn’t even on. Aw hell, wouldn’t have made a difference anyway, would it?”

  “Not at all.”

  Tepper dropped the recorder into the drawer and leaned back in his chair, the springs creaking as it tilted toward the open office window. “You know how many times your daddy and granddaddy got their names in the paper?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Neither do I, Ranger, because it wasn’t often enough for anybody to pay attention. If it’s their tradition you’re trying to live up to, you’ve got an awful peculiar way of doing it.”

  “Old Earl rode with you back when dinosaurs roamed the prairie and I don’t believe Jim ever owned a cell phone. It’s the age that’s different, D.W., not me.”

  “No, Caitlin,” Tepper corrected, “it’s both.”

  As if on cue, her cell phone rang and she took the call only after seeing CORT WESLEY light up on the Caller ID. “You see me on television, Cort Wesley?”

  Her mouth dropped at his response, quickly followed by the phone itself into her lap.

  5

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  Dylan lay in the hospital bed at Rhode Island Hospital. Perfectly still, eyes closed, covered to the waist by a sheet with more wires and tubes running out of him than Caitlin could count. Cort Wesley Masters stood next to her holding his hands by his sides, clenching and unclenching his fists as if picturing what he was going to do to whoever had done this to his oldest son.

  “What’s a medically induced coma exactly?” he asked the doctor, who was in the midst of shining a penlight into the boy’s eyes to check for a reaction.

  Caitlin looked at Cort Wesley, his thoughts and fears easy to read because they mirrored her own.

  Dylan with brain damage …

  Dylan unable to walk …

  Dylan a quadriplegic …

  Dylan never waking up …

  Every parent’s worst nightmare, compounded by the helplessness. Standing there utterly powerless, absolutely nothing they could do other than hope.

  The doctor, whose name was Hirschman, according to his tag, turned with a start. Cort Wesley had listened to his explanation of Dylan’s condition that had ended moments before in silence, his question posed on some kind of delay.

  “Standard treatment when a patient presents with swelling on the brain.”

  “Presents?”

  “What our initial examination of your son determined.”

  Hirschman was looking at both Cort Wesley and Caitlin when he said that. Normally, being confused as the boy’s mother would have brought a warm rush through her, but not today. Today was about clinging to the hope that Dylan wouldn’t be in the hospital for long and beginning the process of finding who had put him there in the first place.

  The preceding April, around six months earlier, Caitlin had accompanied the boy on a trip to Providence to visit Brown University where he hoped to gain admittance and play football. Barely a week later, he was accepted and had gotten some reps on the junior varsity team already this season, though he looked woefully small in his uniform when compared to other players with the physiques of professional wrestlers. She and Cort Wesley had made it out to two of the games, one with Dylan’s younger brother, Luke, accompanying them.

  Upon reaching her in Captain Tepper’s office, Cort Wesley had explained he’d just got off the phone with Phil Estes, Brown’s head football coach. All Estes knew was that Dylan had been rushed to the hospital after some kind of altercation, the details of which remained sketchy. Estes said he’d just gotten to the hospital himself, and Cort Wesley recalled the heavy echo of footsteps along a stairwell in the background of their conversation.

  “I’ll meet you here,” Estes had told him.

  “It’s gonna take us a while with the flights and all,” Cort Wesley replied.

  “See you and the Ranger then.”

  6

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  True to his word, when they arrived from Texas Estes had met them in the waiting area of Rhode Island Hospital’s intensive care ward, where Dylan had been whisked after being stabilized and evaluated in the emergency room the previous night. The coach informed them about the medically induced coma, stressing that it suggested a far dire prognosis than was very possibly the case.

  Possibly.

  After her father had suffered his heart attack, doctors in San Antonio had told Caitlin he could possibly resume a normal life. He died in an intensive care ward pretty much identical to this one, except the waiting area had windows.

  “We had meetings last night,” Coach Estes, a bear of a man himself with forearms the size of fire hydrants crossed over his chest, explained to them. “As far as I can tell, the players went straight back to their dorms afterward. Dylan was walking home with two other freshmen players when he got a text and said he had to take care of something.”

  “Take care of something,” Cort Wesley repeated, his voice sounding as if his throat had been scraped raw by steel wool.

  “That’s what the other players recall that he said. Their words.”

  Cort Wesley turned to meet Caitlin’s stare, both asking themselves the same obvious question in full awareness of the fact that Dylan using those words probably meant something unpleasant.

  Take care of something …

  The life had returned to Cort Wesley’s eyes, regaining their intensity and purpose in light so dull Caitlin figured she’d need a flashlight to read one of the magazines pulled from a stack of months-old selections. She could see his mind working, focus turning however briefly to what he’d do if he caught up with whoever had planted his son in a hospital bed. She stopped her thinking there.

  “They didn’t express any concern?” Cort Wesley asked Estes, after an uncomfortable silence. “The players, I mean.”

  “Mr. Masters, Dylan has a tendency to keep to himself. He’s about the team when he needs to be, all business, and the truth is I’ve enjoyed watching him carry the ball in both practice and those JV games as much as I’ve enjoyed anything this season. First hit hasn’t taken him down yet, not even once,” the coach finished, the statement seeming to make him feel better and his warming gaze indicating he hoped it might do the same for them.

  “It did this time,” Cort Wesley said, his expression not moving at all.

  7

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  “Due to blunt force trauma—you mentioned that too,” Cort Wesley was saying to the doctor now, the emotions shifting on his expression in such rapid fashion that it seemed framed by a strobe light.

  “You want to tell us what that means for
his overall prognosis?” Caitlin interjected.

  “Well,” Hirschman said, “the CT scan revealed no skull fracture and no damage we can detect to the brain tissue itself. He’s responsive to stimuli and, like I said, inducing the coma was just precautionary, especially in light of the concussion he suffered.”

  “But you didn’t say what caused it,” Cort Wesley noted.

  “We believe it was from a blow, several of them, in fact.”

  “Any particular weapon?” Caitlin asked.

  The doctor shrugged. “That’s undetermined at this time, and not for me to say.”

  “Then for who is it to say?” Cort Wesley said, before Caitlin had a chance to.

  “That would be me,” came a voice from the doorway.

  8

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  Caitlin recognized the man standing there as a Providence police detective from her last visit to the city, when, on Dylan’s visitation trip to Brown University, a gunfight broke out during a festival called WaterFire down along the city’s riverfront. His last name was Finneran and he was a beefy man with red spiderweb veins growing over his ruddy cheeks, and a stomach that tested the bounds of his button-down shirt. He looked like he’d lost some weight since her last visit.

  “Know the last time anybody up here killed four people in self-defense?” he’d challenged her in a quasi-interrogation at the station.

  “I’m afraid I don’t, sir.”

  “Never, Ranger, never. Looks like you’ve made history in a second state.”

  She had indeed and was very much prepared to again, as she watched Finneran wait for Dr. Hirschman to leave the room before entering.

  “Please tell me I’m not seeing this,” the detective said, looking like he was fighting to swallow something sour.